One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.
However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this — albeit in an ad hoc way — and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation”. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.
Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.
No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.
“A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir”, in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.
de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response — not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution — to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism — including a pro-motherhood one — careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.
You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.
Women throughout the developed world — notoriously — tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.
Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as Louise Perry is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.
This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.
Helen Dale, “People Unlike Me”, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, 2024-05-29.
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