The Burden and the Gift

“I learned a lot from The Rights of Women—it opened new angles on aspects of feminist history that I thought I already knew fairly well. It also has some memorable and resonant ways of framing what you’re proposing, the underlying ‘lost vision’ of rights: the ‘right to care’; the idea that the ‘asymmetry’ between motherhood and fatherhood offers ‘both the burden and the gift’; women’s rights as the rights we need in order to grow in wisdom and live out our duties well. Women have the right to independence of mind and economic independence because we have equal dignity and capacities, and so that we may educate ourselves and our children.”