So how’d we get here anyway?—this place, this time we live in, with its vacant predicate for the moral responsibilities of human life?

A question at least as tangled follows hard on the first one: Given that we’re where we are, what do we do? I invite suggestions. Erika Bachiochi has a few—probing, challenging, richly informed.

I do not myself endorse every one of them. I think, all the same, that Mrs. Bachiochi’s newly published work, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (University of Notre Dame Press), succeeds brilliantly at the, let’s just say complex, business of showing how rights-seeking women and their families, including unborn babies, can be considered complementary glories of life. She is thinking. She is questioning. I find this wonderful—a wholesome departure from the spirit of “Oh, well!” that has long blocked pathways to recovery of life’s redemptive qualities. That we can talk, a little bit anyway, about redemption shows the existence among us of a saner spirit than the one now ranting and rampaging through our times: the spirit of “Gimme.”

Erika Bachiochi, a well-schooled, impressively balanced scholar of growing repute, takes it upon herself to suggest what the good life represented on the broader, saner avenues of civilized life, prior to its virtual disappearance during the eruptions of half a century ago, and longer. She looks to the formulation of right understandings, and of policies that proceed from those understandings. I cannot say I think she has all her policies right. For one thing, policies and politics constantly rub up against each other. We cannot at the same time rule politics out of play in the restoration of notions abused by politicians enjoying their power and their hopes for more of it.

We have to know what to expect of politicians: how far to walk with them, how closely to watch what they’re doing with their hands. That is the point. And what is it we can hope for from the alliance Bachiochi envisions—present-day policy makers working to sweep up the moral rubble left lying about the place by past policy makers? Just this maybe: the creation of environments where parents can impart to children, with minimal contradiction from outside, the good old human ideals that commence with love and the caregiving that proceeds from love.

The author is a feminist. She revels in the freedoms women now enjoy in consequence of work by women as far back as Abigail Adams who aspired to the fuller deployment of their God-given abilities. A particular strength of the early feminists was their ability to see freedom as something other than license. It entailed duties that the ladies of the time happily embraced. Marriage and children they acknowledged as good things. The moral training of children, and their fitting thereby for the world, was a particularly good thing. Duty and freedom labored side by side. The Lockean, me-first latitude Mrs. Bachiochi blames for today’s moral decay wasn’t much in evidence. Duty—which Robert E. Lee, a man, admittedly, as well as a Confederate, called the most sublime word in the English language—stayed liberty’s wilder excursions.

Duty, liberty—we don’t much encourage that linkage around the house that exultant feminism has built for its followers. Who does encourage it? Who would? Mary Wollstonecraft would. Erika Bachiochi would.

The time has come for some introductions. First, the author herself. I have mentioned little about her besides her name. Erika Bachiochi is a scholar of the millennial generation, with a husband Dan, seven children, a law degree from Boston University, affiliations with the Ethics and Public Policy Center as well as the Abigail Adams Institute, and much-noted bylines in First Things, The Atlantic, and National Affairs. The lady is a self-described pro-life feminist, with, lurking in her Middlebury College C.V., a stint as volunteer for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders. How do we like them Vermont apples? We chew them thoughtfully, not ungratefully.

So. Mrs. Bachiochi, meet Mary Wollstonecraft. Or, more precisely, embrace her: attentive pupil acknowledging inspirational teacher. Mary Wollstonecraft, 200 years dead, is for Erika Bachiochi a kindred spirit; a writer who set much of England and America by the ears with her arguments (in the similarly named A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) for the right of women to exercise their full abilities in the cultivation of virtues that dated at least to Aristotle.

“Promotion of virtue,” her American disciple writes, “was the sole principle by which she judged relationships, institutions and regimes . . . Her fundamental belief remained throughout [her life and career]: Each person was of equal moral worth, whatever his or her status, and this provided the surest foundation for promoting each and every person’s human capacity for wisdom, virtue, and thus happiness.”

The freedom to which she aspired was freedom for excellence. Father was not the rival of Mother, nor Mother the challenger to Father. They were properly a team. Today’s abortion culture would have shocked her to the core. (Historical note: Mary Wollstonecraft—who died in 1797—was parent, with William Godwin, to the Mary Wollstonecraft who, as Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein in 1818.)

Wollstonecraft’s somewhat unpredictable (in view of Godwin’s atheism) attachment to Christian morality captivated the budding feminist scholar. The defects of feminism, 20th and 21st-century style, swam before her eyes. She writes, in her introduction:

The trouble with the women’s movement today lies . . . in its near abandonment of Wollstonecraft’s original moral vision, one that championed women’s rights so that women, with men, could virtuously fulfil their familial and social duties. Nowhere is such an abandonment clearer than in the revolutionary assault on the mutual responsibilities that inhere in sex, childbearing, and marriage that began in the 1960s and ’70s. The modern day fusion of the women’s movement with the sexual revolution . . . is a great departure from Wollstonecraft’s original moral vision and that of the early women’s rights advocates in the United States too: it has cheapened sex and objectified women, [helping upend] the American promise of equal opportunity for the most disadvantaged men, women, and children today.

Which argument, at first glance, seems in want of some adjustment. The sense of the thing, to moral traditionalists, is wholesome and compelling. But Mary Wollstonecraft, for goodness’ sake!—English; out of the cultural ballgame for centuries; subject to confusion with her famous daughter. What have we got here, a cozy Ph.D., dissertation?

I resist the surface logic of such objections: because, for one thing, with Wollstonecraft we are just at the start of the story. More introductions lie ahead— Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Betty Friedan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg; most important in some sense, the widely celebrated professor of law Mary Ann Glendon. There is a thread here. The movers and shakers of women’s rights were not out to nail down and perfect a woman’s right to follow her bliss wherever it led, to rear her ambitions and sensibilities above all others. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, was a more nuanced advocate of female liberties than her secular sainthood would lead one to believe. She hoped, says Bachiochi, “that by freeing both women and men from legally determined familial and social roles, the law might open the way for better collaboration between men and women in the family and in the workplace.” Lucretia Mott had never argued that women should go all-out for liberty. She had believed, as Bachiochi summarizes it, “that moral suasion was the best means toward societal improvement”—better even than the vote. Get that: moral suasion; the inculcation of timeless principles that fortify all claims to human worth, such as honor and dignity.

Abortion? No more than Mary Wollstonecraft, in the lace-trimmed long-ago, would have smiled on the extinction of unborn life did successor campaigners for female rights suggest those rights included renunciation of motherhood. The choice advocated by Wollstonecraft and those who came after her was often identified as “voluntary motherhood”—an idea that turned on mutual, male-to female appreciation of the biologically indicated timing for conception. It was at the very least a feasible ideal, practiced without accompanying demands for government intervention. By contrast with that much-laughed-at 19th-century standard, Bachiochi writes, “relatively easy abortion access has relieved men of the responsibilities that accompany sex, and so has upended the duties of care for dependent children that fathers ought equally to share . . . As the #MeToo movement has revealed in spades, the new ‘coital animal’—lacking the formative schooling of desire expected of an aspiring gentleman—will not so readily heed the word ‘no.’” The bonneted countenance of Lucretia Mott would nod, I venture, emphatic agreement.

The what-do-we-do-now question looks out through the stitchery of the Bachiochi-Wollstonecraft thesis. Continued tolerance of Gimme culture erodes possibilities for the good life as formerly understood. Do something—yes! But what? To Professor Mary Ann Glendon, Mrs. Bachiochi turns for ideas. What kind? Those that reflect “the modern quest for political liberty and legal equality with an older appreciation of the essential goods of family and community, and of the intellectual excellence for which all human beings properly strive.”

Sounds tricky and perilous, to be sure: a trade-in of “equal equality” for “equal dignity” as a social goal, including, as Bachiochi puts it, “reciprocal relationships of mutual respect, interdependence, and collaboration in all realms of life.” And without guarantees for performance.

Organized society—aka government—plays, it is true, a far lesser role than it once did in the support of traditional families and their practices and customs. Families don’t get the moral and legal support they once did. Government policies—no-fault divorce, for instance—often have the result of loosening family connections, funding the absence of fathers, the diminution of any desire to work: without which desire, families tend to break up. As Prof. Glendon writes, U.S. law, of a libertarian cast, “fosters a climate that systematically disadvantages caretakers and dependents.” Individual autonomy is its hallmark; the noisy, nasty needs of children hardly compare with the ambitions of many a modern mom.

The attitudes—attitudes as much as specific policies—that Prof. Glendon and Mrs. Bachiochi embrace are called communitarian. Communitarianism is a new species of conservatism, arising in response to intensifying criticisms of the “Lockean” outlook, with its bias toward individual liberty. What’s individual liberty doing to and for our society if not encouraging the idea that individual, uncoerced choice is the star by which we must steer? “Choice” in the matter of abortion could be called a Lockean legacy, notwithstanding that the great John Locke, from whose surname comes the suddenly depreciatory adjective, was a Christian whose conscience would certainly flinch from representations of his thought as connected with Mr. Justice Harry Blackmun’s in Roe v. Wade.

What Locke would make of our unsettled, unsettling times—I feel sure he would not enjoy living in expectation of a congressionally engineered socialist takeover—is hardly the essential point for us. That point is, who’s going to enact all these nice communitarian policies that are supposed to undermine Lockean doctrines and restore the good old ways? Will they, can they, if adopted, displace Gimme-ism with a more general sense of personal dignity? Then who’s going to make sure they have adequate budgets, and are run by reasonable people, and actually work as designed? If the shepherds and tenders of communitarianism end up belonging to the present political class, with its record of dumb mistakes and overbearing approaches to governance, communitarians might come to question “family-friendly” ideas that work their way into political campaigns.

There’s a lot of work to be done, clearly, before the Wollstonecraftian vision gains, according to its merits, widespread purchase on hearts and minds. That work has an obvious political element. I am more disposed than Erika Bachiochi to see its principal element as educational, instructional, even—okay, I’ll say it—propagandistic. And religious: that above all, probably. We forget the extent to which our cultural dispositions, our understandings of duty, our sense of place in the universe, proceed from inherited faith in God and His sovereign purposes for, as we said in pre-wokeness days, mankind. These are not great days for religious witness. On the other hand, maybe that fact makes them superb days for religious witness.

Mrs. Bachiochi’s strong, emotionally temperate, and well-informed book— which I commend to Human Life Review readers—is no manifesto for communitarian policies, much as she admires them. Her admiration is worth taking into account not least because it keeps company with her probing analysis of the mess into which the abandonment of earlier feminist ideals leaves us wallowing. Votes for women and motherly devotion to family, as Bachiochi tells the story, were in the former times immensely compatible elements of life. To make family members better is to make life better. Isn’t it? If not, why not? Bachiochi would have it that “the older women’s movement understood what today more and more young parents have come to appreciate: The life of the home can be enjoyed as a deeply collaborative task, shared by both mothers and fathers.

Indeed, it is a joint project that many women and men today regard as the most important work that they do, and one that they take very seriously.”

Mary Wollstonecraft, from her ladylike roost amid porringers and candle smoke, could not have guessed her relevance to the age of silicon. But that relevance just keeps growing.

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.