The Dark Truth Behind Feminism: Insights from ‘The End of Woman’ (Book Review)
By Elizabeth Prata
Feminism is evil. But I didn’t know HOW evil until I read The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, by Carrie Gress.
I had avoided books and discussions about feminism because I’m 64, meaning, I’m old enough to have actually lived through Second Wave Feminism. It wasn’t fun. I grew up with feminists. I’ve seen the impact of the 1960s and 1970s on women, culture, the workplace, media, education, and more. Been there, done that. Even though I wasn’t saved and possessed a worldly perspective, I still didn’t like feminism. It didn’t make sense to me. So I avoided any scholarly or deep dive into feminist doctrine.
Cut to 50 years later. I follow Erin Coates on Instagram. Erin highly recommended the book, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us by Carrie Gress, which she had listened to on audio. On the strength of Erin’s strong faith and wise discernment, I bought the book.
I’m glad I did.
Erin was right, it was a tough read. Not a hard read due to the words, it was very well written. It’s a tough read because it’s spiritually burdensome and quite anger-inducing.
What ‘The End of Woman’ covers
The author Carrie Gress presented a historical overview of feminism from the academically accepted origins in the late 1700s, to now. However, she embedded feminist concepts against its birth milieu, the French Revolution. She showed the clear ties of feminism to Marxism. Most of all, she demonstrated the vapid, degraded, hopeless lives of history’s biggest proponents of feminism who tried to live the lifestyle to earn all its fulfillment promises but failed. Many actually committed suicide, or lived a life so depraved they died from its accumulated sins, went insane, or ended life economically impoverished.
Consider this, as Gress wrote: “The French Revolution represented a dramatic shift in culture, even more so than the American Revolution. America’s revolution was against British rule for the sake of freedom, but the French Revolution was an effort to recreate and reshape society in a world without God.”
It NEVER goes well for a society when it attempts to remove God. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is a truism. A biblical truism is that satan prowls around like a roaring lion, and his subtlety and craftiness never sleeps. The French Revolution gave rise to the doctrine of feminism in order to fill that vacuum.
Feminism is unwieldy, mainly because it is against God’s best for men, women, marriage, child-rearing, and society, but also because it just doesn’t make sense in and of itself. Something that arose frequently in the book was that adherents usually came to a crossroads with promoting the principles of feminism or succumbing to ‘societal norms’ of marriage, monogamy, and tending to children. Time and again, those who had promoted free love or a living together arrangement ended up married or leaving the commune. ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’
They discovered feminism’s limits
For example the ‘patient zero’ of feminism usually attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft, saw how society treated children born out of wedlock- especially her own daughter from a previous relationship. Her intended husband, anarchist Willliam Godwin, had stridently declared marriage to be “possession of a woman”, “odious selfishness,” and that the family was the enemy of unhappiness because of its unnatural enslavement of free male sexuality.
Then they got married.
The hypocrisy of feminist adherents is natural, because God’s ways are best and deep down, says Romans 1, they know it. Though they side with their fleshly desires, to the detriment of their own lives and souls, it just makes sense to marry and have a family. “They lived with a kind of hubris believing that they were new and radical by defying convention. History, of course, shows that they were not so novel…” writes Gress.
It should be noted that many if not most of the women in first wave feminism and second wave feminism were middle to upper class women. They had money, means, and time to experiment with fulfilling their sinful desires to restructure society into one that not only accepts their sinful choices but heartily approves of them. (Romans 1:32).
The second wave was worse than the first wave
Second wave feminism’s catalyst is attributed by historians to Betty Friedan and her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s stance was that women were made for more than “just” their ‘mystique’ which is housewifery and mothering. They were shackled to their stoves, crying out on behalf of a “problem that could not be named” but, (according to Friedan) all of them felt. The question in housewife’s minds was, “Is this all?” Buying curtains and waxing the floor?
Friedan rebutted this ‘assumption,’ and opined that all housewives were beleaguered, voiceless drones, going so far as to compare homemaking with ‘a comfortable concentration camp.’
That book was a match that ignited women’s discontent to levels that shook the culture, turned it upside down, and still reverberates over half a century later.
Gress rightly calls Friedan’s comparison of housewifery to a comfortable concentration camp, “overwrought.” “What the starved, gassed, lice-infested, raped, brutalized, tortured, and ultimately exterminated people in real concentration camps would have given to live like the most privileged women in human history,” Gress said.
Friedan’s husband Carl acknowledges, “She had time to write it because she lived in a mansion on the Hudson River, had a full time maid, and was completely supported by me.” So when reading about Friedan’s grievance about being a full-time housewife and mother and how it led to a nameless, widespread problem of voiceless drudgery, consider the source. They were rich dilettantes who had time and means to monkey with society’s structure for the fulfillment of their own sinful desires.
Gress wrote: “Feminism offered us women’s studies and women’s health and women’s rights, but they didn’t tell anyone, even once solid data was in, that their goals leave women miserable, unhealthy, and wondering what we did wrong. … Their goal via the sexual revolution was to reject motherhood, monogamy, and marriage in favor of hookups, money, glamour, and it has left so many unfulfilled, and deeply unhappy.”
Because they lack God.
Feminism easily mixes with other bad doctrines
Gress shows feminism’s connections to communism, lesbianism, and how it aligned with and morphed into the homosexual ‘rights’ and civil rights movements. Feminism is more than a philosophy, and it is more widespread in its pernicious evil than one would initially think. Gress shows how the feminist doctrine itself has turned into a kind of religion.
Smashing the patriarchy has harmed men, too, of course. Men are “Tossed aside, largely because they are not required to win the heart or body of a woman, and the concepts of commitment, self-mastery, self-sacrifice, and family, and many of the practical virtues that accompany them…” writes Gress.
Why read this book?
The End of Woman is not an easy read, as I mentioned. It is well written and well-researched, but the research is solid, which makes for a more academic book than a casual one. It is worth reading though. Why?
-To give you a grounding in the depths and width that feminism has infiltrated not only society but the minds of women, including you, your daughters, and your granddaughters.
-To give you proofs for rebutting the doctrine of feminism. If you are in a wellness group, homeschool group, play date group, book group, or any other group where today’s women congregate, after reading The End of Woman you will likely have a firmer grasp of how feminism operates and can be a witness for Jesus in the rebuttal, or just to strengthen your own resolve to live the Godly goal of wife, mother, and homemaker.
Far from having a ‘problem with no name’ which was Friedan’s code for an aimless, amorphous dissatisfaction with one’s role, Godly femininity is fulfilling, pleases God, and raises strong children.
-To fire you up for hating what God hates and loving what God loves. What feminists focus on are the humdrum tasks of housewifery. Granted, those can be dull at times. No one’s soul is lifted scrubbing your boys’ bathroom toilet. But the satisfaction of providing a clean, warm, safe home for the children and husband to return to, is. Ultimately what feminists leave out is the satisfaction of living inside of God’s boundaries for women, whether married, widowed, single, mother, or childless.
Conclusion
I recommend reading The End of Woman. As Erin Coates also warned, however, the author is Catholic. Coates wrote,
As well researched as this book is Carrie’s solution is sorely lacking, she believes that simply doing the opposite of what we have been doing and a rediscovery of womanhood will rescue us. I believe that that only true repentance and a turning to Christ will turn this ship around. The gospel silence was deafening.
Gress wrote, that “we have to come to know ourselves as women…” No, we have to submit our soul to the Captain of our souls for the transforming of our mind into Christ-likeness. ‘Who we are’ as women is that we are sinners. While Gress goes into the need to recover what it means to be a homemaker, and to learn lost arts of bread making, sewing and the like, and though her concluding sentence is that it is time to come home to ourselves as wives and mothers, the ultimate solution is missing. Praying for redeemed souls who understand obedience to Jesus brings the most fulfillment there is on earth.
It’s a good and interesting book. Please consider reading it.
Further Resources
Podcast from DoubleTake: The Feminine Mystake, 40 min. This podcast essentially summarizes the book reviewed here, in fact, interviews and excerpts from Gress’ book are within. Plus more!
