The Private Is Still Political; Neutrality Was Never Neutral: Rereading Liberalism and Religion with Gila Stopler

Mariana Brocca

Mariana Brocca is a PhD. scholar at the University of Buenos Aires and an Associate Professor at UNICEN, Argentina.

Reading Gila Stopler’s Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025) felt like someone quietly switching on the light in a familiar room. The furniture was always there, but Stopler rearranges it so we can finally see how the pieces connect. Her claim is unsettling and straightforward – the recent rollback of women’s rights is not liberalism’s accident; it grows from its design. We inherited a constitutional imagination that treats family, religion, and care as “not political”, a notion that prevented us from perceiving its underlying structure and thereby blocking substantive equality from achieving more than a utopian existence.

The opening examples –Dobbs and Alabama’s embryo ruling– are not just bad decisions, they are windows into a longer story. A liberal state can repeat slogans on its secularity and still fund, license, or shield practices that subordinate women inside hospitals, schools, shelters, and workplaces based on patriarchal religions. The historical through-line makes this sharper. Stopler reminds us that after “the unholy pact” between religion and state was apparently dissolved, the civil law concerning women barely moved, and when coverture was finally dismantled, its logic reappeared under the banner of privacy (p. 47). The form changed; the function endured.

As Stopler explains, hegemony is established through the everyday languages, images, teachings, and habits that shape how people perceive and make sense of the world (p. 27). From there, patriarchal values formed in religious and cultural orders tend to flow into legal norms and because power justifies and conceals itself as it operates, that diffusion often goes unnoticed (p. 49). Once you start watching those circuits, so-called ‘neutrality’ looks less neutral and more like a channel through which hierarchy travels. Her treatment of religious exemptions crystallizes the point. We often narrate exemptions as small courtesies that let conscience and regulation coexist. Stopler shows that, in practice, they can work as a lever of power – once a dispute is framed as a burden on religion, the burdens on equality and on access to essential services are easily downgraded (p. 42).

The chapter on right-wing populism adds a piece that most backsliding metrics miss. Political liberalism, she argues, has been conspicuously accommodating toward non-liberal and illiberal comprehensive doctrines, and the success of contemporary populism owes much to indulgence of majoritarian illiberal projects (p. 189). The result is a politics of paternal restoration: the promise to govern the nation like a household with a father at its head. It is no surprise that reproductive autonomy, sex education, and anti-violence frameworks sit in the crosshairs since they redistribute authority away from the imagined household sovereign.

In the United States, Stopler shows how the public/private divide has been repurposed to weaken public institutions and shift power to private religious actors, enabling devices, such as private enforcement “bounties”, designed to sidestep constitutional limits while re-imposing a patriarchal order (p. 204). The Argentine scene under President Javier Milei can be easily linked – echoing patterns visible under Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – as it shows how anti-gender rhetoric, curricular fights over comprehensive sex education, and expanded conscience claims turn the so-called private sphere into an effective mode of governing the public one.

Stopler’s final chapter argues that feminism was right to insist that the personal is at the heart of the political – patriarchal power threatens both domains and ignoring that linkage imperils liberal democracy. The practical upshot is clear: rebuild liberalism on substantive equality that reaches the private sphere so that religious freedom is protected without becoming a license to reduce another person’s civic standing. In the end, can a democracy call itself liberal when the private sphere lies beyond the reach of equality, or is that precisely where its future is decided?

Mariana Brocca is a PhD. scholar at the University of Buenos Aires and an Associate Professor at UNICEN, Argentina.

Suggested Citation: Mariana Brocca, ‘The Private Is Still Political; Neutrality Was Never Neutral: Rereading Liberalism and Religion with Gila Stopler’ IACL-AIDC Blog (6 November 2025) The Private Is Still Political; Neutrality Was Never Neutral: Rereading Liberalism and Religion with Gila Stopler — IACL-IADC Blog