Erika Bachiochi

In Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent, Emily Dumler-Winckler looks beyond the moderns to show Wollstonecraft’s kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds the dynamic resources to treat her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular).

If soldiers deserve a pension for serving their country, mothers also deserve material support. History suggests this is a very American idea.

Bachiochi takes a deep dive into feminism in a classical sense and connects it to what feminism should truly be.

Wollstonecraft’s political argument…was concerned with the advance of intellectual and moral virtue.

We urge members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to come to an accord regarding these concerns before they recess for the holidays.

As parents have responsibilities to care for, nurture, and educate their children, a just and humane economy and politics ought to help parents carry out those duties of care.

Constitutional protection of unborn children as equal “persons” under the law remains the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.

As pro-life advocates and legislators consider how they ought to proceed in the post-Roe era, they should heed the wisdom of the early feminists who, as champions of both women and their dependent children, understood the power – and limits – of the law to effect real change.

Weil desired not only to understand the sufferings of the dispossessed but to suffer alongside them.

In Roe’s absence, concerns about women’s economic welfare would have to be addressed as they should: by ending poverty, not unborn lives.

If Roe goes, the pro-life movement can begin where it left off in 1973, working to convince fellow citizens (especially in blue states like mine) that we owe dependent and vulnerable unborn children what every human being is due: hospitality, respect and care.

At the heart of Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision is the assertion that human beings are not defined by autonomy but rather by relations of dependency and obligation.