There’s a revolution brewing in the world of women. So far, however, most of our corporate media, academics, and cultural gurus seem oblivious to this growing insurgency.
In the past three months, I’ve read five new books by and about women, all of them published just this year. In no particular order, they’re Carrie Gress’s “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us,” Mary Harrington’s “Feminism Against Progress,” Kayleigh McEnany’s “Serenity in the Storm: Living Through Chaos by Leaning on Christ,” Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz’s “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” and Peachy Keenan’s “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.”
In all of these books, explicitly or implicitly, the authors courageously reclaim a space in our culture for themselves and for women like them, which means the right to enjoy and treasure marriage, motherhood, home, and family. And each one of them is fed up with radical feminism.
Ms. Keenan proudly declares herself a domestic extremist, meaning that she loves her home life and her children. With wit and humor, sometimes caustic, Ms. Keenan summons women to ditch the ideologies of our broken culture and focus on the cornerstone of civilization: the family.
The UK’s Ms. Harrington is a self-proclaimed “reactionary feminist.” She rejects the “totalitarian sexual-industrial complex” that has infected today’s male–female relationships and calls for “solidarity, intimacy, family, and building a life together.”
In “The End of Woman,” Ms. Gress—also co-author of “Theology of Home“—offers startling insights into the history of feminism, protests the ongoing assaults on the conventional roles of women and men, and defends marriage as “essential for building a healthy and growing civilization.”
Ms. Mandel and Ms. Markowicz detail the destruction of childhood innocence by our schools and culture. In doing so, they ardently defend the family.
Ms. McEnany mingles her religious convictions with politics, but throughout her book, she pauses to celebrate the love she shares with her parents, her husband, and her two small children.
All five women are married with children, so they’re writing what they know. Despite differences in their personal histories and philosophies, all agree that today’s feminism and our sexualized culture have gone terribly wrong. Radical feminism lacks appeal and relevance for the average woman, and our culture, imbued with Marxist ideology, is tearing apart the family and the reverence traditionally accorded to motherhood.
All of these writers believe that women deserve rights equal to men in education, the workplace, and the public square. They’re also comfortable with who they are; ask them that infamous question of our age—“What is a woman?”—and they’ll have an answer. But they stoutly reject that chorus of voices jabbering on about the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, marriage as slavery, and other such notions concocted by academia and the extreme left.
In “Mother,” the last chapter of “The End of Woman,” Ms. Gress wrote that many women “actively reject the ideology continually advanced by radical feminism.”
“They are tired of the Marxist effort to reimagine human nature as anything it wants to be,” she wrote.
She later concluded: “Like a sleeping giant, these women are waking up and realizing they are not alone anymore. That reality has the dramatic capacity to transform our culture, wherever we work and spend our energies.”
Vive les femmes!
