A Debate: “Resolved: Feminism Necessarily Undermines Family Life”

Calendar
DATE
April 03-03, 2024
Location
LOCATION
Sheraton Commander Hotel, Cambridge, MA
Clock
TIME
6:00pm EST

How Does Feminism Affect the Family?

What does feminism do to alter the structure, function, and purpose of the “fundamental social unit”? Modern history saw the rise of feminist movements that have opened opportunities for women previously closed to them, and has dramatically altered and shaped the political, legal, and social landscape regarding the rights and obligations of both men and women in both public and private life. But has feminism’s victory’s for women’s “equality” yielded strong fruits? Has progress in women’s educational and professional opportunities been beneficial to the social fabric, or even to women themselves? Or has the “freedom to choose” eroded the family unit as more women choose to reject it? Does the solution to today’s ills involve discarding feminism, or does America need a better feminism?

Join ISI and the Abigail Adams Institute on April 3, 2024, at 6pm as we find out! Scott Yenor and Erika Bachiochi will square off on these important questions as America continues to fight the battle between the sexes. There will be a reception with light hors d’ouevres at 5pm at the Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge, MA, followed by this timely debate.

Reach out to Tom Sarrouf at tsarrouf@isi.org with questions. You won’t want to miss it!

Meet The Debaters

Erika Bachiochi

Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. A graduate of Middlebury College, Erika was a Bradley Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Politics at Boston College, received her law degree from Boston University School of Law, and spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision was published by Notre Dame University Press and was a 2022 finalist for the ISI Conservative Book of the Year award. 

Erika is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project and its journal, Fairer Disputations. A co-founder of St. Benedict Classical Academy, she is the happily married mother of seven children. 

Scott Yenor

Scott Yenor is a Professor of Political Science at Boise State University, where he teaches political philosophy. He lives in Meridian, Idaho with his wife, Amy, and his five children. He earned his Ph.D. from Loyola University, Chicago (2000) and his B.A. from University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (1993).

Yenor is the author of articles on David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, presidential power, literature and politics, and other topics and of Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought (Baylor 2011), David Hume’s Humanity: The Philosophy of Common Life and Its Limits (Macmillan 2016), and The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies (Baylor 2020). Since 2023, Yenor has been a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

Danilo Petranovich (moderator)

Danilo Petranovich is the Director of the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, Dr. Petranovich taught political science at Duke University and Yale University.

His scholarly expertise is in nineteenth century European and American political thought, but his intellectual interests and loves are far more extensive. Dr. Petranovich received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard in 2000 and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2007. He lives with his wife Cristiana and son Gabriel not too far from the Institute.

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