Rights, Duties, and Relations: Toward a Pro-Woman Feminism for the 21st Century

Erika Bachiochi
Across the globe, conservative political parties are attracting greater number of young men than ever before but are losing among young and unmarried women. For those who view progressive ideologies as inimical to women’s flourishing, who worry that political polarization of the sexes will disrupt family formation even further, and who believe the American experiment in ordered liberty is worth fighting for, it should be clear that the Right must make a better case to women.

“Feminism,” understood as the peculiar modern ideology of the 20th century, has reached its self-destroying zenith in the erasure of woman in gender ideology and in the putative “right” to intentionally end the life of one’s developing unborn child. But, despite its popularity and influence among young and unmarried women, this form of “feminism” is not true advocacy for women. To effectively fight the cultural and legal disintegration wrought by the now-hegemonic ideological “feminism” of the 20th century, it is time for a new feminism for the 21st century: a movement that advocates for women as women and that understands that rights are intrinsically linked with responsibilities, just as the original 19th-century movement for women’s rights did.

Two distinct uses of the single term—“feminism” (as modern ideology) and feminism (as advocacy for women’s interests and rights)—are readily conflated in our day, and not only by progressives. In conservatives’ rightful quest to combat “feminism” as modern ideology, they have too readily accepted progressives’ narrative of the historic cause of women’s rights. As a result, conservatives have inadvertently ceded to progressives feminism as advocacy for women’s true interests. But much like liberalism and conservativism— widely contested terms whose meanings have grown well beyond their discrete historic origins—the term feminism casts a far wider net now than when the term first gained prominence in the early 20th century.REF