Missing Motherhood
The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us by Carrie Gress
“Unlike any other ‘ism’ in the world today,” argues Carrie Gress, “feminism is one we aren’t supposed to question. We are meant to embrace it with our whole hearts, because to do otherwise would be to betray ourselves as women.” In The End of Woman, Gress examines major personalities in feminism, finding that their personal lives were microcosms of the wreckage feminist philosophy has made of human society and relationships. Tracing the “personality” of feminism from instability through nastiness to the inevitable coup of transgender identity, Gress demonstrates that there might be a reason feminists are on the outs with everybody, even as numerous effects of feminism are now reckoned as basic morality or justice.
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Gress does not take on too great a challenge in showing that numerous celebrities of feminism were baldly immoral, mentally ill women who raged through their lives, sloughing relatives and friends. She borrows feminist Phyllis Chesler’s term “Lost Girls” to refer to characters on the model of Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Andrea Dworkin. The Lost Girls’ scandalous rhetoric succeeded by building on Betty Friedan’s calculated destabilizing of popular thought with The Feminine Mystique. If women had been unhappy all along without anyone knowing it, was there any limit to how much fury they had latitude to unleash? The Lost Girls proved there were no limits. Chastity, men, marriage, and children could all be burned on one pyre constructed by a splinter group of women scorned for their neuroses and antisocial conduct.
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Rebekah Curtis is the co-author of LadyLike (Concordia, 2015), and her essays have appeared in Touchstone, Chronicles, Salvo, Modern Reformation, and Lutheran Forum, among other publications. She attends a congregation of the LCMS.
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