Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, carries with it the subtitle: “A Feminist Manifesto.” Where that word may conjure a certain harshness, however, Sargeant’s book illustrates something much more gentle: a humane vision of the givenness of womanhood.
Her work of molding a new vision of feminism is critical, especially on the Right, where the word “feminism” has itself become shorthand for “bad gender ideology.” Many conservative voices, angered by the absurd panoply of sexual identities now available for the choosing, blame feminism as the wellspring of it all—eager to throw out women’s access to the workplace, the university, or the polls along with “transgenderism.”
Sargeant offers a different narrative, one where feminism is not an innate evil, but a way of thinking that got off track when it began to deny women’s essential differences from men. She observes, with great acuity, depth, and wisdom, that much of feminism today seeks to make women more like men, in so far as they are autonomous and impenetrable. Modern feminism seeks to bolster women, to advance them in careers, material wealth, and power. This version of “female empowerment” seeks to flatten out the very particularities of women which make them themselves. A woman’s softness, gentleness, capacity for childbearing, and distinct role in child rearing—one which Sargeant describes beautifully throughout the book, weaving in personal anecdotes of her own pregnancies, labors, and late nights breastfeeding—are all targets of feminism as generally understood today.
Feminism à la Simone de Beauvoir seeks to annihilate the womb from woman, and leave her as man, whether through chemical, physical, or political change. Feminism à la Leah Libresco Sargeant seeks to embrace the particularities of womanhood and the limitations—or dependencies—that innately arise from these particularities. Whereas de Beauvoir would like to see all women relieved of homemaking and caregiving duties, Sargeant would like to see homemaking and caregiving properly valued and dignified in our culture—and better supported by our laws. In no way does she think women “belong in the kitchen,” but that our schools, workplaces, and public spaces should accommodate the natural demands of motherhood.
Sargeant describes, oftentimes with lush elegance, the unique physical connection a mother has to her baby—both in and out of the womb. Only the mother can offer nutrients, transported through her blood, to her baby in utero. Only the mother can offer her baby milk from her breast. In much of U.S. employment policy, Sargeant observes, these physical realities of motherhood are deemed aberrations from the “male” norm, as disabilities that require special exemptions or physical defects in need of chemical or technical intervention (i.e., birth control, breast pumps, artificial wombs). She argues that we must expand our understanding of normal, to move from one that is male to one that is human.
Sargeant, who writes in a clear, Catholic voice, embraces an Aristotelian understanding of reality—”the universe just is“—while still asserting that equality between men and women is an aim worth striving toward. While “equity” may be a bad word to many conservatives, it is not to Sargeant, who writes from a desire to immanentize a more equitable society for her children.
Throughout her work, Sargeant writes not only about women, but about human beings as such. The young, the old, the parents of newborns, the sick, the disabled, the poor, and the lonely all need help from others. Every single human person depends on others for her very existence and continued flourishing. This dependence—which ebbs and flows with every season of life—should be assumed as a universal condition of personhood, not as a strange aberration to be smoothed out. In our world of codependence, healthy men have a particular duty of their own—to lend their strength to others who need it.
Ultimately, Sargeant’s book is not just a challenge to the direction of contemporary feminism, which seeks the obliteration of gender norms altogether, but a challenge to a philosophical trend that places agency above all other goods. Consciously or subconsciously, the modern mind understands freedom as the absence of all limits. And only when those limits are removed does the modern mind believe true freedom—and thereby, flourishing—can be obtained.
Sargeant‘s vision turns this post-Enlightenment view on its head. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who is credited in the final pages of Sargeant‘s book, speaks throughout the whole. His treatise, Dependent Rational Animals, offers the core principles which she applies to our present culture. According to Sargeant, it is only when we are needed, when our agency is shaped by our dependence on others and the dependence of others on us, that we can fully thrive and flourish.
Sargeant challenges the modern notion of the autonomous self throughout her text. She argues there is no true self within, waiting to come forth, completely cleaved from the demands that others present to us. It is only through encountering the different obligations to and relationships with others that we can fully develop and find ourselves.
While Sargeant suggests certain policy changes that would better reflect this human reality, her project is ultimately a philosophical one. As she writes in the first chapter, “No just society can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.” This book is a crucial contribution to rebuilding that foundation.
The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (Catholic Ideas for a Secular World)
by Leah Libresco Sargeant
University of Notre Dame Press, 232 pp., $28
Kayla Bartsch is a former Buckley Fellow at National Review who resides in Washington, D.C.
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