The Women/Ladies/Girls/Spoiled Brats of Mills

Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Women/Ladies/Girls/Spoiled Brats of Mills” is a short polemical commentary. Its scope is the 1990 Mills College controversy, when the women-only Oakland institution announced it would admit men for financial reasons and students, alumnae, and administrators mobilized to preserve single-sex status. Rothbard treats the episode less as education policy than as evidence, in his view, of feminist inconsistency and of a broader culture-war logic in which ordinary standards of argument are subordinated to group struggle.

The essay opens with ridicule rather than neutral reportage. Rothbard frames the student response as melodrama, contrasting the ideal of future “Women Leaders” with televised scenes of grief and protest.

Suffice it to say that they did not act like the responsible Women Leaders of tomorrow.

He then sketches the tactical success of the protest: a strike and campus takeover, administrative sympathy, and alumnae fundraising that delayed coeducation. This establishes the occasion for the essay’s main argumentative turn: Rothbard claims that the Mills affair exposed not one but two “double standards” in feminist rhetoric about sex-segregated education.

The first alleged contradiction concerns institutional symmetry. Rothbard argues that feminists had long condemned all-male colleges as discriminatory, yet now defended all-female colleges as uniquely valuable. His formulation is deliberately compressed and accusatory:

The most obvious is the fact that after a decade of feminist battering at the alleged evils of all-male colleges ("sexism," segregation, discrimination, refusal to prepare females for adult careers, etc.) suddenly feminists have shifted gears to defend the glory, the importance, and the superior life-preparing education of single-sex female colleges.

The second contradiction concerns equality and difference. Rothbard presents feminism as oscillating between the claim that men and women are fundamentally the same in abilities and the claim that women are morally or socially superior because more “nurturing” and “caring.” The Mills defense of an all-female environment becomes, for him, the test case for this tension.

The problem here, clearly, is this: does feminism preach, as it has for decades, that there is no difference whatever (except the famed la petite différence) between the two sexes, that their capacities, traits, etc. are all equal, the same, or are they saying, as feminists have recently taken to arguing, that women are very different, that they are nurturing, caring, etc., and therefore superior to men?

Rothbard’s core conceptual move is to deny that these are merely accidental inconsistencies. He proposes that they become intelligible if feminism is understood, not as a doctrine committed to consistency, but as a politics of sex antagonism. In his account, claims about sameness and difference are deployed instrumentally depending on whether they help women in conflict with men.

Here is how these seemingly embarrassing contradictions and double standards can be resolved: men are the evil, victimizer sex; women are the good, victimized sex.

From that premise, the essay’s sharpest claim follows: Rothbard argues that feminist argumentation, as displayed in the Mills case, is governed by tactical usefulness rather than by neutral principles. The polemical force of the piece lies in reducing rival claims—equality, female distinctiveness, anti-segregation, single-sex education—to maneuvers in a single struggle.

Don’t worry about such “objective” qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all’s fair in hate and war.

The epilogue extends the satire from politics to language. Rothbard recounts students correcting President Mary Metz’s statement that alumnae activism had “made history” by shouting “herstory.” For Rothbard, this linguistic gesture epitomizes what he sees as elite education’s descent into ideological performance.

But the Mills Leaders of Tomorrow promptly “corrected” her, shouting back, “herstory.”

The essay is relevant as a compact example of Rothbard’s late polemical style: libertarian anti-egalitarian critique fused with cultural satire, suspicion of feminist institutional claims, and a preference for exposing what he sees as hidden power logic behind moral rhetoric. Its structure is simple but effective: anecdote, accusation of inconsistency, theoretical explanation, and comic epilogue. Its thesis is not merely that Mills students wanted to preserve a women-only college, but that the controversy revealed, in Rothbard’s view, a broader feminist willingness to alternate between equality and difference whenever either claim advances the same political end.