Monday, September 28, 2020

Why Left-Wing Feminists Hate Amy Coney Barrett

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Monday, September 28, 2020

 

Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, has accepted Donald Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, this highly accomplished jurist, professor, and former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia will be the only mother on the Court and the first mother of school-aged children to serve as a Supreme Court justice.

 

Barrett is an exemplar of authentic feminism. She has managed, by all accounts, to be a loving wife and mother while also putting her immense talents to good use in the legal profession, reaching the pinnacle of her career before the age of 50. But Barrett’s nomination has been met only with vitriol by the same left-wing feminists who claim to value women’s empowerment, and it’s worth understanding why.

 

A century ago, first-wave feminists waged a political battle so that American women would have the right to vote. Several decades later, second-wave feminists turned their focus from political equality to the realm of sex: sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, and the inequality they believe biology imposes on women.

 

Today’s feminists are an outgrowth of that second wave, and, like those earlier women, their political agenda rests on the often-unstated premise that consequence-free sex is a fundamental right. Sex without consequences is, of course, more difficult to achieve for women than for men — an inequality that feminists detest, and an inequality that societies throughout history have attempted to ameliorate through the institution of marriage.

 

But these new feminists had begun to view marriage as, at best, a barrier to fulfillment, and, at worst, a form of oppression. Instead, they argued, women should be freed from the tyranny of biology, a belief that manifested in a crusade for unlimited contraception and abortion. Today’s feminists still prioritize abortion politics, but they’ve upped the ante, arguing that equality requires government to subsidize both abortion and contraception.

 

This myopic focus on sexuality is undergirded by a new feminist philosophy: In order to be fulfilled and to stand on equal footing with men, women must be able to “have it all.”

 

Empowered by technology and medicine that grant them the illusion of control over their childbearing, women can dabble in sex and family life only insofar as they fit into the grander plan of climbing the ladder, reaching the corner office, and perhaps pausing once or twice along the way to get married or have a child.

 

This conception of gender equality has been popularized by high-powered career women such as Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and public-policy leader Anne-Marie Slaughter. Their vision, sometimes called “lean-in feminism,” consists of benchmarks such as filling the boardrooms of every major company with an equal number of men and women.

 

In a 2011 commencement speech at Barnard College, Sandberg popularized her now-famous notion of “leaning in,” by which she meant prioritizing career success and workplace ambition as an antidote to the supposed fact that men run the world. “A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world,” Sandberg told the graduates.

 

Slaughter echoed this idea in her viral 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” arguing that “only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women.”

 

These ideas have resonated with our culture and have gained a following among public figures. At the Golden Globes in January, actress Michelle Williams delivered an acceptance speech that might be described as an ode to lean-in feminism. “I’m grateful for the acknowledgement of the choices I’ve made,” Williams said, “and I’m also grateful to have lived in a moment in our society where choice exists, because as women and as girls, things can happen to our bodies that are not our choice.”

 

She was referring to pregnancy, insinuating, as feminists so often do, that women mysteriously find themselves pregnant without having chosen to participate in the act that has the natural end of creating new human life. Williams next asserted that her career achievements would have been impossible “without employing a woman’s right to choose,” a favored euphemism for abortion.

 

Progressives hailed Williams as an example of female empowerment. But what exactly is so empowering about the idea that women have to sacrifice their unborn children on the altar of career achievement? This version of feminism is telling women, in essence, that they must suppress their biology and mimic men in order to succeed.

 

A society that prizes authentic gender equality would tell women the exact opposite: that success takes many forms, that excelling in a workplace career isn’t the only path to happiness, that women are valuable as they are, and that they don’t need to get ahead by using violence against the vulnerable.

 

Amy Coney Barrett has embraced these truths and puts the lie to feminism’s false, harmful notion of freedom. Women and mothers around the country are embracing Barrett as a heroine not because hers is the only proper way to balance work and family, but because her life illustrates that motherhood need not conflict with fulfillment, and that making sacrifices need not involve sidelining womanhood.

No comments: