Annie’s Reviews > The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision > Status Update

If much historical injustice and prejudice against women has been corrected in our time, the culturally essential work of families and family-supporting communities—practiced and handed down over the ages—has been sorely neglected. Without a substantive account of human freedom, and it’s proper end, human excellence, the essential human goods of children, family, and community, so necessary for authentic (cont)

At their best, families, and the communities that support them, provide the surest protection against the ever-encroaching market mentality, helping persons, in Glendon’s words, “to develop an internalized willingness to view others with genuine respect and concern, rather than as objects, means, or obstacles.”

“Let us stimulate the free market is the greatest device that human beings have discovered for unleashing economic energy and creativity, for utilizing resources, and for responding to human needs…Nevertheless, those who do not want to see any interference with market forces in the form of family policy or labor policy need to think again…The market, like our democratic experiment, requires a certain kind(cont)

Previous generations of women’s rights advocates sought to protect the culturally essential work of caregiving from the erosion of an ever-encroaching market and its materialistic economic principles. A woman’s movement that regards abortion rights as *equal citizenship rights* has surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of the market.

Dang.

“Having known oppression, we cannot stand by and allow the oppression of an entire class of weaker human beings. Having once been owned by our husbands, we cannot condone a position that says the unborn are owned by their mothers. Remembering a time when our value was determined by whether a man wanted us, we refuse to bow to the patriarchal attitude that says the unborn child’s value is determined (cont)

In the apt words of a southern academic at the time: “[Strict equality feminists] would free women from the rule of men only to make them greater slaves to the machines of industry.”

But when such principles are jettisoned and the pursuit of virtue is traded for power- and pleasure-seeking, those same asymmetrical sex differences can be the ground of a deep antagonism between men and women…