Sometimes questions answer themselves.
58 Responses to Why Aren’t More Women Libertarians?
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Um dilema para as feministas libertárias | Feminismo Libertário -
March 12, 2017
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Um dilema para as feministas libertárias – Libertarianismo -
April 18, 2017
[…] movimento libertário seja cheio de “caras” provavelmente pode ser explicado por uma série de fatores sociológicos, mas deve haver uma razão mais profunda pela qual o libertarianismo não tem muitas mulheres no […]
I recall several years ago someone, maybe David Kelley, writing about Nathaniel Branden’s first appearance before an Objectivist group in probably 20 years. When he first walked in the room, he asked his host “Where are the women?”
IIRC, Branden said that during the NBI days typically 40-50 percent of the people attending the events were women.
What was different then?
On a different topic, I found a webbed collection of talks on social anarchism and marxism:
http://www.resistancemp3.org.uk
Now that I have this and mises.org that means I have both sides of the issues in audio format to listen to. First up is a talk on economics from Marx to the present that doesn’t mention Bohm-Bawerk at all!
Actually after listening to a few of the mp3s I’m not sure they are social anarchists, they might be mostly marxists. For example in one talk the speaker mentioned “that Proudhon guy” who was “free market person” who thought if we had smaller firms then markets would work. Interestingly at the end of the talk he mentioned an increase in interest rates might bring on an economic downturn. :0
Good time to add this link:
http://www.alf.org/alfnews/alf70.shtml
From my reading of the response, it seems as if the general answer to the question posed is “Male libertarians alienate potential women ‘converts’ by being condescending or outright sexist.” While I agree with the logic, something about this response leaves me unsatisfied. I have hardly seen enough “sexism” in the libertarian community to account for the YAL’s alleged 2:1 ratio.
Perhaps there are other factors at work? Is it right to disregard all gender-specific psychological possibilities out of hand? It is true that males and females score differently on math and literacy tests. Could it be that they also score differently on “non-aggression tests” as well, so to speak?
I wouldn’t disregard them out of hand, but I would also cast a long look at how society may have steered women away from being people who would be interested in libertarianism, just as it may steer them away from being as interested in math or literacy.
Also, and I say this without knowing your gender, it can be very easy for men, as a privileged group, to think that there is not nearly as much sexism in a particular area as there actually is.
If there’s a cultural issue, I wouldn’t blame male libertarians for it, since we’re really victims of it too, and have had the guts and brains to see through it.
There were lots of radical libertarian broads in the 17th century. Anne Hutchinson, for instance. She was more radical than Roger Williams.
Sorry, that’s what I meant to write: women are just cowardly and stupid.
I never actually said that. But you knew that already. You knew it even before you finished writing that response.
Here’s an article that talks about critical thinking, and how humans don’t do it well. I’d say libertarians are people that are exceptions to the rules described therein.
Well, of course you didn’t say it. I wouldn’t waste time writing it if you had come out and said it clearly.
If male libertarians have needed guts and brains to get past the culture dissuading us from libertarianism, and there are lots more male libertarians than female ones, it follows that women, on the whole, have fewer guts and brains. Is that critical enough?
(I didn’t actually mean that the culture has been biased against libertarianism, but rather that it is often biased against women troubling themselves with “serious” questions about things like politics generally. But never mind.)
Roderick, a better question is: why aren’t more libertarians women? I mean if we are mostly male, then 40% of us should just have an operation. Why don’t we?
I think at one point on this blog, 40% of the regular commenters were transgendered women.
And, of course, there is the extraordinary Deirdre McCloskey: a transgendered woman, free-market anarchist, feminist, Aristotelian, Austrian-friendly, influential economist in libertarian history and the present (addressing Scott Bieser’s comment downthread), and runner of intellectual circles around Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Wait a sec…
(Pulls off Stephan Kinsella’s mask)
Keith Preston! It was you all along!
I never realized that you would be of the transgendered persuasion. Congrats on coming out!
Your bravery is admirable. I would be honoured to consider you an ALLy.
Robert Hutchinson on August 30, 2009 at 8:50 pm wrote . . .
Sorry, that’s what I meant to write: women are just cowardly and stupid.
To which Rachel replies –
Get laid much? Doubt it, with that kind of attitude.
There are several factors at work, most of them have been mentioned – one is this kind of BS – the “If you’re not a libertarian you must be weak and stupid. After all, I’m a libertarian and I’m god’s gift to women. Take off your clothes and make me a sandwich.”
Women are acculturated to be liberals. Feeling v. reasoning, nurturing v. hunting/conquering, empathetic v. problem-solving.
For the most part, I also find a majority of women to be uninterested or even repulsed by the BS conflict of politics.
Most married libertarian men that I know have wives who are either liberals or repulsed by politics. It’s hell on the activism – wife resents every minute that you are involved.
I also find that dropping the BS attitude and speaking to women like they do have guts and brains, and in a persuasive fashion, can at least make them soften and learn a little about freedom, if not win them over.
And Stephan Kinsella – you going to be the first in line? ;o)
All right, how obvious *do* I have to make my sarcasm?
Actually I think it’s good that Libertarian men are asking this question, even if they tend to look at the problem from the wrong angle. This Movement of Ours would be more robust and more successful if it included more women.
I also wonder if part of the problem isn’t a tendency of many libertarian men to focus more on economics than on personal liberty in other spheres. Not that economics isn’t important, or that women can’t understand the subject, but when considering the influential women in libertarian history and the present, I can’t think of a single economist. They tend to work in medicine or law or letters, and focus on ethics and justice. The ABCT just doesn’t excite most of them.
No women economists? Didn’t someone in this thread just mention Deirdre McCloskey?
In addition to Deirdre McCloskey, I can think of the following influential female libertarian economists (listed on a spectrum of Chicago School/Friedmanite [“worse than communists”, according to Hoppe] to Austrian/Misesian):
Rose Friedman
Anna Schwartz
Lisa Bernstein
Sudha Shenoy
Bettina Bien Greaves
I’m sure I’m forgetting many others.
Just to clarify, I don’t know if Schwartz and Bernstein self-identify as libertarians, but Schwartz advocates libertarian policy conclusions in the Chicago style, and Bernstein’s research interest – private commercial law – is congruent with and buttresses market anarchist legal theory.
Gary: sure, there are some. Deborah Walker, Karen Vaughn, etc.
Didn’t say there were no female libertarian economists, just that of the best-known libertarian women, none came to mind. I was thinking along the lines of Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Wendy McElroy, Mary Ruwart, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Karen De Coster, Linda Tannehill, and Sandy Shaw.
An IXQuick search turns up a list of prominent historic and contemporary libertarian women at http://chelm.freeyellow.com/women_index.html . Perusing the list, I noted four or five economists out of more than 160 names. Would a list of prominent male libertarians have the same ratio?
@Scott Bieser – that’s part of the acculturation part – girls are not only not encouraged to study math and sciences, often they are discouraged.
And dontcha know – men don’t like smart women. All too often true. Much less so in libertarian circles, but on whole . . . too much truth to it.
Is the former paragraph actually true based on some kind of evidence or is it just anecdote?
The latter paragraph is not even a little bit true. One of the disappointing things about many women I’ve known is the degree to which they attend to trivial matters like celebrity gossip. And is the latter paragraph true in some kind of objectively provable way or is it again just anecdote?
I suspect a lot of the problem is that libertarians and anarchists, of either right or left orientation, are geeks. (I’m not name calling; I’m a geek as well.) Geeks have a hard time relating to actual women, regardless of political orientation. Our lack of female experience causes us to make up thinks that women actually think, as opposed to just asking them, or having some interpersonal experience we can draw on.
Plus, women by-and-large aren’t going to flock to geek gatherings of any sort. It doesn’t help that some LP meetings are more like D&D get-togethers (“you failed your roll – your motion isn’t carried according to Roberts Rules!”) complete with a Dungeonmaster (aka parliamentarian).
I think a lot of it has to do just with personality traits and priorities. On almost all personality tests, Five-Factor Model of Personality and whatever, women are:
more compassionate and cooperative–not to say that this isn’t true of the libertarian ideaology, but it certainly is not propagated to have the fraternalistic basis that it does.
60-75% of women prefer feeling as opposed to 55-80% of men who prefer thinking–this is the antithesis of what is revered in the intellectual circles of austro-anarchist discussion.
We are more empathetic, generally, than we are systematic.
We value our families over any ideology, over our country, etc.
Men are more aggressive, and they are more competitive.
Also, even is this day and age, something like 51% of women believe it is more important to have a family life than a career.
I don’t agree that men don’t like smart women, at all. Sometimes they find it intimidating, but if the sort of man that calls himself a libertarian or anarchist does not find intelligent women attractive, than perhaps he should re-evaluate what ideas he really subscribes to, because that would seem to me to be the opposite of valuing an individual based on their merits.
Also, it is the same reason lots of people, men and women, aren’t libertarians. They have only so far a field of view. People believe that you are helping your fellow man, not destroying the world for him, when you harness in the profits and consequently motives of those bigger and better than you–for fairness or whatever. They do not realize that they are hurting themselves and others.
Amelia,
What you just stated (quite succintly) is all I said in my post, yet I was accused by the PC brigades of “sexism.” I respect people’s right to disagree with me on this matter, but I am honestly just saying what I believe.
Some the libertarians (certainly Rothbard and many of Roderick Long’s MI Institutes) that have influenced me tend to be on the “nature,” side of this argument. Dr. Long clearly subscribes to a “nurture,” explanation.
As for me, I make no conclusions. I am merely stating factual differences that exist among participation in libertarianism. (and all Internet-based activism) I love human diversity of all kinds and think men and women are pretty dull without each other to challenge intellectually and spiritually.
It seems to be a common understanding that there are few female libertarians, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s true. I recall reading somewhere that, contrary to popular assumption, women are almost exactly evenly split down the “left/right” line. Anyone assuming they’re all a bunch of left-wing militant feminists is clearly wrong.
If you take the (approximate) 49-50% of women who identify as being right-of-center, I would bet that a decent number fall into some kind of “libertarianish-conservative” category, even if they don’t self-identify as “libertarian” or haven’t heavily familiarized themselves with the term or philosophy.
As for radical or Austro libertarianism…maybe it’s safe to call it a guy thing. That’s the perception I get, but it may be mistaken.
A lot of the female “libertarian” movement is Christian organized, God-motivated, as fas as the females I have met interested in the philosophy, which almost demands of them to disagree with some of the basic premises of the ideology. Not necessarily, that is obviously a broad generalization, but from what I’ve observed thus far. Even without abortion and gay marriage, a lot of them tend to be anti-immigration, buy America, etc.
Anyway, I would consider myself an Anarcho-capitalist or Austro-libertarian, or a thousand other terms for it. I am a female, not even the transgendered type, not even the overweight type. haha. We’re out there.
If one implies that there would be more female libertarians if there weren’t so many sexist male libertarians, he is making a sexist point himself. While it would be perfectly understandable if libertarian male sexism pushed women away from activism, it has no bearing on the appeal of the philosophy. To adopt a libertarian outlook is simply a matter of intellectual assent, so to argue that women would be less likely to adopt it based on the attitudes of some men in the movement seems to imply that women don’t make decisions based on intellect, but feelings. I don’t think this is the case, the reasons probably have more to do with notions of gender than anything else. That said I knew a few female libertarian anarchists in college, so there are probably more than most people think. Their reasons for not getting majorly involved are their own.
If one implies that there would be more black libertarians if there weren’t so many racist libertarians, is he making a racist point himself?
Not all of us are perfectly Bayesian omniscient truth discoverers. Most of us use shortcuts. If we notice that a significant portion of people claiming to advance a certain belief system say bigoted things toward us, and that many of the rest of the people claiming this same belief system don’t seem to have a problem with the behavior of the first group, we are less likely to give that belief system a fair hearing, and more likely to assume that there is something flawed and ugly at the heart of the belief system itself, or in any case, not really care about the belief system at all and just conclude that these are really grotesque people not worth associating with.
As social creatures, to adopt ANY outlook is rarely if ever simply a matter of “intellectual assent”; it is also to look at the community of fellow travelers and see if that is a community that we want to be a part of, that we want to associate with.
To argue that that women are less likely to adopt libertarianism or associate themselves with libertarians because of the attitudes of some men in the movement is to imply that women are human, and like all humans, make decisions based on a mixture of intellect, emotion, and cognitive shortcuts.
Again, the point is a marketing one. If you want to attract new people, don’t come across as an asshole to your customers. Simple.
Ahh, but there are plenty of sexists in any ideological group. The most appalling sexism I have ever seen came from a committed deep ecology environmentalist, and his attitudes were not uncommon among his circle. As a matter of fact I’d be willing to wager that the average male libertarian is less sexist than the average male ELFer or AFL – CIO union member.
This gets us into what Glen Whitman dubbed the libertarian small-sample problem:
Hmm, that link didn’t work. Trying again…
Dennis: Thank you for pointing out the obvious stereotyping and sexism underlying this attack on me and YAL.
Amelia: I don’t think that non-PC (LRC-style) libertarianism is necessarily (or even mostly) nativist and bound to religious tradition… You sound like a great libertarian and individualist.
I’m sorry. I don’t know what those initialisms means.
And thank you for mentioning it. I am sorry; that was embarrassing.
Yes, AFAIK, the meaning behind Matt’s acronyms is on the QT. BRB…
OK, after the phone call I just made, Matt will have to report the meaning of each of them he just used to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the PTA. ROFL! He’ll probably just feed them a load of BS.
PS. Matt is a VIP MIA who went AWOL a few years ago. IIRC he found out the UN was looking for his DNA. But IMHO they have it on file at UCLA. Well, my favourite MLB player just hit some more RBIs so I’m going to go watch TV.
Hahahahaha. That was amazingly hilarious.
If James Branch Cabell was right, and women tend to be more practical then men – men more often given to various idea-based or extended-duty-based ethics – the fact that libertarian ideas have little cash value in the current marketplace of ideas could account for much of the difference.
Libertarianism is a normative doctrine that may appeal to some very basic ethical principles – including even empathy (despite Ayn Rand’s egoism, etc., and the usual leftist lampoons of libertarian ideas as “greedy” and such) – but it does not offer near-term chances of reward for most people. So OF COURSE women would tend to avoid it.
Add Camille Paglia to Cabell on our list of thinkers who insist on this bit of sexual differentiation in basic psychology.
Further, consider the nurturant agenda of the modern state, and the traditional (and biologically driven) nurturant role thrust upon women, and one can see why women would tend to be anti-libertarian: From basic drives and historical circumstance. John Lott’s work on women’s role in establishing government growth in America seems fairly conclusive. The death of individualism and the rise of collectivism was driven, in large part, by female participation in the franchise.
This is not a mystery. It’s quickly becoming a historic fact. We either deal with it or be dealt with by historians’ collective shrug.
“The death of individualism and the rise of collectivism was driven, in large part, by female participation in the franchise.”
Thank you. Now I have another quote for the file marked “why I will never again be a libertarian”.
It is a short step from the belief that women do not want liberty to the position that they do not need or deserve it. And if liberty is posited as the highest political good, then it is also a short step from the view that women do not desire liberty to the view that there is something inherently wrong with women.
Libertarians are a better argument for liberal statism than anything within liberal statism.
Wait, people still take John “The dog ate my homework” Lott, (aka sock puppet Mary Rosh) seriously these days? Seriously?
Aster,
Well, if that is the sort of argumentative leap you find persuasive, then I can understand why . . . [insert damn near anything].
I repeated what appears to be a fact. I take it for a fact. Everything I know about American electoral history from, say, 1870 through 1970 corroborates it. Careful statistical analysis solidifies it.
But I will take none of your “short steps.”
I know many women who are arch conservatives. I know many who are strictly apolitical. I not a few who are libertarian. But, it still remains true that a very large majority of women voted to increase the size of political and bureaucratic governance, in state after state, as the franchise was extended to women, and as women increasingly made use of their new rights.
How is it that bringing up a fact, and stating it as such, can bring about condemnation on normative grounds?
The only attitude a person should have to the truth is “I’m for it.”
Anything else is intellectual sloppiness or cowardice.
Now, whether this fact explains the issue at hand is surely open to debate. Unwillingness to debate either the fact or the logic, and treat statistical evidence on its own level (and not make the obvious leaps you make) is hardly the kind of thing I expect from grown adult disputants on a site dedicated, in no small part, to philosophy.
Oh, and by the way: Desert for liberty is not necessarily the same as a case for granting liberty. It could be that none of us DESERVE liberty. Most of my relatives believe we deserve to burn in hell for eternity. And yet, for some reason, each one admits that, in today’s here and now, liberty is at least one of the conditions we should demand from government. (That’s neither my theology nor my philosophy, but it’s not, on the face of it, illogical. There may be many arguments for liberty not based on a concept, strictly speaking, of desert.)
On the bright side, by some definitions I am not a libertarian. I am quite agnostic on many issues of the ideal political/legal order.
Indeed, look at my first sentence. I stated my first supposition as just that, a supposition. (The word “if” means something! Who’d’a thunk?) Onel might glean from that statement that I may not even side with James Branch Cabell on this issue. I may, it might not irrationally be construed, have “an open mind.”
I can read your logic. I think it is not unfair to say that I can read something of your spirit. I see no advantage in combing through this tangled mess of terrible premises and worse passions merely because it is presented in the form of directed, invincible, unassailable purpose.
‘The death of individualism and the rise of collectivism’. For some of us, the removal of the most basic denial of public voice for women counts in itself as a defeat of something collectivist. Some of us see collectivism in societies in which women are first slaves of fathers, then husbands; where they are told that their purpose is to live for children and men (and God), but not for themselves; where their most basic bodily autonomy is held to have no value not derived from male, social, or divine property right; where their minds are held to be inferior by nature and their words of little account, on account of their membership in a collective group.
The twentieth century saw the partial defeat of these ancient patriarchal evils in some parts of the world, in what should by any rational calculus (women are half the human race, don’cha know?) ought to count as an immense triumph for the principle that an individual ought to have a life of one’s own. But this counts for nothing; the only measure of collectivism or individualism that matters in a society is the power of government over men; any distraction from this is irrational, unscientific, emotionalist, “sloppiness”, “cowardice”, unphilosophical(!).
If you wish to spout sexist rot blaming women for a fall from a mythical individualist paradise, then I will agree that you ought to have the political right to do so. But please, if you wish to do this, do not pose as an avatar of reason and individualism.
Libertarianism, you can have. It promises Earth and Heaven, but except to its charmed few its words are only promises, and its philosophical credit card doesn’t clear. I concede that what the centre-Left offers is tainted and imperfect in comparison to refined libertarian principle. But it’s real, has proven by practise to apply to me, and I can only thank God that their power and public stature exceeds yours.
Aster,
“If you wish to spout sexist rot blaming women for a fall from a mythical individualist paradise, then I will agree that you ought to have the political right to do so. But please, if you wish to do this, do not pose as an avatar of reason and individualism.”
Mr. Virkkala is a gentle, nice, decent, sincere guy. His comments were not sexist and he did not blame women as you say. Your comments are unfair.
“Libertarianism, you can have. It promises Earth and Heaven, but except to its charmed few its words are only promises, and its philosophical credit card doesn’t clear.”
When people speak in metaphors and use purple prose the danger of inclarity usually lurks. Libertarianism doesn’t promise heaven and earth, whatever this means. As for your first sentence–you can say you don’t want libertarianism, but either you are in favor of, or opposed to, aggression. If you are opposed to it, you are a libertarian. If you are not–then you are just siding with the criminals, and it’s a bit rich of you to get on a high horse about mere sexism.
Mr. Virkkala is a gentle, nice, decent, sincere guy.
Um, considering these are the same compliments you use to describe Herr Hoppe (who may be gentle, nice. decent and sincere in person to his friends but is certainly none of those things in print when writing about “human trash” and other undersireables), that’s sort of damning with faint praise, isn’t it?
And how is the claim “The death of individualism and the rise of collectivism was driven, in large part, by female participation in the franchise.” anything but an instance of blaming women?
“Mere” sexism, yes. I think you’ve sufficiently answered the title question of this thread.
I’ll say that people like “Micha Ghertner” make me embarrassed to be a male. Maybe I’ll convert after all.
No more offtopic remarks.
“No more offtopic remarks.”
Isn’t this Roderick’s call?
I’m Roderick’s a-hole alter ego.
Y’all can see what I wrote on Rad Geek about my own experiences being a “compulsive” flirt within Libertas…
What I was trying to get at was a tension between a non-sexually repressed space and respecting contextualized/individualized boundaries.
On another note: there were 3 bright young Libertarian women at the RIFI seminar. These statistical arguments are silly and EXTREMELY embarrassing….
They reek of the crudest sort of biological determinism.
*Crudest lol
Why arent most MEN libertarians either? Maybe it’s cuz men…
– Get emotional over fights, so they can’t have a principled stance against war
– Just too domineering (especially over women) They love treating others like their own property (Especially when sending them to war)
– They are too arrogant to lose, so they’ll always demand subsidies (businesses, tariffs, etc)
– They like to get into groups and gang up on each other, so they are not capable of respecting minorities
– They like to bully and boss others around, which is why there are incapable of abolishing government regulations
– They are more emotionally attached to loyalty and solidarity, instead of liberty for all, so they can’t ever understand libertarianism
but…
As a libertarian Man, I object and take some offense to this line of thinking (and I would guess that some other men here would too). But how is this line of thinking different from the blog comments at Matt’s YAL blog about the lack of libertarian women? Makes more sense when you put the shoe on the other foot no? (or is this my meathead man thinking going on again?)
As an interesting sidenote: Emma Goldman didn’t support women’s suffrage:
“She disagreed with the movement for women’s suffrage, which demanded the right of women to vote. In her essay “Woman Suffrage”, she ridicules the idea that women’s involvement would infuse the democratic state with a more just orientation: “As if women have not sold their votes, as if women politicians cannot be bought!”[151] She agreed with the suffragists’ assertion that women are equal to men, but disagreed that their participation alone would make the state more just. “To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers.”[152]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman#Tactics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3v9PzLoMEg&feature=related