Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand - Review | Reason | Find Articles at BNET
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_4_31/ai_55343570/
and believed, of course, that men and women should have equal rights. She had little sympathy for the traditional ideal of womanhood, in which the morality of self-sacrifice and service to others that she so detested was distilled and magnified. In a 1964 interview, she affirmed that women, like men, should build their lives around work: "What is proper for a man is proper for a woman. ... There is no particular work which is specifically feminine."
Yet she herself said as much: "Men are metaphysically the dominant sex"; "an ideal woman is a man-worshiper, and an ideal man is the highest symbol of mankind." As Gramstad observes, Rand's beliefs about gender contradict her general philosophy in several ways. Her notion of femininity clashes with the ideal of self-sufficiency, since "hero worship requires another, one who is the object and recipient of worship"
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Quite a few high-achieving women, notably Margaret Thatcher (one has to wonder what Rand thought of her), seem to have been happy with unheroic men. Rand herself had a gentle, passive, "nurturing" husband.
Should Ayn Rand Have Been a Feminist?
http://www.ayn-rand.info/cth--139-Should_Ayn_Rand_Have_Been_Feminist.aspx
The heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, is one of the strongest women to appear in world literature-and she made her appearance in 1957, when virtually all Americans expected women to become full-time housewives.
When Alvin Toffler interviewed her for Playboy magazine in 1964, Rand said, "I would not attempt to prescribe what kind of work a man should do, and I would not attempt it with regard to women. . . . Women can choose their own work according to their own purposes and premises in the same manner as men do."
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We can look first to Rand's fiction. Rand's female heroes - especially Dagny Taggart, who succeeds romantically as well as in the business world - are unrivaled in their inspirational power for women, especially young women in need of heroes
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Rand is of value to feminists not only because she offers the greatest female hero in world literature, but because that hero is grounded in Rand's broader moral theory. Sharon Presley, in "Ayn Rand's Philosophy of Individualism," defends Rand's egoism against claims that individualism leads to alienation and social atomism.
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Should Ayn Rand have been a feminist? Perhaps so. While her own account of sexuality is in many ways quite traditional (and thus anti-feminist), her individualist ethics suggests an anti-traditional resolution to the questions of sex: As against the tradition, which defines the roles of all women and all men, individualism would suggest that particular men and women solve the questions of relations between the sexes in the way most appropriate for themselves. And, if feminism is to be defined around opposition to the tradition and its arbitrary impositions on the lives of individuals, then Rand's individualism is a powerful weapon in the hands of feminists.
wow :-)