Dr Carrie Gress, author of The End of Woman and the newly published Something Wicked, joined David Hahn this week to make a case that will unsettle plenty of listeners: feminism, she argues, was never really a grassroots movement for women at all, and its foundations lie in envy, contempt for men and a deliberate break from Christianity.
Gress traces the movement back to Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she calls "the feminist grandmother," and argues that the popular story of feminism winning women their education and independence does not match the historical record. Women were already receiving educations before Wollstonecraft wrote, she points out, citing Elizabeth Ann Seton's foundation of America's first parochial schools and the Ursuline nuns who educated both slaves and Native American girls in New Orleans. The real engine of change, she says, was the industrial revolution, which gave ordinary people discretionary income and time for the first time. What Wollstonecraft actually offers, in Gress's reading, is an anthropology built on envy, the idea that men are contemptible and women must become like them. She calls it "fundamentally about envy" and links it directly to Marxism, noting that feminism grew up alongside socialism and communism and has been woven through both movements for two centuries. She points to recent data suggesting only 60 per cent of women now want to marry as evidence of the anthropology's ongoing cost, calling the whole movement "a bit of a Trojan horse."
