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The new women’s studies project includes a scholarly journal ‘grounded in the basic fact that sex is real’

Arizona State University is expanding its School of Economic Thought and Leadership with a unique women and gender studies program taught from a conservative perspective.

The Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought began at the start of the current academic year.

“The primary goal of the Mercy Initiative is to provide a place on campus for women to consider and debate seriously our most pressing social and political issues through a classical liberal or conservative lens,” Richard Avramenko, director of the school, told The College Fix in a recent email.

Mercy Otis Warren (pictured) was an 18th century writer, historian, and political thinker who became the leading female philosopher of the American Revolution and the early United States, according to the National Women’s History Museum.

The Arizona State initiative’s leaders believe her significant contributions to political thought during a time when women’s voices were marginalized in the intellectual field make her a prime figure to base the program around.

Erika Bachiochi, a member of the initiative’s advisory board, told The College Fix how the inspiration for the program came from the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute.

The goal of the Wollstonecraft Project, which began in 2014, is to create a space where “students and scholars could think about neuralgic questions of sex and gender within an older philosophical paradigm,” Bachiochi said in a recent interview via email.

Bachiochi said the project explores “questions of sexual freedom and equality, considerations of sexual difference; the development of intellectual and moral virtue; and the relationship between rights, responsibilities and the common good.”

She said these themes are not often discussed in women and gender studies programs, or, if they are, they are examined under post-modern, post-structuralist, and Marxist paradigms.

The Mercy Initiative offers a pre-modern and traditional perspective, which is less common today.

MORE: 50-year-old women’s studies programs on chopping block

Avramenko told The Fix one of the things the initiative does is facilitate opportunities for students to learn from and be mentored by “intellectually diverse female faculty.” These female scholars are teaching and researching American ideas, institutions, and civic culture, he said.

Supporting the continued education of women pursuing life as a scholar or public intellectuals is another key component of the program, Avramenko said. “We plan to provide scholarships for both undergraduate and graduate students.”

Organizers also plan to host conferences and guest speakers at ASU to give students the chance to learn from and connect with an even larger pool of scholars in the field.

Additionally, the Mercy Initiative supports “Fairer Disputations,” an online journal with the mission to “advance a new school of feminist thought, one that is grounded in the basic fact that sex is real.”

It publishes new, “sex-realist” articles every week by scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from all over the world. Already published works include an article by an MIT professor about the changing definition of the term “gender,” and a piece written by an attorney and homeschooling mother exploring why some couples choose to have a large number of children.

“Fairer Disputations is the public voice of the Mercy Initiative, bringing the conversations and debates to an international audience,” Avramenko told The Fix.

Bachiochi, the editor-in-chief of the journal, told The Fix the inclusion of the “Fairer Disputations” in the ASU program also opens the door for students to access diverse ways of thinking about the variety of issues that the Mercy Initiative explores.

MORE: Two liberal scholars offer better way to discuss what is ‘racist’ and what is ‘sexist’: book review

IMAGE: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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