At its core, feminism does not improve life for women. Instead, its dogmas undermine a woman’s value and essence, and inhibit authentic feminine contribution to our culture. The European Conservative recently sat down with Jennifer S. Bryson, Ph.D. She is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a visiting researcher at Hochschule Heiligenkreuz in Austria. We spoke about her research of 19th and 20th century feminism, its critics, and what true feminism ought to look like.
In your perception, what has been the main goal of feminism? How has its goal changed over the decades? Could you give us a very brief history of feminism and its different waves?
The four ‘waves’ of feminism—although some argue that there have been five or six at this point—are all just variations on the same idea with the same end. While each of these waves has distinct traits, I want to focus on the broader problems with feminism—found in all its iterations—by taking a closer look at its primary goal: to change the structure of society in order to improve the lot of women. This can be broken down into two parts.
First, feminists want to change the structure of society. Feminism grew out of an era in European philosophy when God became passé. This challenged the traditional understanding that human beings are divinely created. The question of what a human being is came to the forefront. At the same time, accounts of history in terms of philosophical meta-dynamics, such as Hegel’s dialectic, were en vogue. Meta-dynamics represent the underlying philosophical ideas and developments which influence historical events and developments.
Intellectuals increasingly turned to the theory of meta-dynamics to explain man’s nature. Human beings were now understood as products of external forces, that they were prey to and could not simply alter such as the social and historical structures in which they were situated. It followed from this understanding that the agency of the individual was transmogrified. That is an unusual word, but I think it fits, because it means “to change in a magical way.” Embracing a materialist understanding of human nature–one which is shaped by external forces rather than internal principles–meant that one just needed to wave a wand in order to change the structure of society. If one uses this magic correctly, then, ta-dah!, oppression would cease to exist.
In Christendom, change involved the human being coming to terms with his or her soul and sinfulness, repenting, accepting God’s salvation, and seeking holiness. Society was improved when individual souls rejected sin. However, because sin is part of human existence, everyone understood that there were limits to perfecting society on this side of heaven. Building Christian civilization involved finding ways to mitigate and live with sin. There was no illusion that humans could re-enter Eden by sheer force of will.
But then came a pivot in Europe, around the era of humanism and the emergence of the early modern period. Souls became ever less important until eventually they were of no concern at all. A new era dawned in which one could conceptually bypass the messiness of human sin by relocating the agent of change to meta-dynamics, such as structures. This meant that those who wield power over society could now change what human beings are. If you are starting to think that this sounds like Marxism, you are right. Feminism and Marxism grew out of a shared zeitgeist.
The earliest promoters of the ‘women’s movement’ were swept up in the spirit of the age. One of those promoters was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was an 18th-century English writer and philosopher, best known for her revolutionary work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she advocated for women’s equality and education, laying the groundwork for modern feminism. She is often considered one of the founders of feminist thought. We read in Wollstonecraft, “I think the female world is oppressed.” By that, she means that the structures in which women live are oppressive. She argued that “the greater number of female follies” are “produced by oppression,” that is, “from the tyranny of men.”
Notice how, in this paradigm, women no longer need to tend to their own souls. Their problems are always blamed on external forces. This is an important and common thread throughout the many varieties of feminism.
The poison in the feminist plant was part of its makeup from the start, and over the past 250 years, its fruits have been revealed. Trying to redesign a complex ecosystem for the sake of just one creature is a bad idea, especially when one does not recognize that there is an ecosystem with many constituent parts.
Once the feminists realized that the structure of society could liberate the individual from oppression, they set about to improve the lot of women. This phrase is the refrain of the feminists’ tune. Many who go running after this pied piper are responding to real injustices that exist while failing to recognize the utopian nature of the promise that “if we just change the structure of society, everything will be better for women.” The revolutionary nature of this promise seeps into the minds and hearts of even the most well intentioned adherents.
This means that feminists believe, “If we just fix X, we will no longer face oppression.” The reward sounds so wonderful that followers feel justified in using ever more radical means to achieve their end. Thus, even if they don’t think of themselves as revolutionaries, the types of solutions they propose, their sense of righteousness, and the growing sense of urgency and necessity reflect a revolutionary spirit.
Proponents of gender ideology adopt exactly the same strategy to ‘liberate’ people with fictional genders. That, in turn, has shifted focus away from women. Did feminism become a victim of its own method and success? In other words: is the revolution eating its own children?
Gender ideology is a fruit of feminism. Women are a product of society, rather than creatures willed, designed, and made by God. The definition of a woman has been transferred to human control. By this reasoning, it follows that what qualifies as a woman will keep evolving. It is in the nature of revolution that each time feminists liberate women from one oppression-du-jour or another, their energies look for the next stage of change. Scott Yenor, a contemporary political philosopher and professor known for his work on issues related to family, gender, and political theory, aptly calls this a “rolling revolution.”
First came the normalization of single career-women. Then, the normalization of married women intentionally without children. Then normalization of lesbian women. Then normalization of women roaming in and out of various forms of relationships or even just hook-ups. These share two underlying shifts. First, a reconceptualization of what a woman is, now ever more distance from her capacity to bear new life with a man. Second, they share an assumption that what a woman is can change, even be helped along by rolls of the revolution along the path called “progress.” With change itself made normative, we should not be surprised that an attempted normalization of men saying, “I too am a woman!” is now underway.
Now the attempted normalization of men saying, “I too am a woman!” is underway. We are also witnessing the onset of a ‘female’ transhuman uploaded onto a chip. On and on rolls the revolution unless enough people in society say “no.” Not just “no further” but outright “no.” We must reject and eradicate the premises of feminism.
Alternatively, we could allow the revolution to roll on until it eventually burns out, but that will mean offering up even more sacrificial victims—children in the womb, girls who are denied the opportunity to discover womanhood, women indoctrinated to chase after male power, etc.
So, Mary Wollstonecraft and first-wave feminism are the problem, not the solution. The history textbooks in public schools lead us to believe that first-wave feminism concerned itself with nothing but a few changes to individual laws on topics such as property and voting. But this is just not true. First-wave feminism brought with it a paradigm shift in understanding what a woman is, and with that, in understanding what a human being is.
Those who want first-wave feminism but no further succeed only in affirming the premises of feminism—that it can improve the lot of women by changing the structure of society. In so doing, they directly foster the more radical forms. Feminism will never allow a woman to be only a little feminist. The fatal error of trying to embrace first-wave feminism and then drawing an arbitrary limit is alarmingly prevalent among conservatives today.
Most recently Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture has removed all references to novelist J.K. Rowling in a Harry Potter display, calling the author ‘transphobic’ for believing biological sex is real. This was not the first nor will it be the last attack on Rowling. She has made it clear that she holds her view because of her feminism. What’s your opinion on that?
There is a habit of labeling anyone who stands up for women—by protecting women’s bathrooms, women’s sports, or women’s spaces—a feminist. This is an error. There are many ways to talk about women and women’s roles. Feminism is only one of them and is the very ideology that produced gender theory to begin with.
This brings me to the practice of rebranding feminism as multifaceted, as though one can follow an ‘X’ type of feminism or a ‘Y’ type of feminism. This only fosters confusion. It is unrealistic to say to the public, “that’s not what I mean by feminism. Here, read my book which explains all these distinctions.” These differences get lost and all the public hears is feminism.
Authors, writers, journalists, teachers, and professors cruelly continue to affirm feminism to girls and young women leading them astray. They generally do not start questioning feminism’s glorification of independent women until it is too late to marry and start a family. For conservatives to counter feminism, we need to drop the label feminist once and for all. Period. In the Western intellectual tradition, we have the resources to examine these issues. Philosophy and theology are just two of the well-developed tools available. We have ways to analyze injustice and weigh the options we have to address it without resorting to revolutionary ideology. We have other, indeed better, ways than feminism for engaging with questions of men and women in society.
What would a true feminism center on? What would be its essential features? What is a conservative feminism?
Feminism centers on revolution, the idea that women’s unhappiness is due exclusively to a social order and that overcoming this requires systemic change.
What is conservative feminism? It is an oxymoron.
I think one reason the conservative movements in Europe and North America have allowed so many feminist notions and self-proclaimed feminists to gain influence inside conservatism is what I call ‘the abortion distortion.’ In the United States, abortion is a prominent political issue, and conservatives take the fight seriously. Because this issue is so dominant and because there is no room for pro-lifers on the Left, if a woman says, “I am pro-life,” conservatives embrace her. She feels entitled to be part of the conservative movement. In this way, the abortion issue distorts which activists and ideas—including feminism—we allow inside the conservative movement.
You mentioned that feminism and Marxism were born out of the same zeitgeist. Alas, authors like August Bebel positively married the two schools of thought. Can you elaborate on this?
Bebel (1840-1913) was a German Marxist politician and one of the main architects of Europe’s Marxism-lite social democracy. He was a leader of the emerging social democratic movement and was elected to the Reichstag in 1867. Bebel operationalized Marxism by developing policy proposals that were in line with the ideology.
In 1879, he published Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism). It spread like wildfire and was translated into many languages. This book promoted ideas that became mainstream in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. For example, Bebel already spelled out the notion that humans need to be free to act on sexual urges. Given the systemic, revolutionary nature of emerging feminism, it made sense that Bebel packaged his revolutionary ideas about transforming sexual relations through a socialist restructuring of society.
As a Marxist, Bebel was a materialist. The materialists’ decoupling of sexual desire from reproduction runs as a thread throughout his book. Bebel combines this with liberalism’s focus on individualism. Thus, in his work, the highest good in life is individual ‘freedom’ to be ‘happy’ in this world. And a core component of becoming happy is the fulfillment of an individual’s desires. This has a built-in rejection of stable relations, such as marriage and taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, like a child. Thinkers like Bebel fostered the valorization of sex for the sake of its momentary pleasure. He explains and develops Marxist arguments for abolishing the traditional family unit. And Bebel gave what many consider “the first political speech ever given for homosexual rights,” delivered in the Reichstag in 1898.
A tremendous Catholic counter to Bebel’s Woman and Socialism was in the work of Augustin Rösler, C.sS.R. (1851-1922). I have started a project to bring Rösler’s works on ‘the woman question’ back into print in German, this time in modern script. In the future, I want to translate them into English.
Ida Friederike Görres, a critic of feminism, said that Simone de Beauvoir’s vision of women is “satanic.” You have completed extensive translations of Görres. What was her position towards feminism and what it can and cannot achieve?
Ida Friederike Görres (née von Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1901-1971) does not write about feminism per se. However, because healthy, rich relations between men and women—that is, relations ordered to God within God’s created order—were a critical theme of her work and because she was such a sharp observer of the zeitgeist, one often finds criticisms of ‘the women’s movement’ in her work. As early as the 1920s, she had an intuition that something was amiss. In her essay in 1965 against the ordination of women, she writes, “In the twenties we first heard it rumoured that women—German University graduates—had presented a petition to the Holy See concerning their admission to Holy Orders … We thought the story rather a huge joke.” In the 1930s and 1940s, she wrote works for young women. She saw a need to give guidance tailored to them at a time when new notions of ‘female’ and ‘woman,’ detached from roots, tradition, and even from reality, were gaining strength.
In 1934 she wrote letters to guide young women through the question of vocation, The Cloister and the World. This contains a terrific essay on St. Joan of Arc in which Görres asserts that St. Joan was “neither an Amazon nor a man-woman, neither an adventuress nor a fanatic. She is not an ‘emancipated’ woman, who rushes arbitrarily and ‘with amazing energy’ over the bounds of her position and sex.” During the Nazi era, she edited three volumes of short stories for girls and young ladies, some of which she wrote to counter the Nazi attempt to reshape womanhood. In 1949, she wrote a wonderful collection of letters to young women, On Marriage and on Being Single (my English translation is about to be published).
Her most direct work on feminism is her 1951 review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She does not hold back. She calls de Beauvoir’s book “satanic.” And in 1971, as a delegate at the Synod of Würzburg, she was critical of the women’s movement activists in the synod. Görres writes, “It was comical to see quite a few female delegates to the Synod persistently calling like a cuckoo for more, more, more prestige, recognition, opportunities, influence—in short, power for women in the Church.”
Görres shared a reflective spirit with Rösler, one which enabled both to slow down and think about male-female relations from many angles: history, philosophy, theology, sociology, the reality of human emotions, etc. This enabled these two insightful thinkers to see the dangers in the zeitgeist and not blindly go along with it. They avoided the trap of becoming reactionaries and did not mandate an artificially narrow mold of womanhood pegged to an arbitrary single moment in the past.
