Other journalists had searched for her already, but I’d looked harder. I’d called people in her home town and at the local high schools, public and private. I’d consulted the yearbooks of the colleges she’d supposedly attended, and their alumni offices. I’d canvassed aging former volunteers for the Presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, for whom she was volunteering that night, fifty-one years ago, when she challenged Robert F. Kennedy in a sleepy airport diner in Indianapolis.

From their two-hour conversation, an eighteen-year-old undergraduate named Pat Sylvester came to embody, for Bobby Kennedy, a whole generation of idealistic young Americans, the ones who, he hoped, would help make him President. And, ever since, people have tried tracking her down. But, as my own quest to find her fizzled, I came to doubt that she’d ever actually existed. Then, suddenly, not long ago, she materialized.

It began in the wee hours of May 8, 1968. Kennedy, then a junior senator from New York, had just survived a crucial challenge to his fledging, fragile candidacy, beating back a determined McCarthy, along with Indiana’s governor, who was a stand-in for Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, in the Indiana Presidential primary. Now he could go on to fight in Oregon and California.

But, amid all the excitement that evening, Kennedy had forgotten to eat, and finding food at that hour wasn’t easy. “The only place in Indianapolis where you can get even a glass of water after 1 a.m. is the airport,” the New York Post writer Jimmy Breslin, who was there covering the campaign, groused. So out to the airport they all went: the candidate, a few aides, and some intrepid reporters who’d learned in Dallas never to leave a Kennedy unattended.

That’s where they found Sylvester, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Breslin later wrote. With her was a second McCarthy volunteer, whom she’d met just minutes earlier, a twenty-one-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina named Taylor Branch. Years later, he’d win a Pulitzer Prize for the first of three books he wrote on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sylvester was wearing a straw hat with a McCarthy ribbon wrapped around it, and Branch sported two McCarthy pins on his tan jacket. They’d missed their respective flights out that night, to Providence by way of Pittsburgh for her, to Atlanta for him. Both sat, exhausted and dejected, by their suitcases.

Kennedy had won the primary that night, but something still gnawed at him: he considered McCarthy’s volunteers superior to his own. Just the night before, at a local restaurant called Sam’s Attic, when someone had told Kennedy that McCarthy’s kids were “brighter, more radical, more committed” than his, Kennedy had shaken “his drooping head affirmatively,” according to Jack Newfield, of the Village Voice. “I wish I had some of them,” Kennedy lamented.

Mary McGrory, of the Washington Star, who had studied the Kennedys for twenty years, spotted that same envy. “He does not need them, but he wants them,” she wrote. “They would bring luster and spontaneity to what is a dazzling but mechanical effort.” But those very kids hated him, Kennedy knew. They considered him a coward for equivocating on Vietnam and an opportunist both for bigfooting their candidate and for jumping into the race belatedly.

Now, making his way through the empty terminal, Kennedy spotted Sylvester and Branch, walked over to them, smiling, and invited them to join him for a bite to eat. “All right,” Sylvester replied, before trying to place her McCarthy hat on Kennedy’s head. They seated themselves in a booth across from Kennedy, while a knot of reporters hovered nearby. Kennedy was smaller than Branch had imagined, but something else about him made a bigger impression: his intense blue eyes.

Then, for the next couple of hours, Kennedy probed and proselytized, trying to understand why the two preferred McCarthy to him and seeing if he could change their minds. Breslin got at least some of it down and, alone among the reporters, wrote it up. The others were, as reporters like to say, just “gathering string.”

Though Bobby Kennedy was one of the most famous men in the world, Sylvester wasn’t cowed. Instead, she let him have it, criticizing his inconsistent stance on Vietnam, lambasting his ineffectual campaign workers, and complaining about the unfair advantage Kennedy enjoyed simply by dint of his famous name. When Kennedy asked the two what they now planned to do following their candidate’s setback in this most recent primary, she didn’t mince words. “We’re going to stay,” she answered. “Most of them will. The ones who like McCarthy don’t want you.”

The more Kennedy pressed, depicting McCarthy as a racially insensitive dilettante who didn’t really want to be President, a man who was taking advantage of his volunteers, the more Sylvester and Branch dug in. And the deeper they dug in, the more Kennedy admired, and coveted, them. “I remember him complaining that McCarthy got the A students and he got the gentlemen’s-C frat boys,” Branch told me. Meanwhile, according to Breslin, two female Kennedy campaign workers sitting at the table squirmed. “What I wouldn’t give for that girl,” one told the other.

“He had won in Indiana, but he couldn’t win over those kids, and they really got to him,” a key Kennedy aide, Fred Dutton, later recalled. “For days afterward, he talked about that boy and girl in the airport coffee shop—how great they were, in their idealism and determination.” Kennedy never forgot the pair; it’s pretty fair to say, though, that that understates the impact they’d had on him, for he was to live only four more weeks.

For Branch, too, Sylvester was a revelation. The undergraduate school in Chapel Hill was still nearly all male; there, and in his native Atlanta, he’d met few young women like her, so audacious and politically engaged. “We communed,” he recalled. He told her so, and it stuck with her. “He said that he was surprised to be able to communicate so well with a girl,” Sylvester wrote to a friend, shortly afterward.

Breslin’s account ends on a happy note, with Branch and Sylvester leaving the airport with Kennedy after he offered to get hotel rooms for them. To Breslin’s eye, Kennedy’s wooing was working; it marked his second triumph of the evening. “It was, last night in Indianapolis, a very good night for Robert Kennedy,” he wrote.

In fact, the two had spurned Kennedy’s offer—“we said we’d be fine,” she later wrote—and opted to spend what was left of the night in the deserted terminal. But, rather than trying to catch some sleep, they decided to write Kennedy a letter. Taking turns on a yellow legal pad, they worked on it until dawn, composing what Branch called “a frenzied, sleepy-eyed rehashing” of their discussion, letting him know that, while he hadn’t won them over, he’d impressed them anyway.

As day broke, they walked to a nearby motel where they thought Kennedy was staying and slipped their manifesto—“a treatise, really,” Branch said—under what they believed to be his door. “For all I know, they gave us the wrong room number, or they threw it in the trash,” Branch recalled. Then the two separated, without exchanging phone numbers. After all, Branch had other things on his mind; his draft physical was coming up, he was graduating soon, and getting married after that.

According to Leon Fink, her boyfriend at the time and now a retired history professor from the University of Illinois, Sylvester was “bemused” by Breslin’s article, which appeared the next day. (It was only from reading it that Sylvester’s politically conservative parents, from whom she was largely estranged, learned that Pat had even been in Indiana.) And, for the next half century, Breslin’s account of that evening, and of Pat Sylvester, was all that history had.

But Branch didn’t forget her, and at one point he tried tracking her down—to learn, as he put it, how their shared experience “had settled” with her afterward. He would ask after her whenever he ran into former McCarthy volunteers or women who had gone to Pembroke, a women’s college, later swallowed up by Brown, to which he believed she’d gone. He reached out to Brown as well. No one knew anything. And, unsure whether he and Breslin even had her name right, he’d simply given up.

Tom Shea, a journalist with the Springfield Republican, also looked for her. He had learned of Sylvester in 1973, from reading a biography of Kennedy by Jack Newfield, a Village Voice reporter. He met Newfield sixteen years later and asked him about her. Every year on the anniversary of R.F.K.’s assassination—this Thursday is the fifty-first—Shea wrote a column about Bobby Kennedy, and he had devoted the 2011 edition to her. It marked one last attempt of his to find her—“a message in a bottle,” he said.

A few years ago, determined to track her down for a biography he was writing of Kennedy, Larry Tye turned to Accurint, a search engine connected, it boasts, to more than sixty-five billion public records. No dice. I searched twice, in 2017 and last year, while researching and then publicizing a book I wrote on Kennedy and King. I, too, had grown curious about Pat Sylvester. Who was she? What brought her to Indianapolis that night? And what had become of her since? How well had her idealism served her? Or, more likely, what had been the depth of her disappointment?

I contacted various Sylvesters in Milton, Massachusetts—her home town, Breslin had written. And Milton High School. And Milton Academy. And the University of Massachusetts. And Brown, which was more than ready for me. “We have received this same request a number of times in the past year, so I know the back story and we have an answer already on hand,” Brian Clark, the school’s director of news and editorial development, wrote back. And veterans of the McCarthy campaign in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Washington, D.C., all the way up to Sam Brown, McCarthy’s youth coördinator. And the curator of the Eugene McCarthy papers, at the University of Minnesota, who scoured the roster of campaign volunteers for me.

There was no trace of her anywhere. Nor did a short online piece I wrote for Time produce her or anyone who had known her. In the Google era, it’s pretty hard for anyone to vanish, but, somehow, Pat Sylvester had managed to. One New York newsman mocked my persistence, and naïveté. “You’ve now learned what many of us knew throughout his career: Breslin made stuff up,” he said to me, in an e-mail.

Then, in March of this year, a Milton Academy graduate named Reva Seybolt, now a life coach in Vermont, stumbled upon a note I’d sent her via Facebook in December, 2017. What she wrote me was thrilling, then crushing, then intriguing. “I just saw your message,” she said, adding, “patsy died of breast cancer a long, long time ago. If you still need info, I can get you in touch with her daughter.”

And she did. With breathtaking speed, I was in touch with people who’d known and loved her, and reading the letters she’d written around the time of her meeting with Kennedy. Patsy—she was never Pat to her friends—had died, but now some part of her had come back to life. I wrote to Branch, saying simply that I’d cracked the story. “Is she alive?” he quickly e-mailed back. “If so, might she speak with me?”

Patsy had attended Milton Academy, but only through the ninth grade. She’d then moved to the Westtown School, a Quaker institution in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where she became politically active and, in June, 1966, was elected co-president of the student body. A picture on the front page of the school paper, Brown and White, showing her with a pixie haircut and pearls, captured her free spirit, though not her uncertainties or her flaming red hair. She graduated in June, 1967, shortly after taking a bus to New York to march in the Spring Mobilization against the Vietnam war.

She had indeed been at the University of Massachusetts in 1968, just as Breslin claimed. But, even before Indianapolis, she’d shown a penchant for fateful airport encounters, the by-product of a probing, improvisational life style. It was in a second such rendezvous that she’d met Leon Fink (she’d been reading Sartre when he struck up a conversation), and it was during another chance encounter that a Harvard boy had invited her to campaign for McCarthy in Indiana.

And, as far away as Indiana then seemed, she up and went. As her letters make clear, she was at loose ends at the time, quoting Rod McKuen and W. H. Auden, subsisting on cigarettes and coffee, careening between nihilism, activism, and radicalism. (Two nights before the balloting in Indiana, she’d experimented with pot and Scotch, and her stomach had gone haywire.) With his detached and cynical mien—he didn’t seem to take either himself or politics too seriously—McCarthy appealed to her; Kennedy was all gung ho in a way she found off-putting.

“This is so damn exciting,” she wrote to her Westtown roommate, Margy Frysinger. “I’m a politician at heart when I became involved, and I am involved. Right to the roots of my hair. We all live, breathe, eat McCarthy.” Naturally, she said, she was “anti-Kennedy, but not anti his workers. They’re just misguided.” To her, by contrast, McCarthy’s volunteers were unbelievably dedicated, putting their grades and even their lives (the men had jeopardized their draft exemptions by dropping out to work for him)—on the line.“We are mentally prepared for defeat—but won’t accept it easily,” she wrote on the eve of the vote. “For McCarthy we pray.”

Kennedy may have “neutralized” Branch that night, as he later put it, impressing him in particular with his sensitivity to racial issues, but he didn’t have the same effect on Sylvester. “In the airport at 1:00 a.m., a guy and I were sitting with our McCarthy stuff in the middle of the hall,” she wrote. “We were discussing our anti-Kennedy feelings, when, lo, along comes a group of Kennedyophiles. In the second wave of them, the Senator walked toward us. He smiled, shook our hands (and put his arm on my shoulder) and invited us for breakfast.

“For an hour + 45 mins we talked with him directly and openly,” she went on. “We learned a lot of stuff from him. Accordingly we told him a lot of stuff. We were open in our criticism of Kennedy’s workers—how dumb they were and how they couldn’t satisfactorily explain why they were for Kennedy over McCarthy.” To her, even the Republican governor from New York, Nelson Rockefeller, may have been preferable to Kennedy. “We now have some serious thinking to do before we decide for whom we really are,” she wrote. “And it may end up being Rockefeller. One cannot be a-political. I was not involved before, and now I am immeshed in everything that’s going on.”

To her friends, the encounter with Bobby Kennedy—and particularly her attempt to place a McCarthy hat on his head—was not just the product of an anti-authoritarian Quaker education; it was pure, vintage Patsy. “She would do outrageous things every now and then, for someone who would act pretty proper and reserved most of the time,” Frysinger, now a retired administrator in Pennsylvania, said. “She was very feisty,” Nina Brown, a landscape architect in Boston, said. “She had the ability to tell you a difficult truth about yourself and make you laugh.”

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During the despondent summer of 1968, with both Kennedy and King now dead, Sylvester had forsworn waiting tables—“I just cannot push $300 worth of pots + pans in people’s faces when they should use the money for something else”—and worked full time for McCarthy. Branch slowly soured on McCarthy, but the candidate remained “imbedded in my bones,” Sylvester wrote. Unbeknownst to either of them, they both attended the Democratic Convention, in Chicago, that August: he was inside, as a McCarthy volunteer; she was outside, getting tear-gassed.

When she returned to college, it was to McGill; it wasn’t only draft-age men who fled to Canada in those days. After graduating, she remained in Montreal, married briefly, raised a daughter by herself, forsook politics and subsisted (barely) on freelance writing and editing. She died in August, 1990, ten days after turning forty-one.

Her daughter, now Nicole Fournier-Sylvester, an education manager for the Global Centre for Pluralism, in Ottawa, was fourteen at the time. Though she remembers how apoplectic her mother grew upon learning that her parents had voted for Ronald Reagan, she never heard her talk about meeting Bobby Kennedy. She’d learned of that only after happening upon Breslin’s column among her grandmother’s personal effects, and from picking up a Kennedy biography at a book fair in Martha’s Vineyard.

All these years later, she told me, her mother’s life in politics remains elusive to her. But did she recognize the firebrand Breslin described? “One hundred and fifty per cent,” she replied. She recalled her mother chastising her for wearing earrings shaped like peace signs without bothering to learn what they represented. “She had no patience for frivolity and wanted me to understand the importance of taking clear and informed positions,” she said. “For better or worse, she was frank. Some people didn’t experience it in a positive way. But, luckily, Robert Kennedy did.”

In a dark corner of my house, where a built-in bookshelf curves out of sight and out of reach, near the ceiling, I keep a couple dozen books that I haven’t brought myself to get rid of but don’t want anyone to see. It’s a connoisseur’s collection of the writing of Ayn Rand and her disciples, assembled by teen-age me a long, long time ago. My first girlfriend, an older woman in her early twenties, introduced me to Rand. I had recently immigrated to the United States from Russia, come out, and dropped out of high school, and somehow Rand’s writing spoke to me, made the world appear simple and conquerable. My Rand phase was relatively brief, but, before it ended, I bluffed my way into my first job in publishing by talking Rand with my future boss, a trailblazing gay publisher who was similarly obsessed with her.

According to a new book, this is normal, sort of. In “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” Lisa Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, notes that, although Rand’s brand of sexual liberation didn’t extend to homosexuality, her female heroines refuse to conform to feminine norms, and her male heroes are all in love with one another. I was certainly not the only queer teen-ager who was seduced by these books, which Duggan calls “conversion machines that run on lust.” The therapeutic value of Duggan’s book goes well beyond freeing me from shame for my teen-age lack of literary taste and political discernment; it also provides an explanation for our current cultural and political moment.

Part of American Studies Now, a series of slim volumes published by the University of California Press, Duggan’s book sums up Rand’s life and philosophy in under ninety pages—an affront to a novelist whose magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” came in at more than ten times that length. “How could a thousand-plus-page novel, featuring cartoonish characters moving through a melodramatic plot peppered with long didactic speeches, attract so many readers and so much attention?” Duggan asks. “Clearly, the fantasies animating the novel struck a deep chord.”

Rand’s novels promised to liberate the reader from everything that he had been taught was right and good. She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious, physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were. Duggan calls the mood of the books “optimistic cruelty.” They are mean, and they have a happy ending—that is, the superior beings are happy in the end. The novels reverse morality. In them, there is no duty to God or one’s fellow-man, only to self. Sex is plentiful, free of consequence, and rough. Money and other good things come to those who take them. Rand’s plots legitimize the worst effects of capitalism, creating what Duggan calls “a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.”

Duggan traces Rand’s influence, both direct and indirect, on American politics and culture. Rand’s fiction was a vehicle for her philosophy, known as Objectivism, which consecrated an extreme form of laissez-faire capitalism and what she called “rational egoism,” or the moral and logical duty of following one’s own self-interest. Later in life, Rand promoted Objectivism through nonfiction books, articles, lectures, and courses offered through an institute that she established, called the Foundation for the New Intellectual. She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who helped shape neoliberal thinking. When Rand was actively publishing fiction—from the nineteen-thirties until 1957, when “Atlas Shrugged” came out—hers was a marginal political perspective. Critics panned her novels, which gained their immense popularity gradually, by word of mouth. Mid-century American political culture was dominated by New Deal thinking, which prized everything that Rand despised: the welfare state, empathy, interdependence. By the nineteen-eighties, however, neoliberal thinking had come to dominate politics. The economist Alan Greenspan, for example, was a disciple of Rand’s who brought her philosophy to his role as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford and, from 1987 until 2006, as the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Duggan doesn’t blame Rand for neoliberalism, exactly, but she spotlights the Randian spirit of what she calls the “Neoliberal Theater of Cruelty.” This theatre would include players we don’t necessarily describe as neoliberal. Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker, is a Rand evangelist who gave out copies of “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents to his staff and said that she “did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism.” When the Tea Party came out in force against the Affordable Care Act, in 2009, some of them carried signs reading “Who Is John Galt?,” a reference to “Atlas Shrugged.” Rand’s spirit is prominent in Silicon Valley, too: the billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and others have credited Rand with inspiring them. The image of the American tech entrepreneur could have come from one of her novels. If she were alive today, she would probably adopt the word “disruption.”

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The collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 should have brought about the death of neoliberalism by making plain the human cost of deregulation and privatization; instead, writes Duggan, “zombie neoliberalism” is now stalking the land. And, of course, the spirit of Ayn Rand haunts the White House. Many of Donald Trump’s associates, including the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, have paid homage to her ideas, and the President himself has praised her novel “The Fountainhead.” (Trump apparently identifies with its architect hero, Howard Roark, who blows up a housing project he has designed for being insufficiently perfect.) Their version of Randism is stripped of all the elements that might account for my inability to throw out those books: the pretense of intellectualism, the militant atheism, and the explicit advocacy of sexual freedom. From all that Rand offered, these men have taken only the worst: the cruelty. They are not even optimistic. They are just plain mean.

The line for which the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is best known is also his ugliest: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” He was referring to a woman named Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, in the case of Buck v. Bell, from 1927, which held that it was constitutional for a state to forcibly sterilize Carrie, a poor white woman who was deemed “feeble-minded,” for the greater good of promoting social welfare. Summing up the views of the eugenics movement, an avid cause of progressive reformers and intellectual élites at the time, Holmes explained, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” The opinion was joined by all of the Justices save for one, Pierce Butler, who was the Court’s lone Catholic at the time. Catholics, a population that many Protestants wished would reproduce less, vocally opposed eugenic sterilization as being an unnatural interference with procreation.

Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. In fact, the case was cited approvingly in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, for the proposition that one does not have “an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases,” which meant that a state was constitutionally permitted to put some limits on the right to abortion announced in Roe. For some, the history of states’ forced sterilization of women—and the Supreme Court’s role in permitting it—might seem a sinister precursor to contemporary efforts to control women’s sexual and reproductive freedom by restricting access to abortion. For others, the history of eugenics in America might instead provoke a very different fear: that progressives today, much as in the past, may wish to prevent the unfortunate and disfavored from being born—this time by allowing individuals to abort certain fetuses, and doing so with a discriminatory tilt.

Concurring in an abortion case in May, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a lengthy and lurid polemic, warning that abortion rights are a form of racist eugenics revivalism. The statute at issue, passed in Indiana and signed into law, in 2016, by Mike Pence, the governor at the time, prohibited providers from performing an abortion if they know that it is sought solely because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. The Seventh Circuit invalidated the law as unconstitutional, under the Supreme Court’s precedents, because it was an “undue burden” on the abortion right. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case, expressing no view on its merits, and decided instead to wait until other courts of appeals weigh in on a handful of similar laws from other states. Thomas agreed with the Court’s denial of the petition, but he wrote separately to make clear that laws like Indiana’s “promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Thomas connected a series of real dots: the “scientific” belief in black inferiority that informed the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement; the eugenicism espoused by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood; and Sanger’s promotion of birth control in poor black neighborhoods. Some mid-century arguments for legalizing abortion—including those made by Alan Guttmacher, who went on to succeed Sanger as president of Planned Parenthood—made eugenic appeals, saying that abortion was important to controlling the “quality” of the population. Thomas linked those facts to contemporary statistics on abortion. According to the New York Department of Health, in some areas of New York City, “black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to aborted than white children in the same area.” Thomas even called up the contested assertion, made by the journalist Stephen Dubner and the economist Steven Levitt in their book “Freakonomics,” that Roe v. Wade led, a generation later, to a massive decline in crime, because the availability of legal abortion meant that many people did not have the unwanted babies whose poor circumstances would have led them to grow up to commit crimes. Thomas discerned in all of this an echo of eugenicists’ racially inflected wish for society to be rid of the “unfit.”

While the eugenics and abortion movements may have disquieting intersections, the notion that abortion rights are the direct heir to our history of eugenic sterilization is unfounded. Nobody is advocating forcible abortion, for eugenic or any other reason. A state forcibly sterilizing women from disfavored groups bears little similarity to a state allowing individuals to make decisions to terminate their own pregnancies—even in cases in which they may do so because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. The former eliminated a person’s ability to decide whether to reproduce, whereas the latter enables it.

But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability can be made relevant to a fetus, then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights—like people. This move imbues the fetus with rights that the pregnant person—and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate. What is really at stake is an idea of fetal personhood.

It is not coincidental that in the same case, last month, the Court upheld part of the Indiana law, which prohibited abortion providers from disposing of fetal remains as they would surgical waste. Keeping the law in place, the Court reasoned that how fetal remains are disposed of after abortion doesn’t affect access to the abortion itself. But it does transform cultural practices surrounding the treatment of fetuses, through gestures that suggest they are person-like entities, and point at their rights. Indeed, in defending the law, Indiana asserted an interest in the “humane and dignified disposal of human remains.”

Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being. Tribe observed that “solutions that split the difference—denying some fetuses life and some women liberty—hardly offer a solution.” But splitting that difference has been our legal solution for half a century. During this time, the interest of neither the fetus nor the pregnant woman has been treated as absolute.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court explicitly refused to “resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” From there, over multiple decisions a scheme emerged of weighing the state’s interest in protecting the fetus against the woman’s limited right to abortion, which lessens through the pregnancy in relation to the fetus’s increasing age. In holding, at different times, that states may not act on the belief that human life begins at conception or plant a “substantial obstacle” in the path of someone who wishes to abort a fetus before “viability”—a line that is constantly shifting along with improvements in medical technology—the Court has discreetly drawn its own limits around the big question it said it wasn’t resolving.

The abortion fight we are gearing up for departs from the realm of uneasy compromise and reëngages the clash of absolutes. For decades, conservatives have sought to overturn Roe. Yet simply getting rid of Roe would leave each state legislature free to choose its own approach to abortion, from liberal abortion access in Northeast states to outright or near-total bans like the “fetal heartbeat” bills recently passed in several states, which ban abortion as early as the sixth week of pregnancy. But, for anti-abortion activists, that goal may no longer be enough. Last month, when the Alabama legislature passed an extreme, near-total ban on abortion, Republican lawmakers explicitly rejected exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you truly believe that a fetus is a person, then it shouldn’t matter how the fetus was conceived. Its rights as a human being are the same.

When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point—that every “unborn child” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me. And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe. It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to allow abortions at all. This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition—would go far beyond what either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible, but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now entering the legal mainstream are headed.

A previous version of this piece incorrectly described the abortion legislation in Alabama.

It might have begun with “Borat.” In that Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary, from 2006, which was subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the protagonist has a particular way of saying “my wife,” which, after the film’s release, became an inescapable catchphrase. For a while, it lived alongside Austin Powers one-liners about being horny as a ubiquitous cultural artifact that made most people wince. But then, several years ago, it circled the Möbius strip of asinine humor and landed on the amusing side: “my wife” was somehow funnier than ever. It was funny to imagine Bob Dylan saying “my wife,” or Al Pacino. It was funny to imagine saying “my wife” so many times that your actual wife divorced you. It was funny to insert the phrase “Borat voice my wife” into pop songs. There was something about the word “wife” itself. It seemed perfectly suited to a man like Borat, who named his son “Hooeylewis” and didn’t believe that women should be allowed to drive. (I haven’t watched the movie in years, but I suspect that it would not entirely hold up in, as they say, the current climate.)

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Though I’m a straight woman who has—you hate to see it—organized her life around long-term, monogamous partnerships with men, I’ve always held the word “wife” at a distance. So much so that, though I have been with the same man for the past ten years and hope to spend the rest of my life with him, I do not want to be his wife. (Me? I find myself thinking. A wife? In this economy?) The very word is freighted with a history that I would prefer not to join, one in which women have been asked to conceive of their systemic subservience to men as a pleasure and a calling—to make a badge of honor out of a badge of woe, as the Stanford historian Marilyn Yalom suggests in her book “A History of the Wife,” published in 2001. According to the doctrine of coverture, which developed in the Middle Ages but aspects of which persisted into the twentieth century, “the very . . . existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband,” as Sir William Blackstone put it, in 1765. Women responded in part by carving out their own forms of soft power, and thus the word “wife” took on additional valences. Structurally speaking, the wife was controlled by her husband, but, culturally, the joke was that she controlled him. In the nineteen-sixties, a survey reported the most common joking terms used by men to refer to their wives. “Battle-axe,” “boss,” and “ball and chain” were all close to the top.

Now, decades after the suffrage movement, and women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, the abstract idea of “the wife” still looms large in our cultural imagination—and sanctimony, loyalty, and resentment orbit her like moons. For a stretch, late in the last century and earlier in this one, literary fiction was overrun with titles that featured wives: there was Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” Amy Tan’s “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Paula McLain’s “The Paris Wife,” Téa Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife,” Anita Shreve’s “The Pilot’s Wife,” and, of course, “The Wife,” by Meg Wolitzer, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Glenn Close. “The Wife” is about Joan Castleman, the long-suffering helpmeet to Joe Castleman, a famous author who builds his legacy by leeching off Joan’s literary ambitions. In public, Joe lavishes praise on Joan as compensation for erasing her. Wife-veneration tastes a bit like imprisonment, even today.

A lot of young people use familial terms non-literally. Around the same time that “my wife” became funny again, teens started calling their favorite celebrities “Mom.” Hot men became “Daddy.” This way of speaking is indebted to queer communities and the informal family structures that ball culture invented and provides. There is, I think, a low-level longing, in this era of atomization and instability, for that kind of kinship. There is also pleasure, often of an ironic sort, in calling someone by a name that connotes indelible connection. The word “wife,” charged with the frisson of a lime-green mankini, quietly exaggerates our dependence on fixed ideas of one another. It highlights a ludicrous aspect of both heterosexuality and our more general desire to possess those we love. And, once you’ve been around it enough, it is fairly irresistible. Four of my wives are coming to see “The Fate of the Furious” with me, I think, selecting a block of seats at the theatre. At a bar, watching a male friend flirt with a stranger, I observe that my cursed father has found himself a bride. Sometimes, out of contextual necessity, I’ll call my boyfriend my partner; more often, in a Borat voice, I call him “my wife.” (The word “husband” has so far proved too stuffy—and the word “hubby” too gross—to really enter the pop-cultural lexicon. There’s never been a wave of husband-based book titles, for instance, although there is a 2016 novel by Jane Corry called “My Husband’s Wife.”)

The figure of the wife has also become an important trope within a specific, baroque type of Internet-based humor, and this isn’t accidental. Like Borat, the online world is profane and disorderly and constantly agitated; the wife, on the other hand, is imagined as sacred, eternal, controlled. When these two things connect, the idea of the wife starts to glitch. It now takes just a minor breeze of Internet attention for a wife to catch fire as a meme. An early example of the phenomenon dates to 2013, when a mysterious photo emerged on the Internet of a suburban garage door on which someone had spray-painted “STOP NOW! don’t e-mail my wife!!!!” (The image is one of the first things cited in an essay by the poet Patricia Lockwood about her experience of the Internet; in a recent piece about “the online wife,” the writer Miles Klee identified it as “patient zero of contemporary wife content.”) Another important wife meme entered the lexicon a few years later, when a man sent a message to a Facebook account shared by a married couple. “—DAVE DO NOT READ THIS—,” it began, and then, after a block of blank space, “Tara…hello.” In 2016, a man tweeted a screenshot of an outrageously confident e-mail he had sent to his “girlfriend’s husband,” insisting that he and this man’s wife had been “bowled over” by “a deep wellspring of powerful emotions” and saying that he was moving to somewhere in their vicinity so that he could be close to her. He added that he hoped she would be able to “grow and explore in other ways that she can share with everyone she loves.” Soon, there were song parodies. (“Is this the real wife / Is this just fantasy,” etc.)

If you want to avoid becoming a meme on the Internet, it is a mistake to display exorbitant possessiveness over a romantic partner. In 2017, a man named Robbie Tripp went viral when he posted a picture on Instagram of himself and his swimsuit-clad wife, which he captioned with two hundred and sixty-eight words that were intended to prove his enlightenment but came off as howlingly sanctimonious. “I love this woman and her curvy body,” he wrote. “As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side.” People began attaching the text to any picture whatsoever. In January, a rumor made the rounds on Twitter that there had been a falling-out among a group of men who ran a popular meme account called Da Share Z0ne, one of whom had angrily removed everyone else from the account because another member had been “talking to his wife.” In February, a minor Twitter personality who used a female avatar confessed that he was not a woman but a man pretending to be his own wife, who also happened to be in the process of divorcing him. In May, a popular YouTube gamer announced that he was separating from his wife, a professional elf cosplayer. His wife then tweeted that he had been cheating on her for months with another gamer—and that she had not been able to read whatever announcement he had made, because he had blocked her on Twitter.

It is getting increasingly absurd to observe intimate relationships filtered through the machinery of social media. (Imagine a married couple sitting meekly in therapy, the husband vowing to interact more intentionally with his meme account’s Twitter D.M.s.) Late last month, a Snapchat celebrity who goes by Shonduras earnestly tweeted, “i watched my wife fall off a cliff,” appending a nineteen-plus-minute video in which he and his wife, whose name is Jenny, tearfully discussed the aforementioned fall off a cliff, which can more accurately be described as a tumble down some rocks. Shonduras never stopped filming: he captured her fall and her tears, and put it all on the Internet. On the Internet, Jenny became Cliff Wife and achieved instant memedom. (“It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, I watched my wife fall off a cliff.”)

In all of these Wife Events, as Tom Whyman termed them, at the Outline, the Wife Guys had actively taken steps to embarrass themselves and their life partners. These stories, in other words, ultimately revolve around the needs and neuroses of men. And yet they are, nonetheless, a gratifying pleasure to behold. The wife as she has historically been understood isn’t made to exist in a world of Wife Events. She will have to change—and she is changing. The online wife is unbiddable, like an escaped llama or a trickster god. She cosplays as an elf; she tweets that her husband blocked her. You can e-mail her if you want to. The wife, as you read this, is gently rolling off a cliff.