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Jewish World Review August 2, 2005 / 28 Tammuz, 5765 I married a feminist By Crispin Sartwell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I am a married man, and if I know anything from day-to-day experience, it is that you cannot infer a man's politics from those of his wife.
This truth came home to me again in a discussion about the politics of Jane Sullivan Roberts, the spouse of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. Over breakfast, I mentioned that Ms. Roberts has been active in a group called Feminists for Life.
"I don't think you can be a feminist and try to force women to have babies they don't want," my wife, Marion Wink, said.
That claim succinctly expresses why many believe that abortion rights are central to feminism: Freedom entails control over one's own body. The idea that the state ought to control female reproduction is therefore an odious violation of the autonomy feminism seeks to uphold.
That's what Marion thinks. But for me, the matter is considerably more complicated.
Feminism has a broad agenda and a rich history. It has dedicated itself to equal pay for women, to making it possible for women to ascend to positions of power in all areas of human endeavor. It has dedicated itself to raising Third World women out of poverty and to stopping the rape, harassment, mutilation and degradation of women.
And feminism is anything but monolithic. There are anarchist feminists, communist feminists and Republican feminists. There are Christian feminists, Islamic feminists and atheist feminists. There are feminists who define pornography as rape and feminists who endorse it as a liberating practice. And although most feminists favor abortion rights, there are others who are not so sure — even the radical feminist Emma Goldman had her doubts.
Jane Roberts has for many years been a high-powered attorney, a status made possible in part by the victories of American feminism. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity or intensity of her commitment to many of the tenets of feminism. But like many people, she comes from a religious perspective (in her case, Catholicism) that condemns abortion and, perhaps, she also has independent moral misgivings.
Such misgivings are philosophically defensible. If it were perfectly clear that abortion is only a matter of a woman's control of her own body, then you could not endorse the liberation of women without endorsing abortion rights. But that is not clear. To what extent and up to what point a fetus is part of a woman's body are difficult questions that trouble even as strong an advocate of abortion rights as my wife.
So Ms. Roberts' anti-abortion feminism is sensible and logical. There are a hundred aspects of a feminist agenda that she can enthusiastically endorse and that may have been and may in the future be essential to her personal and professional life. This may lead to some lively conversations around the Roberts' home.
We don't know whether the Robertses — much as Marion and I — argue about feminism and abortion over breakfast. But when you marry someone like my spouse or Mr. Roberts', you'd better be willing to defend yourself.
The relation of Jane Roberts' successful career as an attorney or her pro-life activities to her husband's future as a Supreme Court justice is a matter for speculation. But it is worth pointing out that, whatever his views on this or that, the judge is a man who married a feminist.
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Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Creators Syndicate |
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