Feminism Overshot the Goal Peachy Keenan
https://www.newsweek.com/feminism-overshot-goal-opinion-1801498
The following essay is an excerpt adapted from Peachy Keenan’s new book, Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, out June 6 from Regnery.
Feminists fought for decades to help girls succeed, but they overshot the goal. They crossed the finish line and then hit the gas and drove the car right off the cliff. The early feminists who wanted women to be treated as equals under the law would spin in their graves if they saw where their descendants have gone.
We can all agree that voting and equal rights for all people, including women, are good. However, “equality” and “feminism” are now just weasel words obfuscating nasty outcomes for your innocent daughters. The kindly, maternal figure of the traditional grandmother has been swallowed whole by the wolf—and she/they plans to eat you next. Too many of America’s boomer grandmothers are more likely to teach their granddaughters to make “My Body My Choice” signs than how to bake a pie. Grandmother, what sharp curettes you have!
In every way, the term “women’s rights” has been warped and hollowed out, a total misnomer, like one of those hilariously euphemistic government names for bad laws.
Your “right” to be treated equally quickly turned into your “right” to demand an abortion at nine months, your “right” to brag on social media about your lucrative career in socially acceptable sex work, and your “right” to be one of hundreds of jilted girls ghosted by a single male user on Tinder.
Somehow, along the way to making our lives easier, feminists made them harder. They set out to allow women to have more fulfilling lives, but our lives became less fulfilling. We were supposed to be happier with all these “freedoms,” and yet, rates of depression and suicide among young women have never been higher. Liberation from the pressure to get married and have children was supposed to free us to grow old unencumbered and living in a paradise of independence.
Instead, older women have skyrocketing rates of depression. White women over the age of 45 have the highest rate of antidepressant use. “Older white women account for 58 percent of adults who have used antidepressants for at least five years.”
Where is the happiness feminism promised them? Where is the thrill that childlessness and no-fault divorce guaranteed? Can’t all those cats cheer them up?
Feminists promised us that we could “have it all” and achieve all our professional and personal goals—with no more mean old patriarchs and their big, swinging glass ceilings to stop us.
It’s true that it’s easier for a woman to become a CEO in the 21st century than it was in the 19th century. For those few dozen female CEOs in the Fortune 500: hope the sacrifice was worth it!
For the rest of us, things are not going that well. It’s never been harder to have the kind of life most women still say they want: to fall in love, be happily married, to raise children, and to enjoy grandchildren one day. These simple, timeless things have never been more out of reach for more women.
Not only are these dreams more difficult to achieve—loyal husband, fulfilling marriage, babies—they are treated as backwards, out-of-fashion trends that you, as an enlightened, modern woman, must reject. Your heart may tell you to seek domestic fulfillment, but the culture at large has erased this desire from public view. Nowhere in popular media do you see examples of young married couples devoted to each other—beholden to their own family culture, not to mainstream American culture.
If you follow Christian mommy bloggers on TikTok or Instagram, you will see no shortage of homesteading homeschoolers with lots of children. But this lifestyle is a curio—a tiny fringe that cultural arbiters regard with total disdain and study like anthropologists examining remote islanders who throw spears at them from the ground when they fly overhead in helicopters. There are some homesteads in this country that I would advise feminist gender studies professors not to try to invade.
Anyways, we can’t all buy farms. Few of us are equipped or prepared for the off-the-grid dissident life, including me. Despite my inner domestic extremist, I’m still outwardly the same city slicker I’ve always been, more comfortable at a lively cocktail party than a barn raising. However, foundational female roles don’t require you to transform into a tradwife stereotype, or Ma Ingalls.
Despite that, getting married and having a child is now Mission: Impossible for many young women, so they’re simply opting out. For the first time, a majority of 30-year-old British women are childless. Feminists, take a bow.
If politics is downstream of culture, then culture is downstream of the family unit (as Ed, Holly Hunter’s character, calls it in Raising Arizona), and the family unit is downstream of the mother—which makes her enemy number one.
Women: the cause of—and solution to—all the world’s problems!
Peachy Keenan is the author of Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (coming June 6th from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com. Follow her on Twitter @keenanpeachy.
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