Remember the Ladies

Women’s History Month, which is celebrated in March, usually focuses on women who have championed women’s right. Even our most famous female Revolutionary War patriot, Abigail Adams, is perhaps best known for admonishing husband John to “remember the ladies” when he was going about the business of helping to form the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, he failed to take her advice.

In the mid-twentieth century, however, three women were instrumental in furthering the gender-neutral causes of individual rights and limited Constitutional government, two political values that had been badly battered by the club of progressivism. These founding mothers of Libertarianism - Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand - had the courage to speak out against the encroaching State when many of their male counterparts seemed to have misplaced their spines.

Isabel Paterson is probably least known of this group, having begun her crusade in the 1920s. Born in Ontario, Canada in 1886, Paterson grew up poor on a cattle ranch in Alberta. She received little formal schooling but was a voracious reader who acquired a broad knowledge and understanding of history and philosophy. Her self-acquired education and career skills probably greatly influenced the high value she placed on maximizing individual potential.

Paterson wrote an influential literary column for the New York Tribune for 25 years in which she challenged popular opinion and shared her developing political ideas. She opposed most of the “New Deal” programs being instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and advocated for less government involvement in social and fiscal issues. She went on to write “The God of the Machine,” a defense of individualism as the source of social and political progress.

Paterson’s contemporary, Rose Wilder Lane, lived the quintessential American childhood. As the daughter of Almonzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose, who was also born in 1886 but in the Dakota territories, grew up on the American frontier and experienced that hard-scrabble way of life first hand. She later helped her mother write and edit the well-loved “Little House” book series, which provides so many American children with their first glimpse of life on the prairie.

Lane eventually established a career as a writer and editor, first with the San Francisco Bulletin, then free-lance. She occasionally worked as a traveling war correspondent, starting with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau after World War I. It was during this time she traveled to Soviet Russia, saw communism up-close and personal and became an avowed opponent of Marxist philosophy. Her political writing venerated individual freedom and expounded its positive impact on humanity.

Lane’s seminal work, the non-fiction book The Discovery of Freedom, became a handbook for the growing libertarian movement of the 1940s. Leader Albert Jay Nock said that Lane’s Discovery of Freedom and Paterson’s God of the Machine, which were published the same year, were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." He also said the two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally ... They don't fumble and fiddle around--every shot goes straight to the centre."

This same year another important addition to the growing collection of liberty-themed literature hit bookstores. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is probably better known than Paterson’s or Lane’s books and the same can safely be said of its controversial author. Ayn Rand inspires adoration in some and abhorrence in others but seldom do readers come away from her works complacent and neutral. Rand wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum to a middle-class family in Saint Petersburg, Russia Empire, in 1905, Rand experienced the horrors of the Russian Revolution first-hand. When her father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks the family fled to the Crimea. They eventually returned to St. Petersburg, where Rand studied history and philosophy at the University of Petrograd. At age 21 she emigrated to the United States and landed in Hollywood, where she worked for a time as a screenwriter and playwright. She eventually moved to New York when one of her plays was produced on Broadway.

Rand published two politically-themed works – the semi-autobiographical We the Living and the novella Anthem – before she caught the attention of the book-buying public in 1943 with her 700-page tribute to individualism, The Fountainhead. Fourteen years later her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, hit bookstores. An ode to the productive members of society and a defense of their right to work, create and prosper unencumbered by excessive government interference, Atlas Shrugged solidified Rand’s status as a novelist of ideas. Her clear and well-reasoned arguments in favor of individualism, laissez-faire economics and constitutionally-limited government helped fuel a conservative backlash against collectivism and also formed the foundation of her philosophical movement, Objectivism.

Rand is a controversial figure not only because of her personal life, which was chaotic, to say the least, but also because of her arrogant and abrasive personality. She was antagonistic toward any philosophy that was not of her own creation and it is ironic that Rand is grouped with Paterson and Lane as a founding mother of Libertarianism since she denounced Libertarians as “plagiarists of my ideas.” Yet many of the ideas that Libertarians and Rand shared had been around for centuries. It was just the right time to bring them back.