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.
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