Joan Kennedy Taylor and the Rediscovery of Libertarian Feminism

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 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. She had already discussed the idea with David Dawson, the man she had been married to for the past two decades, and they had decided to move to San Francisco if Roy's plan did come to fruition and he actually made her an offer. 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, and the experiment had been a success.

0:51They began making arrangements to leave their home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and Motor West. At last, in mid-April of 1979, all was in readiness. Their car was fully checked out for the trip. They were scheduled to leave in three days. They were expected in San Francisco by the end of the month. Joan was to start work on May 1. And then, on April 15, Income Tax Day, David suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 52. After recovering from the shock, Joan considered what to do. She could stay in Stockbridge and live off the meager fees she could collect for freelance writing, copy-editing and proofreading jobs, while dealing as best she could with the difficulty of getting around, especially in winter, for Joan had never learned to drive a car.

1:44She could go back to New York and earn her keep as a paralegal. She could even take attorney Paul Moravsky's advice and go back to school. She could earn a law degree of her own. She had been working for Moravsky as a paralegal for a year and a half now, commuting back and forth from Stockbridge on the bus and staying a few nights every week in Manhattan. He thought she could have a brilliant future in the legal profession. Already she had developed a strong interest in constitutional law. On the other hand, she could pursue that emerging interest in constitutional law outside the legal profession, as a journalist, writing about Supreme Court cases and related matters in the pages of the Libertarian Review.

2:29She could go to San Francisco after all, find a place to live and try to build a new life from scratch in a new place. And after a bit of soul-searching, it was this last option that she decided to take. She arrived in San Francisco one day in May of 1979 with little more than the clothes on her back and the contents of a couple of suitcases. As she herself told the tale nearly 15 years later, when I arrived in San Francisco Roy decided that I should room with him, and he introduced me to a whole new group of people. He made the difference between my being a disconsolate widow trying to pick up the Over the next year and a half, Joan also established ties with the Cato Institute, then in its second year of operation out of a suite of offices in San Francisco about half a block Back Down the Street from the ones that housed the Libertarian Review.

3:40These ties with Cato would last for the rest of her professional life. She began by accepting a position as a bi-weekly commentator on Byline, Cato's daily radio program, which ran Monday through Friday on more than 150 radio stations coast to coast throughout the 1980s. Meanwhile, she was becoming more involved with the Libertarian Party. She had first joined the party in 1976 in Massachusetts, and within the first year of her membership she had impressed her fellow party members with the depth of her knowledge, with her verbal facility, and with her gift for diplomacy, her ability to moderate differences, find common ground and work with people toward mutual goals despite serious disagreements.

4:30To no one's surprise she was elected by her fellow Massachusetts party members to become I'm the only woman on the 20-member platform committee at the 1977 National Libertarian Party Convention in San Francisco. Two years later, in 1979, a few months after she arrived in San Francisco to work on the Libertarian Review, she served as chair of the platform committee at the National Libertarian Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Los Angeles, the convention that nominated the ticket of Ed Clark and David Koch to represent the party in the 1980 presidential election against John Anderson, Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the winner, Ronald Reagan.

5:15Jones' purpose in becoming involved in the Libertarian Party in the first place was to persuade the Massachusetts branch of the party to endorse the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment, which declared that all people are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. It further stipulated that equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. Joan's purpose in becoming involved in the National Party was to persuade its members to support the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to support every woman's right to seek and undergo an abortion if she wished to do so.

6:18These positions were not easily marketed to libertarians in the 1970s, though this fact never ceased to mystify Joan. It seemed to her that any individualist was by definition also a feminist. Were not women individuals, just as men were? It seemed to Joan that any libertarian was by definition also a feminist. Did not women own their own bodies, just as men did? Were they not entitled to the same rights that men enjoyed? What sort of libertarian, What, he wondered, would deny a woman the right to undergo a medical procedure she had freely decided to undergo? What sort of libertarian would balk at amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize the equal rights of women, when these rights had been systematically abrogated and denied in large and small ways, both by the federal government and by state and local governments, ever since the founding of the United States?

7:20Feminists in the 1970s did not tend to view feminism in this way. They tended to view feminism with suspicion. Weren't feminists those angry, whiny, bra-burning women who wanted the taxpayers to be forced to pay for their abortions and their daycare? Weren't feminists those women who hated men and blamed them for everything that was wrong in women's lives? Well, yes, of course, there were feminists back then who corresponded rather well to to that description. But was that the entire story about feminism? Joan thought not. She had thought not ever since the early 1960s when she had read Betty Friedan's then-new book The Feminine Mystique. She had agreed with Edith Efron, who reviewed Friedan's book for Ayn Rand's Objectivist newsletter, the July 1963 issue, and called it a brilliant, informative and culturally If most libertarians, and certainly most libertarian women in the 1970s, thought of feminism as a movement that sought special handouts and other privileges to be bestowed upon women by the federal government, Joan believed this situation was caused fundamentally by historical

8:43ignorance. Perhaps it was from Murray Rothbard, whom she knew and worked with during her period in San Francisco, that she learned the importance of revising the official historical record from time to time, so that the truth about what actually happened in the past is not forgotten. In any case, the fact is that her next major libertarian project after her work at the Libertarian Review was done, and the principal reason libertarians of today should find John 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.

9:29Joan's work at the Libertarian Review was done soon enough as things turned out. After three years in San Francisco, the magazine moved one final time to Washington, D.C. A year later, it ceased publication. Joan moved on to the Manhattan Institute. Yes, that Manhattan Institute. The Manhattan Institute. The standard-issue, bloodthirsty neo-con think tank in New York City. The last place any libertarian under 40 would expect to find anything or anyone libertarian. 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.

10:27When Joan left the Manhattan Institute, she moved on to the Foundation for Economic Education, where she served as an editor of The Freeman, the original magazine of the modern American libertarian movement, a magazine that was around 35 years old when Joan was working on it in the 1980s and is now rapidly approaching its 60th anniversary. And in her spare time, she worked out her revisionist history of feminism. Joan placed the origins of the American feminist movement in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. In the 1830s, as that movement began gathering steam and attracting more and more nationwide attention, it also began attracting more and more supporters, most of them men, but many of them women.

11:17It was in this cause, Joan wrote, that women became politically active in the United States. There was a problem, however. Women in the America of the 1830s had some legal rights, but they did not have the political rights that men did. They could not vote, hold public office, or serve on juries. In fact, there was only one political avenue open to them, and they discovered it. The First Amendment right to petition. The petition process was an important tool of the abolitionists from early on. Joan noted that when ex-president John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts and gave his first speech to the House in December of 1831, he presented petitions from a group of Quakers asking for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

12:12This was to become a major issue for him as a congressman. The Quakers didn't see their request granted, needless to say. This first petition, Joan wrote, was routinely sent to Congress's Standing Committee on the District of Columbia, which didn't act on it. But more and more petitions against slavery began arriving in Congress. Within a couple of years, in December 1833, a National American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. It promoted the sending of petitions to Congress. As a result, Joan wrote, by the end of 1835, petitions were coming in not just from Quakers and other abolitionists, but from ordinary citizens in almost every northern and western congressional district.

13:02In May 1836, the House of Representatives passed a gag resolution to dispose of the petitions, by resolving that petitions relating to the subject of slavery should be ignored, and that no action was to be taken on them. They would neither be printed nor referred to committee. Adams fought against this, but the gag rule remained in effect for more than six years, until December 3, 1842. Over that six-year period, however, the petitioners did not give up hope, nor did they stop working. Thanks to their tireless efforts, Joan wrote, more and more petitions were collected and signed, even though they would be refused and unread.

13:47In the session of Congress that began in December 1837, more than 200,000 petitions were sent to Congress, signed by millions of citizens, at a time when the entire population of the North was only about 10 million. The petitioning continued, and most of the volunteers collecting and signing these petitions were women. And those women could hardly fail to notice the treatment they too often received from their seemingly rather ungrateful male colleagues in the abolitionist movement. In 1840, Joan reported, two anti-slavery workers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, went to London as delegates to a world anti-slavery convention.

14:34They were horrified to find that they and the other female delegates were not allowed to sit in the meeting with the male delegates, but were required to listen to the proceedings from seats in the gallery. The American abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison was so incensed by their treatment that he refused to take his seat as a delegate, and sat with the women. And it wasn't just the men in the abolitionist movement whose behaviour had begun to disturb 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. 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.

15:30them. The longer they thought about it after that, the more preposterous it began to seem. How could one believe that slaves should have civil rights and still believe in denying those rights to the women who were championing their cause, Joan asked rhetorically. Surely these supposedly free women were no less intelligent, no less worthy, no less human than these unfortunate members of another race enslaved on our shores. Yet, like the slaves, American married women in 1848 could not own property, could not sign contracts, could not vote, could not control their own earnings, could be physically beaten and could be returned to their homes by force if they ran away.

16:18So the abolitionist women turned their attention to what would later be called feminist concerns. Two of them, Stanton and Mott, organized what Joan called the First Woman's Rights Convention in 1848. Stanton and Mott called it a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women. It was a resounding success, attracting some 300 attendees, and became the first of a series of such conferences held over the next dozen years in other parts of the country. Joan focused her attention most sharply not on the conferences and alliances and election campaigns that these early feminists involved themselves in, but rather on the ideas that motivated them.

17:08The thesis of this book, she wrote near the beginning of Reclaiming the Mainstream, is that what we now call feminism began early in the 19th century as an individualist movement, And further, that it is this individualism that has been the defining characteristic of the mainstream of that movement ever since. This does not mean that individualism has always predominated. Since the early days of the movement there have been two philosophical strands of thought within it, individualism and collectivism, and from time to time one or the other strand has become dominant. When the collectivists predominate, the individualists become less active and return to cultivating their gardens.

17:57In Joan's view, if the contemporary feminist movement was earning itself a black eye among libertarians by extolling the supposed benefits of federal programs that would privilege certain women at the expense of everyone else, this merely showed that the collectivists in the feminist movement were temporarily in the ascendant. Instead of cultivating their gardens, individualist feminists, libertarian feminists, should take the movement back from these collectivists. They should reclaim the mainstream. Joan Kennedy Taylor was diagnosed with bladder cancer early in 2002 and was given less than a year to live. Nearly four years later, late in 2005, she died from the effects of the cancer and related Kidney Failure, just short of her 79th birthday.

18:51Not long before the cancer robbed her of the strength to write, so that she had at last to curtail her many years of service as an officer of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, she managed to complete one more book, outlining a libertarian solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. At the time of her death, as a pioneer in the definition and promotion of individual and Socialist or Libertarian Feminism, Joan had earned an honored place in the Libertarian tradition. This is Jeff Rigenbach.