When marriage endangers women, it also endangers children. Anti-feminists ignore vast amounta of data and historical precedents that make clear the harms done to women before feminism--and the fact that those harms accrued to children, as well. (And are still happening many places, including in America, as in the brutal sacrifice of child brides.)
Your essay focuses on the ways a deadened language mistepresents feminism. I think the facile ignorance of feminism's work also arises from the widespread historical ignorance of our presentist times. People toss around the word 'fascism" carelessly, as a synonym for generic "evil," because fewer amd fewer people know much of anything about history, most especially the history of women and feminism.
You fail to address the biggest problem with Gress, Schlafly, and their ilk: they are all, to a woman, gigantic hypocrites. A woman with an advanced degree and a paying job as an author and academic or political operative has that position SOLELY because feminists fought for her. Absent feminism those women never would have learned to read and certainly never would have had remunerative and prestigious careers. This will always be the hole at the waterline for Gress’a argument. She wants to kick the ladder away after she’s climbed it
I laughed endlessly at opening Gress’s newest book to see print praise from female doctors, lawyers, professors, intellectuals…. like ma’am this alone puts you on tenuous ground and I haven’t read a word of your argument yet 😂
I saw that. I then put the book on the library shelf and decided that I had plenty to read already. Seriously, any woman arguing that feminism is entirely bad and doing it in any kind of a public role immediately refutes her own argument.
Women’s participation in public life was sharply restricted before feminism and limited exclusively to upper class women. Gress is either ignorant of all of history or deliberately concealing it and in either case her book is a waste of time.
Not exactly, women certainly wrote books and contributed throughout history, but they certainly WEREN’T lawyers and doctors and professors and PhDs. In the era directly preceding feminism, women were consistently restricted from these types of educational and vocational options.
I was responding to Karen, who seems to think that women were not given any kind of a public voice in the era before feminism. Since you agree women wrote books and contributed to academia throughout history, I assume your complaint is narrower, that women specifically could not hold certain degrees or join certain professions. Is that really true, though? I mean, in the era just preceding feminism, maybe so, but if you look at the history of something like women in medicine, we find that they practiced throughout the middle ages. It seems like the decline of women practicing medicine in Europe corresponded with the Catholic Church falling out of political power around the 14th century or so.
As for degrees, universities were traditionally for clerics, so of course women were not admitted, and thus "couldn't hold degrees," but just leaving it at that completely misrepresents the place of women in academia. Convents served as a sort of parallel to universities, and religious sisters were educated and contributed to academia just as much as religious brothers and priests did. That's why you see women "contributing throughout history," as you acknowledge, though without holding PhDs. It doesn't actually seem like this is that much of an oppression.
It strikes me, though, that we are supposed to think that women were not allowed to participate in academic or political society when of course the women who kicked off feminism did just that.
Ah gotcha your comment got tagged as a response to mine. I think we talk past each other in these discussions when we aren’t clear about what exactly we mean by “before feminism”. Do we mean the 1500s or the mid-1800s? Feminism was a response to the specific social culture of its time, which, yes, seriously disadvantaged and endangered women. I think we agree that in the 1500s (under Catholicism) women could buy land, be in charge of estates of money, have a trade, join a convent and be educated, etc etc AND that doesn’t help make a case that feminism was unnecessary or unhelpful for the woman of the 1800s, who couldn’t do any of that with legitimacy!
I love this essay, Esther. This is kind of an aside, but I recently had fruitful conversations with two pro life advocates who blame feminism for abortion, and dislike feminism for its presumed role. I pointed out that abortion is common and sometimes even forced on women in many patriarchal countries like China and India--and it's definitely not because these societies are so "feminist." I've worked with women who were forced or coerced to have abortions by unsupportive male partners who didn't want to take responsibility for the pregnancy. To me, feminism is so much more complicated than its enemies want to admit.
I am afraid this argument does not quite work. Yes, plenty of non-feminist societies have legal abortion and even legal infanticide.
But the modern abortion industry in the West, the largest ongoing mass murder in human history (see link below), to what movement do we owe that? Feminism.
Feminist premises do not NECESSARILY entail mass abortion, anymore than communist premises necessarily entail gulags. But to deny that feminism is plainly the cause of our actual abortion situation in THIS era is as intellectually dishonest as denying that there is any connection between gulags and communism.
How do you know that feminism is chiefly responsible for the scale of abortion in the west? Do we have data on this? While I'm sure feminist-type values play a significant role, and may serve as the pretty packaging on 'pro-choice', it is undeniable that unsupportive male partners who reject parental responsibility also play a significant role. Anecdotally, 100% of the women I know who have had an abortion were significantly pressured (I would say coerced) by their partners, and the women had to shoulder that regret and disappointment. Personally, I consider this a serious problem that does not seem to be addressed sufficiently at all, including by feminism, but underscores part of the reason why women feel the need for such a movement.
I think you have not quite understood me: I am not arguing that the majority of the individual women who choose abortion are doing so for “feminist reasons” (whatever we might decide those are), I am saying that feminism as an ideology is the reason for the modern western abortion slaughter’s existence, right now.
Aside from the personal reasons (including coercion) that a woman might choose abortion for herself, I think this point—why the thing is legal in the first place, continues to be legal, and is socially acceptable—is quite obvious.
But in case it is not, it is clear once one asks these questions:
-In what ideology were the movements to legalize abortion in the West based?
-What kinds of arguments are most commonly used to defend its continued legality?
-What ideology are opponents of abortion most commonly accused of rejecting?
-What do mainstream feminists consistently identify as the most important of their freedoms?
The abortion-feminist connection is, to my mind, the most plainly obvious problem with the idea that we can have Catholic or Christian feminism. It might be a solvable problem (I argue it is not), but the difficulty with which so many have even *acknowledging* this problem does not inspire confidence. It is as if there were a group of “Christian communists” that begin the debate by asking their opponents to provide evidence that communism is anti-religion.
Now, there is certainly a motive on the pro-abortion side to fudge the numbers, if it turned out coercion was in fact a greater percentage. So the data might be false. On the other hand, given the sheer volume of abortions, 1% of them is still scores and scores of women, so the data could be quite accurate. 1% of 50 million abortions worldwide (per year) is 500,000 coercions a year, after all.
Thank you for the link. Even as I wrote it, I was wondering about the likelihood of any data even being remotely accurate. Particularly given that in many countries (such as the UK where I'm from), women are unlikely to disclose that they are being pressured due to safeguarding implications. Especially if it's an ongoing 'partner'. They would likely describe themselves under the category 'she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems' (48%). Even if it is because their 'partner' threatens to leave them unless they terminate their pregnancy (like in several cases I have known).
I understand your argument and resonate with the main thrust. Although I personally consider the sexual liberation movement more generally to be the main culprit. If it wasn't for the fact that a large portion of men believe they benefit from modern 'family planning' practices, I highly doubt that abortion would be legal, or at least as accessible as it is, regardless of any feminist movements.
Nevertheless, I think it is unhelpful to pit one sex against another. Clearly this has a deleterious impact on everyone in the long run, especially the family unit.
Trying to pin it on a singular sociopolitical movement is probably equally erroneous. In the long run societal change is multifactorial and dialectical. Problems cannot only be attributed to one 'side' or movement. Likewise they are unlikely to be solved in a unilateral fashion either.
I haven't read Carrie Gress's latest book but I intend to and resonated with her other books. I wouldn't call myself a feminist, although I sympathise with some aspects, as I too think there is too strong an association with anti-reproductive ideology and I am very pro-family. I believe we have to think about such issues much more systemically, and men's and women's concerns are interdependent.
Overall I get the sense that this is what 'Catholic feminism' is aiming at (pro-family), to counter the uncool 'patriarchal' brand.
Personally I would appreciate a movement more focused on the family as a unit. If we could promote building skills and values that bring men and women together to build harmonious, mutually respectful and fruitful families and communities, that would be good!
"even forced on women in many patriarchal countries like China"
Funny you say that! Do you think there's something else notable about China, for example, western marxism which got imported into it? Or perhaps the leader under which it happened - Deng Xiaoping - who studied Marxism-Leninism in France and Russia?
"and India"
Ah, I remember that - it's the country where Margaret Sanger travelled to, arguing for women to have less kids and more abortions. I believe you're referring to Indira Gandhi who did that. Is there a reason you're ignoring that she was pressured by US into adopting such policy, which by the way, led to sterilization of mostly men? How did she convince some of them? What policies did she implement?
Anyway, remember when "UN" gave its population award - the same year they founded such award - to Indira Ghandi and Qian Xinzhong (who helped implement forced abortions & sterilizations)? Remember when US implemented NSSM-200, to encourage lower birth rates across the world? Including through contraception and abortion?
Remember when Robert McNamara (publicly) talked about how population growth was a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear bomb, the importance of contraception and abortion, and then went on to become world bank president and used it to promote and fund "family planning" globally? By the way, from NSSM-200:
"National Security Council advocated for the use of withholding food aid to encourage adoption of family planning approaches to prevent high population growth."
And: "In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program."
Remember when Jaffe, who was VP of Planned Parenthood, wrote a memo outlining tactics on how birth rates can be lowered, including through compulsory abortions, delaying marriage, promoting homosexuality, etc?
"To me, feminism is so much more complicated than its enemies want to admit."
As always, the best way to tell what a movement stands for it to look at the people within it and their behavior: You can look at UK, and see that feminists were nowhere to be found when it comes to thousands working class, white girls being groomed and gang-raped, and consider what that says about feminism, feminist organizations, and feminists themselves.
I don’t think you need to equate feminism with the occult to disagree with the idea that feminism being “a movement to protect the interests of women” is just too broad, seeing that the “true” interests of women are just not broadly agreed upon by feminists or anyone else.
What I have always thought, and what comes up immediately when I google the definition of feminism is “that women should have equal social, economic, and political rights and opportunities.” I think that definition would be accepted by the vast majority of feminists past and present.
This is why feminists laugh when they hear the term “Catholic Feminist”. The Catholic Church doesn’t allow female priests. It is a patriarchal institution by definition. There are no female priests, bishops or popes, there is no meaningful movement to change that, nor any broad objection to it, therefore it doesn’t meet the definition of feminism that will be agreed upon by 99% of people.
Agreed. It would be akin to defining communism (which absolutely has plenty of people disagreeing with each other and accusing opponents of not being real communists) as “a movement to protect the interests of workers.”
Your definition is quite right. Feminism is, in essence, classical liberalism applied to the sexes. Classical liberalism holds that your unchosen traits cannot matter in any important way.
It is incompatible with Catholicism at a fundamental level for the same reason that liberalism is. It is not merely that the Church happens to have male clergy, it is that the unchosen traits of manhood and womanhood DO matter, quite a lot. So too do other unchosen traits.
"The capacity for childbearing makes women uniquely vulnerable, and finding structures which reliably protect women is a difficult task. In large part this is because rigid family structure is high variance for women: it can be protective and wholesome, and it can be isolating and dangerous. Husbands can be friends, protectors, and advocates; they can also be abusers. In a highly patriarchal society, a woman’s happiness is thus strongly contingent on the character of her husband, from whom she may have precious little recourse if things go awry."
Till death do we part, and who is feminism to break into that bond?
I'll tell you what feminism is feminism is the abortion elephant in the room. Abortion is the thumb on the scale that is propping up the girl bosses and unfairly making employers feel more protected hiring women over men or at least women at the same rate as men, knowing that children will not get in the way of company objectives. But children *should* get in the way of company objectives! And in a way, I'm afraid, more lopsided for women than men. If I'm a married woman, age 20 to 40, I want an employer to assume I might drop out to raise a child. And I want my husband's employer to know he's has a backup at home to raise his children, making him more reliable to the company.
So you think women shouldn’t have any role in the economy other than producing more consumers. We have brains as well as wombs you know. Some of us prefer using our brains.
And by the way nature has its own feminism to deliver eqity, , in the form of longer life spans for women, which women could choose to spend their later life in boardroom if they wish.
Yeah, because it’s so very easy to start a career at 60. Men hoard all the goodies in life and tell women that pregnancy and lactation — something that ALL placental mammals do and most do much better than humans — makes up for public acclaim and achievement.
Nowadays you can get your colleging and large part of credentialing in evening while pregnant and child caring. Then at age 45 or so, bang you're ready to hit the career and that's where eoe rules should apply. With a huge poly math Renaissance woman portfolio (ignore the (largely feminist) slop detracting these women as "displaced homemakers")
You live in a complete fantasy world. How many men who have been accustomed to a woman doing all their shit work for no compensation are going to give up their personal slave so she can use her mind?
Carrie Gress does hold a deeply felt care for women, and as a devout catholic believes that feminism has been at the forefront in advocating for abortion which she sees as a profound inequity for embodied women. Perhaps a good-faith inquiry into this would be helpful.
I think Gress is both correct that there was no real problem historically and also I think she is correct to label feminism as occult. Though I would not say that anything which labels itself as feminism is occult. Rather, there are many people who have bought into the idea that feminism is just "respecting women" or as you put it quoting some feminist thinker whose name I cannot recall "the radical notion that women are people." Because a lot of people have bought into this notion, they feel the need to reconcile feminism with their own religious or philosophical school, hence you get intrinsic contradictions like "pro-life feminist" and "Catholic feminist." These end up being nonsense positions because they conflict with actual core tenets of feminism, which is not properly defined in a broad sense. Or perhaps more charitably, they end up being misnomers because they aren't feminist properly speaking.
Gress' reasoning for placing all feminism as occultism is sound, in my view, and I never see it addressed in articles which critique her for classifying it this way. I also think she has been unfairly smeared by Catholic women who identify as feminists for years. Reading her work reveals to me a very thoughtful, serious Catholic scholar who does not deserve to be maligned by pithy one-liners such as "you only have your degree and your platform because of feminism" (in fact I see one such sentiment in the comments of this very article; someone is upset that you didn't level this ridiculous critique at Gress). In this way I feel I actually "respect women" better than these feminists do, since I don't discriminate for or against Gress on the basis of her sex, but I think her work just is good academic work. I don't care what is or isn't between her legs; she's a good scholar.
I've read her book "The End of Woman," and her whole point is that feminism began as an occultist movement with a founding myth that inverted the Garden of Eden story. I was very impressed with her historical argument in that book. She relied a lot on primary sources and also on sources which were friendly to feminism to make her point (especially a pro-feminist textbook called "Satanic Feminism"). In my opinion, and I think hers, too, anything is wrongly called feminism that does not exist in the spirit of this founding myth. That excludes Catholic feminism as a logical concept; it's like a square circle. This doesn't come from a motivation to simply label feminism "bad," but it is an attempt to hold feminists to their movement's actual core tenet, rather than buy into the broad definition they want us to hold to, that essentially defines feminism as "good" (because no good person thinks women aren't people). But, because this founding myth is intrinsically occult, feminism is necessarily occult.
As for her belief that the problems feminism allegedly addresses pretty much didn't exist, I also agree that these seem to be largely mythologized. Not that any of the problems, things like domestic abuse, rape, etc. don't actually exist, but their prevalence seems to have been greatly exaggerated, and they are exaggerated through an undue control of language. This is where her point about consciousness-raising sessions comes into play. If women were actually being abused by their husbands, they'd know it. You wouldn't need to tell them. Likewise we see statistics like "1 in 3 women will be the victims of sexual assault" and are supposed to think that 1 in 3 women are violently raped, but this ranges from violent rape all the way down to something as innocuous (however wrong it still is) as cat-calling. To place a woman who has been a victim just of cat-calling, or even who has been subject to rude or vulgar sexual language, or even groped, on the same level as a victim of actual rape is a slap in the face to victims of rape. All of these things are wrong, but there is a wide chasm as far as moral gravity is concerned between the one and the other. Furthermore, we have testimony from former-abortion apologists who lived during second wave feminism who have told us that they straight up lied about abortion statistics then. Much of the political action of feminists is built on lies and deception. We even know that the majority of women were against the things that upper-class "feminist" women stood for back in the day precisely because those common women perceived, correctly, that the lives of their daughters and granddaughters would be negatively impacted by the goals of feminists.
I think that Gress is actually dialoguing in good faith, and I think that her position is the nuanced one. It's the one based on an honest and Catholic examination of the historical and political facts. She is not under-defining feminism. She is tying it to a specific originating thought, which comes from the Shelley family following in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's mother. That thought is the seed of all actually feminist ideas. If things call themselves feminist (such as JP2's new feminism) which do not share this root which germinated from this seed, they call themselves feminism erroneously. It's nothing more than a misnomer.
As a historian with a passing interest in feminist history, Gress's argument about feminism and occultism is making a mountain out of a molehill. Gress's misrepresentation of Mary Wollstonecraft was made me wonder if she actually read her it was so unlike what I read myself. The 19th century was FULL of occultism, it was the fashionable thing at the time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist and his wife was a medium holding regular seances in his house. This is the era when tarot cards became mediums of communicating with spirits, ouijia boards were invented and so was a bunch of weird cults (like Mormonism). Fundamentalist Christianity was a response to the growing popularity of occultism as was the hard scientific materialism of the Marxists and rationalists.
It also really, only speaks of an American Context honestly. Feminism in other parts of the Anglosphere like Australia you'd have been laughed at for making a connection like Gress's to the feminists movement here. It Australians are eminently practical and all but a few took that sort of spiritualism seriously. It was much more practically concerned with ensuring that women earned just wages at a time when men would go droving and never come home, or drink their earnings away on their way home from work. It was about recognising the way that women held the social fabric together and expended enormous energy feeding, clothing and housing the poor and destitute. Women got universal suffrage in Australia at federation in 1901 with barely a remark or any serious opposition. It was a matter of practical necessity, and no taxation without representation. If you want to tax women's wages, they deserve a say in what's done with it, and it was very necessary in a small country by population, but with a land mass the size of the united states.
So was Wollstonecraft into the occult, or not? You say she is misrepresenting Wollstonecraft; what does she actually say that is false?
I have not read this book and am asking sincerely. But I have to say this is about the third time I have heard someone accuse Gross of dishonesty while being maddeningly vague about what actual false statements she makes.
No she wasn't. She didn't have a lot of time being a single mother herself. Mary Wollstonecraft's writing called to attention the fact that women and children suffer greatly when men are feckless and vicious, yet women often bear the brunt of the blame for men's lack of virtue. If a man was weak willed, his mother was too devouring. If he was a cad, it's loose women's fault. If he beat his wife and was a drunk, she deserved it. If a man abandoned here or committed adultery, the wife was a cold harpy. If women are expected to be sexually chaste, why are men not really held to the same standard? Gress would actually agree with the core of Wollstencraft's critique of the social dynamics of her time as it actually was, yet she seems to have read something else entirely that defies it's plain English. I'd encourage you to actually read these women in their own words.
I'm not sure if you've actually read Gress' work directly, and in fact my guess is you haven't since you seem to be doing the same thing a lot of people do who have only read summaries or critiques of her work, which is to think that she accused Wollstonecraft of occultism. She didn't. Gress thinks that a few major parts of Wollstonecraft's project are aimed at undermining important cultural and social aspects of inter-sexual dynamics, and she's absolutely right. The only difference is that she thinks that's bad and you think it's good that Wollstonecraft wanted to do that.
Gress doesn't even treat Wollstonecraft all that harshly, and it should be pretty obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of Wollstonecraft's biography (which you clearly have) that her own personal experiences as a child heavily influenced her perception of what "normal" inter-sexual dynamics were like. Gress and others like me would contend that they weren't normally or even all that commonly like that, that Wollstonecraft grew up in an abnormal, uncommon, and tragic situation. Gress' real critiques of feminism start with the Shelleys, with Percy in particular, who was a man who just wanted to use women sexually, left his first wife for Wollstonecraft's daughter, leaving her destitute and resulting in her eventual suicide, and HE is the one who both founded feminist thought and imbued it with an occultic mythos. This is basically the central thrust of Gress' whole argument, and it never gets addressed by critics. The whole Percy Shelley saga is the whole point and it's near-universally ignored.
Read Erika Bachiochi’s book The Rights of Women if you want to know more about Mary Wollstonecraft. Gress’ arguments against Wollstonecraft seem ridiculous after learning about what Wollstonecraft actually said.
It is my understanding that Gress views it as a causation rather than correlation. What KP is remarking on is the fact that just because someone was dabbling in the occult (as many, many people were regardless of political views) does not mean that Wollstonecraft shaped feminism to be a manifestation of the occult.
I don't understand why people think that saying "everyone was doing it" is a good response to the charge that feminism was advanced by occultists. Everyone was doing it, yes. So Gress is right about the fact that occultists advanced feminism? Cool, we agree.
Feminist history doesn't begin in America. It begins in Britain. It's not only speaking to an American context.
This is precisely why I find this conversation frustrating. Look, if Gress’ only evidence for this connection is that feminists were Victorians and lots of Victorians were occultists, that’s too thin for such a serious cause.
But I have yet to hear any plain statement from anyone on this. “There is no evidence that Wollstonecraft ever attended any occult events.” OR “So-and-so claims Wollstonecraft attended seances with her.”
Gress (and most feminist scholars, from what I could tell when i was researching this) doesn't even consider Wollstonecraft a proper feminist. The next generation, the Shelleys, would have been where feminism proper originated, and Percy Shelley gives feminism its founding myth, which is intrinsically occultic (it inverts the Garden of Eden story and props up Satan as the hero of that tale).
I really appreciate this article but did want to point out that there's a little more depth to the shorthand of "[company] is liberal". So many companies support abortion, or generally ideologies that as a Catholic I don't believe are good to support financially, and others likewise try to vote with their wallets. I think another commenter discuses Target's business decisions as an example (though I disagree with some other points said commenter makes). In any case, the flattening of language is a critically important observation made here.
Your claim that the prevalence of problems like abusive husbands was greatly exaggerated does not prove that there was no issue for feminism to solve. This is apparent, for instance, in the widespread lack of of laws criminalizing marital rape. It doesn't matter how rare marital rape is or was, it was an injustice against women (the vast majority of victims) to not treat it as a criminal offense.
I should point out that if rape is illegal you don’t need an extra law to outlaw marital rape. There was a guy named Hale who argued for an exemption based on the idea marriage is a contract to give consent. This was in the 1700s and became important to informing common law. Hale didn’t cite any sources so we don’t know how courts ruled before than. I assume on a case by case basis. (Which is just another situation where women are relying on a man in authority and hoping he is benevolent.)
Modern laws on martial rape undo or clarify that Hale’s argument for an exemption was incorrect.
The flattening of language you describe is indeed happening, but some of the cases you cite are not examples of it.
The uncouth rabble call Target leftist because it stocked Pride products designed by a Satanist, and when it dropped them after a boycott, they said they did so because they felt “threatened” and, for good measure, added “Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.” A business that publishes that statement is a leftist business.
I have not read Gress’s book but I have read Sargeant’s review and Gress’s reply. What I can gather is that she argues that major thinkers of first wave feminism were occultists and their ideas are heavily influenced by this. Now, perhaps you dispute the argument, but it is not an attempt to just lump bad things together, anymore than someone noting that Nazism had a sizeable occult element is simply trying to mash all his enemies together. If the thing is true, it is worth knowing.
My own cards on the table: I reject feminism for the simple reason that it is, at its essence, classical liberalism applied to the sexes, and classical liberalism is an incoherent political philosophy. The presence or lack of occultism in first wave feminism is not essential to the debate for me. It certainly would not *surprise* me, given that first wave feminists espoused more radical and destructive views than modern feminists, as ably catalogued by Mark Richardson here:
This essay adds to the noise a little bit in the feminist/anti-feminist debate. It fails to distance itself enough from feminism’s claims to steel man the contention that feminism may not have something to solve.
I also think Carrie Gress and anti-feminists are probably wasting their breath by fighting against feminists. This is because proverbial wisdom credits feminism with our freedom from second-class citizenship and the opportunities to become literate and vote.
Both sides would benefit from careful study of the historical treatment of women they each invoke. They could look, for example, at the precise origins of the problems feminism purported to solve and compare it to the continuous messaging about the dignity of women from traditional voices. They might find an ancient/natural treatment of women against which Jesus and the New Testament launched the first women’s movement, approximately 1,400 subsequent years of women in the west being understood as fundamentally complementary to men and integral to societal thriving, contributing not only through healing, nurturing, and being life-giving, but also participating in a brilliant intellectual tradition (the Blessed Virgin Mary, the woman at the well, St. Paula, friend of Jerome, St. Monica, mother of Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadwijch, Christine de Pisan (sp?), Catherine of Siena, and Joan of Arc, to name a few), and that the tradition comes to a skidding halt with the genesis of Protestantism.
To the extent that “the west” is understood not as Christendom but as the industrial complex that emerged from the colonial era after the Reformation, it is poisoned by an anthropological vision that dresses up as but in some ways is entirely at odds with the authentic Christian vision. Protestantism’s rejection of a sacramental economy causes us to regress to Aristotle’s low opinion of women that comes from a fallen instinct to value only men’s accomplishments and abilities.
The point is that that investigation might make us realize that the very real accomplishments of modern women’s movements are less revolutionary and more restorative, and that its toxic elements come from shallow, anemic roots. Its lack of perspective, competitive drive, and male aggressive tendencies means that it ultimately fails to lift all of humanity up when it lifts up women—thus the backwardness of something like abortion within its tenets. To the extent that either feminism or anti-feminism is DIVISIVE it is antithetical to the biological, anthropological, and societal role of women. Neither may be necessary if we recognize that authentic Christianity has been repeating and praising the mystical perfection of women’s role all along, and we have all in turns rejected or misunderstood it.
so GOOD, Esther, congrats on this essay
When marriage endangers women, it also endangers children. Anti-feminists ignore vast amounta of data and historical precedents that make clear the harms done to women before feminism--and the fact that those harms accrued to children, as well. (And are still happening many places, including in America, as in the brutal sacrifice of child brides.)
Your essay focuses on the ways a deadened language mistepresents feminism. I think the facile ignorance of feminism's work also arises from the widespread historical ignorance of our presentist times. People toss around the word 'fascism" carelessly, as a synonym for generic "evil," because fewer amd fewer people know much of anything about history, most especially the history of women and feminism.
Excellent point
The actual statistics we have don't support the notion that marriage endangers women and children. Rather, it seems more that divorce does.
https://rwilson.substack.com/p/are-patriarchs-perpetrators-or-protectors
You fail to address the biggest problem with Gress, Schlafly, and their ilk: they are all, to a woman, gigantic hypocrites. A woman with an advanced degree and a paying job as an author and academic or political operative has that position SOLELY because feminists fought for her. Absent feminism those women never would have learned to read and certainly never would have had remunerative and prestigious careers. This will always be the hole at the waterline for Gress’a argument. She wants to kick the ladder away after she’s climbed it
I laughed endlessly at opening Gress’s newest book to see print praise from female doctors, lawyers, professors, intellectuals…. like ma’am this alone puts you on tenuous ground and I haven’t read a word of your argument yet 😂
I saw that. I then put the book on the library shelf and decided that I had plenty to read already. Seriously, any woman arguing that feminism is entirely bad and doing it in any kind of a public role immediately refutes her own argument.
Do you think this is the case because women weren't allowed to publish books or participate in the public discourse before feminism?
Women’s participation in public life was sharply restricted before feminism and limited exclusively to upper class women. Gress is either ignorant of all of history or deliberately concealing it and in either case her book is a waste of time.
So how did Mary Wollstonecraft manage to get published?
Through the assistance of a notably liberal publisher.
Not exactly, women certainly wrote books and contributed throughout history, but they certainly WEREN’T lawyers and doctors and professors and PhDs. In the era directly preceding feminism, women were consistently restricted from these types of educational and vocational options.
I was responding to Karen, who seems to think that women were not given any kind of a public voice in the era before feminism. Since you agree women wrote books and contributed to academia throughout history, I assume your complaint is narrower, that women specifically could not hold certain degrees or join certain professions. Is that really true, though? I mean, in the era just preceding feminism, maybe so, but if you look at the history of something like women in medicine, we find that they practiced throughout the middle ages. It seems like the decline of women practicing medicine in Europe corresponded with the Catholic Church falling out of political power around the 14th century or so.
As for degrees, universities were traditionally for clerics, so of course women were not admitted, and thus "couldn't hold degrees," but just leaving it at that completely misrepresents the place of women in academia. Convents served as a sort of parallel to universities, and religious sisters were educated and contributed to academia just as much as religious brothers and priests did. That's why you see women "contributing throughout history," as you acknowledge, though without holding PhDs. It doesn't actually seem like this is that much of an oppression.
It strikes me, though, that we are supposed to think that women were not allowed to participate in academic or political society when of course the women who kicked off feminism did just that.
Ah gotcha your comment got tagged as a response to mine. I think we talk past each other in these discussions when we aren’t clear about what exactly we mean by “before feminism”. Do we mean the 1500s or the mid-1800s? Feminism was a response to the specific social culture of its time, which, yes, seriously disadvantaged and endangered women. I think we agree that in the 1500s (under Catholicism) women could buy land, be in charge of estates of money, have a trade, join a convent and be educated, etc etc AND that doesn’t help make a case that feminism was unnecessary or unhelpful for the woman of the 1800s, who couldn’t do any of that with legitimacy!
I love this essay, Esther. This is kind of an aside, but I recently had fruitful conversations with two pro life advocates who blame feminism for abortion, and dislike feminism for its presumed role. I pointed out that abortion is common and sometimes even forced on women in many patriarchal countries like China and India--and it's definitely not because these societies are so "feminist." I've worked with women who were forced or coerced to have abortions by unsupportive male partners who didn't want to take responsibility for the pregnancy. To me, feminism is so much more complicated than its enemies want to admit.
I am afraid this argument does not quite work. Yes, plenty of non-feminist societies have legal abortion and even legal infanticide.
But the modern abortion industry in the West, the largest ongoing mass murder in human history (see link below), to what movement do we owe that? Feminism.
Feminist premises do not NECESSARILY entail mass abortion, anymore than communist premises necessarily entail gulags. But to deny that feminism is plainly the cause of our actual abortion situation in THIS era is as intellectually dishonest as denying that there is any connection between gulags and communism.
How do you know that feminism is chiefly responsible for the scale of abortion in the west? Do we have data on this? While I'm sure feminist-type values play a significant role, and may serve as the pretty packaging on 'pro-choice', it is undeniable that unsupportive male partners who reject parental responsibility also play a significant role. Anecdotally, 100% of the women I know who have had an abortion were significantly pressured (I would say coerced) by their partners, and the women had to shoulder that regret and disappointment. Personally, I consider this a serious problem that does not seem to be addressed sufficiently at all, including by feminism, but underscores part of the reason why women feel the need for such a movement.
I think you have not quite understood me: I am not arguing that the majority of the individual women who choose abortion are doing so for “feminist reasons” (whatever we might decide those are), I am saying that feminism as an ideology is the reason for the modern western abortion slaughter’s existence, right now.
Aside from the personal reasons (including coercion) that a woman might choose abortion for herself, I think this point—why the thing is legal in the first place, continues to be legal, and is socially acceptable—is quite obvious.
But in case it is not, it is clear once one asks these questions:
-In what ideology were the movements to legalize abortion in the West based?
-What kinds of arguments are most commonly used to defend its continued legality?
-What ideology are opponents of abortion most commonly accused of rejecting?
-What do mainstream feminists consistently identify as the most important of their freedoms?
The abortion-feminist connection is, to my mind, the most plainly obvious problem with the idea that we can have Catholic or Christian feminism. It might be a solvable problem (I argue it is not), but the difficulty with which so many have even *acknowledging* this problem does not inspire confidence. It is as if there were a group of “Christian communists” that begin the debate by asking their opponents to provide evidence that communism is anti-religion.
Now, what about the reasons of the individual women who commit abortions? There is data on it, and surprisingly the desire of the “partner” (barf) that she have the abortion is at around 1%. (Link here: https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives )
Now, there is certainly a motive on the pro-abortion side to fudge the numbers, if it turned out coercion was in fact a greater percentage. So the data might be false. On the other hand, given the sheer volume of abortions, 1% of them is still scores and scores of women, so the data could be quite accurate. 1% of 50 million abortions worldwide (per year) is 500,000 coercions a year, after all.
Thank you for the link. Even as I wrote it, I was wondering about the likelihood of any data even being remotely accurate. Particularly given that in many countries (such as the UK where I'm from), women are unlikely to disclose that they are being pressured due to safeguarding implications. Especially if it's an ongoing 'partner'. They would likely describe themselves under the category 'she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems' (48%). Even if it is because their 'partner' threatens to leave them unless they terminate their pregnancy (like in several cases I have known).
I understand your argument and resonate with the main thrust. Although I personally consider the sexual liberation movement more generally to be the main culprit. If it wasn't for the fact that a large portion of men believe they benefit from modern 'family planning' practices, I highly doubt that abortion would be legal, or at least as accessible as it is, regardless of any feminist movements.
Nevertheless, I think it is unhelpful to pit one sex against another. Clearly this has a deleterious impact on everyone in the long run, especially the family unit.
Trying to pin it on a singular sociopolitical movement is probably equally erroneous. In the long run societal change is multifactorial and dialectical. Problems cannot only be attributed to one 'side' or movement. Likewise they are unlikely to be solved in a unilateral fashion either.
I haven't read Carrie Gress's latest book but I intend to and resonated with her other books. I wouldn't call myself a feminist, although I sympathise with some aspects, as I too think there is too strong an association with anti-reproductive ideology and I am very pro-family. I believe we have to think about such issues much more systemically, and men's and women's concerns are interdependent.
Overall I get the sense that this is what 'Catholic feminism' is aiming at (pro-family), to counter the uncool 'patriarchal' brand.
Personally I would appreciate a movement more focused on the family as a unit. If we could promote building skills and values that bring men and women together to build harmonious, mutually respectful and fruitful families and communities, that would be good!
"even forced on women in many patriarchal countries like China"
Funny you say that! Do you think there's something else notable about China, for example, western marxism which got imported into it? Or perhaps the leader under which it happened - Deng Xiaoping - who studied Marxism-Leninism in France and Russia?
"and India"
Ah, I remember that - it's the country where Margaret Sanger travelled to, arguing for women to have less kids and more abortions. I believe you're referring to Indira Gandhi who did that. Is there a reason you're ignoring that she was pressured by US into adopting such policy, which by the way, led to sterilization of mostly men? How did she convince some of them? What policies did she implement?
Anyway, remember when "UN" gave its population award - the same year they founded such award - to Indira Ghandi and Qian Xinzhong (who helped implement forced abortions & sterilizations)? Remember when US implemented NSSM-200, to encourage lower birth rates across the world? Including through contraception and abortion?
Remember when Robert McNamara (publicly) talked about how population growth was a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear bomb, the importance of contraception and abortion, and then went on to become world bank president and used it to promote and fund "family planning" globally? By the way, from NSSM-200:
"National Security Council advocated for the use of withholding food aid to encourage adoption of family planning approaches to prevent high population growth."
And: "In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program."
Remember when Jaffe, who was VP of Planned Parenthood, wrote a memo outlining tactics on how birth rates can be lowered, including through compulsory abortions, delaying marriage, promoting homosexuality, etc?
"To me, feminism is so much more complicated than its enemies want to admit."
As always, the best way to tell what a movement stands for it to look at the people within it and their behavior: You can look at UK, and see that feminists were nowhere to be found when it comes to thousands working class, white girls being groomed and gang-raped, and consider what that says about feminism, feminist organizations, and feminists themselves.
I don’t think you need to equate feminism with the occult to disagree with the idea that feminism being “a movement to protect the interests of women” is just too broad, seeing that the “true” interests of women are just not broadly agreed upon by feminists or anyone else.
What I have always thought, and what comes up immediately when I google the definition of feminism is “that women should have equal social, economic, and political rights and opportunities.” I think that definition would be accepted by the vast majority of feminists past and present.
This is why feminists laugh when they hear the term “Catholic Feminist”. The Catholic Church doesn’t allow female priests. It is a patriarchal institution by definition. There are no female priests, bishops or popes, there is no meaningful movement to change that, nor any broad objection to it, therefore it doesn’t meet the definition of feminism that will be agreed upon by 99% of people.
Agreed. It would be akin to defining communism (which absolutely has plenty of people disagreeing with each other and accusing opponents of not being real communists) as “a movement to protect the interests of workers.”
Your definition is quite right. Feminism is, in essence, classical liberalism applied to the sexes. Classical liberalism holds that your unchosen traits cannot matter in any important way.
It is incompatible with Catholicism at a fundamental level for the same reason that liberalism is. It is not merely that the Church happens to have male clergy, it is that the unchosen traits of manhood and womanhood DO matter, quite a lot. So too do other unchosen traits.
Feminism in no way protected the interests of women Jessica.
You clearly exposed a truth I've been struggling to articulate. Thank you!
Are you writing a book on this? If not, you should. I’m starving for this kind of of reasoned and balanced discourse.
"The capacity for childbearing makes women uniquely vulnerable, and finding structures which reliably protect women is a difficult task. In large part this is because rigid family structure is high variance for women: it can be protective and wholesome, and it can be isolating and dangerous. Husbands can be friends, protectors, and advocates; they can also be abusers. In a highly patriarchal society, a woman’s happiness is thus strongly contingent on the character of her husband, from whom she may have precious little recourse if things go awry."
Till death do we part, and who is feminism to break into that bond?
I'll tell you what feminism is feminism is the abortion elephant in the room. Abortion is the thumb on the scale that is propping up the girl bosses and unfairly making employers feel more protected hiring women over men or at least women at the same rate as men, knowing that children will not get in the way of company objectives. But children *should* get in the way of company objectives! And in a way, I'm afraid, more lopsided for women than men. If I'm a married woman, age 20 to 40, I want an employer to assume I might drop out to raise a child. And I want my husband's employer to know he's has a backup at home to raise his children, making him more reliable to the company.
So you think women shouldn’t have any role in the economy other than producing more consumers. We have brains as well as wombs you know. Some of us prefer using our brains.
No Karen. None of you prefer using your brains. That is rather our point.
No woman ever wants to learn and then have public sphere achievements?
No Karen. I think he was referring to feminists, not all women. I agree, for the most part (and I'm a woman).
All women are feminists. I was referring to all women.
I am a woman but not a feminist.
See his response to me. He was speaking about all women.
Yes Karen, I was speaking about ALL WOMEN.
And by the way nature has its own feminism to deliver eqity, , in the form of longer life spans for women, which women could choose to spend their later life in boardroom if they wish.
Yeah, because it’s so very easy to start a career at 60. Men hoard all the goodies in life and tell women that pregnancy and lactation — something that ALL placental mammals do and most do much better than humans — makes up for public acclaim and achievement.
Nowadays you can get your colleging and large part of credentialing in evening while pregnant and child caring. Then at age 45 or so, bang you're ready to hit the career and that's where eoe rules should apply. With a huge poly math Renaissance woman portfolio (ignore the (largely feminist) slop detracting these women as "displaced homemakers")
You live in a complete fantasy world. How many men who have been accustomed to a woman doing all their shit work for no compensation are going to give up their personal slave so she can use her mind?
Raising children is not s*** work. And we don't get the society that you'll need at age 80 without those children being raised right
Sure. Men can do this as well as women can and they need to do so.
Carrie Gress does hold a deeply felt care for women, and as a devout catholic believes that feminism has been at the forefront in advocating for abortion which she sees as a profound inequity for embodied women. Perhaps a good-faith inquiry into this would be helpful.
I think Gress is both correct that there was no real problem historically and also I think she is correct to label feminism as occult. Though I would not say that anything which labels itself as feminism is occult. Rather, there are many people who have bought into the idea that feminism is just "respecting women" or as you put it quoting some feminist thinker whose name I cannot recall "the radical notion that women are people." Because a lot of people have bought into this notion, they feel the need to reconcile feminism with their own religious or philosophical school, hence you get intrinsic contradictions like "pro-life feminist" and "Catholic feminist." These end up being nonsense positions because they conflict with actual core tenets of feminism, which is not properly defined in a broad sense. Or perhaps more charitably, they end up being misnomers because they aren't feminist properly speaking.
Gress' reasoning for placing all feminism as occultism is sound, in my view, and I never see it addressed in articles which critique her for classifying it this way. I also think she has been unfairly smeared by Catholic women who identify as feminists for years. Reading her work reveals to me a very thoughtful, serious Catholic scholar who does not deserve to be maligned by pithy one-liners such as "you only have your degree and your platform because of feminism" (in fact I see one such sentiment in the comments of this very article; someone is upset that you didn't level this ridiculous critique at Gress). In this way I feel I actually "respect women" better than these feminists do, since I don't discriminate for or against Gress on the basis of her sex, but I think her work just is good academic work. I don't care what is or isn't between her legs; she's a good scholar.
I've read her book "The End of Woman," and her whole point is that feminism began as an occultist movement with a founding myth that inverted the Garden of Eden story. I was very impressed with her historical argument in that book. She relied a lot on primary sources and also on sources which were friendly to feminism to make her point (especially a pro-feminist textbook called "Satanic Feminism"). In my opinion, and I think hers, too, anything is wrongly called feminism that does not exist in the spirit of this founding myth. That excludes Catholic feminism as a logical concept; it's like a square circle. This doesn't come from a motivation to simply label feminism "bad," but it is an attempt to hold feminists to their movement's actual core tenet, rather than buy into the broad definition they want us to hold to, that essentially defines feminism as "good" (because no good person thinks women aren't people). But, because this founding myth is intrinsically occult, feminism is necessarily occult.
As for her belief that the problems feminism allegedly addresses pretty much didn't exist, I also agree that these seem to be largely mythologized. Not that any of the problems, things like domestic abuse, rape, etc. don't actually exist, but their prevalence seems to have been greatly exaggerated, and they are exaggerated through an undue control of language. This is where her point about consciousness-raising sessions comes into play. If women were actually being abused by their husbands, they'd know it. You wouldn't need to tell them. Likewise we see statistics like "1 in 3 women will be the victims of sexual assault" and are supposed to think that 1 in 3 women are violently raped, but this ranges from violent rape all the way down to something as innocuous (however wrong it still is) as cat-calling. To place a woman who has been a victim just of cat-calling, or even who has been subject to rude or vulgar sexual language, or even groped, on the same level as a victim of actual rape is a slap in the face to victims of rape. All of these things are wrong, but there is a wide chasm as far as moral gravity is concerned between the one and the other. Furthermore, we have testimony from former-abortion apologists who lived during second wave feminism who have told us that they straight up lied about abortion statistics then. Much of the political action of feminists is built on lies and deception. We even know that the majority of women were against the things that upper-class "feminist" women stood for back in the day precisely because those common women perceived, correctly, that the lives of their daughters and granddaughters would be negatively impacted by the goals of feminists.
I think that Gress is actually dialoguing in good faith, and I think that her position is the nuanced one. It's the one based on an honest and Catholic examination of the historical and political facts. She is not under-defining feminism. She is tying it to a specific originating thought, which comes from the Shelley family following in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's mother. That thought is the seed of all actually feminist ideas. If things call themselves feminist (such as JP2's new feminism) which do not share this root which germinated from this seed, they call themselves feminism erroneously. It's nothing more than a misnomer.
As a historian with a passing interest in feminist history, Gress's argument about feminism and occultism is making a mountain out of a molehill. Gress's misrepresentation of Mary Wollstonecraft was made me wonder if she actually read her it was so unlike what I read myself. The 19th century was FULL of occultism, it was the fashionable thing at the time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist and his wife was a medium holding regular seances in his house. This is the era when tarot cards became mediums of communicating with spirits, ouijia boards were invented and so was a bunch of weird cults (like Mormonism). Fundamentalist Christianity was a response to the growing popularity of occultism as was the hard scientific materialism of the Marxists and rationalists.
It also really, only speaks of an American Context honestly. Feminism in other parts of the Anglosphere like Australia you'd have been laughed at for making a connection like Gress's to the feminists movement here. It Australians are eminently practical and all but a few took that sort of spiritualism seriously. It was much more practically concerned with ensuring that women earned just wages at a time when men would go droving and never come home, or drink their earnings away on their way home from work. It was about recognising the way that women held the social fabric together and expended enormous energy feeding, clothing and housing the poor and destitute. Women got universal suffrage in Australia at federation in 1901 with barely a remark or any serious opposition. It was a matter of practical necessity, and no taxation without representation. If you want to tax women's wages, they deserve a say in what's done with it, and it was very necessary in a small country by population, but with a land mass the size of the united states.
So was Wollstonecraft into the occult, or not? You say she is misrepresenting Wollstonecraft; what does she actually say that is false?
I have not read this book and am asking sincerely. But I have to say this is about the third time I have heard someone accuse Gross of dishonesty while being maddeningly vague about what actual false statements she makes.
No she wasn't. She didn't have a lot of time being a single mother herself. Mary Wollstonecraft's writing called to attention the fact that women and children suffer greatly when men are feckless and vicious, yet women often bear the brunt of the blame for men's lack of virtue. If a man was weak willed, his mother was too devouring. If he was a cad, it's loose women's fault. If he beat his wife and was a drunk, she deserved it. If a man abandoned here or committed adultery, the wife was a cold harpy. If women are expected to be sexually chaste, why are men not really held to the same standard? Gress would actually agree with the core of Wollstencraft's critique of the social dynamics of her time as it actually was, yet she seems to have read something else entirely that defies it's plain English. I'd encourage you to actually read these women in their own words.
I'm not sure if you've actually read Gress' work directly, and in fact my guess is you haven't since you seem to be doing the same thing a lot of people do who have only read summaries or critiques of her work, which is to think that she accused Wollstonecraft of occultism. She didn't. Gress thinks that a few major parts of Wollstonecraft's project are aimed at undermining important cultural and social aspects of inter-sexual dynamics, and she's absolutely right. The only difference is that she thinks that's bad and you think it's good that Wollstonecraft wanted to do that.
Gress doesn't even treat Wollstonecraft all that harshly, and it should be pretty obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of Wollstonecraft's biography (which you clearly have) that her own personal experiences as a child heavily influenced her perception of what "normal" inter-sexual dynamics were like. Gress and others like me would contend that they weren't normally or even all that commonly like that, that Wollstonecraft grew up in an abnormal, uncommon, and tragic situation. Gress' real critiques of feminism start with the Shelleys, with Percy in particular, who was a man who just wanted to use women sexually, left his first wife for Wollstonecraft's daughter, leaving her destitute and resulting in her eventual suicide, and HE is the one who both founded feminist thought and imbued it with an occultic mythos. This is basically the central thrust of Gress' whole argument, and it never gets addressed by critics. The whole Percy Shelley saga is the whole point and it's near-universally ignored.
Read Erika Bachiochi’s book The Rights of Women if you want to know more about Mary Wollstonecraft. Gress’ arguments against Wollstonecraft seem ridiculous after learning about what Wollstonecraft actually said.
It is my understanding that Gress views it as a causation rather than correlation. What KP is remarking on is the fact that just because someone was dabbling in the occult (as many, many people were regardless of political views) does not mean that Wollstonecraft shaped feminism to be a manifestation of the occult.
I don't understand why people think that saying "everyone was doing it" is a good response to the charge that feminism was advanced by occultists. Everyone was doing it, yes. So Gress is right about the fact that occultists advanced feminism? Cool, we agree.
Feminist history doesn't begin in America. It begins in Britain. It's not only speaking to an American context.
This is precisely why I find this conversation frustrating. Look, if Gress’ only evidence for this connection is that feminists were Victorians and lots of Victorians were occultists, that’s too thin for such a serious cause.
But I have yet to hear any plain statement from anyone on this. “There is no evidence that Wollstonecraft ever attended any occult events.” OR “So-and-so claims Wollstonecraft attended seances with her.”
Gress (and most feminist scholars, from what I could tell when i was researching this) doesn't even consider Wollstonecraft a proper feminist. The next generation, the Shelleys, would have been where feminism proper originated, and Percy Shelley gives feminism its founding myth, which is intrinsically occultic (it inverts the Garden of Eden story and props up Satan as the hero of that tale).
I really appreciate this article but did want to point out that there's a little more depth to the shorthand of "[company] is liberal". So many companies support abortion, or generally ideologies that as a Catholic I don't believe are good to support financially, and others likewise try to vote with their wallets. I think another commenter discuses Target's business decisions as an example (though I disagree with some other points said commenter makes). In any case, the flattening of language is a critically important observation made here.
Your claim that the prevalence of problems like abusive husbands was greatly exaggerated does not prove that there was no issue for feminism to solve. This is apparent, for instance, in the widespread lack of of laws criminalizing marital rape. It doesn't matter how rare marital rape is or was, it was an injustice against women (the vast majority of victims) to not treat it as a criminal offense.
I should point out that if rape is illegal you don’t need an extra law to outlaw marital rape. There was a guy named Hale who argued for an exemption based on the idea marriage is a contract to give consent. This was in the 1700s and became important to informing common law. Hale didn’t cite any sources so we don’t know how courts ruled before than. I assume on a case by case basis. (Which is just another situation where women are relying on a man in authority and hoping he is benevolent.)
Modern laws on martial rape undo or clarify that Hale’s argument for an exemption was incorrect.
The flattening of language you describe is indeed happening, but some of the cases you cite are not examples of it.
The uncouth rabble call Target leftist because it stocked Pride products designed by a Satanist, and when it dropped them after a boycott, they said they did so because they felt “threatened” and, for good measure, added “Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.” A business that publishes that statement is a leftist business.
I have not read Gress’s book but I have read Sargeant’s review and Gress’s reply. What I can gather is that she argues that major thinkers of first wave feminism were occultists and their ideas are heavily influenced by this. Now, perhaps you dispute the argument, but it is not an attempt to just lump bad things together, anymore than someone noting that Nazism had a sizeable occult element is simply trying to mash all his enemies together. If the thing is true, it is worth knowing.
My own cards on the table: I reject feminism for the simple reason that it is, at its essence, classical liberalism applied to the sexes, and classical liberalism is an incoherent political philosophy. The presence or lack of occultism in first wave feminism is not essential to the debate for me. It certainly would not *surprise* me, given that first wave feminists espoused more radical and destructive views than modern feminists, as ably catalogued by Mark Richardson here:
https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2019/12/can-feminism-be-reformed.html?m=1
This was a very fair article. I am a feminist because I believe in the equality of men and women.
Thank you for this wonderful essay! Every time I read your writing I am *amazed* and *enthralled* (aka I think it’s good)
This essay adds to the noise a little bit in the feminist/anti-feminist debate. It fails to distance itself enough from feminism’s claims to steel man the contention that feminism may not have something to solve.
I also think Carrie Gress and anti-feminists are probably wasting their breath by fighting against feminists. This is because proverbial wisdom credits feminism with our freedom from second-class citizenship and the opportunities to become literate and vote.
Both sides would benefit from careful study of the historical treatment of women they each invoke. They could look, for example, at the precise origins of the problems feminism purported to solve and compare it to the continuous messaging about the dignity of women from traditional voices. They might find an ancient/natural treatment of women against which Jesus and the New Testament launched the first women’s movement, approximately 1,400 subsequent years of women in the west being understood as fundamentally complementary to men and integral to societal thriving, contributing not only through healing, nurturing, and being life-giving, but also participating in a brilliant intellectual tradition (the Blessed Virgin Mary, the woman at the well, St. Paula, friend of Jerome, St. Monica, mother of Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadwijch, Christine de Pisan (sp?), Catherine of Siena, and Joan of Arc, to name a few), and that the tradition comes to a skidding halt with the genesis of Protestantism.
To the extent that “the west” is understood not as Christendom but as the industrial complex that emerged from the colonial era after the Reformation, it is poisoned by an anthropological vision that dresses up as but in some ways is entirely at odds with the authentic Christian vision. Protestantism’s rejection of a sacramental economy causes us to regress to Aristotle’s low opinion of women that comes from a fallen instinct to value only men’s accomplishments and abilities.
The point is that that investigation might make us realize that the very real accomplishments of modern women’s movements are less revolutionary and more restorative, and that its toxic elements come from shallow, anemic roots. Its lack of perspective, competitive drive, and male aggressive tendencies means that it ultimately fails to lift all of humanity up when it lifts up women—thus the backwardness of something like abortion within its tenets. To the extent that either feminism or anti-feminism is DIVISIVE it is antithetical to the biological, anthropological, and societal role of women. Neither may be necessary if we recognize that authentic Christianity has been repeating and praising the mystical perfection of women’s role all along, and we have all in turns rejected or misunderstood it.