Murray Rothbard’s article “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight,” available in the collection Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Second Edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000; originally published in 1974) is often hilariously funny, but the essence of the article is quite serious. Rothbard applies the insights of free market economics to assess the demands of the feminist movement of his time. To begin, here is a sample of the humor:
Indeed, as capitalism has immensely lightened the burden of housework through improved technology, many wives have increasingly constituted a kept leisure class. In the middle-class neighborhood in which I live, I see them, these “oppressed” and hard-faced viragoes, strutting down the street in their mink stoles to the next bridge or mah-jongg game, while their husbands are working themselves into an early coronary down in the garment district to support their helpmeets.
But, as I said, his basic argument is quite serious. The “first wave” feminism of Betty Friedan stressed that women don’t earn as much as men and are represented in less than their numbers in high status professions such as doctors, lawyers, and university professors. In the decades since Rothbard wrote, this situation has changed drastically; for example, about 50 percent of doctors in the US are women. Whatever the numbers, though, the basic principle of economics applies. In the free market, people are paid what they are worth. If it turns out that women do less well than men in certain fields, this reflects an accurate assessment of their economic value.
In the capitalist market economy, women have full freedom of opportunity; irrational discrimination in employment tends to be minimal in the free market, for the simple reason that the employer also suffers from such discriminatory practice. In the free market, every worker tends to earn the value of his product, his “marginal productivity.” Similarly, everyone tends to fill the job he can best accomplish, to work at his most productive efforts. Employers who persist in paying below a person’s marginal product will hurt themselves by losing their best workers and hence losing profits for themselves. If women have persistently lower pay and poorer jobs, even after correcting for the motherhood-dropout, then the simple reason must be that their marginal productivity tends to be lower than men’s.
Feminists of the Friedan stripe often demand quotas for women in highly-paid and prestigious jobs; but, Rothbard asks, isn’t this a dangerous principle? Quotas that benefit some people limit others. What about the harm that comes to those adversely affected by the quotas?
The other major point is the quota argument: that if one casts one’s eye about various professions, top management positions, etc., the quota of women is far lower than their supposedly deserved 51 percent share of the total population. The quota argument may be disposed of rapidly; for it is a two-edged sword. If the low percentage of women in surgery, law, management, etc., is proof that the men should posthaste be replaced by females, then what are we to do with the Jews, for example, who shine far above their assigned quota in the professions, in medicine, in academia, etc.? Are they to be purged?
(I suspect that one eminent libertarian theorist, who rivals Rothbard in his anti-feminism, would answer an enthusiastic “yes” to this question).
It should not be concluded that Rothbard was insensitive to the oppression of women. Quite the contrary, he noted that there was a time when women were indeed an oppressed class. Before the rise of the market economy, women had few rights, but capitalism made them men’s equals. Here he follows Ludwig von Mises:
It should be emphasized that, in contrast to the women’s lib forces who tend to blame capitalism as well as male tyrants for centuries-old discrimination, it was precisely capitalism and the “capitalist revolution” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that freed women from male oppression and set each woman free to find her best level. It was the feudal and precapitalist, pre-market society that was marked by male oppression; it was that society where women were chattels of their fathers and husbands, where they could own no property of their own, etc. Capitalism set women free to find their own level, and the result is what we have today.
So far, what Rothbard has said does not go beyond what you can find in other free market economists, although he makes his points in his customary incisive and uncompromising style. It is when he comes to a second wave of feminism, typified by Susan Brownmiller, that he really comes into his own. These feminists claim that marriage oppresses women, confining them to bearing children while men are free to earn high salaries. The truth is precisely the reverse: it is women who want marriage and children:
I believe that modern American marriages are, by and large, conducted on a basis of equality, but I also believe that the opposite contention is far closer to the truth than that of the New Feminists: namely, that it is men, not women, who are more likely to be the oppressed class, or gender, in our society, and that it is far more the men who are the “blacks,” the slaves, and women their masters. In the first place, the female militants claim that marriage is a diabolical institution by which husbands enslave their wives and force them to rear children and do housework. But let us consider: in the great majority of the cases, who is it that insists on marriage, the man or the woman? Everyone knows the answer. And if this great desire for marriage is the result of male brainwashing, as the women’s libs contend, then how is it that so many men resist marriage, resist this prospect of their lifelong seat upon the throne of domestic “tyranny”?
If marriage oppresses women, why is the stereotype of the hen-pecked husband so prevalent? And how does it come about that women own so much of the nation’s wealth?
It has been noted for years—and especially by Europeans and Asians—that too many American men live in a matriarchy, dominated first by Momism, then by female teachers, and then by their wives. Blondie and Dagwood have long symbolized for sociologists an all-too prevalent American matriarchy, a matriarchy contrasted with the European scene where the women, though more idle than in the United States, do not run the home. The henpecked American male has long been the butt of perceptive humor. And, finally, when the male dies, as he usually does, earlier than his spouse, she inherits the entire family assets, with the result that far more than 50 percent of the wealth of America is owned by women. Income—the index of hard and productive work—is less significant here than ownership of ultimate wealth. Here is another inconvenient fact which the female militants brusquely dismiss as of no consequence. And, finally, if the husband should seek a divorce, he is socked with the laws of alimony, which he is forced to pay and pay to support a female whom he no longer sees, and, if he fails to pay, faces the barbaric penalty of imprisonment—the only instance remaining in our legal structure of imprisonment for nonpayment of “debt.” Except, of course, that this is a “debt” which the man had never voluntarily incurred.
There is yet another wave of feminism that Rothbard skewers, but I’ll leave it to readers to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say that what he says about this group makes what has gone before tame and mild by comparison.
