Meet the author, legal scholar, and recovered women’s studies major plotting to reclaim feminism.
Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, author of "The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Vision," is the latest entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
"The Rights of Women," which came out last year, was so important that Law & Liberty devoted an entire symposium to it, exploring how a more coherent view of women’s rights might be restored. Bachiochi’s book is must-reading for anyone who believes that the feminist movement was hijacked and radicalized.
Bachiochi takes her cue from the 18th century English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," which came out in 1792. In Bachiochi’s view, too much attention has been paid to Wollstonecraft’s unconventional private life, marriage to the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, and her role as the mother of Mary Shelley, wife of the poet and author of "Frankenstein." Wollstonecraft was a serious moral and political philosopher whose vision of the rights of women is worth reclaiming today.
“A key thread that runs through my book is that we’ve abandoned the way the early women’s rights advocates — first, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft — thought about rights,” Bachiochi tells IWF. “Rights were always seen in relation to obligations, indeed, rights were necessary to carry out obligations.”
Starting in the 1970s, the feminist movement began to reject a holistic, responsibilities-based approach to rights. Betty Friedan’s "The Feminine Mystique," which came out in 1963, was a key milestone in the journey away from the Wollstonecraft brand of feminism, even as Friedan captured some of Wollstonecraft’s themes. “Friedan is an interesting figure,” says Bachiochi, a slim, angular woman with casually-styled long dark hair and an engaging smile. “She and civil rights attorney Pauli Murray coauthored the original statement for the National Organization for Women. It includes a lot of talk about responsibilities. It says that we need to be shaping social institutions so women can participate in the public sphere without conflict with their responsibilities as wives and mothers, as homemakers even. They even talked about men and women as partners. It is nice, rich language."
“But the trouble with Friedan is that she ultimately views self-actualization as the highest end of human beings, and so she never gets to the idea of virtue, which calls us to something higher than self. Yes, she wants women to be excellent. She talks about pioneer women, for example, who were doing economically important things as agrarian housewives. Yet, in "The Feminine Mystique," Friedan sees work in the marketplace as more important than work in the home. She has pejorative words about homemakers — she calls them parasites.”
Bachiochi is a former women’s studies major at Middlebury College, who encountered ideas that set her on a different intellectual path. She is the holder of fellowships at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Mass., where she is founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project. She is the mother of seven children, ranging in age from twenty years old to four years old.
Bachiochi’s project is nothing less than reclaiming feminism. Bachiochi regards IWV’s “Women’s Bill of Rights,” which recognizes inherent biological differences between women and men, as a step in the right direction.
We know you will enjoy meeting this brilliant woman who is engaged in one of the most important intellectual challenges of our day.
