Well, there’s a lot to agree with here and some other things to disagree with. Certainly I’ve been reading and swapping links with Amp long enough that I found the post pretty frustrating too.

That said…

You wrote: “As for things like rape crisis lines, battered women’s shelters, and the like: I’m all for them! (Is there anyone who’s against them?) But why on earth should the federal government provide the funding for a battered women’s shelter in Uvalde, Texas? What’s the federal interest there?”

Well, I’m an anarchist, so I don’t think that the federal government has a legitimate interest in funding anything at all. But if you’re going through the list of things that it’s better or worse for the government to do, from a libertarian standpoint, most libertarians (and more or less all minarchists, I think) tend to take it that government funding for a criminal justice system is one of the most defensible forms of government funding you could have. But I don’t think that there’s any clear reason why government funding of battered women’s shelters (for example) is any more objectionable than government funding of jails; both could be thought of as spaces created as part of a criminal justice system (one to keep violent people in; the other to keep violent people out), and it’s not at all clear that jails are more successful as means of protecting battered women from their abusers than shelters are. So I guess what I’m wondering here is what the specific nature of your complaint is: (1) that it’s tax-funded anything (which would apply to jails and cops as well as shelters); (2) that it’s tax funding for services which are not appropriately provided by the government (which you might think applies to shelters but not to something else); or (3) that it’s federal tax funding for something which should instead be handled by the several states? If it’s (1) I agree but I think it’s very far down on my list of things to phase out (just as tax-funded homicide detectives are); if it’s (2) I don’t see what’s special about battered women’s shelters; and really if it’s (3) I don’t see what’s special about the federal as vs. the state governments. (There are lots of cases where federalizing law enforcement has had bad effects — e.g. in the efforts to beat up peaceful drug users — but I’m not sure what if any bad effects federalizing the grant-making for shelters or rape-crisis lines is supposed to have.)

“And is it so hard to believe that private charities can provide some of these services that Amp assumes the government must provide?”

Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating parts. Of course Amp knows perfectly well that shelters could be (and were) built from the ground-up without government support. It’s true that, given that government funding was out there, most shelters eventually ended up seeking that funding, but the pioneering decade of shelter-building in the 1970s was done almost entirely without government support, and it’s not clear that the effects of tax subsidies have been unequivocally positive, to say the least. (A lot of the first generation of women who built the shelters are pretty pissed off about the colonization of the movement by professional civil servants and nonprofit bureaucrats, the lack of credit for the feminist roots of the movement, and the precarious position that dependence on here-today-gone-tomorrow government grants has put many shelters in.)

Just before this, you said: ‘Life involves trade-offs. Women’s lives involve some particularly difficult trade-offs, regarding things like working, having children, taking time off from work, balancing work & home life, and on and on. I want those trade-offs and decisions to be weighed by individual women and their families. I don’t want government (especially the federal government) trying to impose “solutions” that seek to favor decision A over decision B.’

This is all true enough and right on, as far as it goes. But shouldn’t this be where libertarian feminism begins more than where it ends? Yeah, it’s true that we live in a world where a lot of women face hard trade-offs because they are women (or because their circumstances put them into some situation that’s peculiar to women). And it’s true that where this happens we need to trust individual women to make these decisions rather than depending on the (male-dominated) bureaucratic State to tell them what to do. That’s all true, and it’s important for some feminists to realize (especially liberal feminists, like the national leadership of NOW, who tend to have a lot more faith in the federal civil rights bureaucracy than the evidence really justifies). But of course part of the point of feminist diagnosis is to recognize that those hard trade-offs that women face are, themselves, not given by Nature; they are social facts, created by male supremacy, and they can be changed by concerted effort. (E.G., it’s true that women face a hard trade-off between keeping up with their career and spending time with their children. And given that they face this trade-off, we ought to trust individual women to make the decision that’s best for them. But we ought also to work so that women don’t have to face such a hard trade-off, and to make other options — like more flexible workplaces or, hey, getting Dad to pitch in at least as much — reasonably available. There’s nothing paternalistic or objectionable from libertarian principles about working for that; the important thing is just that we have to work for it by means of cultural change and voluntary alternatives, rather than through the coercive powers of the State.)