Somewhere between 1789 and 1929, Mary Wollstonecraft ceased to be a revolutionary. Virginia Woolf notes that, in her own day, Wollstonecraft’s “theories and convictions” had faded from the realm of the radical into the background of life. “Their originality,” once expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had “become our commonplace.” In fact, even this understanding of Wollstonecraft’s ordinary character is so subterranean that Woolf can assert it as a passing but undeniable truth. If Wollstonecraft’s fundamental theory or conviction was feminism itself, that feminism had, for Woolf’s contemporaries, already become so ubiquitous that it would have been difficult for them to conceive of a world without it.
Today, even if some seem fatigued by feminism’s apparent excesses, few of us seriously probe its premises or have occasion to review its foundational assumptions. After all, what was once the purview of radicals and revolutionaries has now become a submerged morality whose original character is twice faded. To see feminism as commonplace is itself commonplace.
In her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself, Janice Fiamengo covers the “theories and convictions” of Wollstonecraft and others, bringing to the surface the unfulfilling and destructive reality of feminist ideology from the beginning of the movement to our current crisis. Fiamengo presents feminism as a novelty and points toward a postfeminist recovery of Western civilization. A reconsideration of what is revolutionary and what is commonplace allows for the restoration of old truths. Learning the lessons of capitulation to, and compliance with, the feminist persuasion reveals much culpable ignorance in the revolt against God and man.
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Paradox is especially good at challenging the commonplace. A peddler of paradox, Jean-Jacques Rousseau provocatively claimed that women’s strength is their weakness: “Far from blushing at their weakness, they make it their glory...Why is that? It is not only to appear delicate; it is due to a shrewder precaution.” Women used their weakness as a strength in personal relations. Fiamengo shows how feminists have exploited what Rousseau observed to women’s destructive advantage. The “genius of feminism” is to “exploit traditional concern for women” to achieve its ends. “Feminism,” she contends, “would have been impossible without many men’s eagerness to listen to women’s complaints and accommodate their demands.” Feminism presupposed that women’s enduring weakness could be turned to their advantage in conducting a revolution with the acquiescence of men. In the sexual dance, it is men who pursue and women who are won. Feminism claims equality or sameness between the sexes but demonstrates, even in corruption, that women are women and men are men.
Fiamengo offers snapshots of the violence perpetrated by the women’s suffrage movement, the discontent of housewives in the 1960s (embodied in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique), and the radicalization of women at universities during the 1970s. But she does not distinguish a bad, later wave of feminism from an earlier, healthy one. All feminists agree on “the central issue of anti-male and anti-Western animus.”
Fiamengo catalogues the harmful effects of feminism in our day. Marriage rates have dropped. Women initiate nearly 70 percent of divorces. Sexual-assault accusations presume guilt and undermine due process. Violence perpetrated by women is discounted and excused. The LGBTQ+ movement continues to gain ground, requiring not only neutral tolerance but active acceptance of increasing demands. Feminism trades on female empathy to create political activism. It trades on the very human propensity for envy to make women dissatisfied with their roles as mothers and wives. Today’s feminism is destructive. Certainly, when feminism can no longer identify what a woman is and allows predatory men, foreign and domestic, to assault with impunity, something has gone amiss.
Today’s destructiveness was present at feminism’s creation. “There never was a moderate feminism,” she writes, and all feminism is “rotten to the core.” To prove this, Fiamengo alludes to the radicalism of the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft writes that she seeks to “advance, instead of retarding, the progress of those glorious principles [articulated in the French Revolution] that give a substance to morality.” Woolf writes of Wollstonecraft: “The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life-against tyranny, against law, against convention.”
Consider Wollstonecraft’s vision of the Fall. The original condition of man, according to Wollstonecraft, was hardly blissful. The fact that “Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs” proves that “man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion.” Eden was emblematic of a view of human history as a story of male domination, tyranny, and oppression. The “prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man,” Wollstonecraft writes, reduces Eve to another member of the “brute creation, created to do his pleasure.” She does not seek to conserve or return to a traditional understanding of the sexes; the original feminist thinks that the biblical account of the pre-Fall relationship between Adam and Eve-God’s original creation-must be overturned.
Original sin, not original “goodness,” allowed for the improvement of relations between the sexes, according to Wollstonecraft. “Why should that inestimable gift, for a gift it was, if man was so created as to have a capacity to rise above the state in which sensation produced brutal ease, be called, in direct terms, a curse?” The Fall created an opportunity not for death but for life; not for tyranny but for genuine equality. Wollstonecraft, in mock piety, denies the perfection of the original state in favor of one in which all “WILL BE right.” Wollstonecraft attempts to subvert the sexes using Scripture. It is written that there will be a state in which there is “neither marrying nor giving in marriage,” so, she argues, how could it be that “MAN is prepared” for that state but “WOMAN,” as woman, is not? In Wollstonecraft’s hands, redemptive history bends toward a sexless paradise.
Wollstonecraft “simply declare[s]” that, “were an angel from heaven to tell [her] that Moses’s beautiful, poetical cosmogony and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, [she] could not believe what [her] reason told [her] was derogatory.” Her reason, not divine reason revealed in Scripture, is the standard by which she judges. Wollstonecraft’s hermeneutic is as classical as the Enlightenment and as moderate as the Revolution-which is to say, commonplace in our day. Her immoderate modernism has produced immoderate modern human beings who cannot determine what a man or woman is; confusion about the physical is anticipated by revolt against the metaphysical.
Of course, the once revolutionary but now commonplace Wollstonecraft is so fundamental to our understanding of women and the world that “conservative or reactionary feminism” now heralds her as a paragon of classical Christian femininity. The rediscovery of Wollstonecraft reveals her radical character. She is neither Christian nor Aristotelian. The origins of feminism have become “respectable,” but they are not classical.
Instead of salvaging feminism, Fiamengo seeks to dispel the now largely accepted claims feminism makes about men, women, the family, and the West. Fiamengo would have us get off the “what is feminism” treadmill. Today’s “respectable” critics of feminism sing themselves lullabies. “What you are describing is not real feminism,” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists,” they say. Such self-deceptions help appease conservative sympathy for yesterday’s supposedly less radical feminism. Yesterday, that principle meant granting women the right to own property-and who could be opposed to that? Today, feminism means allowing men into women’s bathrooms or demanding that women serve in combat roles. Accepting the principles of feminism while hoping to limit them is indicative of feminism’s pervasiveness and its feminine feints. As Fiamengo asserts, “even discussing the feminine revolution in values is hampered by the logic of our moment.”
The prevalence of feminism and the revolutionary spirit that animates it would need to be recognized and rebuked apart from whatever actual grievances any given iteration has sought to rectify. Sometimes, of course, the fallenness of man yields the mistreatment of women. We can acknowledge this possibility without adopting the entire ideological framework of feminism. Fiamengo recognizes feminism as a very real and visible way in which women’s moral failings have manifested themselves at the expense of men. Feminism, in this presentation, may be tied to the inevitability of patriarchy. It is a feminist conceit to pretend that the only ways forward are more feminism, a particular type of feminism, or oppression. Fiamengo’s attempt to recover a non-feminist understanding of feminism is the kind of project needed to point us toward a postfeminist future in which the radical and revolutionary are no longer commonplace.
Dr. Amanda Dorney is Lecturer of Literature at New Saint Andrews College. She teaches electives in literature and political philosophy. Dr. Dorney earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California Davis in 2023, where she wrote on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's literary and political portraits of man in nature and society. She lives in Moscow with her husband, Dr. Jordan Dorney, and their four children.
Insightful review of Janice Fiamengo’s book, which I now intend to read. One comment caught my attention:
“Of course, the once revolutionary but now commonplace Wollstonecraft is so fundamental to our understanding of women and the world that “conservative or reactionary feminism” now heralds her as a paragon of classical Christian femininity.”
Could not the same be said of our political revolution with its principles laid down in our Declaration of Independence? Are not its principles now a “paragon of classical Christian” political philosophy? It must be noted that critics of our Revolution at the time stated we had set in motion revolutionary principles that were destructive of all society. Perhaps the ostracized Anglican ministers were right after all.