A Sign of Feminist Failure

Surely one of the most provocative conversations this year has been that sparked by conservative essayist Helen Andrews, whose October essay “The Great Feminization”—which censured what she describes as the feminization of Western institutions—went so viral that even liberal corporate media couldn’t ignore it. The New York Times welcomed her to write an op-ed on her thesis, and conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat brought Andrews onto The New York Times podcast to discuss it with conservative Catholic feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant. Writers at The Washington Post, Fortune, and Vanity Fair analyzed it.

Yet perhaps the most illuminating commentary on Andrew’s arguments appeared in a November Washington Post book review that, while ostensibly discussing Sargeant’s recent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, couldn’t help but pit Sargeant’s conservative feminism against Andrew’s “anti-feminism.” Its author, Becca Rothfeld, labels Andrews’ opinions “tenuous” and “perverse” and even claims that Andrews “stands in hell.” Sergeant, who spends much of the New York Times podcast charitably sparring with Andrews, is, however, not ultimately much better according to Rothfeld, who accuses Sargeant of a “subtler and more slippery approach” that is a “softened version of the same ugly hierarchy we have always had.”

But here’s the kicker: “Sexism has two pillars,” says Rothfeld—“the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior. Andrews accepts both pillars. Sargeant challenges the second but accepts the first. True flourishing lies in rejection of both.” In other words, while Sargeant presents a vision for women to be more fully themselves—the subtitle of her book, after all, is “A Feminist Manifesto” (my emphasis)—hers is, in fact, an underhanded means of perpetuating a social straitjacket on the female sex. Indeed, Sargeant effectively concedes that women are comparatively better inclined toward caregiving and men toward providing and protecting. In this capitulation to certain traditional conceptions of gender norms, Rothfeld concludes, Sargeant’s project may not be as viscerally offensive as Andrew’s arguments but ultimately represents a return to patriarchal oppression.

As a feminist, Rothfeld objects that dependence is, or must be, categorically different for women than men. To wit, her reference to the mantra “biology is not moral destiny”—an idea popularized by feminist Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 work The Second Sex—is a central tenet of modern feminism, a belief that female fulfillment comes not from the proper realization of something intrinsic to woman qua woman but from jettisoning false social constructs that repressively inhibit them. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” declared Beauvoir.

I don’t know how many American women today have read Beauvoir, but her ideas define much of what our culture understands as authentic womanhood. A perhaps unprecedented development has occurred over the last few decades, with young women today less interested in marriage than young men, as conservative journalist Emily Jashinsky noted in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Jashinsky cites data that conservative Gen Z men list children as the top criteria for personal success; liberal Gen Z women list children as second-to-last in their definition of personal success. The reasons for this are certainly complex, but there’s little doubt that feminist ideology—with its emphasis on personal autonomy and careerism as hallmarks of success—plays no small part. 

Thus does Rothfeld, a successful, childless, Ivy League graduate, perceive in Sargeant’s winsome, carefully articulated approach a Trojan Horse. Rothfeld argues that what is at stake in recent critical reevaluations of the success of feminism over the last three-quarters of a century by the likes of women such as Andrews and Sargeant is “nothing less than affording women access to the tumult of total humanity.” I don’t think she’s exaggerating what she thinks. 

Sergeant, reflecting a Catholic philosophical framework, perceives that regardless of our passions and life circumstances, there are certain things that differentiate men from women. There is a potentiality in the female that marks her as innately different from the male, an ability to conceive, carry, and nurse a child. All of modernity’s attempts to diminish—if not eliminate—those differences cannot obscure that reality, even if pharmacological and technological developments give the impression of a certain measure of “success” against nature.

Of course, from the Catholic view, to recognize the inherent differences between men and women is not oppressing but freeing. It was Christianity, after all, that elevated women’s status in the ancient world by teaching that all people have inherent dignity, combating dehumanizing practices such as exposure of newborns, polygamy, and prostitution that disproportionately harmed women. Hagiographies of the early Church are filled with stories of courageous women who suffered martyrdom for their faith, including refusing marriage. The monastic life offered unprecedented educational and leadership opportunities to the female sex. 

The problem is that what the Church offers vis-à-vis its understanding of female flourishing—marriage and motherhood or the consecrated life—is not the kind of empowerment that modern feminists have been catechized to want. As Sargeant ably observes, much of the way our society is structured views female fertility as a problem to be solved and managed not honored and generously accommodated. “The Pill” severs sex from its natural result, while technological advances offer the promise of delayed motherhood—or renting a womb—on a timeline that fits with one’s career and life plans. “Let’s schedule the surrogate to have the baby after our anniversary trip to Bali.”

The irony is that this feminism is failing to obtain what it promises. As Jashinsky reports, women are lonelier and unhappier than ever. Perhaps that’s why Rothfeld’s critique—such as her snide remark that the book’s purported weaknesses make Sargeant dependent on the charity of her readers—possesses a discernible undercurrent of bitterness. She claims, for example, that a definition of femininity that includes the innate potentiality for childbearing—and, by extension, how that might in the aggregate affect how women are different from men—is to consign them “to a single corner of the moral universe,” to force them to “undergo a violent truncation,” and to suffer the “indignity of specialization.” That’s how Rothfeld perceives the simple potentiality of her body to bring a new life into the world? How depressing.

Sergeant is an impressive intellect, as The Dignity of Dependence makes clear (perhaps too clear, as her tendency to frame arguments via reference to her academic and professional feats becomes increasingly tiresome). Andrews is an impressive literary force, her writing consistently offering some of the wittiest and most insightful commentary in contemporary conservatism. Both are Christian mothers. And both are viewed as such a threat to the dominant feminist ideology that The Washington Post non-fiction book critic—highly successful in her own right—descends to caricature and mockery. That seems telling.