WEBVTT NOTE Joan Kennedy Taylor and the Rediscovery of Libertarian Feminism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:27.000 When Roy Childs phoned Joan Kennedy Taylor early in 1979 to let her know that he had finally won approval for his plan to add her to the full-time staff of the Libertarian Review, she was delighted. 3 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:34.000 She had already discussed the idea with David Dawson, the man she had been married to for the past two decades, 4 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:41.700 and they had decided to move to San Francisco if Roy's plan did come to fruition and he actually made her an offer. 5 00:00:41.700 --> 00:00:48.900 They had spent much of the previous summer in the city by the bay to make sure they'd be comfortable living so far from New York, 6 00:00:48.900 --> 00:00:51.500 and the experiment had been a success. 7 00:00:51.500 --> 00:00:57.500 They began making arrangements to leave their home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and Motor West. 8 00:00:57.500 --> 00:01:04.140 At last, in mid-April of 1979, all was in readiness. Their car was fully checked out 9 00:01:04.140 --> 00:01:09.980 for the trip. They were scheduled to leave in three days. They were expected in San Francisco 10 00:01:09.980 --> 00:01:18.380 by the end of the month. Joan was to start work on May 1. And then, on April 15, Income Tax Day, 11 00:01:18.380 --> 00:01:23.400 David suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 52. 12 00:01:23.400 --> 00:01:27.440 After recovering from the shock, Joan considered what to do. 13 00:01:27.440 --> 00:01:32.800 She could stay in Stockbridge and live off the meager fees she could collect for freelance 14 00:01:32.800 --> 00:01:38.540 writing, copy-editing and proofreading jobs, while dealing as best she could with the difficulty 15 00:01:38.540 --> 00:01:44.220 of getting around, especially in winter, for Joan had never learned to drive a car. 16 00:01:44.220 --> 00:01:48.040 She could go back to New York and earn her keep as a paralegal. 17 00:01:48.040 --> 00:01:52.920 She could even take attorney Paul Moravsky's advice and go back to school. 18 00:01:52.920 --> 00:01:55.400 She could earn a law degree of her own. 19 00:01:55.400 --> 00:02:00.560 She had been working for Moravsky as a paralegal for a year and a half now, commuting back 20 00:02:00.560 --> 00:02:06.440 and forth from Stockbridge on the bus and staying a few nights every week in Manhattan. 21 00:02:06.440 --> 00:02:10.680 He thought she could have a brilliant future in the legal profession. 22 00:02:10.680 --> 00:02:15.200 Already she had developed a strong interest in constitutional law. 23 00:02:15.200 --> 00:02:20.880 On the other hand, she could pursue that emerging interest in constitutional law outside the 24 00:02:20.880 --> 00:02:26.800 legal profession, as a journalist, writing about Supreme Court cases and related matters 25 00:02:26.800 --> 00:02:29.560 in the pages of the Libertarian Review. 26 00:02:29.560 --> 00:02:34.960 She could go to San Francisco after all, find a place to live and try to build a new life 27 00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:37.760 from scratch in a new place. 28 00:02:37.760 --> 00:02:43.240 And after a bit of soul-searching, it was this last option that she decided to take. 29 00:02:43.240 --> 00:02:48.660 She arrived in San Francisco one day in May of 1979 with little more than the clothes 30 00:02:48.660 --> 00:02:52.500 on her back and the contents of a couple of suitcases. 31 00:02:52.500 --> 00:02:58.240 As she herself told the tale nearly 15 years later, when I arrived in San Francisco Roy 32 00:02:58.240 --> 00:03:03.500 decided that I should room with him, and he introduced me to a whole new group of people. 33 00:03:03.500 --> 00:03:08.140 He made the difference between my being a disconsolate widow trying to pick up the 34 00:03:08.140 --> 00:03:30.600 Over the next year and a half, Joan also established ties with the Cato Institute, then in its 35 00:03:30.600 --> 00:03:36.080 second year of operation out of a suite of offices in San Francisco about half a block 36 00:03:36.080 --> 00:03:40.640 Back Down the Street from the ones that housed the Libertarian Review. 37 00:03:40.640 --> 00:03:44.800 These ties with Cato would last for the rest of her professional life. 38 00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:51.520 She began by accepting a position as a bi-weekly commentator on Byline, Cato's daily radio 39 00:03:51.520 --> 00:03:58.040 program, which ran Monday through Friday on more than 150 radio stations coast to coast 40 00:03:58.040 --> 00:04:00.000 throughout the 1980s. 41 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:05.760 Meanwhile, she was becoming more involved with the Libertarian Party. 42 00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:11.800 She had first joined the party in 1976 in Massachusetts, and within the first year of 43 00:04:11.800 --> 00:04:17.220 her membership she had impressed her fellow party members with the depth of her knowledge, 44 00:04:17.220 --> 00:04:24.000 with her verbal facility, and with her gift for diplomacy, her ability to moderate differences, 45 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:30.500 find common ground and work with people toward mutual goals despite serious disagreements. 46 00:04:30.500 --> 00:04:35.600 To no one's surprise she was elected by her fellow Massachusetts party members to become 47 00:04:35.600 --> 00:04:42.040 I'm the only woman on the 20-member platform committee at the 1977 National Libertarian 48 00:04:42.040 --> 00:04:44.960 Party Convention in San Francisco. 49 00:04:44.960 --> 00:04:51.040 Two years later, in 1979, a few months after she arrived in San Francisco to work on the 50 00:04:51.040 --> 00:04:57.140 Libertarian Review, she served as chair of the platform committee at the National Libertarian 51 00:04:57.140 --> 00:05:02.600 Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Los Angeles, the convention that nominated 52 00:05:02.600 --> 00:05:09.440 the ticket of Ed Clark and David Koch to represent the party in the 1980 presidential election 53 00:05:09.440 --> 00:05:15.960 against John Anderson, Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the winner, Ronald Reagan. 54 00:05:15.960 --> 00:05:20.400 Jones' purpose in becoming involved in the Libertarian Party in the first place was to 55 00:05:20.400 --> 00:05:26.000 persuade the Massachusetts branch of the party to endorse the Massachusetts Equal Rights 56 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:33.000 Amendment, which declared that all people are born free and equal and have certain natural, 57 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:38.720 essential and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and 58 00:05:38.720 --> 00:05:44.960 defending their lives and liberties, that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, 59 00:05:44.960 --> 00:05:50.120 in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. 60 00:05:50.120 --> 00:05:55.920 It further stipulated that equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because 61 00:05:55.920 --> 00:06:00.900 because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. 62 00:06:00.900 --> 00:06:06.080 Joan's purpose in becoming involved in the National Party was to persuade its members 63 00:06:06.080 --> 00:06:12.400 to support the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to support every 64 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:18.500 woman's right to seek and undergo an abortion if she wished to do so. 65 00:06:18.500 --> 00:06:24.520 These positions were not easily marketed to libertarians in the 1970s, though this fact 66 00:06:24.520 --> 00:06:30.760 never ceased to mystify Joan. It seemed to her that any individualist was by definition 67 00:06:30.760 --> 00:06:37.680 also a feminist. Were not women individuals, just as men were? It seemed to Joan that any 68 00:06:37.680 --> 00:06:44.560 libertarian was by definition also a feminist. Did not women own their own bodies, just as 69 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:51.280 men did? Were they not entitled to the same rights that men enjoyed? What sort of libertarian, 70 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:56.140 What, he wondered, would deny a woman the right to undergo a medical procedure she had 71 00:06:56.140 --> 00:06:58.860 freely decided to undergo? 72 00:06:58.860 --> 00:07:04.560 What sort of libertarian would balk at amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize the equal 73 00:07:04.560 --> 00:07:10.760 rights of women, when these rights had been systematically abrogated and denied in large 74 00:07:10.760 --> 00:07:16.840 and small ways, both by the federal government and by state and local governments, ever since 75 00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:20.680 the founding of the United States? 76 00:07:20.680 --> 00:07:25.620 Feminists in the 1970s did not tend to view feminism in this way. 77 00:07:25.620 --> 00:07:28.780 They tended to view feminism with suspicion. 78 00:07:28.780 --> 00:07:34.740 Weren't feminists those angry, whiny, bra-burning women who wanted the taxpayers to be forced 79 00:07:34.740 --> 00:07:38.180 to pay for their abortions and their daycare? 80 00:07:38.180 --> 00:07:43.380 Weren't feminists those women who hated men and blamed them for everything that was wrong 81 00:07:43.380 --> 00:07:44.740 in women's lives? 82 00:07:44.740 --> 00:07:50.180 Well, yes, of course, there were feminists back then who corresponded rather well to 83 00:07:50.180 --> 00:07:51.580 to that description. 84 00:07:51.580 --> 00:07:55.060 But was that the entire story about feminism? 85 00:07:55.060 --> 00:07:56.940 Joan thought not. 86 00:07:56.940 --> 00:08:02.660 She had thought not ever since the early 1960s when she had read Betty Friedan's then-new 87 00:08:02.660 --> 00:08:05.100 book The Feminine Mystique. 88 00:08:05.100 --> 00:08:10.580 She had agreed with Edith Efron, who reviewed Friedan's book for Ayn Rand's Objectivist 89 00:08:10.580 --> 00:08:17.620 newsletter, the July 1963 issue, and called it a brilliant, informative and culturally 90 00:08:17.620 --> 00:08:31.420 If most libertarians, and certainly most libertarian women in the 1970s, thought of feminism as 91 00:08:31.420 --> 00:08:37.220 a movement that sought special handouts and other privileges to be bestowed upon women 92 00:08:37.220 --> 00:08:43.220 by the federal government, Joan believed this situation was caused fundamentally by historical 93 00:08:43.220 --> 00:08:44.300 ignorance. 94 00:08:44.300 --> 00:08:49.300 Perhaps it was from Murray Rothbard, whom she knew and worked with during her period 95 00:08:49.300 --> 00:08:55.260 in San Francisco, that she learned the importance of revising the official historical record 96 00:08:55.260 --> 00:09:00.900 from time to time, so that the truth about what actually happened in the past is not 97 00:09:00.900 --> 00:09:02.140 forgotten. 98 00:09:02.140 --> 00:09:07.540 In any case, the fact is that her next major libertarian project after her work at the 99 00:09:07.540 --> 00:09:13.620 Libertarian Review was done, and the principal reason libertarians of today should find John 100 00:09:13.620 --> 00:09:29.620 Joan Kennedy Taylor, a figure of enduring interest, was her revisionist history of the feminist movement, published in 1992 under the title Reclaiming the Mainstream, Individualist Feminism Rediscovered. 101 00:09:29.620 --> 00:09:35.620 Joan's work at the Libertarian Review was done soon enough as things turned out. 102 00:09:35.620 --> 00:09:42.300 After three years in San Francisco, the magazine moved one final time to Washington, D.C. 103 00:09:42.300 --> 00:09:45.180 A year later, it ceased publication. 104 00:09:45.180 --> 00:09:48.140 Joan moved on to the Manhattan Institute. 105 00:09:48.140 --> 00:09:51.540 Yes, that Manhattan Institute. 106 00:09:51.540 --> 00:09:54.060 The Manhattan Institute. 107 00:09:54.060 --> 00:09:59.180 The standard-issue, bloodthirsty neo-con think tank in New York City. 108 00:09:59.180 --> 00:10:05.540 The last place any libertarian under 40 would expect to find anything or anyone libertarian. 109 00:10:05.540 --> 00:10:27.540 But the fact is that 30 years ago, under the presidency of Bill Hammett, a former student of objectivism who had fallen under the sway of Friedrich Hayek while doing his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, the Manhattan Institute was, essentially, libertarian in its ideological orientation. 110 00:10:27.540 --> 00:10:33.540 When Joan left the Manhattan Institute, she moved on to the Foundation for Economic Education, 111 00:10:33.540 --> 00:10:40.540 where she served as an editor of The Freeman, the original magazine of the modern American libertarian movement, 112 00:10:40.540 --> 00:10:46.540 a magazine that was around 35 years old when Joan was working on it in the 1980s 113 00:10:46.540 --> 00:10:50.540 and is now rapidly approaching its 60th anniversary. 114 00:10:50.540 --> 00:10:55.540 And in her spare time, she worked out her revisionist history of feminism. 115 00:10:55.540 --> 00:11:02.540 Joan placed the origins of the American feminist movement in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. 116 00:11:02.540 --> 00:11:10.040 In the 1830s, as that movement began gathering steam and attracting more and more nationwide attention, 117 00:11:10.040 --> 00:11:17.040 it also began attracting more and more supporters, most of them men, but many of them women. 118 00:11:17.040 --> 00:11:23.540 It was in this cause, Joan wrote, that women became politically active in the United States. 119 00:11:23.540 --> 00:11:26.060 There was a problem, however. 120 00:11:26.060 --> 00:11:32.300 Women in the America of the 1830s had some legal rights, but they did not have the political 121 00:11:32.300 --> 00:11:34.140 rights that men did. 122 00:11:34.140 --> 00:11:38.260 They could not vote, hold public office, or serve on juries. 123 00:11:38.260 --> 00:11:43.680 In fact, there was only one political avenue open to them, and they discovered it. 124 00:11:43.680 --> 00:11:46.500 The First Amendment right to petition. 125 00:11:46.500 --> 00:11:51.780 The petition process was an important tool of the abolitionists from early on. 126 00:11:51.780 --> 00:11:57.460 Joan noted that when ex-president John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives 127 00:11:57.460 --> 00:12:04.120 from Massachusetts and gave his first speech to the House in December of 1831, he presented 128 00:12:04.120 --> 00:12:10.140 petitions from a group of Quakers asking for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade 129 00:12:10.140 --> 00:12:12.400 in the District of Columbia. 130 00:12:12.400 --> 00:12:16.600 This was to become a major issue for him as a congressman. 131 00:12:16.600 --> 00:12:21.120 The Quakers didn't see their request granted, needless to say. 132 00:12:21.120 --> 00:12:26.600 This first petition, Joan wrote, was routinely sent to Congress's Standing Committee on the 133 00:12:26.600 --> 00:12:30.000 District of Columbia, which didn't act on it. 134 00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:35.200 But more and more petitions against slavery began arriving in Congress. 135 00:12:35.200 --> 00:12:42.400 Within a couple of years, in December 1833, a National American Anti-Slavery Society was 136 00:12:42.400 --> 00:12:43.400 formed. 137 00:12:43.400 --> 00:12:47.640 It promoted the sending of petitions to Congress. 138 00:12:47.640 --> 00:12:54.720 As a result, Joan wrote, by the end of 1835, petitions were coming in not just from Quakers 139 00:12:54.720 --> 00:13:00.400 and other abolitionists, but from ordinary citizens in almost every northern and western 140 00:13:00.400 --> 00:13:02.320 congressional district. 141 00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:08.960 In May 1836, the House of Representatives passed a gag resolution to dispose of the 142 00:13:08.960 --> 00:13:15.320 petitions, by resolving that petitions relating to the subject of slavery should be ignored, 143 00:13:15.320 --> 00:13:18.160 and that no action was to be taken on them. 144 00:13:18.160 --> 00:13:22.280 They would neither be printed nor referred to committee. 145 00:13:22.280 --> 00:13:27.720 Adams fought against this, but the gag rule remained in effect for more than six years, 146 00:13:27.720 --> 00:13:31.120 until December 3, 1842. 147 00:13:31.120 --> 00:13:37.960 Over that six-year period, however, the petitioners did not give up hope, nor did they stop working. 148 00:13:37.960 --> 00:13:43.480 Thanks to their tireless efforts, Joan wrote, more and more petitions were collected and 149 00:13:43.480 --> 00:13:47.620 signed, even though they would be refused and unread. 150 00:13:47.620 --> 00:13:54.840 In the session of Congress that began in December 1837, more than 200,000 petitions were sent 151 00:13:54.840 --> 00:14:01.300 to Congress, signed by millions of citizens, at a time when the entire population of the 152 00:14:01.300 --> 00:14:04.020 North was only about 10 million. 153 00:14:04.020 --> 00:14:10.160 The petitioning continued, and most of the volunteers collecting and signing these petitions 154 00:14:10.160 --> 00:14:11.720 were women. 155 00:14:11.720 --> 00:14:16.720 And those women could hardly fail to notice the treatment they too often received from 156 00:14:16.720 --> 00:14:22.240 their seemingly rather ungrateful male colleagues in the abolitionist movement. 157 00:14:22.240 --> 00:14:30.220 In 1840, Joan reported, two anti-slavery workers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, 158 00:14:30.220 --> 00:14:34.820 went to London as delegates to a world anti-slavery convention. 159 00:14:34.820 --> 00:14:39.660 They were horrified to find that they and the other female delegates were not allowed 160 00:14:39.660 --> 00:14:45.220 to sit in the meeting with the male delegates, but were required to listen to the proceedings 161 00:14:45.220 --> 00:14:47.480 from seats in the gallery. 162 00:14:47.480 --> 00:14:53.520 The American abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison was so incensed by their treatment 163 00:14:53.520 --> 00:14:59.200 that he refused to take his seat as a delegate, and sat with the women. 164 00:14:59.200 --> 00:15:04.300 And it wasn't just the men in the abolitionist movement whose behaviour had begun to disturb 165 00:15:04.300 --> 00:15:18.300 of These Politically Involved Women, the laws that men had made, even here in the United States, the nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, treated women very badly indeed. 166 00:15:18.300 --> 00:15:30.300 It was no accident, Joan believed, that it was not until women first banded together to agitate to end slavery that they first became aware of how many laws enslaved them. 167 00:15:30.300 --> 00:15:31.300 them. 168 00:15:31.300 --> 00:15:36.540 The longer they thought about it after that, the more preposterous it began to seem. 169 00:15:36.540 --> 00:15:42.200 How could one believe that slaves should have civil rights and still believe in denying 170 00:15:42.200 --> 00:15:47.980 those rights to the women who were championing their cause, Joan asked rhetorically. 171 00:15:47.980 --> 00:15:53.660 Surely these supposedly free women were no less intelligent, no less worthy, no less 172 00:15:53.660 --> 00:15:59.260 human than these unfortunate members of another race enslaved on our shores. 173 00:15:59.260 --> 00:16:05.980 Yet, like the slaves, American married women in 1848 could not own property, could not 174 00:16:05.980 --> 00:16:12.080 sign contracts, could not vote, could not control their own earnings, could be physically 175 00:16:12.080 --> 00:16:18.440 beaten and could be returned to their homes by force if they ran away. 176 00:16:18.440 --> 00:16:25.140 So the abolitionist women turned their attention to what would later be called feminist concerns. 177 00:16:25.140 --> 00:16:31.540 Two of them, Stanton and Mott, organized what Joan called the First Woman's Rights Convention 178 00:16:31.540 --> 00:16:33.580 in 1848. 179 00:16:33.580 --> 00:16:39.700 Stanton and Mott called it a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition 180 00:16:39.700 --> 00:16:41.660 and rights of women. 181 00:16:41.660 --> 00:16:48.280 It was a resounding success, attracting some 300 attendees, and became the first of a series 182 00:16:48.280 --> 00:16:54.660 of such conferences held over the next dozen years in other parts of the country. 183 00:16:54.660 --> 00:17:00.560 Joan focused her attention most sharply not on the conferences and alliances and election 184 00:17:00.560 --> 00:17:06.620 campaigns that these early feminists involved themselves in, but rather on the ideas that 185 00:17:06.620 --> 00:17:08.180 motivated them. 186 00:17:08.180 --> 00:17:13.700 The thesis of this book, she wrote near the beginning of Reclaiming the Mainstream, is 187 00:17:13.700 --> 00:17:21.180 that what we now call feminism began early in the 19th century as an individualist movement, 188 00:17:21.180 --> 00:17:26.580 And further, that it is this individualism that has been the defining characteristic 189 00:17:26.580 --> 00:17:30.500 of the mainstream of that movement ever since. 190 00:17:30.500 --> 00:17:35.100 This does not mean that individualism has always predominated. 191 00:17:35.100 --> 00:17:39.940 Since the early days of the movement there have been two philosophical strands of thought 192 00:17:39.940 --> 00:17:46.580 within it, individualism and collectivism, and from time to time one or the other strand 193 00:17:46.580 --> 00:17:48.500 has become dominant. 194 00:17:48.500 --> 00:17:54.700 When the collectivists predominate, the individualists become less active and return to cultivating 195 00:17:54.700 --> 00:17:57.100 their gardens. 196 00:17:57.100 --> 00:18:02.720 In Joan's view, if the contemporary feminist movement was earning itself a black eye among 197 00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:09.300 libertarians by extolling the supposed benefits of federal programs that would privilege certain 198 00:18:09.300 --> 00:18:14.760 women at the expense of everyone else, this merely showed that the collectivists in the 199 00:18:14.760 --> 00:18:18.420 feminist movement were temporarily in the ascendant. 200 00:18:18.420 --> 00:18:25.020 Instead of cultivating their gardens, individualist feminists, libertarian feminists, should take 201 00:18:25.020 --> 00:18:27.980 the movement back from these collectivists. 202 00:18:27.980 --> 00:18:32.060 They should reclaim the mainstream. 203 00:18:32.060 --> 00:18:38.760 Joan Kennedy Taylor was diagnosed with bladder cancer early in 2002 and was given less than 204 00:18:38.760 --> 00:18:40.660 a year to live. 205 00:18:40.660 --> 00:18:46.980 Nearly four years later, late in 2005, she died from the effects of the cancer and related 206 00:18:46.980 --> 00:18:51.580 Kidney Failure, just short of her 79th birthday. 207 00:18:51.580 --> 00:18:56.620 Not long before the cancer robbed her of the strength to write, so that she had at last 208 00:18:56.620 --> 00:19:01.700 to curtail her many years of service as an officer of the Association of Libertarian 209 00:19:01.700 --> 00:19:07.860 Feminists, she managed to complete one more book, outlining a libertarian solution to 210 00:19:07.860 --> 00:19:11.600 the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. 211 00:19:11.600 --> 00:19:16.900 At the time of her death, as a pioneer in the definition and promotion of individual 212 00:19:16.900 --> 00:19:24.900 and Socialist or Libertarian Feminism, Joan had earned an honored place in the Libertarian tradition. 213 00:19:24.900 --> 00:19:26.900 This is Jeff Rigenbach.