The Feminist Promise

"Stansell shows why women’s rights became a central element of modern American liberalism. And she helps us understand how liberalism evolved to embrace individual rights and privacy in the most intimate areas of personal life. That came through the women’s movement. Stansell gives a very good account of how these feminist issues, on the one hand, go very deep back in American history, and, on the other hand, reached a critical mass of popular engagement during the 1960s. In the 1970s social issues became more important to the Republican Party, and the notion that the women’s movement was a threat to the family and the stability of society became a mantra among conservatives. I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always that way. A century ago the movement for women’s suffrage was just as likely to get support from Republicans. Even in the 1960s plenty of conservatives supported legal equality. But today women’s rights are a dividing line between liberalism and conservatism. I think liberals have a strong canon and in my own historical writing I’ve tried to suggest what that canon is or ought to be. I wrote a book called The Story of American Freedom , which, in a way, is a history of the origins of modern liberalism. It’s a history of social movements that have contributed to the expansion of liberty in our country, including abolitionism, feminism, populism and the labour movement. These movements form the foundations of modern liberalism. As I argue in The Story of American Freedom, the idea of freedom is the central concept in American political culture. Yet the concept of freedom has changed over time – different groups attribute different meanings to freedom. Throughout our history, there have been conflicts over not only what freedom means but also who is entitled to freedom. Modern liberals adopted the cause of expanding freedom to groups who were denied its full benefit. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter You can go back to Thomas Jefferson . His ideas about government resting on the will of the people and opposition to large-scale economic interest are antecedent. But I think modern liberalism really comes out of the Progressive Era, not just Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, labour leaders like Eugene Debs and social reformers like Florence Kelley and Jane Addams. Then in the 30s we have Franklin Roosevelt , and in the 60s Betty Freidan and Martin Luther King. Different elements have individuals who have pushed them to the forefront of liberal thinking at one time or another. I’m not sure that I can do that. Historians always see things as evolving and changing. In the 19th century, liberalism was virtually the opposite of what it is today. People who called themselves liberals were believers in laissez faire and limited government and often very elitist in their outlook. Twentieth-century liberalism is much more interventionist, redistributionist, and state-oriented. Twenty-first-century liberalism could be a new breed. On the one hand, liberals retain their belief in an activist government stimulating greater equality. On the other hand, liberals believe in dissent, individual liberties and retaining an area of life sealed off from governmental intrusion, surveillance and intervention. Modern liberalism combines these two conflicting tendencies. It’s a somewhat uneasy marriage."