Book Symposium – Introduction: Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights

Gila Stopler

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law at the College of Law & Business, Israel

I am deeply grateful to Cora Chan and Rosalind Dixon for co-organizing this symposium on my book and to Rosario Grimà Algora, Mariana Brocca,  and Stefano Osella for reading the book and contributing to the symposium. In this opening post, I will briefly introduce the main themes of the book. The following three posts will include responses from the contributors, and those will be followed by a closing post where I will respond to their thoughtful contributions.

In June 2022, the US Supreme Court issued a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which it eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, with a devastating impact on the lives of tens of millions of American women. The Dobbs majority based its decision on America’s “history and traditions,” and specifically on those existing at the time of the passage of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1868. In applying the standards of 1868 to women’s rights, the 2022 US Supreme Court was not deterred by the knowledge that in 1868, American women did not have the right to vote, and most married women had no legal personhood due to the rules of coverture. As Michele Goodwin aptly explains while analyzing the Court’s decision, the Dobbs Court’s legal doctrine is no doctrine at all, and “consists of little more than a conservative political and religious judgement.” The Dobbs decision is a good example of the toxic combination of patriarchy and religion that I discuss in the book, which affects women’s rights in Western liberal states in the new millennium.

In the book, I argue that although patriarchy and patriarchal religion have always existed in liberal states and have been partly accommodated by these states at the expense of women’s rights, the resurgence and repoliticization of patriarchal religion in the twenty-first century has considerably magnified the threats facing women’s rights in Western liberal states. Moreover, the repoliticization of religion in the new millennium is often part and parcel of the rise of nationalism and of right-wing populism, and together these phenomena threaten not only the rights of women but the future of liberal democracy itself. In many countries, the calls to restrict women’s rights have become a most effective rallying cry for right-wing populists and religious conservatives in their surprisingly successful attack on the foundations of liberal democracy. The success of the populist attack on women’s rights, together with decisions such as Dobbs, has confirmed feminist warnings regarding the flawed protection of women’s rights in liberal societies, which have hitherto been routinely rejected by most liberals as unfounded and alarmist.

The book suggests that to understand the success of this patriarchal populist attack on women, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand the patriarchal foundations of liberalism and liberal societies. It examines the ways in which patriarchy is embedded in liberal theory, law, and practice, as well as in the dominant mainstream religions in liberal societies, and exposes how the enduring power of patriarchy in liberal societies is used by right-wing populists to advance their own cause, to restrict the rights of women, and to endanger the future of liberal democracy itself. The examination in the book is both conceptual and diachronic and centers on the ways patriarchy and patriarchal religion are reflected in the liberal legal order in Western liberal states, with an emphasis on the USA.

The linchpin of the argument builds on the feminist critique of the public/private distinction. This distinction is foundational to liberalism and its relationship with patriarchy and with religion. The book claims that to understand this relationship and its connection to the public/private distinction, it is necessary to consider the disagreements between Filmer’s classical patriarchal theory and early liberalism. Filmer identified paternal right with political right and claimed that the divinely ordained patriarchal familial order is a representation of the proper political order. Consequently, he viewed all relationships of superior and subordinate as akin to those of father and son.

In her analysis of liberalism and its opposition to Filmer’s theory, Carol Pateman notes that whereas social contract theory rejected the political aspects of Filmer’s patriarchal theory and declared that men were entitled to political liberty and equality in the public sphere, it simultaneously maintained the patriarchal subjugation of women to men as natural and as belonging to the private non-political sphere.

Consequently, the liberal state was structured around a political sphere of freedom and equality for men and a private sphere of patriarchal subjugation of women, which was viewed as natural and non-political. Women’s later entry into the public sphere has hardly changed this basic structure.

Although the advent of liberalism, with its public/private distinction, supposedly signaled the confinement of religion to the private sphere, patriarchal religion’s power to subordinate women and affect their status in both the public and the private sphere has remained considerable. As a result, despite its universal promise of equality and freedom, and separation between religion and the state, liberalism held very different consequences for men and women.

While the critique of the public/private distinction is central to the feminist critique of liberalism, most feminist critics do not call for the complete erasure of the public/private distinction. Rather, the critique contends that in a society in which gender hierarchy and sex discrimination exist, the public/private distinction is often used to perpetuate and deepen them. As the feminist slogan “the personal is political” aptly states, relegating patriarchy and patriarchal religion to the private sphere has neither depoliticized patriarchy and patriarchal religion, nor has it disempowered them. Quite to the contrary, feminist legal theorist Frances Olsen astutely points out that power holders in liberal societies gain legitimacy and immunity from attack and find ways to maintain the status quo to their advantage by characterizing their power as private. Powerful patriarchal religious entities use their position in the private sphere both to protect their own interests and to immunize their discriminatory actions against women from scrutiny and interference. Simultaneously, they characterize any power deployed against them as public and claim that it is unconstitutionally and unjustly oppressive toward them. Thus, patriarchal religious entities use the public/private distinction both as a shield and as a sword, to buttress their own power and to disempower women.

In the book, I argue that the public/private distinction, and its use as both a sword and a shield, has also facilitated the current rise of right-wing populism and of religious nationalism in what Arato and Cohen call the “dark side” of civil society.  Moreover, I argue that the struggle between liberal democratic and religio-populist forces today is not just around the power of patriarchy to control women in the private sphere. What stands at the heart of this struggle is the religious conservative and right-wing populist effort to dismantle the structure of the liberal state and reinstate the traditional patriarchal political order which Filmer has justified as divinely ordained, and which sociologist Max Weber has identified as the purest form of traditional authority and the basis for the patrimonial state.

By exposing the deep embeddedness of patriarchy in liberalism, populism, and conservatism, as well as in religion and culture, the book aims to deepen our understanding of the weakness of women’s rights in Western liberal democracies; to expose the underlying connections between this weakness and the success of religious nationalism and right-wing populism; and to point to conceptual, structural, and legal changes needed to restrict the power of patriarchy, promote women’s rights, and help to curb the rise of religious nationalism and right-wing populism.

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law at the College of Law & Business, Israel

Suggested Citation: Gila Stopler, ‘Introduction: Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights’ IACL-AIDC Blog (4 November 2025) Book Symposium – Introduction: Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights — IACL-IADC Blog