Lane and Paterson not only wrote very similar books; they had very similar lives. Both began as American frontier girls; both had troubled relations with their parents. Both married young and quickly lost track of their husbands; both were popular novelists turned political philosophers; both grew into eccentric rural dotages, refusing Social Security and communicating with only a small, select circle of ideologically congenial confreres.
Lane and Paterson both seemed glad enough to see their husbands disappear; Rand cuckolded her do-nothing spouse in front of his face and with long, tedious rationalizations with which she forced him to agree. Lane had many intimate friendships, involving long-term travel and living arrangements, with other women; Paterson remained a proud exemplar of the Virginia Wolff dream of a woman with a Room of Her Own--in Paterson's case, one she built herself, both literally and figuratively.
Although libertarianism as a modern American ideology and movement was born largely from the work of Paterson, Lane, and Rand, women have tended not to play a large role in continuing the tradition. (There are, of course, notable exceptions, including former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel, whose focus on "dynamism" as the defining great characteristic of a free society and free market is prefigured in Paterson.) Why haven't women figured more prominently in the libertarian movement during the past few decades? All three of these women would reject the question's premise. They came to their conclusions and their careers as unique individuals, not as women, they would insist. They were individual--and individualist--phenomena, not examples of a type. These were not conventional women. None was concerned with specifically "feminine" issues, which helps explain why Paterson, Lane, and Rand have not attracted much attention from contemporary feminist scholars.
Did what they accomplished matter? Paterson, the novelist and literary critic, believed so much in the centrality of ideas to human history that she thought the world of books "actually comprises the world [human beings] have lived in, both mentally and physically. Everyone who lives in this country lives in books"--even an illiterate who "liv[es] in books he has never read."
Rand and Lane might not have agreed--Rand's major heroes in her last novel, Atlas Shrugged, were industrialists and inventors, not artists or intellectuals per se--but the history of their influence bears out Paterson's contention. Libertarians influenced by these three women, either firsthand or secondhand, are working to craft an America that, if they succeed, will be living in books that it mostly has never read. It will be an America that, they all would argue, will be better, richer, freer, and truer to its own roots.
Paterson, whose God of the Machine could be viewed as an extended valentine extolling America's many virtues, would be pleased to know that a set of ideas so well articulated by a woman who died long forgotten could still be in active play in America today, connected back to her by a long-circuit series of influences. But she would not be surprised. She knew that the individual mind was the dynamo that moved the world.�
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