Leah Libresco Sargeant | The Dr. J Show
In this powerful episode of The Dr. J Show, Leah Sargeant discusses her book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, challenging the modern assumption that equality means sameness or autonomy without need.
She argues that true human dignity is found not in independence, but in recognizing our fundamental interdependence—especially in a culture that often dismisses vulnerability as weakness.
Drawing from personal experiences, including miscarriage and the realities of infertility, Leah explores how men and women process loss differently, how these differences can create misunderstanding in marriage, and why justice requires responding to real human needs rather than imposing ideological uniformity.
The conversation also examines abortion, euthanasia, feminism, and the asymmetries within relationships, ultimately pointing toward a richer vision of love, vulnerability, and the essential role women play in building a civilization grounded in mutual dependence and enduring commitment.
00:00 Introduction and Book Overview
01:32 The Thesis of Dependence vs. Autonomy
03:09 Personal Journey and Experiences
05:43 The Impact of Loss and Grief
09:52 Community Support and Caregiving
15:21 Challenging Societal Norms on Autonomy
21:37 The Valorization of Single Motherhood
22:43 The Book’s Place in Catholic Ideas for a Secular World
27:21 Defining Feminism: A New Perspective
29:13 The Importance of Recognizing Gender Differences
32:03 Accommodating Women: Beyond the Male Norm
34:06 The Grip Strength Analogy: Understanding Asymmetries
37:21 Trust and Vulnerability in Relationships
40:37 Navigating Asymmetries in Marriage
52:35 The Power of Vulnerability
57:19 Feminists or not Feminists
01:04:03 Women and the Civilization of Love
01:11:14 Asymmetry vs Inequality
01:16:48 Justice and Individual Worth
01:17:30 Where to find Leah
01:18:42 Thanks for watching_ ebook
Leah’s Substack: https://www.otherfeminisms.com/
Subscribe to our newsletter to get this pdf: Refuting the Top 5 Gay Myths https://ruthinstitute.org/refute-the-top-five-myths/
Videos and images: Riverside and Adobestock
Transcript
(Please note the transcript is auto-generated and likely contains errors)
Ruth Institute (00:34)
Leah Libresco Sargent. Welcome to the Dr. J Show.
Leah Sargeant (00:37)
Thank you for having me on.
Ruth Institute (00:39)
I want to just dive right into the topic of your book, which is the book is called The Dignity of Dependence. And it’s an extremely important topic, in my opinion.
This is a topic that I’ve been concerned about in one way or another for long time. And so I’m just super excited. I want to tell all the Ruthies that you need to get this book. Okay. So, and you can see mine’s all marked up. I actually read the book before I interview the author. I know, I know. It’s not always the case, but anyway. look at Leah, let’s just dive right in. What is the thesis of your book, The Dignity of Dependence?
Leah Sargeant (01:02)
love to see that.
I’d say the two core ideas of the book are first that women’s equality with men isn’t premised on our being interchangeable with men, and that dependence, not autonomy, sets the pattern for human life.
Ruth Institute (01:27)
⁓ okay. So let’s start with the second one first. Tell us more, because I think a lot of people have thought about the fact that equality and interchangeability is like, no. Like, you know, I think a lot of people immediately understand where you’re going there. But talk about the second point, because that’s not something people talk about that much.
Leah Sargeant (01:30)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you know, think one of the issues is that we can talk a lot and a lot of our law presumes that a full flourishing human life is an autonomous life where mostly you’re able to take care of yourself when you give to other people, you give out of your surplus. doesn’t force you to cancel your own plans or change the course of your life to give care to others. And that things that aren’t wield and chosen are to some extent suspect. And the people who need so much
Ruth Institute (01:55)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (02:13)
that they go beyond what we might will or choose, that they really alter the course of our life to love them, are legally suspect that it is the need of the child in the womb or the need of the person aging and in their last months that makes them a legal and licit target of violence through abortion and euthanasia.
Ruth Institute (02:32)
Well, you don’t pull your punches, girlfriend.
Leah Sargeant (02:34)
It says manifesto right on the cover.
Ruth Institute (02:37)
Well, I appreciate it, you know, because it needs to be said that the fact that somebody is weak and dependent makes them a target. And there’s nothing Christian about that whatsoever. I mean, the whole idea is that we’re looking out for the weak in some way and the vulnerable. You know, that’s what we’ve been called on as Christians. And so that’s I like the way you put that. us, give us a little insight into how you became interested in this particular topic.
Leah Sargeant (02:38)
You
Mm-hmm.
So part of what interests me on both questions that equality and interchangeability and dependence for us autonomy is I think that these are true claims that everyone can hold on to some of the time. And the challenge is extending them everywhere they go and where they cost us more to extend. But what I’m interested in, I didn’t grow up as someone who’s pro-life. So part of it is that I grew up in a family with intense care for the weak, but excluding certain categories of people who were dependent.
Ruth Institute (03:18)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (03:29)
And it was a real struggle for me as someone who’s deeply interested in care for people who are immigrants and care for people who are poor to articulate a theory of what kind of need could disqualify the unborn but didn’t put anyone else at risk. And for me, honestly, before even becoming Catholic, I think it was a lot of the debates about euthanasia that really touched me because I had thought of this as something that was more containable, that people were just trying to avoid the last few
Ruth Institute (03:46)
⁓ okay, okay.
Leah Sargeant (03:59)
worst weeks of dying and that that was an understandable impulse and something people could kind of safely take on as a society. And looking at countries in Europe that have explored legal euthanasia regimes, it’s clear it expands very quickly to a lot more people than we imagine because once we say the dying, just even the act of dying is something that isn’t really a part of the human experience. It’s something we can skip over without forfeiting anything. It’s something we should skip over.
Ruth Institute (04:13)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (04:28)
It actually becomes hard to articulate who who is having a hard time right now shouldn’t try and skip over those bits even at cost to their own life. You see in Canada, one out of 20 deaths now comes at a doctor’s hands and they’ve legalized but not yet implemented euthanasia for mature minors without the consent of their parents.
Ruth Institute (04:40)
Ow! Ow! Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, for you, there some personal issue that got you interested in the euthanasia question?
Leah Sargeant (04:56)
No, with that one, really was kind of having had one idea of what it would look like when people made this legal and then seeing what happened and realizing I was wrong. And when I tried to articulate why it was wrong, the reasons had bigger consequences than I anticipated. On the topic of children in the womb, part of it for me was becoming Catholic, which bound me to obedience on this question. But I think the real conversion of heart came because unfortunately, the first six children that my husband and I had
Ruth Institute (05:05)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, yes, yes.
Leah Sargeant (05:25)
died in the womb through miscarriage. yeah.
Ruth Institute (05:26)
Yes, I saw that.
permit me to say, that sounds so hard. We had a whole infertility experience as well, but that was not part of it. know, I, yeah, so anyway.
Leah Sargeant (05:31)
Thank you.
Yeah. And
I think it really exposed both how much we loved these children, you know, who were very small and who weren’t fully known to us, right? But we loved them because they were. But also the harshness of a medical establishment that mostly taking the logic of, these are only quasi persons or potential persons would flip on a diamond an appointment from, let’s check in on your baby. And then the moment they found out the baby was dead, go like, well.
Ruth Institute (05:45)
Yes. Yes.
Leah Sargeant (06:05)
It seems like your pregnancy isn’t there anymore, right? Like they didn’t have room for grief. Because to say this was mournful would be to say that there was a moral person there.
Ruth Institute (06:15)
Yeah, do you know, I had a very similar conversation on this topic with Stacey Trescancos. You know, Stacey, she’s got a book on IVF. Yeah, she has a book on why IVF is not the way. She’s a chemist and whatnot. And she had, I think, five miscarriages. And so we had this whole conversation about loving the very, very tiny, from the first moments, your heart, as a woman, your body, your heart is kind of calling out to this.
Leah Sargeant (06:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, she’s wonderful. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
guess.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (06:42)
to this child that has been given to you. And you kind of know it’s been entrusted to you in some way and yet you want it and you feel like I made it, it’s mine, but no, that can’t be true. That can’t be the whole story that we made it. I hate that term. We made a baby. I hate that for just that reason. If you don’t mind, I’ll just share why I got interested in this topic. As I mentioned, we, my husband and I had a…
Leah Sargeant (06:55)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ruth Institute (07:08)
for your infertility experience. And I was a lapsed Catholic. So it sounds like you started as an atheist and you’re a convert. I’m a revert, I’m a revert, right? So I was in and stormed out of the church because I was sure I was right. And they were so backwards and so on and so forth. And then 12 years later, boom, infertility. And all of a sudden I’m like, I can’t do everything.
Leah Sargeant (07:09)
You
Ruth Institute (07:34)
that I can’t get everything I want just by trying harder and staying on script and all that. And so that was the crisis that brought me back to the faith. And we resolved our infertility crisis by adopting a child from a Romanian orphanage and then six months later gave birth to a baby girl. yeah, I’ve heard all these stories, believe me. But for us, the neediness of that little boy.
Leah Sargeant (07:38)
Yeah.
my
Ruth Institute (07:59)
is that’s what really did it. Because if I had had just my daughter, I could have put her in daycare. I’d have gotten away with it. I’d have been one of those career moms. Because I was teaching at George Mason at that time. The place was full of women who never missed a day of work. They had 10 kids and that among them, all these ladies that I knew in the law school and the econ department, amongst them, they had probably had 10 children. None of them had ever missed a day of work. It was like a badge of honor.
Leah Sargeant (08:11)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (08:28)
there’s just no way I could do that with that little boy. And so that’s what, it’s like I had an experiment in my own house. Is this gonna work? No, this is not going to work. But then that provoked the whole line of inquiry that led me to where I am today, literally. That the helplessness of the child is not a once in a blue moon.
Leah Sargeant (08:38)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (08:53)
weird thing that might occasionally happen. It’s the story of every human life. And if we can’t somehow provide for that, it’s a big thing to overlook.
Leah Sargeant (08:58)
Mm-hmm.
And children are more often the kind of relationship with someone who’s profoundly dependent that we do seek out. People put a lot of effort into avoiding it when they don’t want it. And yet, every day people are praying, hoping that they might be gifted someone who needs them so utterly, who for years won’t be able to take care of themselves as an autonomous person without ever being able to control, as neither of us could, whether they’ll receive this gift. But what I think is important to remember is every day,
Ruth Institute (09:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Sargeant (09:33)
even though people seek children, we’re all exposed to each other’s needs in different ways, whether that’s through accident, disease, the sudden change in life circumstances. So we think of how do we prepare for a child that will set up the nursery and then we’ll read the baby books. And in some sense, that’s our training wheels for all the unexpected ways someone else’s need or our own can crash into our plans and upend our life.
Ruth Institute (09:39)
Yes!
Yes, yes, yes. And that’s why I think traditionally before women were so involved in the paid workforce, that women were kind of like a buffer zone. You know, the fact that you were home running a household meant that you could volunteer here or volunteer there, or you were the one to go, the moms picked up each other’s kids. you know, just, were being available to others was part of it. Talk about that. Yeah.
Leah Sargeant (10:25)
Well, that happened for
me today. So today my son had his year and a half checkup. And usually I’ve picked the pediatrician I can walk or bike to because I don’t have the ability to drive to the pediatrician. But I’m in Maryland and with Windchill it’s 10 degrees today. So I was asking other moms in the neighborhood, could someone take me to the doctor with my son? Could someone pick me up when I’m done? And I was lucky enough, I got two different offers at various time points. So I took the mom who came closer to when the doctor actually wrapped up.
but it’s something she was able to offer because right now she’s a stay at home mom. And our neighborhood is stronger for, think, having a real mix of both moms who are just primarily at home, moms who are working part time, and even some moms like me where I am working full time right now, but I only go into the office three days a week, sorry, two days a week. And three days a week I’m in my neighborhood. And if someone did say, Leah, I’m taking one kid to the ER, can I dump a kid at your house? I’d be like, yeah, I don’t have a meeting in the next hour, everything else I’ll push.
Drop them off, give me a chance.
Ruth Institute (11:25)
Right,
right, right, right. And I want to say for the record, I never miss an opportunity to say this, that the years that I spent at home full time with the kids were the best years of my life. So ladies, if you’re out there and you’re scratching your head and you’re thinking, you know, I really want to wait till I get tenure before I get started. I’m like, no, no, you don’t need you don’t. mean, you can if you want free country, but you don’t need to do that. And that
script that we’ve been given has a lot of pitfalls. Let’s just put it without getting hysterical about it, which I could. Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Sargeant (12:01)
be honest, one thing that’s
helped me a lot is that I’ve worked part-time for a number of years with kids where I’ve worked three quarters time for my various jobs. But I also haven’t been in a career like teaching or like law where you’re making this kind of linear progression year by year and you’re keeping pace with a cohort of people who may not be having kids. So for me, it’s been easier to blend being a mom and having a job because I’ve been able to make leaps in my career by changing jobs when I’m ready for more responsibilities or when I need more time away.
Ruth Institute (12:28)
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (12:31)
versus everyone around me is doing one thing and I’m falling behind.
Ruth Institute (12:34)
Yeah. Do you know something? Because my training is not only in economics, it’s in labor economics, which is the study of labor markets, right? And I noticed right away, okay, look, the people who are driving these policies and these attitudes, the opinion makers and the lawmakers, they’re lawyers and they’re academics. And what do we know about those two career paths? They are the most structured career paths with an up or out timeframe. You either get promoted or you might as well slit your throat because you’re finished.
Leah Sargeant (12:39)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah
Yes.
Mwahahahaha
Ruth Institute (13:04)
And there’s a lot of pressure associated with that, especially in law where the students come out with big lost debt, lost school debt. It’s like, oh my gosh, there’s a lot of pressure around that. But that’s just a very small set of the market. The free market is very good at giving you flexibility, but we have to want it and we have to see the value in it. And when I was a young person calling myself a feminist and trying to do the career thing and so on.
Leah Sargeant (13:07)
yes
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ruth Institute (13:34)
Nobody was talking like that. that was like my contribution as an economist. Guys, we could just let the market provide people with the kind of flexibility that they actually want instead of having a federal thing that regulates everybody in every dimension, you know, kind of thing.
Leah Sargeant (13:48)
Well, this is where if we
get into what the policy can look like, things that do make it easier for people to take on part-time work, like does make a big difference, not just for moms. My husband has had a couple seasons of part-time work as we went from two to three and we both scaled back, but it’s harder to do when our benefit structure all assumes that there’s this clean break where if you work 29 hours, you get no benefits. If you work 30 hours, you get full benefits. I that makes it harder on employee and employer to navigate that balance.
Ruth Institute (13:57)
Right.
Right. Right. Right.
Yes,
that’s right. That’s exactly right. I think that’s, I’m glad you brought up that point, you know, that, and in point of fact, I did end up leaving a tenured position, which, you know, you might as well slit your throat. Right, exactly. My friends all told me you’re a radical now. And I’m like, okay, but this is what I have to do. You know, this is what my family, and by that time I was back in the faith enough to know that this is what the Lord wants me to do.
Leah Sargeant (14:25)
Hmm unheard of yeah, yeah
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (14:40)
blessed
mother’s gonna take care of me somehow. I don’t know exactly how, but she did, you know, she did all the way along, know, so it’s like, okay, that’s cool. So I think we should talk about the understanding of dependency. You know, we’re talking about it in a, know, well, there are many levels on which to have this conversation. So I’m interested in your ideas about how…
We have a dominant idea of autonomy. That’s like the American way, you know? In what way are you challenging that dominant idea? Where do you see that playing out in significant ways, Leah?
Leah Sargeant (15:06)
Mm-hmm.
You know, I do think the beginning and end of life are where it has the clearest impact, but I would also push back throughout life where for women, especially, there’s this idea that pregnancy and childbearing interrupt your normal life because it really does change what you’re doing. You know, your whole life turns around this person who you haven’t yet met fully and their needs shape what you need. There’s something I love that, you know, in What It Means to Be Human, O. Carter Sneed talks about how often
Ruth Institute (15:32)
Right.
Right.
Leah Sargeant (15:45)
in the pro-life movement, we talk about all the things the baby has to kind of justify a claim that they make morally. Well, the baby has fingernails and after this many weeks, the baby can hear you. So we kind of point to capacity to say this baby is already a person or almost a person. So granted to them on suffrancy, that’s, you the mom, we talk about how the baby is like the mom to justify this, but the mom becomes a little like the baby because the baby needs so much, the mom becomes needier. And I think that’s often raised on the pro-choice side, right?
the baby is taking something from the mother, lowering her from the site of being a fully human being, an autonomous person, to being someone who is like the baby, more dependent. If the baby isn’t a person, she’s kind of losing her grasp on personhood too. And Carter really talks about this as, and that’s fine because the mom and the baby are both human. The baby is like the mother, not in that the baby has all these capacities, though they do, in that the baby and the mother
Ruth Institute (16:20)
Right.
Right.
Leah Sargeant (16:39)
need things from people. This isn’t novel, it’s the degree. It’s not a complete difference in kind. And the goal is that you have this kind of radial structure where the baby needs something only the mom can do for them during pregnancy. But the mom has needs that a variety of people can help meet, whether that’s her husband or her friends or her mother. And it probably is more than one person to kind of cushion those various needs her boss in giving her time off. And the goal is not to say,
Okay, well, the mom shouldn’t need anything. The fact that the mom is becoming like the baby more dependent means something is going wrong for her. We want to rush aid to the baby that comes only through the mom and rush aid to the mother who has indeed become like the baby.
Ruth Institute (17:22)
Mm-hmm. You know, I noticed when in the first month of, in the first trimester of pregnancy, I cried, I slept, and I was hungry. Okay, all the things that a baby’s gonna do, I’m like, my gosh, this is so embarrassing. But it was true, you know, I wasn’t really myself. But the other thing I noticed about that, and this is something, somebody pointed this out to me a long time ago. When we, the glorification of the single mother
Leah Sargeant (17:32)
Yeah, yep.
Ruth Institute (17:48)
that has taken place for a variety of reasons. But one part of it is this thing on autonomy, that she’s, it’s noble to be a single mother. Well, really what’s happened, she isn’t really a single mother. She is an unmarried mother. So at the Ruth Institute, won’t usually hear us talk about single, but you’ll hear about unmarried parents is what you’ll hear about, right? But instead of a personal relationship with her husband,
Leah Sargeant (18:09)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (18:15)
She has replaced that with a series of commercial transactions. She has a job, so she’s dependent on her employer. She’s actually very dependent on her employer. She’s actually very dependent on her childcare provider, right? I mean, a single mom whose babysitter doesn’t show up, that is a person who’s really needy. That is a very desperate person right there, you know? And so instead of, it’s not that she’s no longer dependent. It’s like we’ve,
pasted over something over the top of her dependency by replacing her dependence on a unique individual, namely the father of the child who hopefully she loves and who loves her. We’ve taken that out of the equation and pasted commercial transactions on top of it. And so to my eyes, something certainly lost by going from the personal to the impersonal realm there.
Leah Sargeant (19:10)
Well, you know, I think that’s interesting because this is in some ways kind of class based also in what’s going on here. when we talk about the valorization of the single mom, I don’t think that’s something that people who are single moms in poor communities feel like they’re being valorized, right? That this isn’t, oh, she’s operating from a position of strength. She gets what she wants. Like she just does without men. You know, often these moms are women who desperately would like a man to stay present in their life.
Ruth Institute (19:26)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (19:39)
One thing I think is tricky that is in these conversations, it’s the people with the most leisure and the most power who drive the conversations and they wind up talking about situations over broadly. So there’s a kind of storytelling that follows that pattern. But I love a book that’s an ethnography of poor single moms called Promises I Can Keep, where, yeah, so you’re familiar, but for listeners, the researchers are really interested, like, why are these women having kids out of wedlock? They know it’s hard.
Ruth Institute (19:49)
Yes, yes.
I know that book, Tell people about it,
Leah Sargeant (20:09)
delusional that what it’s like to have a baby and they’re not delusional that it will set them back for education and work. So why do they do it? And for a lot of these women, they feel like there is no path open to them that involves doing things the right way. Like there aren’t enough marriageable men in their community to go around and they don’t see a lot of successful marriages. They go, okay, well, I kind of have two choices. I could try and do things the right way and in all likelihood, maybe get my education or a job, but have no family or
I could just have a baby and then I’d have a baby. And you know, it’s not that I wanted to say like, that’s a great idea, but there’s something so true they’re holding onto, which is that if the whole world says like, okay, there’s a certain amount of prerequisites you need to have before a baby, if you can’t hit them, you don’t get one. And they’re saying, but a baby is so good that if that’s the deal, I’m just gonna have a baby anyway. And I think that hope is what’s kind of sorely needed at every income level or every class distinction, this faith that…
Ruth Institute (20:42)
Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Leah Sargeant (21:06)
a baby is a good thing and worth making sacrifices for. And what I wish is that these women had the support they needed so that their sacrifices were the more ordinary sacrifices of just getting up all night, not the sacrifice of doing this alone.
Ruth Institute (21:19)
Right, right. you know, I periodically, I collect photographs of families, intact families, where they’re visibly poor. So there’s like a whole batch of photos from the Dust Bowl or the Depression, you know, and these people are in rags or they’ve got a broken down car, they’re standing in front of broken down house, but the father’s in the picture. The father’s in the picture. Even poor people used to have their moms and dads, you know, and that…
Leah Sargeant (21:28)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (21:47)
That to me, that’s a dimension of equality that we should be striving for, that everybody does have a mom and dad. Why don’t we see what we can do to get them together? Now, we’re going to divide this conversation into several parts. The last thing I want to be sure we cover in this part before we move on to another part. This book is part of a series at the Notre Dame University Press. And that press, I want to get the exact title, it’s called Catholic Ideas for a Secular World.
Leah Sargeant (21:51)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (22:14)
So tell me about how this book fits into that series. Give people a little idea about what’s in the series, what they’re trying to accomplish with it, and how your book fits into that.
Leah Sargeant (22:23)
this is really a series about building bridges, about giving people a way to encounter ideas that they certainly would put down early on if on every page I’m like, let me proof text this against the Bible or against this pope. it’s written so that I am putting forward ideas you can engage without having to trust me that Catholicism is true. Now, if you’re persuaded by the whole book, you might be a little curious at that point, well, how did Catholicism get all these things right? Could there be something true to it? But the book isn’t evangelical in that way.
Ruth Institute (22:49)
Right.
Leah Sargeant (22:53)
⁓
Ruth Institute (22:53)
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (22:54)
And it’s meant to be a book and the way I really think of mine in particular where I don’t expect that someone who comes to this book and disagrees with me substantially is going to be fully converted by it by the end. But I think they’ll find some points of agreement that surprise them and some points where they are still disagreeing, but they have this kind of nauseating tug of like, but how do I articulate why Leah is wrong? It’s not that I’ve changed my mind, but there’s something about my former way of dismissing this argument doesn’t work for me anymore. And I’ve got to stay sitting with it.
Ruth Institute (23:21)
Right.
Right. Right. And I think there’s reason for you to be optimistic with at least serious subsets of the population. People are going to be engaged with what you’re trying to say, because the reality is if you start from the position of dependence, whether it’s the child or the disabled person or the sick person, you start from the position of the dependent person and realize just how much we failed in so many ways.
We talk a good game about helping weak people or hurting people or whatever, but on many levels we’re profoundly uncomfortable. The people who… Well, new example, completely new example. People who have a serious mental illness, we’re profoundly uncomfortable trying to grasp in our kind of modern liberal consent-based, autonomy-based view of things
Leah Sargeant (23:54)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (24:13)
that here is a person whose cognitive ability, might be intelligent, but their ability to take care of themselves is impaired. ⁓ They are impaired and therefore they need certain kinds of help. They don’t need full on autonomy, right? So there are a lot of different places where this can come into play. I can vouch for this everybody.
Leah Sargeant (24:21)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (24:35)
she doesn’t blast you with Catholicism on every page. In fact, she barely mentions it, you know, in a way she barely mentions it, but it’s there, you know. And some of the other books in the series include the books by French political philosopher Pierre Manet, and his work is very interesting. I’m a big fan of his, and that’s how I came into contact with this whole series, you know. So anyway,
Leah Sargeant (24:37)
Hehehe
Ruth Institute (25:01)
We strive for that same kind of approach at the Ruth Institute. build ourselves as a interfaith international coalition because we want to put out the arguments in a way that’s accessible to as many people as possible. And we do have followers across the spectrum religiously. I’ve had on my staff, I’ve had people from a variety of religions working for the Ruth Institute and so on and so forth.
So I understand your strategy. Totally understand your strategy. It’s a natural law strategy, don’t you think?
Leah Sargeant (25:28)
Hehe.
In some ways, though, I’m often arguing less from kind of a rigorous natural law perspective and more from the, OK, so let’s leave aside the most hot button issues. You’ve run into the case, you the reader, where women are kind of treated as though they’ve messed up by being women. And the whole goal of helping them is to help them better fit into a male mold, whether that’s about,
accommodating yourself to a work structure that doesn’t work for you, or whether I talk about, and I draw from Caroline Criado Perez’s research, women surgeons who mentor younger surgeons by teaching them how to use medical equipment with non-standard grips, because they’re proportioned to male hands and they can’t use them dexterously as they were intended to be used. So if you see those moments where the fact of your difference of your womanhood is taken as a problem you have to solve, not a way to welcome and accommodate you as you were,
Well, first I want you just to connect all those examples if you didn’t already. And then I want you to consider that the way we treat fertility and the way we treat children in the womb might be one more example of looking at something that is different for women and then working from the assumption it’s a defect in women.
Ruth Institute (26:42)
Right, right. That different doesn’t, just like same doesn’t mean equal, different doesn’t mean less than. Right? And that’s where you’re going.
Leah Sargeant (26:50)
Exactly.
Ruth Institute (27:21)
Well, this is a good way to segue into the second part of the conversation that I wanted to have. And that is, and I haven’t mentioned this so far, the subtitle of the book is A Feminist Manifesto. Okay, so the book is called The Dignity of Dependence of Feminist Manifesto. Now, the reason I didn’t mention that right off the bat,
Leah Sargeant (27:30)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (27:39)
is because there are a lot of followers of the Ruth Institute for whom they would not be interested in such a book, because that would be a negative for them. So what I want to explore, I really wanted to, Ruthies, if you got this far, I really want you to read this book just the same, okay? But now I do want to talk about this term feminism, because it’s, as we all know, it’s a highly contested term. Everybody has feelings about it. They don’t always…
People use the term, aren’t always using the same dictionary when they’re using the same word. So I’m interested to know how do you define the term feminism?
Leah Sargeant (28:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’d say that it’s about considering what it means to be just to women as women, full stop. And I’d contrast that with the idea of what it means to be just to women as generic human persons, assuming there’s no major difference between men and women that would cause us to treat them differently, or what it means to be just to women as defective men, where a lot of what it means to help women is about, again, helping them fit into a male mold better rather than being welcome as they are.
Ruth Institute (28:43)
And so when you say woman as woman, what do you mean by as woman? Now that we’ve kind of pushed the definitional problem back a step, but let’s go there. What do you mean? What do you include in that?
Leah Sargeant (28:47)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
I really think this is really grounded in our embodied nature. So what are the main things that differentiate men and women? Well, there’s a lot of issues on which men and women kind of fall along two overlapping bell curves. And I think one of the most unambiguous is height, where you can find some women who are taller than some men. This doesn’t divide us starkly into two peoples. And yet there are differences on average that shape how we encounter the world. And I think one of the funnier ones is that kitchen counters are kind of placed at the height that’s most comfortable to work at.
for men disproportionately, though some towel women may find them pretty amenable, which is kind of ridiculous because you’d think the one thing you would get out of a sexist society or a sex society that’s not treating women as politically equal would be kitchen counters that are sized for women in the kitchen. And you’ll run into issues like that where just not thinking about these differences as salient leads you to design a standard that is pervasively worse for women. In some cases, not thinking about these differences as salient
also disadvantages men. And I think the starkest example of that is the way we design schools, particularly elementary schools. That I don’t know that I’m particularly happy with a low recess school day for anyone, but it takes a heavier toll on boys students than it does on girls students. It’s harder for them to tolerate, even though both kids may be harmed. And that’s a place where we take a standard that girls find it easier to meet or accommodate themselves to and force boys into it inappropriately.
Ruth Institute (30:07)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (30:18)
So you can think about those kind of overlapping bell curves, but often people say, well, there is overlap. So is this really a big difference? Like maybe we do need to think about the kitchen height counters, but is this really being accommodated as women or as short people? And I can point to things where the bell curves are further apart. I think one of the most notable differences where it’s almost completely different is grip strength, where 95 % of men are stronger than all but 5 % of women.
Ruth Institute (30:32)
Right, right.
Leah Sargeant (30:48)
So it’s like height, but the curves are much further apart. And this one I like to point to because it is a stark difference, but no one follows up on that with, well, if men have stronger grip strength than women, maybe women shouldn’t have the vote, right? it’s a, it’s yeah. So I’ve never had someone say that I’ve ought to say, which is good. But I think that’s always kind of the hesitation that as we, if we look too closely at these differences, will it reveal
Ruth Institute (31:02)
That’s logical. Now that is a logical statement for you right there, okay? Right.
Leah Sargeant (31:14)
that we’re wrong to treat women as political equals or wrong to treat them as equal and dignity to men. And so I like to warm people up with those kinds of examples and say, we can tolerate there being stark differences without that immediately eroding our claim to equality. Fertility is one of the starkest differences there is. And that’s the one that I think we have the most trouble accommodating. So when I say accommodating women as women, I really mean that full spectrum of ways where we take a narrow norm that fits some men.
Ruth Institute (31:15)
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Right, right.
Right.
Leah Sargeant (31:43)
better than it fits most women and applied as a universal norm that comes up again and again in different domains. But fertility stands out for that stark binary difference where it’s both the most salient difference, but the most dangerous feeling difference to talk about how we could accommodate people.
Ruth Institute (31:59)
Yes, and because that really is what defines male and female in mammalian species. All mammals have these traits. And so you and I produce the large gametes called eggs, and our husbands produce the small gametes called sperm. And a lot of things follow from that. Grip strength doesn’t immediately and obviously and necessarily follow it from it, and height doesn’t necessarily follow. But the things that… ⁓
Leah Sargeant (32:06)
Mm-hmm.
guess.
You
Ruth Institute (32:27)
that have to do with reproduction are going to be different. by all means, we need to recognize those. And I want to come back to that because that’s a really important point. this is a time when I need to just be candid with you, ⁓ Leah. The first three chapters of your book I found really hard. And so I’m going to say, Ruthie, if you pick up this book, just go and just start on chapter four. ⁓ And the reason I did is because you cataloged
Leah Sargeant (32:38)
Go for it.
Ruth Institute (32:52)
kind of a lot of these different things. And many of them were not really that important. And it came across in the kind of, you spoke in a feminist idiom, which I don’t like, you know, and I mean, I just don’t. And not everybody does, as you know. I’m sure you figured that out. But because those different, it was this kind of relentless cataloging of things that were not really, I didn’t think nearly as significant. But when you get,
further into the book and you’re talking about the things that really are definitive between male and female. I mean, we’ve seen these recently in the Supreme Court where ⁓ the Supreme Court justices are trying to adjudicate a sex discrimination case and the people who want sex discrimination law can’t tell you what sex is, okay? This is a problem, this is a big problem. It’s not your problem though, so we don’t need to go there. But let’s talk about the grip strength for a minute.
Leah Sargeant (33:38)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (33:50)
Tell people what you had to say about the grip strength, about the jars, the jelly jars. ⁓
Leah Sargeant (33:52)
Yeah. So I think this
is where if you just say, well, what would it look like if we thought about women and men as equally needed to be accommodated? You would just design jars that are easier to open. There’s no points for difficulty here. And it is harder because we design it to a level that’s trivial for almost all men and challenging for some women. But part of the reason I dwell on these examples where I agree, this isn’t make or break. I use an oven mitt to help me out or I like.
put a lot of effort while my husband does it casually, is a lot of the reason I’m going through this litany of different examples from different domains, some of which are higher stakes, you the question of how we test medical drugs, if we don’t test them on women, women get higher degrees of side effects. Like that one’s higher stakes, the grip strength is lower, is especially for the reader who comes in who’s brought in mainly by the feminist manifesto, but is suspicious of the dependents. I want to say,
Ruth Institute (34:43)
Right. Right.
Leah Sargeant (34:45)
This is example
after example in varying domains and with varying stakes, and you can see the pattern that’s building up. Here’s the one that you’re going to hate, and it’s abortion. I want you to be able to match it to these other patterns. And I put it pretty starkly, this is the same kind of problem, and you can recognize this problem as unjust in every other domain, even the low stakes ones when it comes up. And I want you to take another look at this one. And for you and for Ruthie, so our listeners, like…
Ruth Institute (34:56)
Right.
Leah Sargeant (35:11)
But I already agree about the pro-life stuff. So why do I have to slog through examples about where the basketball three-point line should be and how women feel about that? Part of what I’d like for women who come in agreeing with me on the abortion question to get out of those chapters is looking at these issues, even with varying stakes and domain after domain, I hope it builds up a sense of why women feel like they can’t trust us on the abortion issue, that they don’t feel accommodated as women in domain after domain.
Ruth Institute (35:19)
Right.
Leah Sargeant (35:39)
putting emphasis on those differences won’t get them more justice, they believe. It will just further expose them to degradation. I think in that feminist tradition, it’s funny because there’s a way in which I agree very strongly with mainstream feminism, descriptively, and then disagree strongly normatively. Ruth Bader Ginsburg always thought that the right to abortion should be grounded in equal protection, not privacy, which is what Roe actually held. She thought that was kind of weird and incoherent.
Ruth Institute (35:47)
Interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (36:07)
couldn’t hold up forever, and indeed it didn’t, but she thought the argument was equal protection, that we live in a society that takes the male norm as normative, and the male norm is you can walk away from a child at any age. It might be an act of cowardice, but you can definitely do it, and no one has to help you to abandon a mother. Now, for Ginsburg and for a few other feminist legal thinkers, this means men have a certain
Ruth Institute (36:10)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right.
Right, right.
Leah Sargeant (36:34)
freedom legally that women don’t have. And in order to be equal citizens, women needed the same equality to walk away. And I would say it’s an equality of vice. She obviously wouldn’t gloss it that way. And because they can’t do it naturally, they require access to abortion to sever that connection that a man can simply abandon. And where I agree with her descriptively is she’s correct. That’s what we expect of women. And when they don’t have that freedom of vice,
Ruth Institute (36:35)
Right.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes, yes.
Leah Sargeant (37:01)
We say, well, that’s kind of then a private problem, isn’t it? That’s a you problem. So I think she described our culture’s expectations well. And then her response was, if that’s the price, we have to prepare women to pay it. And my response is, if that’s the price, we’ve got to smash this system up, right? But we agree descriptively. And I think women coming into this book who don’t start with your and my assumptions will say, look, like, I don’t.
Ruth Institute (37:04)
Right,
Yeah, right.
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (37:28)
have the space or the freedom to take these arguments about a child seriously, because it will cost me something and no one will help me when it does. I think building up all those other examples hopefully builds up my credibility of, see the things you are struggling with that make it feel like being a woman remains a private problem. I want to address those too. I even want to address the jars. And because I think these are all part of the same problem of not welcoming you.
Ruth Institute (37:35)
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, yes. So you’ve said so much there. This is a very rich little conversation that you just started there. And I’m probably going to forget one or two of the five things that I want to say about this. First of all, with respect, well, first of all, I want to say that if you can reach those women, God bless you a thousand times, because they’re not going to listen to me.
I get it. I respect that. I understand what you’re doing. With respect to the jelly jar, there is a way of dealing with that that is completely consistent with your thesis, which is that you ask your husband to help you, and it’s okay. It’s okay for him to help. ⁓ yes, yes, but wait till your little boy.
Leah Sargeant (38:31)
This is easier if the men don’t work outside the home. I’ve gotta open things while he’s at work sometimes. ⁓
Ruth Institute (38:42)
is a teenager, the first time you ask him to help you, honey, will you open the jelly jar for me? He’s going to feel like a big boy. And in that exchange, there’s something beautiful of you allowing yourself to need the other person to ask for help. A lot of people can’t ask for help. That’s another part of the system that needs to be smashed, right? That we think we’re defective. We think we have to do it ourselves, right?
Leah Sargeant (38:50)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Ruth Institute (39:11)
No, it’s just, it’s fine to allow someone to give. It’s fine to cultivate that desire to give in other people by asking nicely. Whining, stomping your foot, no, not so much. But asking nicely and being grateful and thanking, know, all that. It’s part of our autonomy thing that we have in the West is that we’re afraid of that. We’re afraid of being dependent, that if we ask for help, we’re
we’re making ourselves less than. So to me, that’s all part of the story that you’re… Well, story isn’t the right word. That’s all part of the adjustment that you’re trying to call attention to. Am I right about that?
Leah Sargeant (39:40)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, and I think this is also something where
the decreasing rates of marriage or the pushing back of marriage, pushing back of children cuts against the sense of I can entrust myself to someone. I have that lived experience of doing it. And it cuts against amity between the sexes because for my husband and me getting married, at least during dating, I think we were equals in most ways in the equivalent way also. Like we could take on the same things. Who’s going to cook? Well, who feels like cooking, et cetera.
Ruth Institute (40:03)
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (40:18)
But it’s when I started getting pregnant and both having losses and carrying children to term that there were much larger asymmetries in our marriage, asymmetries that were a lot bigger than the jar. And even having kids, you there things my husband takes on that people think of as the mom’s job, like bedtime, because I’m nursing the baby. Like, I can’t do bedtime for you because I have this different responsibility. I can’t make dinner tonight because I’m lying down being extremely nauseated. So in that same way, Carter talks about the
Ruth Institute (40:26)
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (40:46)
woman becoming weaker through pregnancy. That happened very strongly for me in different ways. And it meant I had to entrust myself to him versus us sharing a load together in an even way. But I think the further that is in the future, the harder it is to go, when I do this, it will work. I keep having the lived experience of him always stepping up moment to moment. And it strengthens our marriage. But I think the less you have that and the less you see it, the more it feels like your needs should be private or should be able to be solved all on your own.
Ruth Institute (40:50)
Yeah, yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes, yes, 100%.
I want to go back to what you said at the very beginning of this, which is that when you’re first dating and you’re both doing jobs that are kind of office jobs, I gather your husband’s not a construction worker. he? Yeah, okay. So he’s an office job kind of guy. Okay. You really are equal. And for us, what happened in our marriage was that when we experienced infertility, that was the first time that it really became real that we were different as man and woman, because man and woman,
Leah Sargeant (41:25)
No, he’s a teacher, so…
Yes.
Ruth Institute (41:43)
each responds to that loss in a different way. And we were kind of, we were in conflict over it because, you know, I wanted him to understand me and he wanted me to understand him and I wanted to talk about it he didn’t want to talk about it. And, you know, it was like all, every stereotypical sex difference you can think of that has to do with emotions, it was all right there in front of us. And we had never, it was the first time we really had to do it. It’s crazy in a way, you know, when you really think about it, it’s like, you know, how long have I been with this man?
Leah Sargeant (41:46)
Mm.
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (42:12)
We’re just now figuring out that men and women are different. mean, what’s up with that, you know? ⁓
Leah Sargeant (42:12)
Yeah
Well, and I think childbearing really stands out where a man also can care for his wife and yet he can’t take burdens off her in the same way. He can take the jelly jar out of your hand and open it, but he can’t do labor for you as much as he genuinely might wish to. And he can’t bear the loss in the same way. There’s ⁓ an ethnography of couples going through miscarriage I read where one of the things that meant a lot to me in the middle of this was one husband who like
Ruth Institute (42:25)
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
⁓
Leah Sargeant (42:42)
loved his wife and was at such a loss of what he could do that was commensurate with what she was going to that he got her a new dishwasher. It’s such a mix of stupid and moving, right? That he had this real sense. And I think this is, again, the more you give yourself and love this real sense of both, it is my responsibility to take care of my wife. And yet, as much as I want to do that, as much as I would stand between her and physical danger if I could, there’s no way for me to interpose myself between her and the possibility of this loss.
Ruth Institute (42:53)
Yes, exactly.
Right.
Right.
Leah Sargeant (43:11)
Maybe a dishwasher will help, right? Like it’s all this love and just struggling for the outlet and I found that very moving and funny.
Ruth Institute (43:17)
I agree.
Yeah, I agree. I agree because it’s a unique experience that you’re having. There really is nothing that’s commensurate with it. There’s literally nothing. If you were going to be precise and measuring about it, there’s literally nothing you can do. So the next best thing is a dishwasher. Why not? Very endearing.
Leah Sargeant (43:24)
Mm-hmm.
Guess. Guess.
And think that’s also kind of the thing I would add to conversation about how women depend on men and what this asymmetry looks like in marriage is that sometimes it is kind of told the story of the husband is the provider. He brings things home, he takes care of stuff, but there will be moments in a long marriage where what you are facing together goes beyond what he can solve or pay for. And I think that’s where I’m both in some sense very sympathetic to this portrait of what a good man does, but I always frame it, my chapter on men is called Men Into the Breach because it’s more about
Ruth Institute (43:54)
Yes, 100%.
Leah Sargeant (44:06)
the rushing forward to give what he can, then the guarantee he’ll be sufficient.
Ruth Institute (44:10)
Right, right. And listen, men run into burning buildings. Men run toward the sound of trouble. They do that. And that’s a beautiful thing. And we as women, think it’s of great value for us to be appreciative of that, even if it doesn’t work exactly the way you want.
Leah Sargeant (44:14)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
And it’s good for men to know that they don’t need to be ready to solve every problem or to be fully established in their career to be ready for marriage as long as they have that willingness to step in.
Ruth Institute (44:33)
Right.
Yeah, and a lot of men, men really don’t like the feeling of being helpless. In one sense of the word, that’s a burden that lies heavier on them than on us, right? Because if you’ve got a problem, you can’t solve. I’ll never forget when we had a flood in our house here in Louisiana a few years ago, and I watched the water come into the house, and my husband, the look of helplessness on his face, I hope I never see again. I mean, it was awful for him. And as soon as the water receded,
Leah Sargeant (44:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (45:05)
boom, he’s moving into action, he knows what to do. He was in his element then, you know, when there’s action to take. And so I think for you and I to have this conversation, I hope a lot of fellows are watching, you know, because I want, fellows, I want you to understand we appreciate you. I think that’s been the thing that the kind of toxic feminism, I think that you and I would both agree there’s a feminism that’s completely talk, yes, yes, that,
Leah Sargeant (45:25)
Zero sum feminism, right? Where women can only gain at the expense of men, yeah.
Ruth Institute (45:33)
that pathologizes everything male and that scapegoats everything male. I think very important culturally in this moment that men know that there are women who respect what their unique contributions really are. There’s another word I wanna go back to that you used. You talk about entrusting, entrusting yourself to another person. We have a story about that word too.
because one of the things with our little boy was that he couldn’t trust anybody. He was two and a half years old. Things that our little girl developed into naturally, he couldn’t do, and we had to kind of deliberately do things to help him. One of the most striking ones was peekaboo. We had a therapist tell us, the peekaboo is a important developmental thing because the child is there and they expect
Leah Sargeant (45:57)
yeah?
You
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (46:25)
There’s a little bit of anticipation and then you uncover it, you take the cloth off their face and they’re, oh, you know, and it’s interpersonal and all of that. Well, when we put the cloth over his head, he was scared. He was afraid, you know? So one of the things we had to do in a very intentional way was to teach him to entrust himself to us because, you know,
Leah Sargeant (46:29)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (46:52)
the baby naturally will grow into entrusting themselves because mommy does come when she cries. When I cry, mommy comes. And so, okay, that’s great. But if mommy, if nobody ever comes, and then what happens is the baby turns inward on the self. And that’s why these kids become, there’s something called institutional autism. There’s something called attachment disorder. That’s all the stuff that, that was our introduction to parenthood.
Leah Sargeant (47:09)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (47:20)
was dealing with that. So at some point, Leah, it became clear to me that I was not really entrusting myself to my husband, and he was not really entrusting himself to me. And that’s when I changed my name. I had been Jennifer Roback all those years. And finally, it’s like, I like the Roback name because it’s my dad’s name. And now my dad has died. And so I was kind of doing it for him.
Leah Sargeant (47:40)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (47:45)
And you know, honey, I think our little family really needs for you and I to be united. You know, it was like a big revelation, but totally worth it. know, totally worth it for me to be Mrs. Morse. You know, that was totally, totally worth it. But we needed, our little boy made it clear that this is what all children need, right? When you have an extreme case like that, not all kids are deprived to the extent that he was.
But it illustrates something that I do think is universal to the experience of being a child. And so it just, we need to trust each other. And every time I quarrel with you, I’m undermining our kid. So we got to stop that. My husband, I think, figured that out before I did. But the idea of us entrusting ourselves to each other is more than about just you and me and you and your husband. Do you see what I mean?
Leah Sargeant (48:20)
Yes.
Yes.
And it’s also about having this posture of assuming you don’t have to pretend to be stronger than you are to exist in public or existing your friendships. I think this comes down to everything from that you should invite friends over when your house is messy sometimes so that in hard moments, it’s clear that you’d rather see your friend and be with your friend than go like…
Ruth Institute (48:36)
Please react to that. want to hear what you…
Leah Sargeant (48:58)
well, I can’t receive them as a guest in like a professional cleaned up way versus I want to see them and pray with them and I haven’t vacuumed and there are crumbs in the kitchen floor. But if I set that as the bar for seeing my friend, I’m not going to see my friend for a week, which is more important here. It’s important to be seen by your friend. And one of the ways I think about this, just even in my parenting, is I think about how rare it is for adults to be seen doing something they don’t have mastery of.
think of practicing something as both for kids, as kids do more learning, adults specialize, and that when you practice, that’s probably a private thing. And so I really want my kids to see that my husband and I have things we’re not good at. We don’t just route around them or outsource them to others. And some of them are things we’re actively trying to grow in. My daughters are one of my oldest daughters, literally scandalized by the fact that I’m really bad at drawing. Like I once drew her a picture of a penguin and she burst into tears.
because she thought I had drawn it that badly on purpose because it didn’t occur to her a grownup might draw a penguin that looked terrible. And I didn’t take from that, like I shouldn’t draw for her. I’m like, yeah, Beatrice, like, I’m not very good at this. I’ve never spent a lot of time practicing how to draw. And to get better, I would have to practice. And daddy is genuinely both maybe has more raw talent, but he’s put a lot more into this, which is why his penguins look like penguins.
Ruth Institute (50:05)
That’s charming.
Leah Sargeant (50:23)
But it’s not impossible for me to get better, but the only way for me to get better would involve drawing a lot of things that aren’t very good. And I think about how often in an ordinary day do they ever see an adult have disfluency with something publicly versus think this is something I’ll grow out of and won’t do in public ever again.
Ruth Institute (50:37)
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right. That’s really interesting because there’s a vulnerability in that, know, in admitting that you can’t do everything.
Leah Sargeant (50:47)
But it’s also a witness to entrusting yourself. I assume – and in the case of a four-year-old at the time, it’s too big an assumption that I can draw you this penguin to the best of my ability and you won’t reject me for it. And that was asking too much of a four-year-old. But my faith that our relationship could withstand this, as it ultimately did, hopefully is tutelary to her. She was going through a phase where she would have one line go wrong in a drawing and she would go, I will
Ruth Institute (50:53)
Yes.
⁓
Right, right.
Leah Sargeant (51:16)
crumple it up, right? Like with like devastation tears during down because again, her goal was success and it’s a good goal, but there’s no way through that except struggle.
Ruth Institute (51:25)
Right, right. And further down the pike, you could say, or maybe in a deeper way, in even deeper way, what we’re facing all the time is the fact that we are not God. It’s like modern man has set God aside. And so the difference between us and the divine, we don’t understand there’s supposed to be a big gap.
Leah Sargeant (51:37)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (51:48)
You know, we’re not supposed to know everything. We’re not supposed to be able to do everything. And the gifts that we have are gifts from God. That perspective chills out a lot of this anxiety, but it’s not really part of our culture in the same way that it once was.
Leah Sargeant (52:03)
And it’s normal to get out over your skis. And in some ways it’s guaranteed. If you’re trying to follow the Holy Spirit, if you’re saying, I want to be part of your plans, which are greater than and better than my plans, you’re going to do some things that look like wrong moves in the eyes of the world and sometimes that genuinely don’t pan out. But you’re taking risks that are foolishness in the eyes of the world because you are not husbanding your own strength, working only with your own limits. You are putting yourself out there in a way that doesn’t make sense without God.
And one thing that really stands out in that kind of faithfulness to me was something someone did for me, which is that we had met another couple in New York City when we were relatively new there. We met them through church and we liked them a lot. So we invited them for dinner and then they were one of the first people we told that we were expecting a baby. And the mom said immediately, I had a miscarriage, which everyone knows you’re not supposed to say. Like you’re not supposed to say it to someone who’s pregnant, who’s in the danger zone.
Maybe you’re not supposed to say it to anyone at all. Maybe it’s meant to be totally private, but you’re definitely not supposed to blurt it out in response to someone telling you that they’re pregnant. And she felt terrible. And she went back home that night and she said to her husband, like, I don’t know why I said that. It just came out. Like, and I feel awful. How could I say that to her? But a week later, I started bleeding and she was the first person I called because she had told me and I knew she was.
the closest person I knew who had gone through this. And so it’s impossible for Mia for her not to see that as the Holy Spirit. And I thank God for her incredible generosity that she made the wrong choice in that worldly sense because she followed this thing that God laid on her heart that didn’t make any sense to her at the time. And it turned out it put her and me in a position to love each other and to pray with each other. But so often in the world that involves taking on something that clearly
Ruth Institute (53:41)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (53:52)
isn’t a good idea if we’re working in purely worldly terms, whether it’s a kind of vulnerability of putting ourselves out there and making a promise or a partial promise we can’t guarantee we can keep, but we still say, I want to be here for you. And I’m going to ask God to give me the strength to do it, because I think we both know I can’t keep this promise on my own, but I want to be here for you anyway.
Ruth Institute (54:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. That’s very beautiful. And I can think of lot of examples in my own life of people being vulnerable with me or me being vulnerable with them that turned out to have a good outcome, you know, where it might not have seemed that you couldn’t have predicted it. And I guess that’s another part of the modern mind, especially me in economics. We assume everybody calculates everything for crying out loud, you know, that’s kind of
Leah Sargeant (54:24)
Yes.
Yes. What’s the expected value of this conversation? Yes.
Ruth Institute (54:37)
It’s kind of ridiculous. I mean, in one sense, it makes sense in a certain context and in a certain way. But if you take it too far, you will lose your mind, basically, is the short version.
Leah Sargeant (54:49)
I just say this really stands out to me as someone who’s been on both sides of this question as an atheist and as a Catholic. Because as an atheist, including in interpersonal arrangements, I was working only with my own strength. If I had an argument that went nowhere, that’s kind of the end of it. But as a Catholic, I think of myself more as participating in a relay race. So I can have conversations that as long as I’m engaging in them with love and with prayer, I can trust are fruitful in some way without kind of pushing
Ruth Institute (55:04)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (55:16)
to see fruits in this conversation. Because I don’t know who’s going to come along next. And I may think, well, I’ve got a really good argument. I hope this person is convinced. But maybe I’m not the person to convince them. What matters most is the way I received them and that I made the argument. But I didn’t pressure them. I was like, here, can I show you this? Is it interesting? They go, no. It’s not. But the way I interacted with them and the fact that I prayed for them afterwards meant that when someone else came along who did have the right story to open their heart,
Ruth Institute (55:18)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (55:44)
They listened to that person because the ground had been prepared. And I know there are people who did that for me who probably don’t think of themselves as playing any role in my conversion because in the moment nothing happened.
Ruth Institute (55:53)
Right.
Right, right. And we won’t know that in this life. We won’t know the full implications of anything that we did, good or bad. I do from time to time think to myself, if the Lord put somebody in my path and I run them off with my smart mouth,
Leah Sargeant (55:58)
Exactly.
Ruth Institute (56:10)
that I don’t want to have that conversation with the Lord on judgment day. You I mean, you were the last chance for this person and you ran him off. You know, what’s wrong with you? You know, I don’t want to that. I don’t know where I want to.
Leah Sargeant (56:12)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Or even just you kept them away from five years when they could have come home earlier, right? I kept going after them. I, the Lord kept pursuing them, but I had several paths open to them and you strewed obstacles in their way.
Ruth Institute (56:24)
Yeah, right, right. know, so.
Right. Right. Right. So, you know, at some point, you know, your prayer becomes, Lord, keep me from doing anything mean or stupid that will drive people away from you. I mean, it’s a low bar, but, you know, first do no harm, as they say. Right. So that comes to my mind. There’s one last question I want to ask you about feminism, and then I want to go a little bit further. The thing I want to ask you about feminism, we were talking about women as women, you know.
advocating for women as women. So in your mind, are the ladies who run the pregnancy care centers, do they count as feminists in your mind?
Leah Sargeant (57:09)
I’ll be honest, I don’t care as much whether people identify with the word. I want to be truthful about the fact that I do and show people where I see this in continuity with women with a lot of views, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t, but I think we’re oriented towards this question. But I don’t need to go to a pregnancy resource center and go like, as women helping women, qua women, you’re all feminists now. I want to put the definition forward. go like, well, I do like that.
Ruth Institute (57:15)
Okay.
Hahaha
Leah Sargeant (57:34)
I think there is something to gain or I think I am a daughter of this long and contested movement and I care about where it goes next. I think the women, what makes the most sense for them not to identify as feminist, even if they agree with me on lots of these points, would be, I don’t really care about where this movement goes next, whether it’s redeemed, whether it’s strengthened, whether it dies. It’s never been a part of my life and I don’t feel a sense of responsibility for it.
But I really do. I grew up in a feminist household. And what I think about is I see so many people who are oriented towards a partial good, and I want them to have the fullness of it. And I think to some real extent, the things that drew them to this movement can take them all the way home.
Ruth Institute (57:59)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Well, in the economy of grace, nothing is wasted. So, you know, if the Lord’s calling to you, he’s going to use whatever’s there. The reason I ask you about the pregnancy care ladies, and also I’ve noticed the abstinence education ladies, the abstinence education movement is largely women, you know. And so these are people who are advocating for women as women. You know, these are women serving other women.
Leah Sargeant (58:18)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Guess.
Ruth Institute (58:40)
And so in that respect, they should count as feminists under the definition that you originally announced. And I’m not so concerned about whether they would agree with that or not, because for all the reasons you just mentioned. But in your mind, do they and their activities and their orientation, do they count as part of a feminist movement, a feminist movement? Could you call you?
Leah Sargeant (58:46)
Mm-hmm.
They count as part of my feminist movement. Like it’s very clear a bunch of feminists don’t think I count as part of the feminist movement, but I’m happy to plant a flag and have as many people rally around it as feel like they can.
Ruth Institute (59:09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to get that on the table because that group of people, they take so much abuse. They take so much abuse and it just makes me crazy.
Leah Sargeant (59:13)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think what I would never do is – some people go like, well, if you believe in these things, if you believe in other people, then, ha! You are a feminist. You’re part of it whether you like it or not. I don’t care about entrapping people with the proof of going, you identify with this phrase that doesn’t resonate. I want to show you this is why I both, telling you the truth, do identify with this fractured but fundamentally oriented around a true thing movement, but this is the part of it I care most about. And the door is open if this sounds true to you.
If you just want to do all the same things I want to do and never want to use the word, you’ve got my blessing.
Ruth Institute (59:55)
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. You’re not imperialistic about it and you’re not possessive about it and you’re not possessive. For my part, I just want to put on the table for the Ruthies who might be wondering. Some time ago, I stopped using the word feminist at all because it has so many contested meanings and stuff. I realized, well, it was an incident that took place probably, I want to say early 2000s. I gave a talk at a law school.
Leah Sargeant (59:59)
Yes.
Ruth Institute (1:00:21)
Case Western University Law School in Cleveland. And what I wanted to talk about was why you don’t need to get on the careerist path, and why it would be good to start your family sometime before menopause, for example. And so the title of my talk that I announced was Humane Alternatives to Feminism. So you can guess where that took me, right? I mean, we spent the whole time arguing about
Leah Sargeant (1:00:45)
Yeah, yes.
Ruth Institute (1:00:49)
women’s having checking accounts, or women having credit cards, and those kind of things. And after a while, I realized that whether I say I’m for feminism or against feminism, I’m going to end up talking about a set of things I don’t necessarily want to talk about. And so for me, I just leave that for somebody else. Other people can sort that out. I’m just going to say, this is what I’m in favor of. This is what I’m not in favor of.
Leah Sargeant (1:00:51)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:01:15)
and leave the word out of it completely because that word has a tendency to channel people down a particular path. They’ve already set the terms of the debate. I guess that’s the point. And I don’t like their terms. I think their terms are the problem, kind of. And so therefore, I’m not pro-feminist. I’m not anti-feminist. I’m just me. And I’ll talk to anybody that I think I have something to say with. So I don’t know what you think about that approach. But I wanted to say that for the benefit of my…
Leah Sargeant (1:01:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:01:42)
followers who are wondering what is Dr. Morris doing talking to a feminist? What is going on?
Leah Sargeant (1:01:45)
I’m fine with it. I always think one of the things is that words are
helpful as shorthand for definitions, right? But when people get stuck on them, you want to pause and say, okay, well, I didn’t defend it my parish where we had everyone who came in, say what they thought feminism was, but I had them put it on two different sides of a pillar based on whether they identified with feminism or didn’t identify with feminism. And I think it was a helpful exercise because you could see that on each side of the pillar,
Ruth Institute (1:02:07)
Uh-huh.
Leah Sargeant (1:02:12)
the definitions weren’t totally cohesive. You could see disagreement within the not a feminist and yes, a feminist side, but also that very few people who are on different sides of identifying with the word agreed on the definition. I know at least one person put, feminists are people who hate men. I’m like, well, in that case, I’m not a feminist, right? But there’s a reason that’s not on my card on the I am a feminist side. And I think it’s helpful just to pause when you have this kind of intense, like, is the word good? Is it not? Especially, you know,
Ruth Institute (1:02:18)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
All right.
Yeah, right, right,
Leah Sargeant (1:02:41)
that covers more than a hundred years of different kinds of activism at this point to say, okay, well, what is it that attracts you to the word? What is it that repels you from the word? And how much of this is an actual difference between us? And how much of this is we actually mostly overlap, but we disagree about whether the word does a good job capturing what we overlap on.
Ruth Institute (1:02:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. And that’s great. You’re interested in that. I’m not interested in that. You know, I mean, I’m doing something else, you know? So, that’s right. That’s right.
Leah Sargeant (1:03:05)
Yeah, that’s fine. Mm-hmm. I mean, the hand is not a foot. Maybe it is my job to redeem feminism and your job to build up a home for women who find the whole word makes them itchy.
Ruth Institute (1:03:19)
Yeah, right, right. I mean, we’re about deconstructing the whole sexual revolution. That’s what we’re really about over here. And so that encompasses a lot of different issues. And that’s another whole long story of grace and putting one foot in front of the other and following the Holy Spirit. I’m doing stuff I never would have expected to be doing. Let’s just put it that way. And when you get to be my age, that’ll be true for you too. I just bet you anything. So for the third part of our conversation, I want to go back to the…
Leah Sargeant (1:03:23)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:03:45)
I pick up some threads that have been floating around, but I want to really draw out the idea of the civilization of love. Because here at the Ruth Institute, we proclaim as part of our mission statement that we’re here to defend the family and build a civilization of love. That’s how we understand our mission. And so your understanding of feminism has something to say about that. Let’s just put it that way.
What unique attributes do women have as women that can contribute to the civilization of love?
Leah Sargeant (1:04:16)
think women have more invitations into a non-meritocratic relationship of love with others, particularly through children, right? That one thing that’s always stood out for me is that, you know, I do have a career and I do some cool things in it that I could impress grownups with, but my children don’t care about them, you know. And especially as young babies, what they care about is that I exist and that I have milk and that I am there. And there are moments, you know, including while I was making the choice about whether to leave a job
Ruth Institute (1:04:34)
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
Leah Sargeant (1:04:45)
still wanting to work, but wanting to leave a job that had become a bad job where there is that uncertainty, well, what will happen next and what will I do? And I had a little bit of the reassurance of like, will my kids care about this at the material level if I’m out of work for a while? Sure. But day to day, what will they know about whether I’m still doing this prestigious thing? Nothing. And will I still be sufficient for the things that matter most to them? Yes. And I think that’s very important in our society where you put a big premium on intelligence.
Ruth Institute (1:05:12)
Thank
Leah Sargeant (1:05:14)
and accomplishments and a lot of things that are good, but not the ultimate good. In many ways, being a mother is, hope, my tutorial in how to die well. Because when I am old and when I’m dying, I will not be able to rest on my accomplishments and I won’t be able to contribute every day in the ways that I do now. And I won’t be a public figure in certain ways that I am now. What I will desperately need to be able to do is to rest in the goodness of my being.
instead of the goodness of what I am doing. And that can be very hard. And I think we receive a strong countercatechesis about that from the world, that we are what we do, not that we are good because we are loved. And it’s these moments where my kids are younger and in some sense blind to a lot of worldly concerns that I hope I’m hanging on to their faith in the goodness of my being and that that might help carry me through to the end.
Ruth Institute (1:06:09)
And in what ways is your approach specifically and uniquely Catholic?
Leah Sargeant (1:06:15)
I think one part of it is that I can make the argument in a secular way, and I do to some extent since it’s for a range of audiences, that you just don’t like where the autonomy meritocratic world will take you. But you may not believe that there is a genuine alternative. You might be persuaded by a book like, well, I guess humans aren’t autonomous, and I guess we have to find a way to live within that. But it’s so hard. And I think it is hard, the sense of
Our loves ask things of us beyond what we can guarantee and beyond what our strengths give us. And I will spend some amount of my time, even if I save up a lot of money and do a lot of things where I just depend on other people and take things from them that they choose to give me that I can’t pay back. And I think it’s easier from a secular point of view to end with, and that’s kind of bad. I don’t like it, you know, like, or I’m not sure it will ever happen. This, this may be what I need, but it’s not what the world is. The world is more hostile than this. Think about, again, Ginsburg’s idea of just, well, if women are different in this way, they’ll just be treated as lesser. There’s no way of catching up from this except by severing that connection. And I the Catholic point of view is that we are loved into being, right? That our embodied nature is good, that God took on our embodied nature as the instrument of our salvation. So while a secular reader might get through my book and say, OK, I guess I have to accept that dependence
Ruth Institute (1:07:28)
Right? Right?
Leah Sargeant (1:07:39)
It is a big factor in human life, and I need to reconcile myself with it somehow and make the best of it, even though it’s a hard thing to do. A Catholic shouldn’t have that kind of reluctant, know, well, got to push on. Should say like, yeah. And this reminds me what God has done and the gift he has made of our lives to us. And this is always from the beginning of our creation because we are created, not self-authored been the order of our being. And even in heaven, when we will not be sick or ill or need things in those ways, we’ll still live in this utterly dependent relationship on the beatific vision. So I think a Catholic can come out of this book and say, and in those moments of where I’m responding to someone else’s need or where I’m desperately needy, I can see more clearly that there’s a foretaste of heaven in that. Even when I’m sick and someone is nursing me, that my ultimate purpose for being is to rest completely and trust myself to God and
Ruth Institute (1:08:08)
Right.
Leah Sargeant (1:08:36)
These are my training wheels.
Ruth Institute (1:08:38)
And you know, the Catholic Church offers a lot of role models for this type of thing because we have famous and beloved saints who have been canonized who are not particularly spectacular contributors. know, I mean, we have St. Therese of Le Su, promoting the little way and childlike dependence on God. It was the most obvious example that will be obvious to everyone. But you know, we have,
Leah Sargeant (1:08:59)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:09:06)
canonized lots of poor people. We’ve canonized lots of crippled people, lots of people who are not maybe in their right minds. Sanctification is available to everyone, and God has a unique path for each one of us. And if we seem like we have gifts and talents and we’re special and we’re important and we have a lot of money or whatever, all of that’s a gift. All of that’s a gift. And the question is, are we going to do with that gift?
Leah Sargeant (1:09:08)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:09:35)
I want to return also to the point that you made earlier about equality versus sameness.
I’ve noticed, and you’ve probably noticed too, that a lot of times campaigns for equality have this kind of elastic nature to them. Okay, we’ve got equality here, we’ve gone this far, let’s go to the next step and make us equal in some other dimension. Let’s keep moving the goalpost to find more and more grounds for equality, which turns out to be opportunities to impose something on the structure, and it’s not organic is what I guess what I’m trying to say. The church has often pointed out that equality across the board is not possible. mean, Leo the 13th and Rerum Navarum pointed out that, you know, the claim that we must have income equality ignores so many things because there’s so many things that go into what your income is and stuff like that. And I think the whole movement for women earning as much as men, I don’t know if you want to call that feminism or…
Leah Sargeant (1:10:18)
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:10:36)
Marxism or what you want to call that, that whole movement to equalize income has ended up equalizing, working on a lot of different dimensions. And yet, inequality is inevitable. I would summarize the Catholic position this way. Some inequality is inevitable, but not all inequality is justifiable, is permissible there’s a context for equality. I’d like to get your thoughts about the contexts and limits and boundaries of what we should rightly be striving for in the arena of equality.
Leah Sargeant (1:11:14)
This is funny because you’re more uncomfortable with the language of feminism and I’m more uncomfortable with the language of inequality, though you’re right, it turns up in these various spots. I lean very heavily instead on the word asymmetry because I think it’s very hard for people to hear inequality even when it just means these people are different. Like this person genuinely has a greater capacity for this kind of work or this way of thinking and this person has less. This person is taller, this person is not, and not hear inequality as so we can rank order these people according to their moral worth, which I don’t think is what you’re saying. That’s why I’m often trying to say, okay, in the same way you find the word feminism too tied up, I find asymmetry really helpful to pause and say, okay, well, what are we talking about here? There’s an asymmetry here. These people aren’t the same. There’s a disparity and asymmetry. What are we going to do in response to it? Which leaves open, will these people have political equality? Yes. Will these people have identical outcomes? No.
Ruth Institute (1:11:42)
right.
But wait a minute, but wait a minute.
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (1:12:08)
how are we going to untangle all the different things that are downstream of this fundamental difference without jumping to that word because I think it can kind of send the conversation off. And one place where I really appreciate this is kind of in disagreements or disputes about prioritization even just within disability where there can be an effort to hide inequality, descriptive inequality or asymmetry is by putting forward whoever is the most accomplished person from your particular group. know, arguing for the dignity of people with Down syndrome.
Ruth Institute (1:12:18)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (1:12:37)
because this person with Down syndrome is successfully holding down a job and this person with Down syndrome completed a major swim and therefore, you know, the inequality is not so large for this person. But of course, for the person for whom that’s all out of reach, you know, isn’t included in that assertion. So you’re trying to say, okay, well, how can I acknowledge the people who have a profound difference, a profound asymmetry that will shape the whole course of their life, that will mean their life, even when we’re both treated justly looks different than mine.
Ruth Institute (1:12:44)
Right.
Right.
Leah Sargeant (1:13:07)
And is the right word to use inequality or is the right word to use difference? And I think it depends on the audience and the situation, but I think, again, there’s that sense of difference brings with it inequality and the sense of degradation that makes people anxious to paper over the differences.
Ruth Institute (1:13:22)
Yes.
Yes, yes. And you slip the word justice in there. OK. And there has been for a long time an assumption that inequality equals injustice. And that can’t be correct. I mean, there has to be nuance on that point. That’s what Leo XIII was really talking about back in 1891 when he wrote in the War Room that not every income equality necessarily points to injustice, although we can’t deny there are some.
Leah Sargeant (1:13:28)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Ruth Institute (1:13:51)
Inequality, know, there are some injustices, but that’s not the clue to it. So that’s an interesting. So your way of doing it, your way of addressing that is to look for a language that takes note of differences between people without a rank ordering or without a presumption that this one’s better than that one. And so therefore we need to elevate this one or bring this one down or something like that, that not all differences can be rank ordered.
Leah Sargeant (1:14:07)
Yes.
Ruth Institute (1:14:19)
in some way.
Leah Sargeant (1:14:19)
And I think it’s helpful again as a
Catholic to say, well, the fundamental symmetry between me and every other person, whether they’re verbal or not, whether they’re physically able to walk or not, is that we are highly dependent creatures dependent on God’s grace. The most important things neither of us can do for ourselves. Some interesting, relevant, less important things I can do for myself that someone else can’t. I can perform certain kinds of labour. I know how to program in Python. I’m good at abstract thinking.
Ruth Institute (1:14:32)
Yes.
Leah Sargeant (1:14:48)
I can do all those things for myself and someone who can’t may need different helps or not be ready to hold certain jobs. But can I save myself from my sin? I cannot. In that most important need, I’m utterly symmetrical. But in a bunch of other different, interesting, but lesser goods, I may have notable asymmetries with someone else.
Ruth Institute (1:15:08)
Right, right. And you know, there’s a very famous story in Catholicism of St. Thomas Aquinas, you know, by anybody’s measure, probably the smartest man in a millennium, and certainly a major contributor to Catholic theology and so on and so forth. He stopped writing because he had a vision of God and he had a profound encounter with God. And when he was done after that encounter, said, everything I have written is as straw. So what he saw was the gap. Yeah, he’s the smartest guy on planet Earth.
Leah Sargeant (1:15:31)
Guess.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:15:36)
you know, almost certainly, but the gap between him and God, and that’s what makes him a saint, you know, because as smart as he was, he could recognize that the gap between himself and God is like far beyond, you know, the difference between him and, you know, a newborn baby or something like that. we have, Catholicism has some resources that we can call on. I mean, I think that’s one of the things that we’re agreeing with here, you know, and many of our
Leah Sargeant (1:15:52)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:16:03)
⁓ Christian brothers and sisters from other traditions, you have these resources too. And if you don’t, you are welcome to come over and take ours, okay? And use our stuff. I want you to use our stuff. That’s what we’re here to do, you know? To make sure you know that this applies to you and can be of value and used to you. So instead of creating equality, what do you think about this idea? That instead of that is the goal that we say, we’re supposed to defend the weak.
Leah Sargeant (1:16:08)
guess.
Yeah
Mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:16:29)
Defending the weak is our goal. What do you think about that?
Leah Sargeant (1:16:32)
I agree with that, but I also think it’s that the fundamental idea of justice is giving each one what they are due. It is not homogenizing people beyond what their actual natures can bear. And what I like about this is it also suggests justice is strongly relational. It is very hard for me to be just to you without knowing you. If I treat you as a stranger, we can have systems of laws that are about justice between strangers, and that’s something, the level at which a nation operates. But for me to be just as a human person,
Ruth Institute (1:16:52)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Sargeant (1:17:02)
I need to know something about you so I do render what you are do. And the hope is that that quest for justice, that forced reason to know you, causes me to love you.
Ruth Institute (1:17:14)
Mm-hmm. Oh, well, do you know what, Leah? This is a really good place to stop our conversation. We’ve covered a lot of territory that’s going to be very interesting to a lot of people and helpful to a lot of people. Tell people about where they can find more of your work and where they can follow you on Substack and whatnot.
Leah Sargeant (1:17:30)
Well, as long as you’re willing to type it into your browser, you will find me at Other Feminisms. And it’s got that S at the end to make it clear that it’s a rowdy bunch around a contested term, OtherFeminisms.com. And that’s my sub stack, Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Ruth Institute (1:17:44)
Okay, that’s your Substack page. Okay, very good.
I think we follow each other on Substack. And where can they get your book?
Leah Sargeant (1:17:50)
Yes?
Hopefully, anywhere books are sold, so you can definitely get it on Amazon. You can get it directly from Notre Dame University Press. a number of people have gotten their libraries to get it, so give it a try.
Ruth Institute (1:17:56)
No, uh-oh.
Well, Leah Libresco Sargent, this has been a fascinating conversation. We’re going to release the whole thing. We’re going to release it in parts because there’s been so much interesting material here. I want to thank you so much for being my guest on today’s episode of The Dr. J Show.
Leah Sargeant (1:18:21)
Thank you so much for having me on.
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About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
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