Sexism

The moral rejection of prejudice against women is not in serious dispute within the conservative tradition. What is in dispute is what counts as such prejudice: whether the recognition of sexual difference is itself the wrong, or whether the wrong is the failure to recognise equal dignity within and across that difference. The older tradition held the latter, and the contemporary conservative position is in part an effort to defend that distinction against a redefinition that has tended to collapse it.

What the conservative defends, in this domain, is the conviction that men and women are equal in dignity and different in nature, and that public policy must honour both rather than choose one against the other.

Key takeaways

• Sexism, in the conservative tradition, names the unjust treatment of men or women on the basis of sex — a moral wrong the tradition recognises and rejects — but the term is now used to cover a much wider range of phenomena, including the recognition of any sex difference as morally significant, and the conservative dispute is largely with this wider usage.
• The tradition distinguishes between the equal dignity of men and women, which it affirms, and the interchangeability of the sexes, which it does not, holding that recognition of real difference is compatible with — and on the older view required for — the proper recognition of equal worth.
• The contemporary dispute is less about the wrongness of prejudice against women than about whether the social institutions that have organised sexual difference, especially marriage and the family, can be reformed in the name of equality without being damaged in their function.

History and context

The Western moral tradition has from its earliest stages held that women and men share a common rational and spiritual nature. The Genesis account that both male and female are made in the image of God grounded the medieval position that the souls of the two sexes are of equal worth, capable of equal sanctity and equal damnation, and addressed by the same moral law. The Pauline texts that the modern reader finds difficult — on head coverings, on women’s silence in the assembly, on the headship of husbands — were read within this framework rather than against it: men and women were understood as differently situated within a single moral economy, not as differently valued.¹

The early-modern period produced the first sustained arguments for full civic equality. Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) argued for women’s education on explicitly Anglican grounds — that the rational soul whose salvation was the chief end of life could not be cultivated without learning — and she became, in Patricia Springborg’s reading, the first English feminist whose case rests on conservative theological premises rather than rationalist ones.² Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) extended the argument to political rights, holding that the same rational nature that grounded men’s claims grounded women’s also.

The nineteenth-century woman-suffrage movement in the United States and Britain drew on both inheritances. Frances Willard’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest women’s organisation in the late-nineteenth-century United States, defended suffrage on the explicitly traditional ground that women’s distinctive moral concerns — for children, for the household, for the temperance of public life — required a vote to be effective. Catharine Beecher and Elizabeth Cady Stanton represented the alternative wings of the same movement, with Beecher defending women’s distinctive vocation in the home and Stanton pressing toward a more egalitarian dissolution of role differences.³

The second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, organised around Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), produced both the legal reforms of the period — the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX in 1972, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 — and a more ambitious theoretical project that treated the distinction between the sexes as itself a social construction available for political revision. Conservative responses divided. Phyllis Schlafly’s The Power of the Positive Woman (1977) accepted the legal reforms but resisted the theoretical project, arguing that the Equal Rights Amendment as drafted would dissolve precisely the legal recognitions — of motherhood, of marriage, of differential military obligation — that constituted the equality of the sexes as social practice rather than as juridical abstraction.⁴

The third-wave and subsequent academic developments extended the redefinition of sexism from a specific moral wrong to a structural condition of “patriarchy” understood as the cumulative system of social arrangements that organise sexual difference. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) supplied the influential theoretical move: that gender is performatively constituted rather than naturally given.⁵ The conservative response, articulated most systematically by Mary Harrington and others in the last decade, has been that the dissolution of sexual difference into a continuum of self-chosen identities undermines the very categories on which the protection of women — from violence, from exploitation, from the costs of childbearing — has historically depended.

The conservative position

Three claims structure the tradition.

First, men and women are equal in dignity. The conservative tradition has affirmed this consistently, against periodic temptations to do otherwise, on the grounds that the moral and rational nature shared by both sexes grounds an equal worth that no social practice can disturb. The legal protections against discrimination in employment, education, and the franchise are accepted by the tradition not as concessions to a foreign ideology but as developments internal to its own commitments.

Second, the sexes are different in nature. The conservative reading holds that recognition of equal dignity does not require, and cannot honestly be made to entail, the claim that the sexes are interchangeable. The differences — in average physical capacity, in reproductive role, in patterns of social interest — are not exhaustive of individual variation, and the tradition has always made room for women whose vocations and aptitudes departed from the modal pattern. What it has resisted is the claim that the modal pattern itself is an artefact to be dissolved, on the grounds that the dissolution affects both sexes but bears most heavily on the women whose distinctive circumstances — pregnancy, nursing, the early years of child-rearing — are made into private burdens by a public refusal to acknowledge them.

Third, the institutions that have organised sexual difference deserve careful reform, not dissolution. Marriage, the family, the differential allocation of certain public and private responsibilities — these are read by the tradition as the accumulated wisdom of a long social experiment rather than as the residue of patriarchal arrangements awaiting demolition. The conservative is open to reform where particular arrangements have produced unjust results; the tradition has supported, for example, the legal recognition of married women’s property and the criminalisation of marital rape. What it resists is reform whose stated goal is the dissolution of the underlying institutions themselves.

Differing positions

The radical feminist position, in its strongest form, treats the sexes themselves as social constructions whose maintenance serves the interests of male domination. Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) developed the most rigorous version of this argument, holding that the legal recognition of sex difference is itself an instrument of subordination.⁶ The conservative reply notes that the empirical project of dissolving sex difference has produced, in the institutions that have tried it, neither the equality nor the liberation that was promised; instead it has produced a sustained legal contest over the meaning of categories — woman, mother, female — whose stability had been the condition of the protections feminism originally sought.

The liberal-feminist position, less ambitious theoretically, holds that the legal and procedural equality already won is incomplete and should be extended to the workplace, the academy, and political life through continued anti-discrimination law and equal-treatment policy. Most conservatives accept the bulk of this programme and disagree mainly about its specific mechanisms — preferring, for example, the prohibition of discrimination to the imposition of quotas. The disagreement here is real but moderate.

The gender-identity position, which became prominent in policy debates after 2015, holds that the distinction between sex and gender is fundamental, that gender identity is a matter of self-recognition rather than biological sex, and that legal and social institutions should be reorganised accordingly. The conservative response presses on the institutional consequences: the contest over single-sex spaces and sports, the question of medical interventions for minors, and the displacement of “woman” as a stable legal category in favour of “people who menstruate” and similar locutions. The tradition does not deny the existence of the human experiences the new vocabulary aims to describe; it disputes the wisdom of the social and legal reorganisation that is said to follow from them.

References

1. Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (Apostolic Letter, 1988), §§6–9.
2. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694); Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
3. Frances E. Willard, Woman in the Pulpit (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1888); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 612–28.
4. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1977).
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
6. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).