For years, feminists expressed frustration that things didn’t get better fast enough. So what happens when things get worse? The overturning of Roe vs Wade, expected in a US Supreme Court ruling this month or next, would be arguably the biggest legal setback to women’s rights in a western country in living memory.
Yet to Amia Srinivasan, the end of federal abortion protection was “absolutely inevitable. I wasn’t at all surprised”. A 37-year-old philosophy professor at Oxford university, Srinivasan has emerged as one of today’s most innovative feminist thinkers. She has appeared everywhere from The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society to Vogue magazine. In her grand rooms at All Souls College, she holds forth with ease.
Srinivasan’s talent is to see disputes differently, often broadening what’s at stake. When it comes to not being surprised by the Supreme Court, it probably helps that she has been underwhelmed by decades of feminist progress, from 1960s liberation (which, she argues, barely changed our sexual hierarchies and desires) to the #MeToo movement.