Welcome to the weekly Fairer Disputations round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. This week: Emily Jashinsky on Taylor Swift and marriage, Mary Wakefield on standing up for the existence of mothers, and Brad East profiles Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant. Plus: outsourcing our friendships to AI, the problem with idolising victims, an obvious child-care solution, an event on educating women—and more!
First, Emily Jashinsky reviews Taylor Swift’s latest album, in which she sings of desiring marriage and family life.
Next, Mary Wakefield reflects on what would be lost in a world without mothers.
Finally, Brad East profiles Fairer Disputations Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant and her tireless pursuit of making the world a better place for the weak.
More Great Reads:
- When Your Child is Sick, Abigail Shrier, The Free Press
- When You Outsource Friendship to AI, Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dispatch
- The Problem with Idolising Victims, Victoria Smith, The Critic
- One Obvious, Underused Child-Care Solution, Marina Lopes, The Atlantic
- A Family-Friendly Community Offers Affordable Family Fun, Nadya Williams, Institute for Family Studies
- When Adoption Promises Are Broken, Nicole Chung, The Atlantic
Fairer Disputations Recommends:
In Arizona? Join us for a panel discussion hosted by the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and moderated by Fairer Disputations Editor-in-Chief, Erika Bachiochi:
College professors from UVA and Hillsdale, and the head of an independent Catholic school for girls, will reflect upon the educational pursuit of teaching women — both as students in their classrooms and historical and literary figures on the page — as a process of finding exemplars for the good life today. Asking what it is to be human, how to really attend to experience and to seek one’s noble purpose, and what it would look like to take women’s writing seriously in the study of classical canonical texts, speakers will uncover routes toward a fulsome liberal education for women today. The panel will discuss figures such as 15th century thinker Christine de Pizan; founding era historian Mercy Otis Warren; poets Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, and Denise Levertov; author and educator Anna Julia Cooper; astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, and more.
Speakers: Angel Adams Parham, Associate Professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, Katie Elrod, Head of Montrose School in Medfield, Mass., an independent school in the Catholic tradition for girls in grades 6-12, and Dr. Christina J. Lambert is an assistant professor of English at Hillsdale College.
Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Time: 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Location: Carson Ballroom, 3rd floor, Old Main, 400 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281
