{"id":89409,"date":"2026-10-25T01:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T05:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=89409"},"modified":"2026-10-24T09:57:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T13:57:52","slug":"qotd-feminism-as-a-luxury-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-feminism-as-a-luxury-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Feminism as a luxury belief"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 25px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>One ideology where it&#8217;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&#8217;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 <em>really, really rankled<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>However, just as most people aren&#8217;t members of Heath&#8217;s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this \u2014 albeit in an <em>ad hoc<\/em> way \u2014 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 &#8220;female socialisation&#8221;. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women <em>as a group<\/em> more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.<\/p>\n<p>Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/pdfdirect\/10.1111\/jopy.12500\" target=\"_blank\">This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men<\/a>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir&#8221;, in Betty Friedan, <em>It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women&#8217;s Movement<\/em>, Random House, 1976, p. 397.<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>de Beauvoir&#8217;s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response \u2014 not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution \u2014 <em>to women unlike her<\/em>. While it&#8217;s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism \u2014 including a pro-motherhood one \u2014 careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They&#8217;ve been submarined. As I say, I&#8217;m old.<\/p>\n<p>Women throughout the developed world \u2014 notoriously \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/ifstudies.org\/blog\/how-many-kids-do-women-want\" target=\"_blank\">tell pollsters they want more children than they have<\/a>. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called &#8220;gender wage gap&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/ifs.org.uk\/inequality\/the-careers-and-time-use-of-mothers-and-fathers\/\" target=\"_blank\">exists because women have children<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>acta non verba<\/em> (&#8220;deeds not words&#8221;). However, even if fully half the &#8220;I want more kids than I have&#8221; response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as <a href=\"https:\/\/open.substack.com\/users\/5933734-louise-perry\" target=\"_blank\">Louise Perry<\/a> is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.<\/p>\n<p>This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of <em>ad hominem<\/em>. 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&#8217;s and Heath&#8217;s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.notonyourteam.co.uk\/p\/worshipping-the-future\" target=\"_blank\">the basis of Lorenzo Warby&#8217;s essays on this Substack<\/a>). That&#8217;s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too. <\/p>\n<p>Helen Dale, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.notonyourteam.co.uk\/p\/people-unlike-me\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;People Unlike Me&#8221;, <em>Not On Your Team, But Always Fair<\/em><\/a>, 2024-05-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One ideology where it&#8217;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&#8217;t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[66,53,41],"tags":[987,1481,139,1626,43],"class_list":["post-89409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-feminism","tag-luxurybeliefs","tag-psychology","tag-revealedpreference","tag-women"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ng5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89409"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105503,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89409\/revisions\/105503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}