Women After Feminism, Part I - American Reformer

Restoring the Honor of Femininity Is Crucial to Reviving the Family

Rush Limbaugh of sacred memory was always worried about maintaining America’s competitive advantage in the world. When others were becoming dynamos, he suggested that America should “screw up the cultures of our international competitors” through exporting poisonous ideologies like feminism to “saddle them with the same obstacles we have.”

America is still saddled with feminism, though some real change is afoot. Feminist assumptions are entrenched and nearly unquestionable on the American Left. The Right remains divided on feminism. Growing numbers consider feminism an intellectually exhausted, dead-end civilization killer and are imagining a world after feminism.

Among these is Carrie Gress, a Catholic writer, whose new book Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity clears away feminist underbrush before depicting a non-feminist, Christian vision of woman.

Nobody “Stole Feminism”

Clearing the underbrush is no easy task because trying to identify real feminism often devolves into word games. There seem to be as many varieties of feminism as there are feminists. There’s liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, difference feminism, and intersectional feminism. The list continues: first, second, third, and fourth wave feminism. À la carte feminism. Postmodern feminism. Sex-positive feminism. Pro-life feminism. Maternal feminism. Trans-exclusive radical feminists. Retail feminists (one of my labeling contributions) sell radical versions with moderate-sounding arguments.

When people blame feminism for some problem, feminists always retort, “Yes, that feminism is bad, but there is a good or better feminism.” Or “there was a good feminism, but then it was stolen and replaced with a bad one, a radical one.”

Perhaps feminism could have been different, but it isn’t. Perhaps a better feminism can save it, though it is not clear how or why that other brand has not been tried. Diving into the history of feminism can resemble debates between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. Many histories of feminism are simply law-office history—accounts of the past designed to justify something in the present.

For Gress, real feminism—the belief that women should embrace supposedly male notions of autonomy or independence—is something wicked.

After Feminism

Such law-office histories condemn most of human history as patriarchal, by which they mean that it features abusive men behaving badly under the protection of the sexual double standard and women as vain, submissive, docile, and easily manipulated. They offer a good feminism to bring about a new kind of woman and a new kind of man.

This supposedly good feminism centers the “strong,” “smart,” and “educated” new women, and a new man who is more chaste, more egalitarian, and more of an ally—a sensitive male to share household duties under the rubric of caring. State action fosters female “strength” and “dignity” in the workplace. State-enforced deconstruction of stereotypes includes a robust Title IX regime and subsidies for day care—in other words, compulsory feminism.

Some law-office historians even imagine that English radical Mary Wollstonecraft pointed toward a healthy vision for women and family life. Gress throws shade on such notions throughout Something Wicked. Making Wollstonecraft the inspiration of solid family policy is like making Benedict Arnold the model for patriotic education.

Gress deconstructs this history to depict a life-enriching vision of women. While many today know what a man should be (a protector and provider, at least), few can define a good woman. “The last fifty years,” writes Gress, “have airbrushed any semblance of a good woman from the culture and replaced her with the working woman, the productive woman.”

Against the new deal for the sexes, Gress offers a variation on the old, better deal. Reaching back into the “beautiful and compelling vision of the feminine” Christianity offers, Gress wants to restore the old deal, the one that has the capacity to build, heal, and allow human flourishing.

Make no mistake. Gress defends neither the sexual double standard nor the notion that the sexes have different virtues. Moral analysis is more complex than such simple notions.

The sexes are capable of the same virtues, but virtues and vices register differently for men and women. Caring is important in both sexes, as are courage and intelligence, but these virtues (and their associated vices) matter differently.

A man who runs from a fight or is scared of spiders is judged harshly, while such weakness is hardly unacceptable, and can even be charming in a woman. A young man who lacks ambition in the workplace is judged more harshly than many a woman who lacks similar ambition. An adulterous man is a cad and was despised by employers and the community at large in the past, but an adulterous woman is judged more harshly than the cad. Both men and women should care, but women who do not care for their children or who do not like children are judged more harshly than men, since they are ignoring manifest maternal duties.

Ultimately, a man who is not a provider or protector to his family is more of a failure than a woman who neither provides nor protects. A woman who cannot beautify or nurture life is more of a failure than a man who does neither.

Against those who elevate the importance of female “strength” and “being known for one’s mind,” Gress elevates a feminine ranking of the virtues. Women should be judged, she implies, on how they manifest feminine virtues like respectfulness, graciousness, hospitality, gentleness, nurturing, warmth, and consistent presence.

Gress differs, in other words, from her contemporary critics on the rank of femininity. The most important characteristic for a wife and a mother—and hence for a woman entering either estate—is an interest in and character fit for being a wife and a mother. A wife and a mother may be strong, smart, or tough. She may write books. She may have workplace achievements. But none of those things are as central to her mission as a mother or wife as loving her family, caring for her children, and respecting her husband. Plenty of virtuous women are not as strong or smart as feminists (mis)understand those terms, but most wives and mothers formed under the Christian dispensation are feminine.

Similarly, Gress welcomes the old protector and provider vision of the male to complement this feminine woman. Patriarchy, when well-functioning, is designed to lead women and children to “what is true, good and beautiful; to holiness; to Jesus,” Gress writes. This “call of the patriarch is much higher than the feminist’s vision of a milquetoast man.”

Nearly every modern country faces growing divisions between the sexes, a striking decline in marriage, and a declining birth rate. Only Israel, a country of weak religious commitment but with a strong cultural script for womanly character (i.e., the legendary Jewish mother), defies these trends. Nations with Christian backgrounds have not fallen back on a similar model of Christian womanly excellence, though, as Gress shows, they are available. Instead, Christians are almost embarrassed by their heritage.

Reviving the family is not a matter of recognizing the importance of female strength. Rather, rediscovering the beauty and priority of femininity is the main objective. Carrie Gress points the way by clearing the underbrush of law-office history and then by providing a nuanced moral treatment that elevates feminine virtues while not denying other attributes to women.

Gress’s book comes at just the right time as we watch in real time the sad but predictable unraveling of women after generations of feminism. Many are becoming keenly aware of what womanhood isn’t, or ought not to be. Maybe it’s time to consider again what it can and should be.