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

In fact, the term feminism is now so broadly defined as to be applied retrospectively by both scholars and lay people alike to include the women’s rights movement of the mid-19th century (and even earlier thinkers), all of whom lived before the word “feminism” was even coined. For better or worse, feminism thus includes this early period as its “first wave.” But unlike core aspects of 1970s feminism, the antebellum movement in the United States ennobled women—and their defining capacity for motherhood—and understood rights as correlative with responsibilities. Indeed, part of modern “feminist” ideology’s hegemonic success has been to read its own ideological commitments back into that earliest movement that advocated for women’s rights—and then to ahistorically equate “women’s rights” with sexual license, radical autonomy, and abortion rights.REF In doing so, “feminism” as a modern ideology has recklessly undermined the true interests of women and the very purpose of rights.

For too long, conservatives have assumed the veracity of this account of history and have thereby allowed progressives to control the narrative. But, as we will see, even early 20th-century “feminism” was definitionally a contest over how to define women’s interests and how to philosophically ground, and give content to, women’s rights.REF Without an alternative women’s movement that explicitly advocates for the distinctive needs and true interests of women, young women too often assume that progressives are the authentic advocates of women, even as the Left has emptied the words “woman” and “rights” of any objective, substantive meaning. Lost from both history and contemporary debates is the original pro-woman, pro-life, pro-family, quintessentially American account of women’s rights as knit together with responsibilities, the one beautifully articulated in the United States in the mid-19th century.REF

The Antebellum Women’s Movement Memory-Holed

When schoolchildren read about “feminism’s first wave,” they are taught about the first public convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, as well as the names of the movement’s most radical figures, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They are also given the strong impression that winning the right to vote was the movement’s chief goal. The outspoken anti-abortion, pro-motherhood views of even the most radical first wave figures (such as, for example, Victoria Woodhull) are mentioned only by pro-life advocates and organizations.REF The early movement’s strong religious character—and the leaders who were more representative of its mainstream—are almost entirely lost from collective memory.

Yet the early women’s movement in the United States—in speeches at national conventions and in other public writings—made strong appeals to Scripture and the divinely ordained natural law; the virtues of men and of marriage; the inherent dignity of children (born and unborn); a single standard of chaste sexual norms; and the distinctive goods and shared responsibilities of motherhood and fatherhood. Even as this early movement leaned on the natural rights tradition of the American Founding, it owed its chief arguments to Christianity. Accordingly, its leaders often grounded their claims explicitly in women’s equal status as bearers of the image of God. They spoke in one voice about women’s expansive familial and social responsibilities and the God-given, natural rights that enabled their fulfilment.REF For such reasons, modern woman-erasing “feminist” ideology is not the early movement’s legitimate heir.

A deep religious sensibility—with God-given rights and responsibilities ever corollaries—is exemplified in works well known to early advocates but too little known today. These include noted abolitionist Sarah Grimké’s early and heralded Letters on the Equality of the Sexes;REF “Discourse on Woman” by Lucretia Mott, the beloved and well-known leader of the antebellum movement;REF and the speeches from, and letters to, the first national conventions in the early 1850s.REF Some of these were collected by Paulina Davis, the president of the first national convention on Woman’s Rights, Duties, and Relations at Worcester in 1850 in the aptly named 1853 publication, Woman’s Rights Commensurate with Her Capacities and Obligations: A Series of Tracts.REF

The sole study of Seneca Falls—to the exclusion of far more well-attended national conventions and of the writings of more mainstream and much-admired advocates—mistakenly places Stanton and suffrage at the center of early claims for women’s rights.REF But it was actually the Bible-believing Quaker Mott, not the radical liberal Stanton, who held pride of place in the antebellum movement. Mott, not Stanton, was specially called out in reference to the first local meeting at Seneca Falls in the preface to the proceedings of the second national convention.REF To the extent that conservatives disregard these more central figures and sources, they risk misinterpreting even Seneca Falls itself.REF

A deep dive into these lesser-known documents of American history reveals that the philosophical concept of “woman’s rights”—like the concept of “rights” itself—is largely of Christian origin. Properly understood, rights are not mythical abstractions that can be defined however the sovereign will pleases, as moderns following Thomas Hobbes would have it.REF As the American Founders and antebellum women’s rights advocates generally appreciated, civil and political rights are concrete liberties to carry out concrete responsibilities, sensibly derived from the natural law and oriented toward the common good. For the good of men, women, and children, their families, and the nation, now is the time to rescue the historic cause of “woman’s rights, duties, and relations” from the progressive Left’s woman-erasing ideology. But first it is necessary to understand the historic reasons for, and noble ideals that animated, that original cause.

The Antebellum Movement’s Biblically Inspired Claims

Industrialization, Coverture, and Their Discontents. The mid-19th century women’s movement rose up in response to the Industrial Revolution’s impact on America’s largely agrarian society, as factories drew men (and then poorer women) out of family farms and shops to earn wages.REF As paid labor left the home, and with it, men, too, wage-earning husbands became newly dependent upon industrial capitalists, making homemaking women dependent upon the wages of their husbands as they had not been before. The existential interdependency and common interests of husband and wife as they labored together in the productive agrarian household had begun to fray in the new economy, even as much traditional household work began to be displaced by these same developments.REF

Under the extant common law of coverture, a married woman lost the right she had as a single woman to own or transfer property or execute contracts or a will. Her “very being” was placed under the assumed beneficence (or “cover”) of her husband who, with the dawn of liberalism, now held individual title to family property. This pre-industrial legal arrangement, already risky for the wife of a vicious husband, was particularly ill-suited to the new economy, in which women often needed to supplement their husbands’ income and to manage how it was spent. Because women lacked the educational, economic, and legal means to independently earn a living for themselves, they were also too often thrust into marriages (and the full dependency coverture marriage entailed) out of sheer economic need. In cases of neglect, abandonment, or abuse, not uncommon given the alienating stresses facing men together with the rise of the new cities’ bars and brothels, married women had to find the means to fully provide for themselves and their children, or to take custody of them. But coverture assumed the children were their fathers’. A wife’s supplemental earnings, meager though they may be—as well as any personal or real property she brought into the marriage—belonged to her husband alone.REF

More still, the not-insignificant number of non-married women who had long labored as integral parts of large agrarian households were now thrown into low-wage factory work in urban settings, or, if all else failed, prostitution. Meanwhile, to shore up a vision of the home as a loving haven from a dog-eat-dog world, women were increasingly depicted culturally (and by means of their education) as fragile and weak—a recurring trope in Western thought that has never quite described actual women or their significant economic contribution to the household in every age.REF

Christian Women’s Advocacy Rebuked. On the heels of the Second Great Awakening, middle-class Christian women in the United States were inspired to spearhead local (and eventually national) charitable organizations. They sought to fight against not only the ongoing moral outrage of slavery, but also the social upheaval and economic precarity industrialization had inflicted upon women and children on the margins of society. As they began to organize themselves and speak out publicly against slavery, child labor, illiteracy, domestic abuse, intemperance, marital rape, and the legal and societal factors (e.g., the sexual double standard) that contributed to growing rates of prostitution and infanticide, some Christian denominations began to denounce these women’s public advocacy as “unnatural” and “unwomanly.”REF

In 1837, for instance, the Congregationalist Church of Massachusetts issued a letter to be read in every congregation to warn against such advocacy on the part of women. In so doing, the ministers gave voice to the view of “woman” as necessarily dependent upon and naturally subordinate to man, one that had animated dominant strains of pagan, Christian, and modern thought, and to which notable women throughout history had cogently (but only individually) responded.REF According to the mid-19th-century Congregationalists:

The power of woman is in her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection and which keeps her in those departments of life that form the character of individuals and of the nation…. When she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seems unnecessary, we put ourself in self-defense against her; she yields the power which God has given her for protection, and her character becomes unnatural.REF

Thus, before the early women’s movement could even begin to make claims for their rights as correlative with their responsibilities, its earliest leaders found it necessary to offer an account of woman as a responsible being, accountable first and foremost to God. As Christine de Pizan in the early 15th century, Mary Astell in the late 17th century, and Mary Wollstonecraft had but a half-century before, they turned, in large part, to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures to help them.REF

Notably, in the late 20th century, in apostolic letters both to the faithful and to women throughout the world, Pope John Paul II interpreted Scripture much as these mid-19th century Christian women did, but within the context of the Catholic ecclesial and sacramental structure. Though men and women are equal in dignity because both are made in the image of God, only men can be biological, spiritual, and sacramental fathers, and women, mothers. John Paul II’s own call in 1995 for a “new feminism” then did not envision a false egalitarianism, but rather upheld paternal and maternal authority, as richly distinctive, both in the Church and in the home.REF

Woman as Accountable to God, Responsible to Others, and a Fitting Companion to Man. Devoutly Christian abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who had crafted pamphlets and spoken publicly against slavery—and been condemned for doing so—issued a series of letters in 1838 in which she herself translates the Book of Genesis from the original Hebrew and defends “the equality of the sexes.” Noticing that in the first Creation account, “man” is a generic term that includes both man and woman, she maintains that the two sexes were created in perfect equality and entrusted by God to rule together in harmony and love. “Dominion was given to both over every other creature, but not over each other,” she writes.REF

In the second Creation account, Grimké observes that when God creates woman as a “helpmate” to the man, she is sent (unlike the lower animals) as a suitable companion for him: “in all respects his equal, one who was like himself a free agent, gifted with intellect and endowed with immortality…able to enter into all his feelings as a moral and responsible being.” The pair’s fall from “innocence” and “happiness,” she writes, was not a fall from equal dignity or mutual responsibility, nor is the image of God lost in them.REF More still, God does not command man to rule over woman. Rather, perverted translations of Genesis 3:16 (“he will rule over you”) falsely “converted a prediction to Eve into a command to Adam.” Addressed to the woman, not the man, the passage predicts the peculiar “lust for dominion” that would bear down on her and thereby threaten the original “oneness” and unity of the sexes.REF

The lesson Grimké draws from her translation of Genesis is that, just as the man is individually responsible to God for his talents, so, too, is the woman. Christ alone is her master, and “the glory of God [i]s the end of her creation.”REF In order for women, then, to “answer the purpose of our being”—for women to fulfill their duties with the talents God has given them—women must work first to understand their divine purpose. But lack of education and coverture marriage (which made husbands responsible for the bad acts of their wives) had kept women absolutely dependent, answerable not primarily to God but to man.

Submission to One Another—Not Domination and Degradation. Grimké’s interpretation of Genesis would be echoed throughout the antebellum movement and beyond. Women speaking at, or writing to, the first national women’s conventions in the early 1850s likewise grounded women’s equal status in the imago Dei, declaring that man and woman were made for “equal companionship”REF and that “every mature soul is responsible directly to God.”REF The women speaking at the conventions also followed Grimké’s view of the Fall.

Paulina Davis, who served as president of the first national conventions in 1850 and 1851, a vice president of the 1852 convention, and editor of Woman’s Rights Commensurate (collecting speeches from both) stated in 1852 that the Fall had “inverted the order of human things: woman became the victim of suffering and bondage—man became her master, and swallowed up her existence in his.” Calling upon the “Messiah, the Prince of Peace, [who] took the form of a servant,” Davis bemoaned how “[p]ower which is properly only the servant of Goodness, is every where its master.” She continued: “womanhood, which is chosen to characterize the Church made perfect, as the ‘bride of the lamb,’ follows this rule, is every where in a state of degradation corresponding inversely to the glory which is yet to be revealed in her.”REF

Echoing Grimké’s argument that Genesis 3 included a descriptive prophesy addressed to woman and not a command to man, Antoinette Blackwell (whose maiden name at the time was Brown) turned to the interpretation of various texts in the New Testament.REF Blackwell argued that “the submission enjoined upon the wife, in the New Testament, is not the unrighteous rule predicted in the Old.” She said that it was a Christian submission “due from man toward man, and from man toward woman,” quoting several Scriptural passages, including “Yea, all of you be subject to one another (Eph 5:21).” Regarding the Scriptural injunction that in marriage man is the “head” of the woman, she responds: “True, but only in the sense in which Christ is represented as head of His body, the Church…. The mystical Head and Body, or Christ and His Church, symbolizes oneness, union. Christ so loved the Church he gave himself up for it…. So ought men to love their wives. Then the rule which grew out of sin, will cease with the sin.”REF

Two Versions of Womanhood. On the eve of the first national convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, Lucretia Mott similarly argued from the premise that women were made in the divine image in her “Discourse on Woman.” A speech delivered in Philadelphia in late 1849, read at the convention, and then re-published widely, Mott’s “Discourse” specially responded to the prevalent challenge that women’s public advocacy was making them “unwomanly” and taking them “out of [their] appropriate sphere.”REF

In the speech, Mott writes insightfully of two versions of womanhood: one “true” because cultivated, mature, and refined, and the other, immature, childish, and thereby not fully realized. In response to the claim that the advocates wished to “act the man,” Mott explicitly defends both sexual difference and woman’s responsibility to develop her capacities. She writes, “We would admit all the difference, that our great and beneficent Creator has made, in relation of man and woman, nor would we seek to disturb this relation; but we deny that the present position of woman, is her true sphere of usefulness.” Indeed, Mott happily points to woman’s difference from man in “nature,” “configuration,” and “physical strength,” concluding, “we are satisfied with nature.”REF But, she argues, women, like men, have a duty to develop their God-given powers and human capacities for the good.

Mott was worried, as so many female writers before and after her, that women’s want of liberal education and mature responsibilities were leading some to “degenerate into a kind of effeminacy,” a sentimentality “in which she is satisfied to be the mere plaything or toy of society, content with her outward adornings, and with tone of flattery.” Mott argues that to become a “true woman” and “help meet, in the true sense of the word,” she must “understand her duties, physical, intellectual, and moral” and cultivate her powers as a moral and responsible being. An education aimed solely at domesticity, especially in the new industrial context, could not enable women to cultivate the maturity and intellectual virtue needed for true spousal companionship, the morally formative work of motherhood, or engaged republican citizenship, as a truly liberal education would.

Likewise, Paulina Davis’s speech, “On the Education of Females,” at the 1850 Worcester convention decried the widespread valorization of a certain kind of female effeminacy—which she took to be formed by slavish “dependency” and want of liberal education—that masqueraded as “woman’s nature” per se. “Cultivated,” Davis argues, “for the delights of her affectional nature, the heart is disproportionately developed, and she is made a creature of pure feeling and passionate impulse.” She continues, “Intellectual culture of any kind which might abate or stead or balance feeling, is held unwomanly; and the sex is enslaved by the disproportionate activity of its own distinguishing traits.” The “over-strength of her heart,” Davis concludes, is “exaggerated by the weakness of her head.”REF

Women Specially Charged with the Care of Embryonic Life. The early advocates called upon women to resist the era’s depiction of them as fragile and weak. To undertake responsibly the common demands of motherhood—a privilege that made them, in the words of Stanton, “second only to God”—women needed to be intellectually, morally, and physically strong, for their own sake, their husband’s, their children’s, and the larger society, too.

Like later feminists, then, the early movement campaigned tirelessly for women to enjoy full personal agency and governance over their own bodies, including the right to decline sex within marriage (which they called “voluntary motherhood”), against the traditional male prerogative which was violative in the hands of unchaste men.REF But the early women’s rights advocates also recognized, as today’s “feminists” seem not to, that modern embryology (scientifically advanced enough even by that time) reveals that as soon as a woman is pregnant, and usually before she is even aware, her body has already begun providing abundant nurture and care for a developing human being. They recognized that when pregnant, women were, as the radical Victoria Woodhull put it in in an essay in 1870, “appointed to the holy position of motherhood [and thereby] are directly charged with the care of embryonic life.”REF

The country’s earliest women’s rights advocates—and the nation’s first female doctors, too—spoke clearly about the moral evil of induced abortion, even as they pitied those women who, out of either ignorance or desperation, found ways to procure one.REF Woodhull wrote, for instance, “It is just as much a murder to destroy life in its embryonic condition, as it is to destroy it after the fully developed form is attained, for it is the self-same life that is taken.”REF And one of the nation’s first female obstetrician/gynecologists, Alice Bunker Stockham, wrote in her wildly popular book, Tokology, “By what false reasoning does she convince herself that another life, still more dependent upon her for its existence, with equal rights and possibilities has no claim upon her for protection?”REF Like pro-life doctors today, the country’s earliest female doctors well recognized their responsibility to care for both mother and child, a care that sometimes meant the devastating loss of a child in an effort to provide care to the mother (or occasionally, the loss of both).REF

But the early advocates were not just demanding of themselves and of society at large. The early American women’s movement also made strong demands of caddish men: to stop treating women as playthings or objects for men’s sexual appetites, or even as sentimental child-like spaniels designed only to please men and be admired by them. These women wished to be regarded as persons worthy not only of affection but also of dignity and respect.

Because the consequences of sex are so much more profound for women than men, these women argued, in keeping with Christian teaching, that men had a moral obligation to govern their sexual appetites (as social norms at the time expected of women) and to take up their duties as fathers. Both represented the surest means, they believed, of preventing abortions and creating happy homes—an insight that still holds true today.REF These women thus sought for women to become responsible, moral agents of their lives, just as men were then expected to be, prepared by liberal education not for servile dependence or sentimental immaturity. They envisioned a new generation of mature, liberally educated women capable of companionship and partnership in the task of virtuously carrying out their shared duties to their families and beyond.

Advocating Equality in Difference. In her speech on the education of females at the 1850 Worcester convention, Davis clarifies what the young movement meant by “equality.” These women did not advocate “identity or likeness, in general or in particulars, of the two sexes, but equivalence of dignity, necessity, and use; admitting all differences and modifications which shall not effect a just claim to equal liberty in development and action.”REF Or, as she put it in her opening address to that convention, “Nature does not teach that men and women are unequal, but only that they are unlike; an unlikeness so naturally related and dependent that their respective differences by their balance establish, instead of destroying, their equality.”REF

Because the distinctively human faculties—such as reason and the capacity for virtue and self-sacrifice—are the same in both sexes, they ought to be developed in both. This would lead, Davis argued, to the emergence of a diversity of characters, as “no individual is equal in fact and form to any other in the universe” as “[n]ature seems never to repeat herself.”REF If both women and men were properly educated, the natural differences between them would redound to the good of both, she thought, “adjust[ing] the sexes to each other, and establish[ing] mutuality” rather than antagonism.REF

Harvard-educated minister (and uncle to Louisa May Alcott) Samuel May explored the same theme in a celebrated 1845 sermon that was included as the first entry in Woman’s Rights Commensurate:

I can think of no excellence, that would be becoming and beautiful in a true woman, that would not be equally becoming and beautiful in a true man. Jesus of Nazareth, the perfect man, exhibited as much of the feminine, as he did of the masculine character. And doubtless every individual, of either sex, will approach the perfection to which we are all called, just so far as he or she combines in one the virtues and graces of both. Patience, tenderness, and delicacy are as needful to complete the character of a man, as firmness, enterprise and moral courage are to complete the character of a woman.REF

The nation was suffering, in the view of this early movement, from women’s ill performance of their duties, duties that sprang from their relationships to God, family, and society. Their full rational and moral capacities were underdeveloped because they were under-utilized. The early movement worried far less than their adversaries about women being “unsexed”: “That woman’s nature was stamped and sealed by her Creator, and there was no danger of her unsexing herself, so long as He was on the Throne, or His eye watched her,” Lucy Stone, secretary of the convention and emerging leader of the post-war movement, said.REF

Human Capacities, Distinctive Duties, and the Law of Benevolence. A few years later, in an 1856 convention speech, Stone said that the movement grounded its claims on both nature and revelation. There, she explained the ends for which human capacities were given: “[W]hen God made the human soul and gave it certain capacities, he meant that those capacities should be exercised. The wing of the bird indicates its right to fly; and the fin of the fish the right to swim. So in human beings, the existence of a power presupposes the right to its use, subject to the law of benevolence.” Explaining further, she said, “[T]he noblest, highest, and best thing that any one can accomplish, is what that person ought to do, and what God holds him or her accountable for doing.”REF

In similar fashion, Abby Price, a close friend of Walt Whitman, said at the 1850 convention that it was not necessary to maintain that the sexes are “adapted to the same positions and duties” in order to argue for women’s and men’s equal rights. Rather, the key truth that must be affirmed was that “they are absolutely equal in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” by which Price meant “their rights to do, and to be, individually and socially, all they are capable of, and to attain the highest usefulness and happiness, obediently to the divine moral law.”REF

Though the more radical advocates, like Stanton, would decades later suggest the Bible itself was oppressive to women—a view common to many modern feminists—most of the antebellum advocates viewed Scripture as both authoritative and supportive of their cause.REF As Samuel May said in the 1845 sermon that prefaced the convention speeches in Woman’s Rights Commensurate:

[W]herever Christianity has developed any of its power, it has elevated woman. It requires that she be treated not as the drudge, the slave of man, much less the creature of his lust; but as his nearest friend, his equal companion, his second self. Jesus and his apostles would have us look at woman as an intellectual and moral, not merely as a physical being. Nothing is worthy of her, any more than of man, that does not breathe the spirit of true goodness, active benevolence, stern integrity, moral courage. She, no less than he, is called to be like the Son of God.REF

Most modern feminists, like the earliest women’s advocates, recognize women’s and men’s shared human capacities. But whereas early women’s rights advocates worked for women to be recognized as morally responsible agents, singularly accountable to God for the benevolent use of those capacities, modern feminism has instead elevated personal autonomy as the sexes’ common goal, with no law higher than the will or determination of the self. Early feminism fought against women’s tyrannical subjection under unbounded men. Today’s “feminism” fights for the unbounded subjection of (each) self to its own (often tyrannical) desires. As both the American Founders and early American feminists understood, “freedom” without the channeling guide of virtue conformed to the law of benevolence, obediently to the divine moral law, is not proper freedom at all. It is a dangerous ideological abstraction for women, men, and the children in their care.

Woman’s Rights Commensurate with Her Capacities and Obligations

Today, the very phrase “women’s rights” is all too often taken as inclusive of or even synonymous with the “right” to intentionally end the life of one’s dependent unborn child. In recent years, the term has expanded to include the “freedom” to exit or enter the legal category of “woman” as one wills. In this modern view, “rights” are a kind of license for personal and sexual autonomy: the abstract “freedom” to determine a future unhindered by—a “freedom from”—unchosen moral or bodily constraints.REF “Feminism” as modern ideology has thereby swallowed feminism as advocacy for women’s rights: Both rights, and now woman, are reckoned but a product of the will to power. Persons are increasingly understood to enjoy the license to autonomously engage in performing one’s chosen gender as they see fit, but never to take up the responsibilities sex (and sexual intercourse) actually entail. Both words—“rights” and “woman”—have thus been rendered substantively meaningless today, with the consequences strewn before our eyes on a daily basis.

In sharp contrast, “rights,” for the antebellum movement, as at the American Founding, were always correlated with concrete responsibilities, “freedom for” doing what one ought. Indeed, in some cases “rights” and “responsibilities” read not as opposites, as too often believed today, but rather as synonyms. For instance, in her Discourse, Mott employs the terms in a way that reads just that way, “an extended recognition of her rights, her important duties and responsibilities in life.” Or as Paulina Davis declaimed in a 1852 resolution: “[T]hat woman may perform her duties, and fulfill her destiny, we demand for her moral, social, pecuniary, and political freedom.”REF One convention even defined women by their rights-as-duties: “Women are human beings whose rights correspond with their duties.”REF Lucy Stone makes the synonymity between the two even more explicit when she writes in 1892: “We are all getting to be women’s rights advocates or rather investigators of women’s duties.”REF

On the Responsibilities of Woman and the Means Necessary to Carry Them Out. Perhaps the most compelling statement of how the core of the antebellum women’s movement thought about rights-as-correlative-with-responsibilities was through Vermont delegate and 1852 national convention vice president, Clarina Nichols’ lengthy 1851 convention speech, “On the Responsibilities of Woman,” collected in Woman’s Rights Commensurate. Of the many convention speeches collected in that work, hers is the one that received “loud cheers” from the convention audience, which is itself a telling fact.

But before Nichols explains the integral relation between rights and responsibilities, and how the law of coverture, in particular, had strained her own life as a mother, she offers a characteristic introduction:

I stand before you, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter—filling every relation that it is given to woman to fill. And by the token that I have a husband, a father, and brothers, whom I revere for their manliness, and love for their tenderness, I may speak to you with confidence and say—I respect manhood. I love it when it aspires to the high destiny which God has opened to it. And it is because I have confidence in manhood, that I am here to press upon it the claims of womanhood. What we want for woman is the means of education, that she may understand and be able to meet her responsibilities.REF

She elaborates on the interaction between relations, responsibilities, powers, and rights:

We all believe that the Creator of us all is both omniscient and omnipotent—wise and able to adapt means to the ends he had in view. We hold ourselves created to sustain certain relations as intelligent beings, and that God has endowed us with capacities equal to the discharge of the duties involved in those relations. Now let us survey woman’s responsibilities within the narrowest sphere to which any common-sense man would limit her offices. As a mother, her powers mould and develope [sic] humanity, intellectual, moral, and physical. Next to God, woman is the creator of the race as it is, and as it shall be. I ask, then, has God created woman man’s inferior? If so, He has been false to his wisdom, false to his power, in creating an inferior being for a superior work! But if it be true, as all admit, that woman’s responsibilities are equal to man’s, I claim that God has endowed her with equal powers for their discharge.”REF

For women to discharge their responsibilities and develop their powers, they require “the right to the means that will enable us to be the helpers of men, in the true sense of helpers.” Here Nichols adds: “I do not understand that we are at liberty to help men to the devil,” which is greeted with “loud cheering.” She finishes the thought, saying she believes it is woman’s mission to help man “heavenward,” by which she means “to the full development and rightful enjoyment of his being.”REF

This view of the mutual dependence, reciprocal responsibilities, and shared interests of men and women runs throughout the early conventions. This is true, even as men who behave as tyrants, and extant coverture—which enabled such tyranny—are strongly condemned as both contrary to Scripture and the republican doctrine of natural rights. Indeed, just as these women bemoan a degeneracy of femininity (e.g., slavish dependency) as distinctive from true, mature, responsible womanhood, they also bemoan faux (e.g., tyrannical) masculinity as distinct from true, mature, responsible manhood.REF Neither degeneracy is from God. Both are products of the Fall. Both are to be resisted and transformed to uphold the equal dignity of all.

Two Great (Sex) Classes and Their Unity of Interest. The early women’s movement thus wished to foster the conditions for mature men and women to work together for the good of families and the nation. As Antoinette Blackwell said at the 1852 convention, “God recognized at the creation the fact that two great classes of mind were needed to work together. They are both necessary in every department of human effort.”REF Indeed, Blackwell saw both in shared human nature and in sexual difference twin rationales for women to enjoy a voice and role in public life, a position characteristic of the movement as a whole.

Insofar as their natures were the same—as of a common humanity—Blackwell claimed that as grounding for a kind of natural (or human) right. Insofar as men and women are different, she said, “one sex cannot represent the other, and injustice must be done to the unrepresented class.”REF The absence of women’s voices had given way to a “wholly masculine” law, created and executed, she said, by “type or class of the [male] nature.”REF Samuel May made a similar point in a letter to the 1850 convention, “The State now is in the condition of half orphanage. There are fathers of the public, but no mothers.”REF

Indeed, the antebellum insistence for collaboration and mutuality between the two sexes—“an absolute unity of interest and destiny which nature has established between them”—was memorialized in the signed statement of nearly 90 women (and men) from several state delegations of the very first national convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850:

Men and Women, in their reciprocities of love and duty, are one flesh and one blood—mother, wife, sister and daughter come so near the heart and mind of every man, that they must be either his blessing or his bane. Where there is such mutuality of interests, such an interlinking of life, there can be no real antagonism of position and action. The sexes should not, for any reason, or by any chance, take hostile attitudes toward each other, either in the apprehension of wrongs which exists in their necessary relations; but they should harmonize in opinion and co-operate in effort, for the reason that they must unite in the ultimate achievement of the desired reformation.REF

In her opening speech at that first convention, Paulina Davis rightly observed that the women’s rights movement was without example in history, because “it has no purpose of arming the oppressed against the oppressor, or of separating the parties, or of setting up independence, or of severing the relations of either.” Rather, she said their reformation was to be brought “without violence, or any form of antagonism”: “It seeks to replace the worn out with the living and the beautiful, so as to reconstruct without overturning, and to regenerate without destroying.”REF

Laws Modeled on the Highest Laws of Nature, Not the Lowest Instincts. Greater civilizational development would come, Davis insisted, as societies relied less on barbaric “dominion of force” and the “lower instincts of our nature,” and more as human institutions were “modeled after the highest laws of our nature.” The law “of heaven” and “Divine Providence,” she said, was that the “elder shall serve the younger.” Maintaining that “[l]ong suffering [sic] is a quality of the highest wisdom, and charity beareth all things for it hopeth all things,” Davis urged the participants of the first national convention for Woman’s Rights, Duties, and Relations to rest their claims on God’s natural and revealed justice.REF

The antebellum movement therefore philosophically grounded claims for natural, civil, and political rights on the following varied bases: (1) as the corollaries of their responsibilities as rational creatures accountable to God; (2) as needed to preserve themselves due to being equally vulnerable human beings and co-laborers in an industrializing era, “liable as man to all the vicissitudes of life”;REF (3) as mothers specially responsible for their children; and (4) as citizens in a republic that based its own existence on an appeal to God-given natural rights.

In addition to the primary goal of a co-equal liberal education to facilitate their own maturation as women, the early movement sought:

• Property and contract rights, to justly recognize and remunerate their contributions inside and outside the household;
• Custody rights, so they would not be forced to abandon their children to escape domestic abuse;
• Rights of access to the trades and professions, so they could continue to make economic contributions to the household in the new industrial economy and not be forced into an ill-suited marriage or prostitution just to survive;
• The right to voluntary motherhood, to wit, the right to decline unwanted sex against the legally sanctioned prerogative of their husbands;
• The right to not be taxed or otherwise governed without political representation; and, as time wore on,
• Just workplace laws and protection.

Modern “Feminism” and Its Ideological Hegemony Today

In sharp contrast to the early women’s movement, whose first national convention in 1850 began with a tribute to the “mutuality of interests” between the sexes and “their reciprocities of love and duty,” the group of American women who first called themselves “feminists” in the early years of the 20th century wished for full economic independence from men and sexual liberation imitative of the worst males.REF Influenced by socialist ideologies and encapsulated by the thought and work of Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, the “feminists” were the first to publicly advocate for artificial birth control, the technological lynchpin of modern feminism both then and now.

As noted-historian Nancy F. Cott writes in The Grounding of Modern Feminism, the new modern ideology that took “feminism” as its name “severed the ties” the 19th-century women’s movement had to Christianity, as it jettisoned its emphasis on duties and its approach to sexuality. Concerning the last, Cott writes:

Unlike a long line of Anglo-American evangelical women [in the 19th century], who insisted men adhere to the same canon of sexual respectability that governed women—and unlike Christabel Pankhurst, whose demand for a single standard of morality was epitomized in her notorious slogan ‘Votes for Women and Chastity for Men’—[the feminists] urged a single standard balanced in the direction of heterosexual freedom for women.REF

But even as the sex radicals sought to wholly own the term, the meaning and content of feminism in the 1910s and 1920s was immediately contested—and from all sides. So, for instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1898 had famously advocated for women’s economic independence, still held onto two key aspects of the 19th-century movement, extolling motherhood (“the common duty and common glory of womanhood”), as well as the virtue of chastity.REF Against the sex radicals, she denounced “women’s new ‘licentiousness’ as an imitation of the vices of men ‘precisely in the manner of that of any servile class suddenly set free.’”REF Meanwhile, against Gilman’s own school of strict equality feminists (which would eventually organize around the Equal Rights Amendment), labor advocates like Florence Kelley and Mary Anderson understood their own efforts to pass protective legislation on behalf of poor and working-class mothers as a kind of feminism, too.REF

Feminism as Contest, Basic Rights Achieved. In this way, early 20th-century feminism was definitionally a robust contest between competing visions of women’s advancement in the late industrial era amidst sexual difference and individual variability. “Feminisms,” then, competed in how best to advocate for women as a distinctive class of individuals with a range of needs. As Cott aptly puts it, women are “alike [with men] as human beings, and yet categorically different… samenesses and differences derive[d] from nature and culture, how inextricably entwined we can hardly know.”REF

It is no surprise, then, that when The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement defined the new term in 1933, feminism did not describe the particular views of the sex radicals who had first used the term. Instead, the word had already taken the much more general meaning it still has today: “the opinions and principles of the advocates of the extended recognition of the achievements and claims of women; advocacy of women’s rights.”REF Cogent both then and now, feminism, thus defined, involves advocacy of women’s interests and “women’s rights”—the true nature of which having been contested since the word feminism was first coined. Unfortunately, Cott observes, “By the end of the 1920s women outside the [strict equality organization] rarely made efforts to reclaim the term feminist for themselves, and the meaning of the term was depleted.”REF

By the middle of the 20th century, there was broad public support for the claims championed by the 19th-century women’s advocates, from property, contract, and marital rights to equal opportunities in education and employment. As a result, most highly educated and professionally accomplished women—women with public influence and voice—no longer felt the need to contest the term, nor specially to work on issues related to women’s equal dignity or advancement. Indeed, once the Title VII and IX amendments to the Civil Rights Act were passed and successfully litigated in the early 1970s—protecting women’s equal opportunities in the workplace and education, respectively—the original political cause for women’s civil and political rights, extending from at least the mid-19th century, had largely been achieved.

The Meaning of Woman and the Purpose of Rights. But in the meantime, and of great consequence to this day, the sex radicals still gladly identified as “feminists.” Mid-century theorists like Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, and Shulamith Firestone gave theoretical shape to the modern movement, and there were very few prominent women’s advocates of the older dispensation left to contest the content of the term from within feminism’s orbit.REF Since that time, the most trenchant critiques of “feminism” as an ideology have been from the outside, and therefore often rhetorically in opposition to feminism as such. Thus did feminism as ideology begin its hegemonic reign, with the ever-expanding sexual revolution its crown jewel.REF

The trouble is that today the term feminism also enjoys its broader meaning: The term is still synonymous with advocacy for women’s rights.REF This remains the case even as the modern ideology that takes its name no longer advocates for either women as a sex that is distinctive from men, or rights as properly correlative with responsibilities. In this altogether new context, then, to denounce feminism tout court has been to cede the ground and content of “women’s rights” to the Left, even as pro-woman lawyers work to save landmarks such as Titles VII and IX from their ideologically driven expansion at the hands of powerful “feminist” organizations. (Indeed, legal protection for girls’ and women’s sports, and against transgender surgeries on youth, is a good example of a new feminism of women’s advocacy fighting against “feminism” as ideology.)

In such a context, inherently more vulnerable women and girls—made more vulnerable by the attempted erasure of sex differences basic to ideological “feminism” and the sexual revolution—need a new pro-woman movement, grounded in reality, to contest the claims of modern “feminism” and advocate for women’s interests today. Against the early movement’s appreciation of men’s distinctive strengths and responsibilities, men and boys have been harmed by the attempted erasure of sex and sex differences, too.

Toward a Pro-Woman Feminism for the 21st Century

The early American women’s movement took for granted that a woman was female—one whose human body was organized around the awesome capacity to bear and nurse children, and the serious responsibility (and privilege) to carry out maternal duties of care if and when she became a mother. But in the view of the early advocates, women ought to engage voluntarily and responsibly in that act that might make one a mother, as should men, because of their reciprocal responsibilities as fathers. Both sexes also ought to enjoy access to liberal education and other necessary means to fulfill their myriad responsibilities as men and women excellently.

The early women’s rights advocates thereby worked, in an industrializing America, to see women recognized as fully human: rational and mutually responsible creatures equal in dignity to men and personally accountable to God. Theirs is a vision of the integral collaboration of women and men, and their rights as responsibilities, that extends the quintessentially American experiment in ordered liberty—itself one with distinctively Judeo-Christian origins—to include women as full republican citizens. It is an early, ennobling vision that is all but forgotten today, even by conservatives.

Retrieving the Nobility of Being Male and Female in the Image of God. Today, modern ideologies—ideological “feminism” foremost among them—have upended the West’s dignified account of what it is to be human. The loss of this Judeo-Christian inheritance has degraded both women and men. No longer viewed as having been made in the image and likeness of God, neither women nor men are cherished as uniquely rational creatures, accountable to the God who loved them first, and thereby responsible to others.

More still, females are no longer culturally honored, or even recognized, for their singular capacity to bear, nurse, and mother children, even as this capacity was too often viewed, especially before early feminism, as the rationale behind their legal subordination. Now, the healthy bodies of girls (and boys) are rendered infertile through transgender treatments and surgeries, and are bought, sold, and otherwise violated through rampant pornography, surrogacy, sex trafficking, prostitution, and, in some places in the world, forced marriage. Ideological “feminism” often cheers much of this dehumanization.

Political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain once noted the kind of horseshoe effect that animates traditional anti-feminism and modern “feminist” ideology: “One version of Feminist equality, that articulated by a radical Feminist like Shulamith Firestone, begins from the same presumption as many anti-Feminists, namely, that the biological differences between the sexes are necessary factors in women’s continued subordination; sex inequality is lodged in nature.”REF This horseshoe effect continues today when prominent anti-feminists like Andrew Tate and trans-identified writer Andrea Long Chu both agree that to be feminine is to be submissive to dominating masculine power (or in Firestone’s view, reproductive technologies) to manage women’s asymmetrical vulnerability.REF But this is the view that the early women’s advocates sought to dislodge from interpretations of Scripture and the social and legal norms those interpretations informed.

A new feminism for the 21st century can help the West reclaim its own humanizing heritage by recalling the edifying principles that animated the antebellum woman’s advocates. In this view, sex equality exists amidst sexual difference—and ennobles both sexes.

Serving Women’s True Interests in the Family, in the Law, and in Education. To serve women’s true interests, a new women’s movement should focus on three of the original movement’s chief goals: (1) encourage the reciprocal duties of both mothers and fathers; (2) promote rights for responsibilities; and (3) liberally educate women and men for moral maturity.

Family: Unique Relations of Care, Not Interchangeable Caregivers. The educational and professional landscape today is strikingly different from that of the 19th century. Women now attain college degrees at higher rates than men, not to mention the great numbers of women in professional schools like law and medicine. Scholars like American Institute for Boys and Men Founder Richard Reeves, Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers and Nick Eberstadt, among others, are right to try to shift the nation’s attention to improving the educational and professional attainment of boys and men, without denigrating the achievements of girls and women. Indeed, a new pro-woman feminism would recognize that men and women are two “great”—and distinct—classes, as Paulina Davis put it, often with distinctive interests and needs that merit distinct attention. As the antebellum advocates insisted, men and women rise or fall together.

Against the view that women are naturally subordinate to men, antebellum advocates strongly advanced the fundamental equality of the sexes, but the movement did not deny sexual difference. Maternity was what made women “second only to God,” a special privilege and superpower that only women could experience, even if they never physically bore a child. A pro-woman feminism for the 21st century would likewise recognize the unifying solidarity at the heart of being a woman and so at the heart of any authentic women’s movement: the shared potential for (and great gift of) motherhood.

Such a solidarity should in no way undermine those women who are not called to physical motherhood. As history has proven in spades, women are capable of excelling—and offering the gift of themselves—in much else besides. But most women still become mothers, and every person alive today was born of a woman. Decades of ideological “feminism” have tended to regard motherhood as but an opportunity cost in the labor market, not a superpower that deserves far greater cultural praise and warrants a seat at the table. But today, society lacks not only the voice of mature mothers in our public conversations, but it also often lacks the voice of mature fathers, too.

Indeed, the earliest women’s rights advocates knew that if women were to take their places as full citizens, the nation would have to become far more hospitable to women as women, those who definitionally enjoy the asymmetrical privilege of bearing (and raising) the next generation. Instead, society got a “feminism” that privileges abortion-on-demand as a means of “equalizing” the reproductive asymmetry between the sexes. After a half-century of “abortion-as-freedom”—a message that has kicked into high gear since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—sexual intercourse still encumbers women more than men. But now the distinctive privilege of being a mother is increasingly hard to discern as being worthy of praise in today’s culture, while the distinctive burdens are hardly more easily born.

The irony, as the author has long argued, is that modern “feminism” capitulated to a male-normativity concerning sex, parenting, and work that thereby undermined the early feminist vision of a society that was truly hospitable to women in the fullness of their dignity. Indeed, society has yet to experience a nation of strong, liberally educated women who enjoy the full panoply of civil and political rights, properly understood. No wonder young women are so afraid of pregnancy and the prospect of bearing (and raising) children today. To find their place in the hyper-sexualized, woman-degrading culture into which they have been born—reflected most egregiously in the porn-saturated internet—they learn early and often how to escape from the beautiful gift of female fertility and its potential for the extraordinary experience of motherhood.

But early feminism did more than praise the gift of motherhood as women’s distinctive superpower. It also called men to their responsibilities as fathers, not only for the good of women and children, but also for the good of men themselves. As Sarah Fish of Rochester noted in a letter to the 1852 women’s convention: “When we shall have the bright sunlight of truth beaming in our pathway, we shall hear no more about its being exclusively the mother’s business to train her children—thus lulling to rest the mental and spiritual energies of the father—but there will be a mutual responsibility.”REF

As Fish’s letter rightly implies, fathers not only ideally protect and support the work of care and nurture in the home through high expectations and stable paychecks, though those are surely great goods: A father also enjoys a specific and unique relation of paternal authority, responsibility, and care with each of his children that the mother does not, one that is both different and equally needed.REF Indeed, the essential and distinctive relationships that mothers and fathers enjoy with their children have important policy implications that decades of ideological “feminism” have ignored—to the detriment of all involved.REF

Law: Rights as Oriented Toward Responsibilities, Not Radical Autonomy. As demonstrated, this country’s earliest advocates for women did not view “women’s rights” as encompassing the freedom to intentionally end the lives of their unborn children, even as they knew women were sometimes desperate enough to do so. After all, the reason they fought for their natural (and civil) rights, in large measure, was to carry out the natural duties they had to their children.

This fact is not merely a point of esoteric historical interest. Even as advocates for the protection of the inherent dignity of vulnerable unborn human beings struggle in the post-Dobbs era to make their case in the public square, state courts (and voters via referenda) are hearing arguments that such protections illicitly discriminate against women. Rather than honestly present the views of the earliest women’s rights advocates—and their noble vision of “reproductive justice” (i.e., care due both mother and child)—a plethora of law reviews, both before and after Dobbs, argue that 19th-century protections of prenatal human beings relied on the misogynist views of male doctors; just so, they claim that fetal protective laws rely on derogatory views of women today.

These historical arguments, brought to bear on today’s debates, simply erase the views of the early movement for women. They are erased even as those women, both as advocates and doctors, were making their appeals for mother and child at the very same time the 14th Amendment’s protections for due process “life” and “liberty” and “equal protection of the law” were being ratified.REF

Both at their origins, and even today, sex discrimination law in the form of Title VII (employment), Title IX (education), and other statutory and constitutional guarantees only makes sense as protections for women as women. The Constitution, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, does not forbid the acknowledgement of sex differences, even as it protects equal opportunity for both sexes.REF That is, what is legally impermissible is not discrimination between the sexes—much less maintaining that there are only two sexes—but arbitrarily discriminating against one sex or the other. Such legally protected opportunities enable women and men to be accountable to God for the proper employment of their capacities and to be responsible for providing for themselves and their families.REF

Indeed, one important responsibility that falls asymmetrically upon men and women (by nature, not merely by convention or positive law) are the consequences of sex and the begetting of children. Although the American public has been ill-informed of these matters, a prohibition on elective abortion implicitly maintains that an expectant mother—like an expectant father—owes duties of care to the unborn child, such that neither she, nor he, can intentionally end the child’s life.REF Just so, the law should justly enforce the paternal duties of care and provision that men owe their children—and encourage good marriages, the stable institution in which, as the first-wave advocates well knew, paternal responsibilities are most often responsibly and lovingly discharged.

Education: Authentic Liberal Education, Not Technocratic Progressive Indoctrination. A coherent philosophical and legal understanding of women’s rights is hardly the only arena of American life to be abandoned to progressive ideologies in the mid-to-late 20th century. Indeed, at the very same time women’s civil and political rights were being fully (and properly) recognized—and modern feminism-cum-sexual-revolution was beginning to take hold—progressive educational theories started to change the face of American education at every level.

No longer was the formation of girls and boys at home and at school understood to be a profoundly moral and inescapably religious enterprise. It was now primarily for building the technical and interpersonal skills needed for the global market economy. Where liberal education was not traded in altogether for the honing of new technical skills, liberal arts programs were themselves inundated by progressive educational theories and political ideology. Certainly the opportunity to acquire technical and professional training is important, and it was important to the antebellum advocates, too. But the seismic loss of the morally formative integrative enterprise of an authentic liberal education—the kind of education the early advocates wanted for women—has negatively impacted both men and women alike and has made both less morally prepared for today’s technological revolution.REF

Recall the view of Lucretia Mott, Paulina Davis, and prominent women thinkers before them: Without robust intellectual and moral formation, both women and men will degenerate into the worst forms of themselves. Tyrannical or abusive men (who misuse their hormone-mediated physical strength and capacity to dominate and oppress the weak) are a degeneration of what men ought to be. Just so, hyper-emotional or sentimental women (who misuse their hormone-mediated concern for persons to manipulate others or undermine what is true) are a degeneration of what women ought to be.

As the Catholic philosopher Edith Stein observed—echoing those earlier thinkers—each sex can be liberated from its own degenerate tendencies by cultivating in itself the virtues, especially those more naturally acquired by the opposite sex.REF As fully integrated persons, then, virtuous men can attend with tender strength to the needs of the vulnerable; virtuous women can attend with courageous care to that which is objective and true. Rigorous liberal education works to achieve this liberating integration of mind, heart, and character—a liberation from self for the sake of God and others.

Conclusion

As liberal arts schools and classical educators around the country work to recover the cultural patrimony of the West and thus save that ennobling civilizational project—and it is needed more now than ever—Americans ought not forget the great but lesser-known female thinkers that have been lost, too. A noble and robust tradition of women writing and working for the interests of women, their families, and other vulnerable populations predates feminism’s ideological dalliance with the sexual revolution.

A new women’s movement—a pro-woman feminism for the 21st century—could serve women and girls’ true interests again, and thereby uplift men and boys, too, and so inspire, once more, an embattled, divided nation.REF

Erika Bachiochi is the author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame University Press, 2021), a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Fairer Disputations, the online journal of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School of Civil and Economic Leadership and Thought at Arizona State University.