Patriarchy, Women’s Rights, and the Future of Liberal Democracy: A Response to My Interlocutors
February 9, 2026
[[Editor’s note: this is the final post in the symposium on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
I am immensely grateful to profs. Upham, Rimalt, Prieto-Rudolphy, Palazzo, and Mancini for their careful and thorough reading of my book and for their discerning and generous commentaries. I am also deeply grateful to the ASCL Blog for offering to host this symposium. For lack of space, I will not be able to discuss all the insightful remarks of my interlocutors except to thank them for their solid support for my thesis and for their detailed and illuminating perspectives. I will use the limited space I have to reply to one central critique raised by each of my interlocutors, after first laying out the relevant context of the book.
The book examines both conceptually and diachronically how patriarchy and patriarchal religion affect the rights of women and how they have been reflected in the liberal legal order in Western liberal states, with an emphasis on the USA. The argument is situated in the context of the recent democratic erosion occurring in many liberal democracies. I claim that weaknesses in liberal theory and practice, particularly the primacy of the public/private distinction, have facilitated the strengthening and re-politicization of patriarchal religion and the rise of right-wing populism, and that these jeopardize both the rights of women and the future of liberal democracies.
In the book, I point out that patriarchy is more than sexism; patriarchy is a fully-fledged political order, which was identified by Max Weber as the earliest and most basic form of political organization.[1] Filmer, in his work Patriarcha, defended the political right of kings to rule over their subjects based on the divinely ordained right of the father to rule over his sons.[2] While liberalism rejected the political aspects of Filmer’s patriarchal theory and adopted the social contract theory which views all men as entitled to political freedom 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.
I show in the book that the liberal assumption that it is possible to confine patriarchy, and the discrimination it involves, to the private sphere of religion and the family, is wrong. As a result, women’s rights have never been fully protected in liberal states, and more recently, patriarchal religious, nationalist, and populist ideologies that have flourished and gained power in the private sphere, have been taking over the public sphere and threatening the liberal democratic framework in many countries. In the book’s conclusion, I argue that extricating liberal democracy from its patriarchal roots entails replacing political liberalism with a substantive egalitarian liberalism that focuses heavily on the private as well as public sphere and requires the state to take active steps to remove all types of gendered power differentials that are supported and maintained by patriarchal liberalism in both spheres.
With this context in mind, I will now turn to respond to my interlocutors’ central comments.
Prof. Upham asks, “What about the men?”, referring to the damage patriarchy causes to men. He gives the example of Japanese men, whose rigid and endless work demands result in their complete absence from their children’s and family lives. I agree with Upham that patriarchy’s strict gender roles harm both women and men. If implemented, the obligation in The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) on states to take all appropriate measures to modify existing legislation, customs, practices, and social and cultural patterns of conduct that discriminate against women or that are based on the idea of the inferiority or superiority of one of the sexes, will correct patriarchy’s harm to women and men alike.[3] Many liberal democracies have made significant progress towards more egalitarian roles for both sexes in the labor market and at home. Unfortunately, as I discuss in the book, the embeddedness of patriarchy in liberal societies has enabled right-wing populists to enlist considerable support from men by committing to reverse this progress.[4] Gidron and Hall explain that white working-class male support for right-wing populism in liberal democracies stems from the relative decline in their social status vis- à-vis women due to gender equality legislation and economic and cultural developments. The loss of status is perceived by white working-class males as a crisis in masculinity and is weaponized by populists against the existing liberal democratic social order, fueling anti-democratic sentiments.[5] Homolar and Lofflmann argue that alongside ethnicity and nationality, populist masculine rhetoric “forms the core of the radicalizing playbook that helps turning individual grievances over frustrated desires and unmet expectations into a call to arms for political agents who promise alleviation and transformative change.” [6] Populist rhetoric represents men as emasculated victims of progressive change who have the right to demand redistributive justice, including through anger, vengeance, and violence.
In her commentary, Prof. Rimalt objects to my description of the religious forces that have been increasing their political influence in many liberal democracies as religious conservatives. She maintains that describing them as religious fundamentalists better captures the nature of the forces that are currently driving democratic backsliding and the unique threats they pose to liberal rights and gender equality. I agree with Rimalt that many of the conservative forces driving the democratic backsliding in liberal democracies can be considered religious fundamentalists. Nevertheless, I argue in the book that these forces also include religious nationalists and right-wing populists who are not necessarily deeply religious people that want to deepen the practice of religion in their private lives. Rather, they are religious conservatives who are dedicated to the mission of infusing Christianity (or their respective religion), including its morality and its traditional views of gender and the family, into the public sphere and the governing institutions in their country.[7]
Moreover, following Stoeckl, I argue that Rawls’ political liberalism hinges on the implicit assumption that there are only two kinds of religious doctrines – a small minority of fundamentalist doctrines which are unreasonable and are therefore shunned and cannot cause much harm, and all remaining religious doctrines which he designates as reasonable and implicitly assumes that they are all willing to adopt a liberal political conception of justice which treats all citizens as free and equal.[8] Stoeckl argues that the empirical study of religious actors reveals that there is a third group of religious actors which she calls “traditionalists”. Traditionalists are not fundamentalists, and therefore they are not shunned either by political liberalism or by society. However, at the same time, traditionalists are unwilling to adopt a liberal political conception of justice which treats all citizens as free and equal. Rather, they strategically use their extensive political power, both internally within states and internationally, to implement their illiberal ideology and change the consensus over the appropriate conception of justice in society.[9] In the book, I argue that it is the combined force of these extensive and ever growing religious, nationalist, and populist groups with overlapping agendas that leads the religious conservative attack on women’s rights and on liberal democracy.
As mentioned in several of the commentaries and in my response, the book engages and critiques Rawls’ political liberalism.[10] In her commentary, Prof. Prieto-Rudolphy wonders “to what extent we can blame Rawlsian liberalism, a highly idealized theory, for the flourishing of gendered beliefs in the private sphere when no society has ever perfectly embodied Rawlsian ideals.” My response, which I discuss extensively in the book, is that we can, and should, blame liberalism – with its emphasis on the public/private distinction and on shielding patriarchal religious doctrines from criticism – for the flourishing of gendered beliefs, and that Rawls’ political liberalism is no exception. In his book Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that political, rather than comprehensive, liberalism is the appropriate political theory for modern heterogeneous democratic societies in which a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines exists.[11] Putting aside the question whether Rawls envisioned his political liberalism as ideal theory or as a blueprint for liberal societies, his theory fails even on its own terms. For example, as mentioned above, Rawls contends that “except for certain kinds of fundamentalism, all the main historical religions … may be seen as reasonable comprehensive doctrines.”[12] This means, as Okin points out, that Rawls considers religions that both preach and practice highly sexist modes of life as reasonable.[13]
Furthermore, as the discussion in the book shows, far from being perceived as ideal theory, variants of the political liberal constitutional framework suggested by Rawls can be found in most Western liberal democracies, and so can their precarious consequences. Rawls’ misguided assumption that citizens who adhere to non-liberal and illiberal comprehensive doctrines will simultaneously develop a genuine commitment to a liberal political conception of justice, on which he bases his entire theory, has been proven wrong by the success of right-wing populism in the new millennium. This success, which is based on the strength of pre-existing non-liberal and illiberal groups that rally behind right-wing populism, has exposed the frailness of the extant liberal political framework and the implausibility of its theoretical foundations.
While in her commentary, Prof. Palazzo is highly appreciative of the book’s analysis, she nevertheless worries that it “insufficiently reveals that law itself is not a neutral source of truth, but a contested space that can be mobilized by opposing political projects”. I fully agree with Palazzo that law is not a neutral source of truth, and I consider my book to be a feminist critical legal studies (FCLS) work, which exposes this fallacy. The book shows that far from being neutral, law in liberal democracies is inherently patriarchal, and legal concepts that are portrayed as neutral, such as the public-private distinction, carry very different consequences for women and men.
In response to my claim in the book that right-wing populism misappropriates human rights concepts and uses them against disempowered minorities such as women and other sexual minorities, Palazzo posits that if law is not neutral, then “debates about the “misappropriation” of human rights by right-wing populists appear less as conceptual distortions than as ordinary struggles over meaning within law.” I disagree. Recognizing that law is not neutral and that it is constantly being mobilized by opposing political projects does not mean that feminist legal theorists must relinquish the claim that some political projects distort the concept of “human rights” and its appropriate understanding in a liberal democracy. Quite to the contrary, recognizing that law is a political instrument that can, and often is, misused by the powerful against the powerless makes the struggle over the appropriate meaning of legal concepts such as human rights even more urgent.
Finally, Prof. Mancini argues in her commentary that while my analysis is largely persuasive, a comparative perspective reveals important regional variation. She points to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as reflecting a more nuanced approach when balancing between demands for religiously motivated exemptions and sexual and reproductive rights. I agree with Mancini that the ECtHR remains more protective of the rights of women and sexual minorities than the American Supreme Court. This is in large part because the ECtHR has not yet been captured by right-wing populist forces, while, as I discuss in the book, the capture of the American Supreme Court was completed by the end of President Trump’s first term, with the unprecedented appointment of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney-Barret, eight days before the 2020 presidential elections. In Reva Siegel’s words: “The Republican Party engaged in norm-busting appointments politics to produce the Supreme Court that decided the Dobbs case.”[14]
The comparison between the ECtHR and the American Supreme Court demonstrates the danger that I discuss in the book of the reinstitution of religious patriarchy as a political rule. With its jurisprudence giving countries a wide margin of appreciation in sensitive issues such as reproductive rights, the ECtHR has succeeded in maintaining a patriarchal liberal status quo. Nevertheless, despite the Court’s relatively progressive rulings, this status quo has, among other things, led it to refuse to recognize women’s right to abortion.[15] This strategy may end up backfiring as more countries in the EU are taken over by right-wing populists that dismantle the liberal democratic constitutional framework in their countries and establish patrimonial states where religious patriarchal rules apply in both the public and private spheres. The shift in the balance of power in the EU towards these states may enable them to capture the ECtHR and reverse the gains in women’s and sexual minorities’ rights, much like what has happened in the USA.[16]
I want to thank Profs. Upham, Rimalt, Prieto-Rudolphy, Palazzo, and Mancini again for their illuminating commentaries and conclude by reiterating the crux of my argument in the book. The rise of right-wing populism and politicized conservative religion, and their joint attack on the liberal state, have shown that what stands at the core of the current struggle is not only the excessive power of patriarchy in the private sphere but a concerted attempt by different patriarchal ideologies to carry out a patriarchal overhaul of the public sphere and state structure towards the establishment of a patrimonial state. s I argue in the book, feminism has been right all along. The personal is indeed at the very heart of the political, and patriarchy is a threat in both spheres, not just for women, but for the future of liberal democracy. Liberal democracies that continue to ignore this reality do so at their own peril.
[1] Julia Adams, The Rule of the Father, Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe, in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion 237, 238-239 (Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek eds.)
[2] Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha” and Other Writings 1–68 (Cambridge University Press 1991)
[3] Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Dec. 18, 1979, 1249 U.N.T.S 13. See discussion of the convention in ch. 2. sec. 5 of the book.
[4] See discussion in the book’s Introduction
[5] Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right, 68(1) The British Journal of Sociology s57 (2017)
[6] Alexandra Homolar and Georg Löfflmann, Weaponizing Masculinity: Populism and Gendered Stories of Victimhood, 16(2) Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 131, 132 (2022)
[7] Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States 149-150, 152 (Oxford University Press, 2020)
[8] Kristina Stoeckl, ‘Political Liberalism and Religious Claims: Four Blind Spots’ 43(1) Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, at 35-38 (2017)
[9] See my discussion of Christian nationalists in the USA and Religious Zionists in Israel as traditionalists in ch. 5
[10] See especially ch. 2 sec. 2 & 3, ch. 6 sec. 2, and Conclusion
[11] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii (Columbia Univ. Press 1993).
[12] Id. at 170.
[13] Susan Moller Okin, Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate, 72 Fordham L. Rev. 1537, 1556 (2004).
[14] Reva B. Siegel, Memory Games: Dobbs’s Originalism as Anti-Democratic Living Constitutionalism – and Some Pathways for Resistance, 101 Tex. L. Rev. 1127, 1176 (2023). See my discussion in ch. 6.
[15] Most recently repeated in ECtHR 13 November 2025, Application no. 6030/21, A.R. v. Poland, sec. 104
[16] For a similar concern see Ruth Rubio-Marin, Anti Gender Constitutionalism, 21 European Const. L. Rev., 37, 53-53 (2025)