By Auguste Meyrat
What is a feminist? This used to be an easy question to answer. When feminism simply meant equal rights and opportunities for women, most people felt comfortable identifying as such. After all, who could oppose women having the right to vote and own property?
However, even as feminists have been breaking one glass ceiling after another, it has become less clear what their goals are today. Worse still, the rise of transgenderism has undermined the fundamental claims of feminism by questioning the objective reality of the female condition.
Perhaps the touted benefits of the movement were exaggerated, and its history and underlying principles deserve a more rigorous examination. Maybe those who embrace this movement today should reconsider exactly what they have accepted.
One person who can guide this reconsideration is Dr. Carrie Gress, an occasional contributor to TCT, in her new book Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity. Far from being a pure and unadulterated good that has empowered and liberated women without any cost, Gress exposes the very roots of the feminist movement, which make it incompatible with the Christian Gospel. By dismantling the many myths of feminism, she opens up much-needed questions about what a true Christian feminism might look like today.
Gress begins her argument with the founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, who applied the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality in her famous pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In keeping with her rationalist Unitarianism, Wollstonecraft believed “that priests, pastors, or any kind of male authority—even Jesus—were obstacles to female potential and divine life. Instead, reason… was women’s point of access to God.” Thus, from the very beginning, the main goals of feminism were liberation and empowerment, and the main obstacle was Christianity.
Even so, Wollstonecraft and other like-minded feminists often joined forces with Christian social reformers like Hannah More, fighting the evils of slavery, child exploitation, and mass alcoholism. However, secular feminists ended up dominating the movement, adopting a generally hostile view toward Christianity. Many of them, including American heroines like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were even involved in spiritualism and occultism.
This, in turn, laid the groundwork for later feminists to equate true feminism with a total rejection of boundaries and sex roles. Prominent figures like Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan concluded that sex was a social construct fabricated and reinforced by patriarchal institutions. Therefore, it was their task to dismantle these institutions, strip men of power, and become their own gods. Autonomy, the “new idol” of the feminist movement, demanded no less.
Thus, a movement once associated with temperance, suffrage, and family protection degenerated into one dedicated to promiscuity, misandry, and witchcraft. Every time this inevitably led to more misery and exploitation for women in general, feminists reflexively blamed systemic sexism and demanded even more privileges for women as a remedy.
In addition to leading so many women astray with false promises and incoherent arguments, Gress shows how modern feminism has completely obscured the deeper realities of the female condition. Instead of compromising with this ideology, Gress recommends reframing the issue with non-ideological language:
Words like woman, anthropology, male and female, common good, complementarity, equal dignity, subsidiarity and solidarity, and even patriarchy, could be used precisely. This would also have the advantage of forcing us to find new ways to describe complex realities beyond simplistic slogans.
In other words, women should stop trying to deny their own femininity by closing their eyes and trying to be the same as men.
Gress places this idea in the Christian context by confronting the efforts of contemporary Christian feminists to forcibly fit modern feminism into Christian theology. While well-intentioned Christian feminists try, in practice, to baptize modern feminism by presenting figures like Mary Wollstonecraft as devout Christians and portraying St. John Paul II and St. Edith Stein as progressive feminists, Gress rightly explains how all of this is completely backwards.
Instead of studying women “in a vacuum, isolated from family, husbands, and children,” a deeply Catholic anthropology recognizes that “man and woman are complementary creatures, who reflect two ‘equal’ but distinct modes of being in the world,” and that “the nature and genius of woman, in reality, cannot be understood apart from those of man”.
Gress concludes her argument by exploring the broader implications of modern feminism on Western culture. Citing the work of neuroscientist and philosopher Ian McGilchrist, who divides the mind into right and left hemispheres, Gress explains how modern feminism, along with most modern ideologies, overemphasizes the left hemisphere at the expense of the right. In practice, this means focusing on generalities, policies, and reductive abstractions, while neglecting the deeper mysteries of life, emotions, relationships, and complex realities.
In this way, it becomes possible for feminists to boast of their numerous legal victories while collectively becoming more and more depressed about their situation.
Gress achieves her main goal of thoroughly discrediting modern feminism as a corrosive ideology that threatens both Christianity and women. However, her exposition of what a true Christian feminism would look like remains incomplete. This is probably because such a discussion would require many more chapters and delving into even deeper concepts that most readers would have difficulty following.
Nevertheless, it is more than enough that Gress even initiates this discussion. Women are more than asexual ghosts in feminine wrappers, and more than an oppressed minority that needs more rights and representation.
They are fully integrated, rational and relational beings, with unique souls and bodies that fit a transcendent, complementary, and at the same time distinct feminine nature from that of men. It is more than time to embrace this truth, profound and mysterious as it is, if Christians hope to guide women and men along the path that God has created for them.
About the author
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He has a master’s in Humanities and an MEd in Educational Leadership. He is senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Thinker, and The American Conservative, as well as for the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.