Only woman can undo feminism’s damage

Do we need a new women’s movement? I ask the question having recently attended a women’s conference in Rochester, New York, hosted by Erika Bachiochi, legal scholar and author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision and Feminists Choosing Life of New York. The whole conference culminated in a Declaration of Interdependence signed at Seneca Falls on the site of the 1848 Women’s Right Convention which brought women the right to vote. 

If you sit on the left side of the spectrum, you will be unconflicted about feminism today. 

But if you sit on the right, you may say no, we don’t need a new women’s movement. Schools are dedicated to ensuring girls thrive. Women receive preferential treatment in hiring. You may go even further and say it’s men who need a movement. Heck, a man can’t even go to a ballgame and eat a meal his wife brings him without getting publicly pilloried. You’d note that if you constantly have to define what form of feminism you support (first wave, second wave, radical, maternal, reactionary, sex-realist, Catholic, etc.) well then, be it resolved that a movement where the cause cannot easily be defined cannot actually be a movement.

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And yet this is precisely why we need a new way forward. And this is why conservative women, must step up and lead the charge. I know less about the feminism of 1848 than I should. But I know a lot about modern feminism and how women experience the world today. And that experience is not a wholesome or positive one, in many respects. It will be women—can only be women—who undo the damage of modern feminism. 

The September conference illustrated in several important ways how this can happen. 

For starters, Abigail Favale author of The Genesis of Gender spoke about what it means to be a woman. Not using acerbic gotcha journalism but lending academic credentials to explaining how we arrived at this place of believing gender is a choice. “Man” and “woman” name reality, she said, “asymmetrical and synergistic powers of generation.” As women we are “sentinels of the invisible.” What this means to me is no matter what legislation you put in place on abortion, it is one person—the mother—who alone is the steward of embryonic life inside her. She did not get pregnant alone, nor should anyone ever raise a child alone. But pro-choice activists know women are indeed sentinels of the invisible, which is why they push an abortion pill, taken alone and in private. Women can and must effectively speak to this and create a better way forward.  

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Mary Eberstadt, public intellectual, and author of several important books about women and the family, spoke via video deliberately admonishing us to teach our daughters about how men and women are not enemies. Young women embarking into adulthood should tell men they are pro-life and post-sexual revolution. They should “establish,” she said, “that you are not part of a vindictive female set.” This deliberately sets the stage for a new women’s movement that overturns the founding ethos of the feminism we are living out today, which hitched its star to sexual liberation, pretending men and women experience the sexual act in exactly the same way. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, human rights activist, spoke about modern feminism as practiced today in the West as a moral fraud: “Spiritually, morally, and materially bankrupt.” She did not, however, counter this by saying there are no problems to solve, rather, that there are threats to women and girls from both ends of the political spectrum. 

Not every turn of phrase in the declaration of interdependence is precisely how I’d frame it. I’d remove any word, however small and irrelevant, that points to women as victims writ-large at the hands of men. For we are perfectly capable of victimizing ourselves. Access to abortion, for example, to my mind transgresses women’s rights and our ability to act as women in the world. But while early promoters of abortion involved influential men, see Bernard Nathanson and Henry Morgentaler, this today is a cause promoted mainly by women. Women’s rights is quite obviously contested terrain, and women will be better able to speak to other women about this.

The Declaration of Interdependence is open for any woman to sign—I did. Conservative women can sit on the sidelines and let other women represent them as has been happening for decades, or we can choose to actively create an interdependent, pro-life, pro-family, pro-women’s-strengths-in-the-world women’s movement from which our sons and daughters can benefit. I don’t need to—and shouldn’t have to—find the right adjective in front of the term feminist to support this mission. 

Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow at Cardus Family. 

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(Andrea Mrozek is a Senior Fellow at Cardus Family)