Even well before the suffragettes of the 19th century, women had been writing, thinking, and pushing for equal rights for almost a hundred years. How did those early feminist activists inform policy and the way we view household and family politics today?

Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute. Her new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, provides an intellectual history of the women’s rights movement going all the way back to the 18th century.

She and Greg discuss the influential work of Mary Wollstonecraft on the women’s rights movement, how industrialization and the rise of capitalism shifted priorities in the movement, and the history of the abortion debate.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The effect of technology in reproduction

37:43: What answers asymmetry now, what answers the fact that men and women can engage in sex but women get pregnant and men don't, is technology. So, you have contraception and you have abortion, and when technology fills in the gaps, again, you have this shift, so that's when you see the sexual revolution come about: more sexual risk-taking, more sort of casual sex as a sexual ethos that kind of takes over because we're relying now on technology instead of our development of self-mastery in the sexual realm.

The big shift in the women's right movement

19:28: With industrialization and the rise of capitalism, women started to become far more dependent, where they used to work together on the agrarian homestead. That dependency puts them at great risk because they now depend on men for a paycheck. So it's not just women's ambition that sent them into the workplace; it's a real desire to have some insurance against male vice in a lot of ways, which is what you saw in that first wave of feminism.

The challenges of balancing work and care

52:32: We need to listen more to those who would prefer to be in the home and prefer to be caring for their children, who would prefer to see the work of the home that both mothers and fathers engage in as having great value, as getting back to the Wilson crafting insight as kind, kind of underlying every social, political, and economic good. And that we've forgotten about that. And thinking about what children really need to become independent and mature—not only workers, not only citizens, but also spouses and neighbors—is a really important shift that needs to happen.

On Ginsburg's fight for women's equality

14:43: By really fighting for women to be understood as equal citizens, Ginsburg is constitutionalizing Wilson's craft's principle. What Ginsburg is fighting against in the 1970s as an advocate for the ACLU is that we shouldn't have these laws that basically confine women to maternity and expect that just because a woman has the capacity for childbirth and motherhood, she should be kept out of professions. And that was a really important gain and a really important underlying political philosophy.

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Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

Professional Profile at Ethics & Public Policy Center
Contributor’s Profile on The Federalist Society
Erika Bachiochi on LinkedIn
Erika Bachiochi on X
Erika Bachiochi on TED Talk

Her Work:

332. The Origins of Feminism feat. Erika Bachiochi

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc