2015/12/01 by Jennifer Burns · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #American Political and Social Dynamics #Research, Science, and Academia #Academic Freedom and Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jav504
openalex publication_date 2015/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
“They make all of us male writers look like Confederate money,” wrote the curmudgeonly cultural critic Albert Jay Nock in 1943. According to Congressman Howard Buffett, they “have talent that surpasses that of almost any mere male that I know in the country.” Reflecting on the rise of the Right over the course of the twentieth century, the journalist John Chamberlain noted, “If it had been left to pusillanimous males probably nothing much would have happened.” To William F. Buckley Jr., they were the “three furies” of libertarianism: the children's author and magazine writer Rose Wilder Lane, the book critic Isabel Paterson, and the best-selling novelist Ayn Rand. Popular writers who are not typically remembered as significant intellectuals, Lane, Paterson, and Rand nonetheless exerted, according to their contemporaries, a powerful influence on the ideological development of the American Right.1 But what exactly was this influence, and how should historians make sense of the striking presence of three women, bound by similar life experiences and tenuous bonds of friendship, at the core of modern antistatism? It seems more than coincidence to find three women at this pivotal moment, yet Lane, Paterson, and Rand resist easy analysis on the grounds of gender. They did not claim their womanhood as a source of particular wisdom and did not identify with women as a group. The triumphant self that ran through their fiction could manifest itself in both male and female guise. Moreover, after early writing careers focused on the lives and specifically gendered experiences of women, all three abandoned these concerns as they shifted to political work. The individualism they developed as mature intellectuals advanced no coherent portrait of gender—by turns ignoring women altogether, imagining them as figures interchangeable with men, or proposing them as either stronger than or fundamentally parasitic upon the men in their lives. Nor do Lane, Paterson, and Rand map easily onto what we know about women and conservatism. Although they shared the anticommunist and antiradical views of the women who belonged to groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion, they were resolutely not “joiners,” neither clubwomen nor party women, nor ever affiliated with any woman's organization.2