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Libertarian Feminist Heritage Series Paper 2 Suzanne La FolletteThe Freewomanby Sharon Presley
SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE is the author of the probably first full-length
book on libertarian feminism in existence, a book which her
colleague, friend, and mentor, Albert Jay Nock, called "superb."
Yet today she is almost unknown among libertarians and barely
known among feminists. Of her book, Concerning Women (1926),
Nock wrote, "at every turn, throughout the future, until
freedom is attained, this book will be dug up and drawn upon, like
Mary Wollstonecraft, but more effectively, as saying the final
thing." Concerning Women was out of print until 1972
when it was reprinted in the Arno Press "American Women
series. In 1973 an excerpt entitled "Beware the State"
was included in The Feminist Papers, an anthology edited
by Alice Rossi.
Born in 1893 on a ranch in
western Washington, La Follette moved with her family to
Washington, D.C., where her father, the cousin of Senator Robert
La Follette, served in the House of Representatives for eight
years. She and her brother Chester both recall that the adults in the
family were all "good feminists."
While in Washington, La
Follette got an early lesson about the difficulties women were up
against in their struggle for rights. In a letter to Alice Rossi, she
described her participation in a women's movement parade
the day before Wilson was inaugurated. The progress of the
parade was severely impeded, she recalled, by a "seething
mob of men who surged around the struggling marchers, shouting
obscenities. There were few police in sight, and those who were in
sight were making no effort to control the crowd."
After finishing college in Washington, D.C. in 1919, La Follette plunged
immediately into the world of politics with a job on the staff
of the Nation. It was there that she met Nock. And when Nock
founded The Freeman in 1920, she joined him as one of the
editors for the four years of its existence.
After the demise of The Freeman, La Follette began work on
Concerning Women. The most important influence in writing
the book, in her judgment, was Nock rather than the feminist
movement. It was Nock, confirms her grand-niece Maryly Rosner, who
encouraged La Follette to write it. And Nock, who considered
himself a "100 percent feminist," was well-pleased with
her efforts. "I knew it would be a good book," he wrote
in a letter to a friend, "but I assure you it is so
far beyond all my expectations that I cannot say enough in praise of
it. If I am any judge, it is a truly great book.'
The tone of Concerning Women is set by a passage from Mary
Wollstonecraft which appears at the beginning of the first chapter:
"Let there be, then, no coercion established in society
and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into
their proper places." Women's "proper place,"
thought La Follette, was wherever they wanted to be. To those who,
for example, believed that woman's historically secondary
role proved something about her essential nature, La Follette replied
with typical incisiveness:
Though La Follette considered herself a radical libertarian rather
than an anarchist, her analysis of feminist issues was as profoundly
and consistently anti-statist as those of anarchist feminists such as
Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman. The State, she believed, was
the natural enemy of women. "It is evident from the very
nature of the State," she wrote in a passage directly
reflecting the influence of Franz Oppenheimer's The
State, "that its interests are opposed to those of Society;
and while the complete emancipation of women ... would undoubtedly
imply the destruction of the State, since it must accrue from
the emancipation of other subject classes, their emancipation,
far from destroying Society, must be of inestimable benefit to
it."
La Follette was
apparently not influenced by the nineteenth century anarchists,
but she did make one favorable comment on anarchism in her book,
in connection with her discussion of men's control over women:
Believing
that the subjection of women, like chattel slavery or
"industrial slavery," had its basis in economics,
La Follette considered that the primary way in which the State hurt
women was through legally imposed economic disadvantages. Economic
freedom was, in her view, far more crucial to women than political
equality or the right to vote. "The ultimate emancipation
of women then," she wrote in a passage that embodied the main
thesis of her book, "will depend not upon the abolition of the
restrictions which have subjected her to man - that is but
a step, though a necessary one - but upon the abolition of
all those restrictions of natural human rights that subject the mass
of humanity to a privileged class."
Her belief that economics was
at the heart of women's problems led La Follette to a healthy
skepticism about the reformist politics of the organized women's
movement. "Even if we assume that the establishment of legal
equality between the sexes would result in complete social and
economic equality," she pointed out, "we are obliged to
face the fact that under such a regime women would enjoy precisely
that degree of freedom which men now enjoy - that is to say, very
little." The State, she asserted, could be forced to
renounce all legal discrimination against
women without affecting its fundamental discrimination
against the propertyless, dependent class - "which is
made up of both men and women." She concluded that "until
economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real
freedom for anybody ... The State represents the organized interest
of those who control economic opportunity ... those who control
men's and women's economic opportunity control men
and women."
La Follette had no clear-cut solution for the problem of State control
of economics, except education. Considering the ballot
"ineffectual," she thought it would only be useful
when voters came to understand the true nature of the system. People
needed to recognize that the "essential nature of freedom ...
comes out in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural
resources, resulting in complete freedom of the individual
to apply his productive labor where he will. It is freedom to
produce, and its corollary, freedom to exchange - the
laissez-faire, laissez-passer of the Physiocrats."
Showing the influence of Henry George as well as of the
nineteenth century classical liberals, she also asserted, "The
right to labour and to enjoy .the fruits of one's labour means
only the right to free access to the source of subsistence, which is
land."
One of the kinds of legally
imposed economic discrimination against women which La Follette
analyzed in detail was protective labor legislation. In a lengthy
chapter which closely foreshadowed modern libertarian
feminist concerns, she pointed out that protective labor laws and
minimum wage laws reduced women's chances of getting
employment, and also reduced their ability to compete:
So rapidly do [protective labor laws] increase,
indeed, that women may be said to be in a fair way to exchange the
tyranny of men for that of organized uplift. They are sponsored
by those well-meaning individuals who deplore social injustice enough
to yearn to mitigate its evil results, but do not understand it well
enough to attack its causes; by women's organizations whose
intelligence is hardly commensurate with their zeal to uplift
their sex; and by men's labour organizations which are
quite frankly in favor of any legislation that will lessen the
chances of women to compete with men in the labour market.
Marriage laws provided another
way that the State imposed economic disadvantage on women. La
Follette saw marriage as a one-sided contract with all the
rights on the side of the husband, countered by unjust
privileges on the side of the wife. Marriage laws deprived woman
of the right to control property while allowing her to be
totally dependent on her husband. Women's economic
independence would, La Follette thought, make it possible to
escape from traditional marriage concepts that placed women in the
role of serfs. And that would make it possible, in turn, to elevate
marriage to a higher plane:
"For only when
marriage is placed above all considerations of economic or
social advantage, will it be a way to satisfy the highest
demands of the human spirit."
Like
the nineteenth century anarchist feminists, La Follette did not
approve of State control of marriage in any respect. Institutional
marriage was, in her opinion, simply a way for the State, the
Church, and the community to interfere with a personal and private
matter: "Marriage under conditions arbitrarily fixed
by an external agency is slavery; and if we allow the right of an
external agency - be it State, family or community -
to place marriage in so degrading a position, we necessarily deny the
freedom of the individual in this most intimate of relationships."
As examples of State interference in marriage, she indicted the
regulation of birth control, which she saw as being forbidden for
political and religious reasons; divorce laws, which made
it difficult to free oneself from an unhappy
marriage; and the concept of "illegitimacy," which
placed a stigma on children born without the permission of the State.
Her solution was to call for "marriage without legal
sanction," i.e., without the State, at least for those who were
willing to make that choice. Many modern day libertarians, more
earnest in their theory than their practice, would do well to take
inspiration from her unflinchingly radical position. (For the
record, La Follette never married.)
The Church as well as the State came under La Follette's
attack. She considered marriage and divorce laws to be impositions of
Christian morality, which as practiced was, in her view,
anti-woman, hypocritical, and puritanical. As a radical libertarian,
she was, of course, opposed to laws which enforced morality, but
she also saw clearly the negative, even devastating, social and
psychological effects of such laws: "Society can never be made
virtuous through arbitrary regulation; it can only be made
unhappy and unamiable. The attempt to suppress all unauthorized
expression of the sex-impulse in women tended to make them not only
miserable and abject but hypocritical and deceitful; and it
tended also to make men predatory."
Both in her book
and in various later articles, La Follette struck out against
hypocritical morality, condemning censorship, laws against
prostitution, and laws limiting reproductive freedom. Her radical
analysis of motherhood out-of-wedlock anticipated modern
feminist thinking on that issue. Speaking out strongly against
the rejection of the so-called illegitimate child, she saw unwed
motherhood as a defiance of the idea of male proprietorship.
Men condemned illegitimate children, she thought, because
out-of-wedlock sexual activities implied a sexual freedom for women
that would threaten male dominance.
The libertarian theme of Concerning Women is aptly summarized by
Alice Rossi at the conclusion of her introduction to "Beware
the State": "On issue after issue La Follette comes down
on the side of the least degree of state interference in the lives of
men and women and a consistent belief that it
is only through full economic independence and
personal autonomy that sex equality will be achieved." Sadly,
however, this marvelous gem of a book was desultorily received.
By 1926, concern with feminist issues was at an ebb and the book
was reviewed in only a few magazines, then forgotten.
After the publication of Concerning Women, La Follette turned
her humanistic sensibilities to the field of art. "All art,"
she declared, "serves humanity by the simple fact of its
existence." Her interest in art, first publicly evidenced
by a series of articles in The Freeman, led her to write a
second book, again at Nock's suggestion. Art in America was
published in 1929 - "just in time for the market crash."
It has since become a classic of art history, and was reprinted in
1968 by Harper and Row.
La
Follette's approach to art was as individualistic as her
approach to feminism and to politics. Writing in the American
Mercury in 1925, she proposed endowing individual artists
rather than institutions. "The salvation of humanity,"
she declared, "never yet lay in the hands of any
institution, not even in the hands of the Church. It is and always
has been the individual who has cleared the path of human progress."
Not only an art historian but - briefly - a poet too, La Follette
published two poems in 1927, "Ulysses" and "Wind on the Heath."
Both were reprinted in The Best Poems of 1928.
In 1930, La Follette founded and became editor of the New Freeman.
She was well-equipped to do so. Nock considered her "the
best editorial mind I ever saw." In a letter to a friend in
1926, he wrote, "I think she is just as good an editor as I am
and even a shade better (if you will look back on The
Freeman, you will see that when she had it, she produced a trifle
better paper than I did) and in another five years will be much
better than 1 could ever be."
The New Freeman revived the concept of the original one:
it was politically libertarian and broadly humanistic, concerned with
cultural and social events as well as political ones. Each issue
contained several pages of commentary on current events written by
La Follette, usually expressing cynicism about government meddling in
foreign or domestic affairs. Occasionally the commentary would
include feminist topics such as protective labor laws, the Woman's
Party, prostitution, alimony, and divorce laws. Art, drama, music,
and literary criticism and reviews also graced the New
Freeman pages, as well as Nock's "Journeyman"
commentary. An elegant and intellectual magazine, it was not
without humor also. In one issue of the New Freeman, for
example, subscriptions were solicited with this ad:
Are your mind's eyes looking forward or merely recreating images of
the past?
The timing of the New Freeman, however, was as unfortunate as the
timing of La Follette's books. After 15 months, the magazine's
financial backer, suffering from the Depression, had to withdraw
support and the New Freeman folded.
The New Freeman was, unfortunately, the last public place in
which Suzanne La Follette ever commented on feminist issues. The
relatives and colleagues I interviewed for this article
don't recall hearing her discuss feminist issues as such again
after the magazine folded. But her brother Chester points out that
she would have been unlikely to talk about such topics with people
who agreed with her.
There are a few indications that La Follette retained her
feminist views in later years. In 1964, when the New York
Conservative Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor
of anti-abortion laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the
Party's letterhead - and it was. "She may not have said 'I'm
doing this as part of the feminist cause,"' her
grandniece Maryly Rosner told me, "but she believed in
things that were part of the feminist movement." La Follette's
colleagues in later years recall that she would not tolerate sexist
remarks. "Suzanne would not take any putdown because of sex,"
says Priscilla Buckley. Columnist John Chamberlain remembers
that "she didn't like people criticizing women."
After the New Freeman ceased publication, La Follette
free-lanced for magazines like the Nation, The New Republic,
and Scribner's, writing on her favorite
topics of art, economics, labor, and current affairs.
Always a perceptive observer of political affairs, she wrote an early
indictment of Hitler and fascism for Scribner's.
Then, in the middle '30s, came one of the most important efforts
of La Follette's life - her involvement with the trial of
Leon Trotsky. Her previous qualified sympathy for the Soviet
Union for what she perceived to be its experiments in economic
justice had begun to sour in the early '30s with the first news
of the Stalin purges. Her reaction was to join the Committee for the
Defense of Leon Trotsky, an organization trying to secure asylum
for him. Then in 1937, when the Dewey subcommittee of inquiry to
investigate the treason charges leveled against Trotsky was
formed, she became its secretary. Though John Dewey was the
chairman because of his prestige, Chester La Follette recalls
that the inquiry was actually his sister's idea. As secretary
she attended the interrogation of Trotsky in Mexico and played a
major role in writing the subcommittee's final report, Not
Guilty. Her papers from this inquiry now reside in the Harvard
library.
From 1937 to 1941, with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship, La
Follette worked on a book on the economics of art. Though she had
thought it was going to be her "magnum opus," it
was never finished and she returned to
freelance writing in the '40s.
In 1950, The Freeman was reincarnated for the second time, this
time with John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt as editors and
La Follette as managing editor. This new version of New Freeman
was, in Chamberlain's words, "anti-statist and
anti-communist." He told Time magazine, "We want
to revive the John Stuart Mill concept of liberalism. We feel we're
rescuing an old word from misuse." In 1952 a policy
split over Taft vs. Eisenhower caused so much dissension among the
Board of Directors (La Follette favored Taft, of course) that
the magazine was sold, and finally ended up in the hands of Leonard
Read and the Foundation for Economic Education. (There is very
little resemblance, however, between the FEE Freeman and
those edited by Nock and La Follette.)
During this period, La Follette's main focus became anti-communism. Not
only the purges of the '30s, but the sufferings of her Russian
friends (one woman's whole family was exterminated by Stalin
because she had left Russia) convinced La Follette that the
Soviet Union was a major threat to liberty. She even went so far as
to defend Joe McCarthy, though she knew his methods were
"slipshod." But, according to Chamberlain, she saw
McCarthy as the only one willing to fight the Communists in
the State Department.
In 1955, La Follette became a founding editor of National
Review and worked as its managing editor until her retirement in
1959. Her anti-communism was the main reason she was willing
to work with traditional conservatives like the Buckleys. In those
days, recalls Chamberlain, there was no libertarian-conservative
split. There were "precious few" of either and no place
to publish except a handful of conservative journals. But,
Chamberlain adds, La Follette was "not a traditional
conservative…we were all anti-statists."
Though a few articles by La Follette appeared in National Review,
including her introduction to the reprint edition of Nock's
Snoring as a Fine Art, she wrote progressively less each
year. Chester La Follette recalls that his sister was bothered
because she felt that William Buckley never really utilized her
literary talents. Helen Tremaine, her close associate, concurs,
noting that "Suzanne complained that Bill Buckley never liked
anyone's writings but his sister's."
But if La Follette did not write much for National Review,
she was important as one of its editors. Indeed, her most significant
contribution to the libertarian cause (apart from writing
Concerning Women) may have been to nurture and direct
four magazines. Too often the contributions of editors are
insufficiently appreciated - writers get all the glory
because they are more visible. But good editors are as crucial to a
magazine as good writers. Not only Nock but her later colleagues like
Chamberlain and Priscilla Buckley considered La Follette to be
an excellent editor. She was, Chamberlain says, "a very good
stimulator of other people's ideas and great at originating
ideas."
La Follette passed away in 1982 but is remembered
vividly by her friends as a beautiful and cultivated woman,
"opinionated," "overwhelming" but "perfectly
gracious," "extremely kind" and loyal. Suzanne La
Follette was both remarkable as a person and admirable as a
libertarian. Her contributions as a writer, editor, feminist,
and radical libertarian deserve to be widely recognized and
appreciated by libertarians and feminists today.
Sharon Presley was the National Coordinator of the Association of
Libertarian Feminists from 1976 to 1982. She wishes to acknowledge
the following people for their help in making this article possible:
"Charles Fowler, who first drew my attention to the excerpt in
The Feminist Papers; and those who graciously consented to be
interviewed - Maryly Rosner (La Follette's grand-niece),
Chester La Follette (her brother), and her colleagues, John
Chamberlain, Priscilla Buckley and Helen Tremaine. This research was
made possible in part by a grant from the Center for Libertarian
Studies."
Reprinted, with permission, from the January 1981 issue of
Libertarian Review.
Copyright © 1981, 2003 by Sharon Presley
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