This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 8th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Door War was a little noted and admittedly ill-conceived attempt at securing liberty

for the people of Rhode Island.

And though the war failed, the ideological fight for liberty there continued, and leading that

fight were many women largely forgotten by history.

Anthony Kamegna, assistant editor for intellectual history at libertarianism.org, comments.

In a previous podcast we discussed the Door War, which people can learn more about in that episode with you.

But this gives us an opportunity, at least,

to talk about some important women in history

and learn about how important women before suffrage were doing things that were critical

and sort of move the needle.

So Francis Whipple is one of these people.

What should we take away from her experience and her struggle?

Well, I guess, let me first say that while I was in graduate school several years ago starting

the topic for my dissertation, I picked the Loco F, a libertarian movement that had not been studied, something

that had been buried in the historical literature, and a movement that sp span many decades that I thought was worthy

of a revival.

And as I started working on it, I found very unexpectedly that women were a key force, at sometimes the key driving force in that movement,

which kept alive the most radical ideas from the Enlightenment from the American Revolution

throughout the 19th century.

So women's movements were extremely important, not only for Loc focalism, but for the classical liberal tradition.

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