Though many feminists today turn to the State for solutions to the discrimination and oppression that women face, there is a long feminist tradition in America that is wary of government. Most notably, in the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchist feminists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman spoke out against the strictures of state-regulated marriage and the economic dependence and legal discrimination that kept women trapped in bad marriages and unfulfilled lives.

This tradition was carried on later in the early 20th century by radical libertarian Suzanne La Follette. Though she is the author of the first full-length book on libertarian feminism in existence, Concerning Women, a book which her colleague, friend, and mentor, essayist Albert Jay Nock, called “superb,” she is almost unknown among feminists today. Out of print until 1972 when it was reprinted in the Arno Press “American Women” series, an excerpt titled “Beware the State” appeared 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 recalled that the adults in the family were all “good feminists.”

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. When Nock, whom she had met there, founded his libertarian magazine, the Freeman in 1920, she joined him as one of the editors for the four years of its existence. She continued as an editor and journalist the rest of her life.

After the demise of the Freeman, La Follette began work on Concerning Women, which was published in 1926. Its libertarian theme is aptly summarized by Rossi: “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.”

The economic independence of women is one of the major themes of La Follette’s book. Though not an anarchist, she agreed that the State was the natural enemy of women. Believing that the subjection of women, like chattel slavery or “industrial slavery,” had its basis in economics, La Follette declared that the primary way in which the State hurt women was through legally imposed economic disadvantages.

Another major theme is La Follette’s book is opposition to state-regulated marriage. Like the 19th century anarchist feminists, La Follette did not approve of State control of marriage. 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…”

The Church also came under La Follette’s attack. She considered marriage and divorce laws to be impositions of Christian morality, which were in her view, anti-woman, hypocritical, and puritanical. 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. 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. She herself never married nor had any children.

La Follette’s book received little attention. Though La Follette attributed it to a decline in interest in women’s issues, it is likely that a more significant contributing factor was her iconoclastic views on government and feminism. Only a handful of people carried on the libertarian tradition in the 1920’s and 30’s, a time when socialism was more favored by the intellectuals and individualism increasingly frowned upon.

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.” Nonetheless it became 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 H.L. Mencken’s 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.” Ulysses was reprinted  in The Best Poems of 1928.

La Follette briefly edited a revival of the Freeman, titled the New Freeman, but coming as it did at the eve of the Great Depression in 1930, it didn’t last long. It was, unfortunately, the last public place in which she ever commented on feminist issues. Her relatives and colleagues didn’t recall hearing her discuss feminist issues as such again after the magazine folded. But her brother Chester pointed out that she would have been unlikely to talk about such topics with people who agreed with her.

During the 1930’s, La Follette continued to decry statism, especially New Deal welfare programs and growing totalitarianism abroad. These essays appeared in magazines such as the New Republic, the Nation, Current History and Scribner’s Magazine.

In the late 1930’s, one of La Follette’s most important accomplishments was overseeing John Dewey’s “Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials.” The purpose was to examine the charges against Trotsky brought by Stalin. The Commission exonerated Trotsky of the charges against him, accusing Stalin of a frame-up. The final report, Not Guilty, co-authored by La Follette and Dewey, was published in 1938. The investigation stripped away any sympathy for the Soviet Union that La Follette may have had; anti-communism was to be a major theme of her writings after this report.

La Follette and her colleague John Chamberlain briefly revived the Freeman in 1950 as a mostly anti-communist publication. When it failed, it was sold to the Foundation for Economic Education, which continues it in a different form today.

In 1955, La Follette became a founding editor of National Review and worked as its managing editor until her retirement in 1959. In those days, recalled her Chamberlain, there was no place for a libertarian to publish except a handful of conservative journals. But, Chamberlain added, La Follette was “not a traditional conservative…we were all anti-statists.”

La Follette retained her feminist views throughout. 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,” said Priscilla Buckley. Chamberlain remembered that “she didn’t like people criticizing women.”

La Follette passed away in 1983 but is remembered vividly by her friends as a beautiful and cultivated woman, “opinionated,” “overwhelming” but “perfectly gracious,” “extremely kind” and loyal. Her iconoclastic courage to go against the rising tide of a different approach to feminism virtually alone in the early 20th century, standing firm for her ideals, deserves our admiration no matter what our views.

References:
Edward T James, Janet Wilson James, & Paul S. Boyer. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. 5. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

Suzanne La Follette. Concerning Women. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926 (Arno Press reprint, 1972, in the series  “American Women: Images and Realities”).

Art in America. 1929. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965.) “Beware the State,” in Alice Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973; New York: Bantam, 1974.

Sharon Presley, “Suzanne La Follette: The New Freewoman,” accessed on June 12, 2012 at http://www.alf.org/lafollette.php

Submitted by Sharon Presley, www.sharonpresley.com