The Appeal of Womanly Feminism

“A new feminism is emerging.” So goes the tagline of Fairer Disputations, a new online repository of literature and journalism on sex-realist feminism—an initiative by the Abigail Adams Institute’s Wollstonecraft Project. A century and more of agitation for women’s rights has birthed cynicism as well as much else, and there are many whose patience has worn out, after bobbing upon the many waves of feminism over their lifetime.

Undoubtedly, this new initiative looks like another reincarnation of an idea spouting all the old tropes that the patriarchy is terrible, tradition stifles women, and children should be optional extensions of Self. Perhaps it is simply another attempt for millennial fems to add their own personal touch or regain a reputation otherwise sullied by earlier forms of the same name.

This new branding could be a pivot, of sorts; modern feminists are under no illusions that things are going well for their reputation. Monica Dux and Zora Simic summarise it well in The Great Feminist Denial when they show how today’s feminists are made up of “selfish younger ones with delusions of empowerment; barren thirty- and forty-somethings; and an embittered coterie of baby-boomer feminists stupidly wondering what went wrong”. Yet the most common response by younger generations of women seeking equality and freedom is to dig their heels further into the third-wave iterations of these concepts rather than looking critically at whether feminism may have taken a wrong turn.  

The point of difference with Fairer Disputations that might make family-focused, tradition-loving ears prick is that it is largely spearheaded by women who challenge either one or both of two major pillars of modern feminism. The first is feminism’s devastating foray into identity politics, summed up in the acquiescence that “some women have penises”. Or erasing the word woman altogether, and using instead the ludicrously derogatory term, “people who menstruate”.

The second point of difference lies in the challenge to feminist sacred cows. Imagine questioning if contraception and abortion are necessary features of feminism. Adherents of one are not necessarily adherents of the other, but there is a strong tie between them, and not only because they present as two of the most scandalous heresies to emerge from feminist thought in recent years. Opponents of abortion and contraception are united in their affirmation of the biological dimension of woman, and in fiercely protecting the inherent goodness of it against exploitation.  

Feminism’s role is to work itself out of a job. That is, when our societies become truly homogenous, recognising and facilitating the distinct contribution of men and women as individuals with feminine and masculine strengths of equal value, feminism will be made redundant, and eventually, not even comprehensible. Yet while economic models and social mores remain more advantageous to men, with women compelled to adapt in order to participate as “equals”, feminism has a place.

This emerging feminism, which bears little resemblance to the angry mothers of the Sexual Revolution, can best be understood through the modest but potent output of a diverse collection of advocates. Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress, traces the development of feminism from the Industrial Revolution to today’s transhumanist “cyborg era”. Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution has spawned a following among young women who write to her en masse to thank her for her call to abscond from hook-up culture. Abigail Favale’s Genesis of Gender (2022) and Erika Bachioci’s The Rights of Women (2021) are further examples of this new upsurge of opposition to popular feminism, which is increasingly being merged with the broader, and more nebulous branding of identity politics. Philosophers, lawyers, academics and authors all along the political spectrum are combining forces too, against the growing impingement of women’s rights from transgender activists. Kathleen Stock and Nina Power in the UK, Holly Lawford-Smith in Australia, and Rachel Lu and Jennifer Lahl in the US, are all featured authors at Fairer Disputations, and are all leading advocates of this new wave of dissenting feminist thought.

For those seeking a better understanding of this growing sex-realist feminism,  Harrington and Perry are a good place to begin, and pair well. While Harrington’s treatment is more historically detailed and heavier on the statistics, her personal testimony plays an important role in Feminism Against Progress. Harrington lived a radical-left, bohemian lifestyle, which left her increasingly dissatisfied and anxious. Marriage and motherhood shattered her faith in disembodied sexuality and gave rise to her “reactionary feminism”. Perry offers a more anecdotally and anthropologically-focused exploration of why the Sexual Revolution hasn’t delivered, and could never deliver, on its promises. She further shows how today’s hook-up culture, normalisation of BDSM, the porn epidemic, and rising violence against women, is a direct consequence of third-wave feminism’s radical libertarianism.

These complementary critiques do not argue that “feminism” as a masthead term ought be consigned to social history with a sigh of relief from the general non-anatomically-obsessed, even-tempered public. As problematic and confusing as the f-word has become, both authors believe that the word still holds valuable, even necessary explanatory power. Neither Perry nor Harrington suggest that a reversion to pre-feminism days is the answer. Social upheaval brought about by the Industrial Revolution during the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, the devastating effects of two world wars, and the velocity with which our lives have irreversibly been changed by technology, are only the obvious reasons why it is necessary to sustain a dedicated examination into how these developments specifically affect women.

Of course, if women have been oppressed by men in the past, so too have less-powerful men been oppressed by more-powerful men. However, what Harrington and Perry are at pains to show is how the fight for women’s rights turned into the devouring mother of modern-day feminism. Some may believe that feminism as a conceptual tool for helping women achieve greater things is beyond saving. The fact is that any proposed neologism would fall to the same fate. It seems humbler, almost, to retain the term, warts and all. “The feminist movement in all its fractious multiplicity,” writes Harrington, “is an umbrella term for women’s specific responses to the technologies and ideologies of the industrial era—responses that were often justified.”

Harrington’s personal impetus for writing Feminism Against Progress is arresting and utterly fascinating. Realising she had “bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good”, upon the birth of her child she recounts “feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby”. From this starting point of the ontology of birth, Harrington develops a searing critique of our society’s blind faith in Progress. “Pick any subject,” she quips, “and you’ll find that what looks from one vantage point like ‘progress’ mostly seems that way because you’re ignoring the costs.” The main thesis of Feminism Against Progress is that two major technological phenomena have shaped the female experience in the modern world. The repercussions of these phenomena, Harrington argues, cannot be exaggerated, for the “endpoint of a three-century struggle for ‘progress’, understood as individual separateness, has culminated in a political effort to eliminate all meaningful sex differences through technology”.

The first is the Industrial Revolution, which saw cottage industries disrupted and whole communities dislocated into faceless mill towns where women were increasingly exposed to sexual predation and poverty. The cottage industrial economy allowed women to care for their young and work at a craft that could be used for trade. From basket weaving to embroidery, women’s maternal spirit and enterprising energies were interwoven in a hard, but homogenous existence. As Flora Thompson describes in her memoir Larkrise to Candleford, an account of her childhood in 1890s rural England, “People were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have today; but they were happier.” The loss of these deep-rooted communities, and with it a sense of place and identity, of protection and familiarity, was especially destabilising for women and children. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, which follows the childhood and adolescence of her heroine through the harsh existence of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, illustrates well the devastating effects on women of the mass diaspora from field to factory, and from hamlet to city.

The other major technology to change women’s lives, according to Harrington, was the Pill. The first oral contraceptive pill was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Women found themselves, for the first time in history, able to (semi-) reliably control their fertility. The Pill derailed all the old ethical codes and social expectations surrounding sex, which in turn diminished any incentive to undertake any comprehensive studies into its adverse effects. While the pill is no longer called an experimental drug, its sudden widespread use, along with the praise of third-wave feminists for its liberating potential on their bodies, foreshadows today’s experimental hormonal treatment on trans people.

Yet, as Harrington makes plain, the Pill did not lead to sexual equality or decreased rates of abortion. In fact, it made these things worse because the rate of recreational sex skyrocketed. Men, unsurprisingly, quickly developed new expectations of women’s sexual availability, revealing the underlying misogyny of the new technology. Fertility had become the woman’s problem.

Harrington explains that with this most fundamental sex difference “solved”, the concept of equality shifted to become understood as “sameness” between the sexes. Women were, from a social theory perspective, the same as men. This is why “career women” are not sure whether they are supposed to pursue their careers in the ways men do, or as women. Voluntary sterilisation through the Pill has paved the way for this possibility. However, Harrington suggests sterility limits women by forcing them to behave as men. Adopting a masculine stance to career and family is structurally at odds with the methods of early feminists, who argued that changes to social structures were necessary to better reflect women’s equality in every facet of their female experience. The advent of the Pill obscured this earlier pillar of proto-feminism, but after half a century of use, the hidden cost is emerging. Harrington argues however, that women can reclaim the “equal but different” trajectory feminism forfeited when it embraced the Pill. And they can do this by “challenging the centrality of abortion and birth control to our sexual culture”. She contends that “by making sex properly consequential again” women have at their disposal a source of true empowerment not currently being harnessed.

This is perhaps the strongest affinity Harrington and Perry share in their books.

If I had to name one flaw in Harrington’s book, it is that while she adeptly weaves together her observations of the mutually affecting Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and the Sexual Revolution of the twentieth, she omits her creative response to the former, which she offers in a separate essay. Published on UnHerd, “Why Trad Wives Aren’t Trad Enough” is a brief but brilliant expose on the new war between radical fems and trad wives.

In it, Harrington adroitly explains that the “trad wife”, the woman who repudiates feminism in all its forms and champions a return to The Way Things Were, is a misnomer. Harrington argues that trad wives need to look further back than 1950 and return to the medieval model of “trade wives” where women participated in the local economy through home crafts, alongside child-raising. While she delves into this pre-industrial model in her book, she omits (or perhaps had not yet developed) the notion of gearing modern digital economies towards this earlier economic pattern.

Harrington is hopeful that the rise of the digital economy, accelerated by the pandemic, as well as a concerted effort by women to “rewild sex”, will forge a new kind of post-Pill feminism. This feminism will be better able to facilitate men’s and women’s waged and unwaged work more equitably, without the brunt of the economic disadvantages falling to women, who still remain the majority of caregivers (and still the majority of pregnant people). This is perhaps Harrington’s most compelling argument, not least because it can be applied beyond feminism to society and culture at large. Yet Harrington uses feminism to great effect as the lens through which to critique the naive belief in the triumph of Progress.

Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution was born of her time spent volunteering, as a student, at a woman’s shelter. There, she discovered an unassailable chasm between the Feminist Studies course in which she was enrolled, and what she witnessed happening to victims of domestic violence. This problem not only remained unimproved by the rise of the new sexual freedom, but had actually been exacerbated by it. Third-wave feminism reduced the emphasis on men behaving well as much as it emphasised women behaving liberally. This, Perry argues, created more problems than it solved. She realised progressive feminism had become an exercise in theoretical studies, with little traction on reality. It was a luxury belief.

Perry’s heterodoxy, and her dissidence from popular feminism, is evident as early as the contents page. With chapter titles including such popular feminism apostasies as “Sex Must Be Taken Seriously”, “Men and Women Are Different”, “Some Desires Are Bad”, “Consent Is Not Enough” and “Marriage is Good”, she sets a tone that is practical and forthright. While each chapter is more self-contained than in Harrington’s contingent approach, both arguments are underpinned by the general claim that the Sexual Revolution has let women down.

Mapping out hook-up culture’s rapid development into a wider culture of casual and transactional sex, Perry exposes the dark, lurid and dangerous developments of sex without ethics—that is, apart from consent. Perry argues that women should aim for higher than that their sexual interactions are “consensual”. Further, when men’s sexual appetites are unrestrained, it leads to more sex and more sexual partners. This, in turn, creates an increasingly difficult climate for women, who generally prefer a monogamous relationship and the support of a partner in child-raising. Delving into the evolutionary explanations for men’s and women’s differing experience of and approach to sex, Perry returns to the original purpose of marriage, and its desirableness for women in the face of evolutionary male sexuality.

As Perry shows, true freedom can only rise out of limitations on behaviour. In other words, our society has lost our moral code for sex and desperately needs to find it again. Perry’s promotion of marriage is not made blindly: she admits that abuses of women have been perpetrated within the confines of marriage. Her modest claim is simply that it is the best thing we’ve got, in general, for supporting women and their children.

The Sexual Revolution’s cardinal virtue of radical autonomy, enabled by the Pill, also laid the groundwork, as Perry and Harrington both contend, for the new phenomena of gender dysphoria and transgenderism. By disembedding sex from the body by making sterilisation the norm and fertility the exception, third-wave feminism paved the way for a more total disembeddedness of self from the body. This is just one reason why those concerned by transgenderism cannot form a serious opposition to it without engagement with this new feminism. As Germaine Greer points out, “When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves.” Greer, who might now be grouped with dissenters like Moira Deeming and Katherine Deves, further argued that “the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character”. Equality for women equals the elimination of women.

Harrington and Perry, along with their fellow sex-realist feminists, show how retrieving feminism from identity politics and hook-up culture, and rehabilitating it in sex-realism, disrupts both lef-twing narratives and neoconservative brands of the same name. In fact, this new feminism takes arguments from both the left and right, leveraging the corrective tensions between each to better discern how women might participate economically and socially in a better world. These women inhabit the space near the centre of the political spectrum. The majority seem to be socially conservative (pro-marriage, pro-motherhood) yet all are economically homeless in our current bifurcations of economic ideals into either Scandi-style socialism or US-style unbridled capitalism. Neither of these systems celebrates or incentivises unwaged care-giving work.

Harrington’s reimagining of our economic lives provides the best model that I have come across yet. She at least looks to facilitate the duality of woman in her role as nurturer (wife, mother, homemaker) and also as creative individual who is willing and able to benefit society not just indirectly through the first role, but directly through trade and service. Infused with Perry’s practical sense and disdain for modern narratives that obfuscate women’s modern-day grievances, these two books provide a guide for women wondering where they can turn to re-envisage their place in today’s world.

As Elizabeth Gaskell writes in Mary Barton, “There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.” Perhaps feminists have been clutching at straws all along. By gathering the threads of experience, knowledge, expertise and application, Harrington, Perry and this new breed of feminist are helping us understand what a society that recognises the value of its female contingency looks like. Out of the rubble of the Sexual Revolution, of aggressive industrialisation, technological over-reach and wage-focused economic models, these women are showing a new way. “We need,” writes Harrington, “a movement that honours the interests of women, and of men, as irreducibly sexed fusions of self and body, against an emerging order that seeks to de-sex and disembody us all.” These women are articulating a way forward for feminism which is integrated, unchained from identity politics, and perhaps above all, unapologetically in pursuit of the best interests of women.

Feminism Against Progress
by Mary Harrington
Swift Press, 2023, 224 pages, $29.99

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
by Louise Perry
Polity Press, 2022, 200 pages, $30.95

Veronika Winkels is a founding editor of Mathilde, a hardcopy magazine promoting women, culture and history. She writes from Melbourne where she lives with her husband and their four children.