History of Feminism

(I'm tired and I rambled rather than addressing your post. I'll make a better effort tomorrow).

As opposed to the common good, is central to capitalism. The rights of the individual are not universal rights, despite prevailing national mythology. When the Constitution was written, only propertied white men could vote. The Founders believed them to be universal in the sense they belong to those who counted, which were a small minority of the population. The rest of the population was defined outside the body politic. That ethos continues today, with no greater awareness of the extent to which those rights are bound by race, class, gender, and sexuality as the Founders demonstrated.

I talk about the Constitution because as a liberal document founded on the ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, etc... it is the quintessential capitalist document. It imbued capitalism and the individual rights that promoted it with a natural quality. Classical liberalism was the political corollary to capitalism. It provided an argument for the superiority of the capitalist state. It emerged in opposition to mercantilism--an economic system in which the crown controlled trade and granted licenses to organizations and merchants who were allowed to trade (slave traders, tobacco monopolies, landholders, and miners). All property legally belonged to the crown, with land use grants bestowed as gifts. Private property is a concept that emerged with the development of capitalism, and liberalism imagined property rights to be self-evident, as inherent rights of individual men rather than the state or communities. That idea led to the mass dispossession of peasant lands throughout the world, starting in England with the Enclosure movement and eventually spreading throughout the developing world where indigenous peoples saw their access to land (previously protected by the crown in places like Spanish America).

Now we are in a neoliberal era, in which the US and the rest of the big economic powers promote neoliberal opening of markets and the accompanying focus on individual over collective rights. Many here believe deeply in the idea of individual liberty but doesn't realize the extend to which that liberty is bound by race, class, gender, and sexuality. When the rights rest in the individual as opposed to the common good, they enable those with power and wealth to justify their exploitation of others by appealing to the idea that their liberty is inviolate. They then justify the oppression of the poor by references to choice. The choice issue in the sex trade is no different from its invocation for matters of labor. Just as right-wingers justify low wage jobs by appeal to "choice," many here do the same for the sex industry (something few do for other forms of labor). Women's rights therefore depend not on equality but on the individual woman's choice to allow the privileged to exploit her labor and her body. That choice is of course circumscribed by the marketplace and patriarchy. What options exist for poor women with limited education? We even had the choice argument evoked by someone who insisted children as young as nine willingly choose the "profession" of prostitution, so having sex with them was consensual. (The person was NOT tombstoned, by the way).

For a far more informed analysis of the issue, see this article:
http://isreview.org/issue/91/explaining-gender-violence-neoliberal-era
and this conference posted by redqueen: http://www.democraticunderground.com/125548526