Patriarchy, Women’s Rights, and the Future of Liberal Democracy: A Response to My Interlocutors
[[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.
[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).
[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)
The Cost of Conscience: Religious Exemptions and the Erosion of Women’s Rights
[Editor’s note: this is the fifth of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
In Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, Gila Stopler offers a powerful feminist critique of liberal democracy by exposing how women’s rights are structurally undermined through the liberal state’s accommodation of majority religions. Her central claim is that religion functions as a deeply patriarchal institution whose authority is preserved—and constitutionally legitimized—by liberalism’s commitments to toleration, religious freedom, and the public–private divide. Rather than operating as a neutral framework, liberal constitutionalism enables the erosion of women’s rights from within the legal order by insulating religious practices from democratic scrutiny.
Stopler challenges the conventional Enlightenment narrative that portrays secularism as an emancipatory force that confined religion to the private sphere and thereby facilitated women’s liberation from religious authority. Drawing on feminist critiques of the social contract[1], she demonstrates that the designation of certain domains as “private” does not signify a withdrawal of power, but rather a mode of its reconfiguration and concealment. Within this framework, religion occupies a uniquely privileged position. Its ostensible privatization shields religious norms from democratic contestation while simultaneously allowing them to regulate gender relations, family structures, sexuality, and reproduction. Far from being politically neutral, the private sphere becomes a site in which patriarchal power is entrenched and normalized.
Crucially, moreover, Stopler shows that the liberal insistence on treating religion as private obscures the extent to which religious patriarchy extends well beyond the private sphere and profoundly shapes public life. One of the most significant mechanisms through which this occurs is the proliferation of religiously based exemptions from generally applicable laws. Across the United States, Europe, and Israel, claims for exemptions increasingly target women’s reproductive rights and the rights of sexual minorities—domains that, as Stopler observes, are central to the patriarchal sexual order and its linkage of sex, marriage, and gender hierarchy. In Israel, these dynamics are further intensified by conflicts over women’s presence in the public sphere itself, including practices of gender segregation and exclusion that restrict women’s freedom of movement and participation.
Stopler’s comparative analysis reveals striking similarities between constitutional systems that are often regarded as fundamentally different in their approach to religion–state relations. The United States, frequently idealized as a bastion of secularism, and Israel, which lacks a formal separation between law and religion, both exhibit a growing willingness to accommodate religious claims at the expense of women’s equality. This convergence underscores Stopler’s broader claim that the problem lies not in the absence of secularism, but in liberalism’s structural deference to religion as a protected sphere of authority.
Judicial decisions such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby exemplify this tendency. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that for-profit corporations controlled by religious owners could be exempted from providing contraceptive coverage mandated by law, on the ground that compliance would burden the owners’ religious freedom[2]. As Stopler argues, this reasoning is emblematic of a broader transformation in the concept of conscientious objection. Traditionally understood as a limited protective mechanism for marginal individuals holding exceptional beliefs—such as pacifists—conscientious objection has evolved into a collective, politically mobilized strategy aimed at undermining the general applicability of secular law. These claims increasingly amount to “jurisdictional objections” that challenge the state’s authority to regulate domains claimed by religion[3].
The cumulative effect of religious exemptions is the hollowing out of women’s rights without their formal repeal. Equality remains enshrined in constitutional texts, yet its realization becomes contingent and uneven, producing parallel legal regimes in which women disproportionately bear the costs of accommodation.
While Stopler’s analysis is largely persuasive, a comparative perspective reveals important regional variation. Europe, though not immune to the proliferation of conscientious objection claims, has demonstrated a relatively greater capacity to resist their corrosive effects. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) reflects a nuanced approach that distinguishes between the protection of minority conscience and the accommodation of claims that undermine the rights of others. In Bayatyan v. Armenia, the Court robustly protected individual conscientious objection to military service under Article 9 of the EctHR[4]. By contrast, when religiously motivated exemptions have been invoked in the fields of sexual and reproductive rights, the Court has adopted a markedly more cautious stance, not privileging Christian majorities. In Ladele, the ECtHR upheld the dismissal of a registrar who refused to register same-sex unions on religious grounds, finding no violation of Article 9 and emphasizing the state’s duty to protect the rights of same-sex couples[5]. Similarly, in cases involving pharmacists who refused to dispense contraceptives, the Court held that freedom of religion does not entail an unconditional right to act in accordance with religious beliefs within the professional sphere[6]. The Court’s conclusion that the failure to provide for a right to conscientious objection does not constitute a violation of Article 9, if motivated by the protection of the right to health, further underscores its prioritization of women’s rights over claims of conscience[7].
Europe’s relative success in containing the assault of patriarchal religion on women’s rights can be attributed to the existence of common standards and the institutional role of the ECHR as a shared normative framework. Yet Stopler offers a sobering warning about the rise of illiberalism and populism and their strategic mobilization of religion. Across liberal democracies, religion is increasingly deployed within populist projects that frame gender equality as elitist, undemocratic, or culturally alien. Anti-gender discourse has emerged as a powerful unifying force—a “symbolic glue” that binds heterogeneous illiberal actors through a shared opposition to feminism, sexual minorities, and liberal human rights[8].
Within these discourses, gender becomes a proxy battleground for broader critiques of liberal democracy and globalization. Populist rhetoric relies on binary logics and moral panic, naturalizing gender hierarchy and sacralizing “the people” as a homogenous moral subject under threat from feminists and sexual minorities. In this context, rights themselves are appropriated and re-signified, stripped of their emancipatory content and redeployed to legitimate exclusion and inequality[9].
Ultimately, Stopler’s critique of the public–private divide exposes a foundational contradiction within liberalism. A state that claims neutrality toward religion cannot simultaneously guarantee women’s equality when religious institutions exercise entrenched patriarchal power. Her intervention calls for a feminist rethinking of toleration: without confronting religion as a patriarchal, public and political force, liberal democracies will continue to erode women’s rights in the name of religious freedom.
[1] C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Stanford University Press, 1988.
[2] Supreme Court of the United States, Burwell v. Hobby LobbyStores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014).
[3] S. Mancini, “Global Religion in a Post-Westphalia World”, in A. F. Lang, A. Wiener, Handbook on Global Constitutionalism, Edwar Elgar Publishing Limited, 2023: 556 – 567
[4] ECtHR 7 July 2011, Application no. 23549/03, Bayatyan v. Armenia.
[5] ECtHR 15 January 2013, Application nos. 48420/10, 59842/10, 51671/10 and 36516/10, Eweida and Others v.
the United Kingdom.
[6] ECtHR admissibility decision 2 October 2001, Application no. 49853/99, Pichon and Sajous v. France.
[7] ECtHR 11 February 2020, Application no. 43726/17, Ellinor Grimmark v. Sweden; ECtHR 11 February 2020, Application no. 62309/17, Linda Steen v. Sweden.
[8] W. Grzebalska, E. Kováts, A. Pető, Gender as Symbolic Glue: How ‘Gender’ Became an Umbrella Term for the Rejection of the (Neo)Liberal Order, in Breaking Feminism. LUX, 2018: 32-38.
[9] S. Mancini, M. Rosenfeld, Politicized Religion and the Reframing of Fundamental Rights, Oxford University Press, 2026.
The Politics of the Sacred: Women’s Rights at the Limits of Political Liberalism
[Editor’s note: this is the fourth of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
Gila Stopler’s Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights offers a powerful analysis of the relationship between patriarchy, religion, and political liberalism, and of the enduring harm this relationship has caused to women. The book shows how liberal states have failed women not despite, but often because of, the legal doctrines and normative assumptions that are meant to protect religious freedom.
At the heart of Stopler’s analysis lies a sustained critique of the public–private distinction. Liberal theory has long treated the private sphere as non-political, natural, and pre-social. This assumption, Stopler convincingly argues, has allowed illiberal doctrines to develop beyond the reach of constitutional scrutiny. Patriarchal subordination was normalized and shielded precisely because it took place in spaces labeled “private” and therefore insulated from political intervention.
Stopler’s central insight is that this separation has now reached a point of collapse. Illiberal doctrines that were cultivated in the private sphere have moved back into the public arena, supported by the growing influence of strong religions over lawmaking, education, welfare provision, and social services. The rise of right-wing populism marks the definitive erosion of the public–private divide and poses a direct challenge not only to women’s rights but also to liberal democracy itself. In this sense, the book is not only about gender equality; it is also a diagnosis of liberalism’s structural weakness. Stopler’s attention to the fragility of liberal democracy—its limited capacity to resist illiberalism even under well-designed constitutional frameworks—is particularly welcome, as it confronts a major obstacle to the reception of her proposal: the fact that positions of power remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, reflecting centuries of entrenched patriarchy.
The book is meticulously researched, theoretically grounded, and intellectually honest. It traces the history of the public–private distinction through historical, legal, and political thought, including the work of liberal theorists such as Rawls, whose defense of state neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good helped reinforce the idea that religious doctrine lies beyond the reach of public reason.
One of the book’s most valuable analytical contributions is its taxonomy of state approaches to religion, which distinguishes between privatization, authorization, and nationalization. Stopler’s proposal of “soft nationalization” of religion—where the state intervenes to protect vulnerable parties without imposing religious doctrine—is both careful and persuasive. Religion is not treated as a monolith: Stopler differentiates between “strong” or conservative forms of religion and more plural, progressive practices, leaving room for internal critique and reform. This approach aligns with post-structuralist accounts of religion as dynamic and internally diverse, while avoiding the tendency to demonize religion as such.
At a deeper level, the book shows how a strong intuition—one grounded in lived, bodily, and relational experience—can be translated into a rigorous legal analysis and a concrete normative proposal. Stopler’s legal training provides the backbone to articulate this intuition within law’s language and institutional limits. At the same time, the analysis insufficiently reveals that law itself is not a neutral source of truth, but a contested space that can be mobilized by opposing political projects. Seen in this light, debates about the “misappropriation” of human rights by right-wing populists appear less as conceptual distortions than as ordinary struggles over meaning within law. What matters, ultimately, is not which faction temporarily succeeds, but the direction in which legal reform is steered. Stopler’s own direction is guided by an intuition rooted in bodily knowledge, historical awareness, and women’s lived experience. The book’s greatest merit lies in its recognition, supported by extensive legal and historical evidence, that women have suffered profound harm from conservative religion, and above all from their exclusion from the sacred.
The book’s introduction identifies what I would describe as the original sin of Western patriarchy: spirituality got lost in translation into institutionalized religion. A certain religious discourse has repeatedly been used to project trauma and justify violence, as illustrated by contemporary judicial invocations of divine wrath to deny women access to abortion (see the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court’s reference to the “wrath of a holy God” in Burdick v. Aysenne). Stopler’s account of the emergence of a singular male god and the displacement of earlier mother-goddess traditions exposes the deep symbolic foundations of women’s exclusion. It is increasingly clear that Western religions reflect a distorted form of spirituality, particularly evident in the systematic marginalization of the feminine.
What is ultimately at stake is women’s exclusion from meaning-making itself. Religion and culture are saturated with norms that regulate not only behavior but also emotions and desires (p. 24). By excluding women from the sacred, patriarchal religion removed them from the processes through which truth, value, and moral obligation are defined. This explains why intervention in the so-called private sphere is indispensable, and why attention must be paid to religious language, imagery, everyday practices, and the formation of meaning and feeling (p. 27), since these become self-limiting norms that foster control without our realizing we are being controlled.
From the abolition of pagan priesthoods under Theodosius in 391–392 CE, to Pauline and Augustinian prohibitions on women speaking in assemblies, to the persecution of women as witches, Christianity in the West systematically severed women’s access to the sacred. As recent scholarship has shown, including Ilenia Ruggio’s work on constitutional identity and women’s exclusion from the priesthood, this legacy has never been fully overcome and continues to shape contemporary constitutional orders.
Why does this matter today? Don’t we have more pressing problems, one could argue? Because doctrines grounded in the denial of bodily truth—especially the denial of women’s role in creating life, which is framed as a punishment for tempting Adam to sin—have severed women from one of the most important dimensions: that of the sacred. Today, the distancing from bodily experience that characterizes patriarchal religion interacts with other forms of alienation, disembodiment, and social fragmentation, a process intensified by technological developments that weaken embodied and relational knowledge. Together, these dynamics contribute to a “shrinking” of humanity, driven by separation from nature, from other human beings, and—most critically—from the wisdom carried in our own bodies. Stopler’s book helps clarify how religious patriarchy has served as both a driver and a justification for this ongoing process of bodily truth replacement, a problem that is doomed to become increasingly acute.
Walking through the ancient library of the University of Coimbra, a space once reserved exclusively for men, I could not help feeling the accumulated weight of this exclusion. Stopler’s work gives conceptual clarity to that historical experience and traces its legal afterlives. She shows how contemporary abortion rulings, restrictions on women’s access to religious authority, and laws that openly subordinate women in the name of religion are not anomalies, but predictable outcomes of a misplaced commitment to a fictive and porous public–private divide.
The private is political. And, as Stopler’s book compellingly demonstrates, the most intimate core of the private—the sacred—is political as well.
Feminism, Liberalism, and Religion
[Editor’s note: this is the third of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
In Women’s Rights in Liberal States. Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, Gila Stopler discusses the global rise of religious and far right-wing movements, pointing out an unlikely (but not exclusive) culprit: liberalism, or the liberal state, which has let patriarchal beliefs flourish, unchallenged, in the private sphere.
Dean Stopler’s book is incredibly timely and will become mandatory reading for anyone interested in the complicated relationship between populism, the patriarchy, religious beliefs, and liberalism. The book also provides a thorough discussion of recent developments in Israel and the United States pertaining to women’s rights and the rise of far-right movements, while skillfully acknowledging the relevant differences between the two countries, both in their political systems and their approach to religion.
The private sphere has been of concern to feminists for a long time. It is within the intimate setting of the family where patriarchal social norms are first encountered, to be learned, internalized, and, eventually, reproduced. The same is largely true of religious beliefs: they are often learned and internalized within the private sphere. But many religions (and, thus, religious beliefs) are, as Stopler notes, “patriarchal,” that is, they are premised on a gendered worldview, whereby men are women are not equal or are formally equal but destined to fulfil different (gendered) roles. When these religious beliefs are left to flourish in the private sphere they eventually seep into the public sphere and start eroding women’s rights and, even, democracy.
These beliefs, Stopler contends, should be understood as unreasonable comprehensive doctrines under a Rawlsian framework. Like “war and disease,” they should be contained. As a result, Stopler is in favor of some degree of state intervention in patriarchal religions, at least at the level of religious organizations. However, she sets the limit at intimate relationships: while the state can intervene to prevent gender-based discrimination in private organizations, including religious ones, it cannot legitimately do so within intimate relationships.
Stopler’s is a thoughtful and thought-provoking argument. It connects important strands of feminist theory with Ralwsian liberalism, while challenging some key assumptions about the place and limits of religion within the latter. And it does so by connecting what could be an entirely theoretical discussion with a context-sensitive treatment of an important global trend: the rise of the far-right and the related erosion of gender-based rights in the United States and Israel.
Stopler’s book is, in that way, wonderfully ambitious—and it delivers. Of course, those more inclined towards the theoretical dimensions of Stopler’s argument will perhaps miss a more thorough treatment of Rawlsian neutrality and whether the latter is compatible with Stopler’s preferred solution, which requires state intervention in religious organizations. One might also wonder 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.
Those more inclined towards the comparative dimensions of Stopler’s argument might wonder to what extent different constitutional frameworks can accommodate Stopler’s preferred solution and what factors, in addition to the avowed neutrality of the liberal state, can contribute to explaining the current gender-backlash and its appeal. Indeed, young men tilt more and more conservative in several countries, further apart from women than they were before; social media is ripe with misogynistic content; and anti-trans legislation and sentiment is flourishing in many parts of the world. Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of this gender backlash would, perhaps, reveal its ethnic and racial dimensions, tightly linked to anti-immigration sentiments and the nostalgic desire for an ethno-state, both key to the far right’s ideology.
The fact that Stopler does not devote as much time to these issues should not be seen as a shortcoming in what is already a formidable book. On the contrary, Stopler’s work also succeeds in showing how important it is to pay attention to misogyny in the private sphere and how fragile gender equality in the liberal state is. It is up to future work in the area to start answering the questions that Stopler’s work raises but does not yet answer.
Women’s Rights, the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism and the Misappropriation of Feminism
[Editor’s note: this is the second of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
Gila Stopler wrote a thought-provoking book that exposes 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 and to uncover the underlying connections between this weakness and the success of religious nationalism and right-wing populism in these societies.
I agree with much of what Prof. Stopler argues. Indeed, to understand current regression in women’s rights in Western countries such as the United States or Israel, it is crucial to highlight the enduring power of patriarchy in liberal societies and how it is used by right-wing populists and religious conservatives to advance their own cause, to restrict the rights of women, and to endanger the future of liberal democracy itself. Hence, in this commentary I seek to supplement and strengthen Prof. Stolper’s central claims by adding three additional perspectives to the discussion on the relationship between religion, liberalism, and patriarchy.
My first comment is conceptual. Throughout the book, Prof. Stopler refers to the rise of religious conservatism, adopting a term widely used in current scholarship to describe the type of religious forces that have gained growing political influence in many liberal democracies and primarily the United States. I would suggest replacing the term religious conservatives with religious fundamentalists, as the latter better captures not only the nature of the forces that are currently driving democratic backsliding but also the unique threats they pose to liberal rights and gender equality.
Religious fundamentalism involves a strict, literal interpretation of sacred texts and a belief in their absolute, unalterable truth. It often leads to dogmatism and extreme intolerance toward opposing viewpoints, which are seen as threats to “the truth.” For fundamentalists, their religion is beyond any form of criticism and must therefore be imposed upon others. Conservatism, by contrast, while often socially traditional and cautious about rapid change, is a broader political and social philosophy. It values inherited traditions and institutions without necessarily requiring literal interpretations of religious doctrine or a total rejection of modernity. The key distinction is that fundamentalism represents a more extreme, dogmatic, and militant subset of religiosity – one that cannot be equated with conservatism as a whole.
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, are not religious conservatives – they are religious fundamentalists. This more precise classification better illuminates their judicial reasoning and explains the often extreme and violent implications of their decisions. Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs[1] is not merely a rejection of precedent; it is also a text that disregards the devastating real-world consequences of abortion bans for women’s lives and denies that such consequences should matter to the courts, even when they cause immense suffering. Similarly, Justice Thomas’s opinion in Bruen[2] – the case striking down New York’s requirement that individuals show “proper cause” to carry a concealed handgun in public – reveals a similar indifference to the human cost, disregarding the decision’s consequences for escalating gun violence and mass shootings, as well as its impact on ordinary people’s fundamental right to life.
The proposed focus on ‘religious fundamentalism’ as a distinct form of ‘religious conservatism’ also illuminates the nature of the ultimate project that these religious forces seek to advance, bringing me to my second comment.
In her book, professor Stopler rightly emphasizes that at the heart of the struggle waged by religious forces in liberal democracies lies not only the preservation of patriarchal power in the private sphere but also the patriarchal restructuring of the public sphere and the creation of a patrimonial state. I wish to reinforce this insight by suggesting that the precise objective of religious fundamentalist forces is to elevate “religious liberty” to the status of a super-right – one whose protection is prioritized above and beyond other fundamental rights. Crucially, the goal is not to protect the religious liberty of all religious views, but rather to enable the establishment of a single, fundamentalist version of religion as the primary regulator of the public sphere. This underscores the true essence of the fundamentalist project, exemplified by U.S. Supreme Court Justices such as Thomas and Alito: it is a reactionary enterprise aimed at undermining the existing constitutional order and replacing it with a new one – an order in which the Anti-Establishment Clause becomes increasingly irrelevant, and fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity emerge as a dominant force in shaping public life.
A recent article by Adam Hamdan[3] illustrates how these trends manifest in the Court’s jurisprudence. The article offers a statistical analysis of the role of religion in Supreme Court decisions. Hamdan finds that under the Roberts Court, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of religious groups, especially Christian groups, more frequently than its predecessors. The Roberts Court has also taken up a greater number of Free Exercise Clause cases and issued consequential rulings on religious liberty at a significantly higher rate than earlier courts. Notably, Hamdan reports that in two-thirds of cases involving Christian groups, those groups prevailed, underscoring how the Court’s rulings actively assist in, and align with, efforts to impose a Christian nationalist worldview on the American public, practically erasing the Anti- Establishment clause.
Finally, we cannot discuss the current regression in gender equality without critically acknowledging the misuse of the term feminism and its strategic adoption by ultra-conservative and populist forces. These actors are actively undermining the feminist agenda and the struggle for gender equality by reframing feminism as a patriarchal concept. Their primary tool in this effort is the promotion of what they present as a new strain of feminism: “conservative feminism”, positioned as a declared corrective to the alleged failures of liberal feminism.
A revealing example comes from a recent episode of Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. Douthat is a conservative Catholic commentator whose new show, sponsored by The New York Times, aims to explore the New Right and other contemporary political realignments. In this recent episode he hosted two women described as ‘theorists’ to discuss the following question: “Did liberal feminism ruin the workplace, and is there a conservative feminism that can correct its mistakes?”[4] His first guest, Helen Andrews, recently published an essay titled “The Great Feminization,” in which she argues that women’s large-scale entry into the workforce has “feminized” numerous professions. According to Andrews, this shift endangers the labor market because women’s supposed prioritization of “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition” ultimately weakens institutions and professional standards. The second guest, Leah Libresco Sargeant, has recently published a book titled The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Under the guise of a new strain of feminism and as part of the slogan “advocating for women as women”, she calls for celebrating women’s distinct care-related and compassionate qualities that she ties to their biology or more precisely to their ability to become pregnant. Although Libresco Sargeant rejects Andrews’s assertion that feminine traits are inherently inferior to masculine ones, she nonetheless advances a similarly essentialist rhetoric that reduces women’s nature to innate caregiving and reproductive capacities, thereby echoing patriarchal stereotypes of women.
Historically, patriarchal structures sought to undermine feminist ideas by associating feminism with negative stereotypes such as militancy, radicalism, misandry, and the rejection of femininity. What we are witnessing today is a far more sophisticated campaign: feminism has been seized by populist and religious fundamentalist actors who redefine it as a sexist ideology that affirms, rather than challenges, patriarchal norms. So, following Prof. Stolper’s important book and as we chart the various threats to gender equality in this era of democratic backsliding, rising populism, and religious fundamentalism, we must recognize that the hostile takeover of feminism itself is an additional aspect of the contemporary assault on gender equality.
[1]Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
[2]New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022).
[3] Adam Hamdan, Rule for Thee but not for Me: From Roberts to Vinson, a Statistical Analysis of the Role of Religion in the Supreme Court, Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs Vol. 6(1) 178-199 (2025)
[Editor’s note: this is the first of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, Cambridge University Press, 2025].
Dean Stopler has written a penetrating and persuasive account of the position of women in liberal democracies, specifically, although not exclusively, the United States. She characterizes liberal societies as patriarchal, meaning that the societies are organized, managed, and dominated by men to the detriment of women. I largely agree, but have one complicating narrative from outside the Western societies that form the basis of Stopler’s argument. Before I give my perspective, however, some background on the book is necessary.
To simplify an empirically rich and absorbing account of patriarchy in Western society, Stopler begins with the historical, social, and ideological foundations of gender discrimination. Although religion may have initially included worship of a Mother-Goddess, e.g., Amaterasu in Japan, the emergence of archaic states brought monotheism and, over the centuries, an elaborate ideological, religious, and social structure entrenching patriarchy based on a single male god. While male dominance of the contemporary world is hardly a novel idea, Stopler broadens and deepens that analysis by focusing on gender discrimination in precisely that portion of the world that often compliments itself on countering that dominance, the liberal democratic West.
As the title indicates, the self-congratulatory rhetoric of democratic liberalism masks, if not reinforces and perpetuates, a patriarchic structure that keeps both genders in their unequal relative positions. Stopler does not resort to dramatic or rhetorical reference to time-worn, if accurate, generalizations, but painstakingly demonstrates how patriarchy is reconstructed in contemporary Western democracies with reference to and analysis of phenomena like the transformation of the US Supreme Court and decisions like Dobbs eliminating the national right to abortion.
In doing so, she recounts the transformation of liberalism’s celebration of individual human rights from an emancipatory call to gender equality into a vehicle for the re-establishment of male control of women, particularly married women, all with the passive involvement, if not approval, of leading liberal ideologues like John Rawls and in contravention of international covenants like CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women]. For Stopler, the vehicle for this transformation is the pre-occupation with and faith in the public/private distinction and its insulation of the patriarchal structure of human relationships, especially but not exclusively in families.
Stopler is persuasive, and I agree that contemporary political, religious, and ideological trends, at least in the United States, support her claims. For this reviewer, however, she neglects a perspective that would significantly complicate the relative status of men and women in contemporary affluent democracies. The missing perspective is that of non-dominant men, by which I mean 80 to 90% of the male population. To illustrate my argument I will recount the social and economic position of Japanese men in a Tokyo suburb of 30+ years ago. To make explicit what will be obvious, I am recounting a personal experience. I make no empirical claim either that the situation I describe was universal in Japan at that time or that it represents the situation in other circumstances and societies. That said, I believe that my reflections present a viewpoint that is often neglected in discussions of gender relationships in rich, capitalist societies like the US, Western Europe, and Northeast Asia.
At the end of the last century I lived with my family in a middle to upper-middle class suburb of Tokyo. The area was entirely Japanese (with perhaps assimilated Korean citizens), i.e., there was no significant population of foreigners other than the four of us. Our daughter was beginning kindergarten and we enrolled her in the local nursery school. Each morning and afternoon either my wife or I delivered and picked her up at the appropriate time. During that year, my wife made lifelong friends among the mothers of our daughter’s friends. I never met – literally never saw – a father. The mothers were at home; the fathers left home for work before the children went to school and returned after the rest of the family had eaten dinner and, often, gone to bed. The fathers not only worked on Saturdays but also frequently had to socialize with colleagues in the evening. My wife has maintained her relationships with her friends from that period over the course of several subsequent stays in Tokyo. The first and only time I met a father was when one accompanied his family to New York on vacation.
To step back from the personal to state the obvious: the mothers managed the home and childcare and had no chance for any life other than that of mother and housekeeper. While it is important to note that occupational opportunities increased after the children had reached adolescence, the chance to pursue a profession or conventional management career was non-existent. Meanwhile, the husbands/fathers were working intensively. In other words, the relative gender roles were consistent with the patriarchic society described by Stopler.
What is missing, however, in my experience and in many accounts of patriarchy is what happened to the men. A tiny percentage became patriarchs, designing, creating, and presiding over the liberal Japanese society of the period. The rest became employees. They did not rule the world; they served others. Like the women, they were denied professional fulfillment, unless they enjoyed going out drinking and making small talk with bar hostesses with their bosses or being assigned for months at a time to market research while living in a business hotel in, e.g., Hungary or Argentina. Unlike their wives, however, they were also denied to a non-trivial extent the joy of parenthood. In a word, they were oppressed. At that time living in Tokyo, I felt sorrier for the fathers than for the mothers.
Two important qualifications must made. First, the above account is out of date. A recent return visit to our daughter’s nursery school confirmed what my wife and I had expected: there are now lots of fathers bringing and picking up their kids. On a grander scale, although the political role of women generally remains relatively low in Japan, the current Prime Minister and, perhaps more significant, the current Minister of Finance are women. Second, Japan and the Japanese gender situation are unique, just as are the equivalent situations of Germany, the US, and every other society. Thirdly and most important, my family’s experience does not contradict Stopler’s central argument about patriarchy, especially in the family. What I hope my reflections do contribute, however, is an additional perspective on the costs of patriarchy: what it means for non-dominant men and especially for fathers. To state the obvious: the preclusion by gender discrimination of free choice of how to structure one’s life has social and personal costs that extend even further than those described in Women’s Rights in Liberal States.
