She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a contributing editor for The New Republic.
[12] She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and she has served on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the National Humanities Center.
Elshtain contributed to national debates on the family, the roles of men and women, the state of American democracy, and international relations for more than thirty-five years.
Carlin Romano, author of America the Philosophical, explains in his work that Elshtain's aim "was not so much to lobby for specific policies as to push for good civic-minded 'individualism' over the egoism of 'bad individualism'".
[16] Beginning by examining America's societal interpretations of gender roles during wartime (man as a brave fighter and woman as a pacifist), Elshtain argues that men may make poor civic soldiers due to the fact that they are predisposed to a dangerous kind of eager adolescence on the battlefield, while women may be enthusiastically patriotic and possess a kind of necessary maturity, which is vital to successful combat.
Rather, she recognizes that Americans are no longer acting as representative bodies in governments, which embrace separate interests and also work as a collective towards the betterment of the whole.