This file is a single-author polemical essay. Rothbard’s scope is broad: media feminism, Friedan/NOW, wage gaps, quotas, “brainwashing,” marriage, day care, sexual politics, lesbian separatism, and New Left radicalism. Its opening announces the tone: feminism is treated not as a suppressed demand for justice but as an overpromoted orthodoxy needing opposition.
It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on “Women’s Liberation.”
The essay’s central thesis is an inversion of feminist claims: women’s liberation, Rothbard argues, misdescribes voluntary market and family arrangements as oppression, while capitalism and contract have already done the emancipatory work that feminism claims to require. He first divides the movement into liberal and radical wings.
The current women's movement is divisible into two parts.
The older wing, associated with Betty Friedan and NOW, is answered through economics. Rothbard rejects quota reasoning as logically dangerous and explains women’s lower earnings through interrupted careers, childrearing, occupational sorting, training costs, and marginal productivity rather than discrimination.
The lower average income for women can be explained on several grounds, none of which involve irrational "sexist" discrimination.
His key conceptual move is to make the free market a test of discrimination: if employers irrationally underpay women, they lose profit and labor to competitors. Market outcomes are therefore read as evidence of productivity and preference, not structural exclusion.
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.
Against feminist accounts of social conditioning, Rothbard argues that “brainwashing” cannot explain away women’s expressed preference for domesticity without becoming unfalsifiable.
The “brainwashing” contention becomes what the philosophers call “operationally meaningless,” for it means that the female militants refuse to accept any evidence, logical or empirical, of whatever kind, that might prove their contentions to be wrong.
This leads to his broader anti-egalitarian claim: sexual differences, family roles, and occupational distribution should be understood as a division of labor emerging from choice. He denies both the conservative claim that women must remain domestic and the feminist claim that domestic women violate their nature.
There is in this, as in all matters, a division of labor; and in a free-market society, every individual will enter those fields and areas of work which he or she finds most attractive.
The second half turns from Friedanite liberalism to “New Feminism,” which Rothbard portrays as anti-family, anti-male, statist, and sexually separatist. Marriage is reinterpreted not as female enslavement but as an institution binding men to support women and children; without it, he argues, mothers would bear both childrearing and income burdens.
The ultimate test of whether women are enslaved or not in the modern marriage is the one of "natural law": to consider what would happen if indeed the women's libs had their way and there were no marriage.
His policy critique follows the same libertarian logic. Government day care is dismissed because genuine mass demand would be supplied by markets unless obstructed by regulation; equal sharing of careers and childcare is mocked as economically unworkable outside subsistence living. The essay then shifts into cultural argument, treating objections to women as “sex objects” as hostility to heterosexuality itself.
Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be.
The relevance of the essay lies in this fusion of Austrian/libertarian economics with aggressive cultural backlash. It is not an empirical study but a polemical artifact: disparities become market information, preference defeats socialization theory, marriage becomes contract and protection, and radical feminism becomes an attempted reversal of domination. Its core structure is therefore clear: reject egalitarian quotas, defend capitalist contract, reinterpret domesticity as chosen division of labor, oppose state remedies, and cast feminist liberation as a threat to family, heterosexual norms, and spontaneous order.
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