This essay traces the evolution of feminism from its early pursuit of justice to its modern contradictions—highlighting how efforts to achieve equality have, over time, eclipsed the very identity of womanhood. Though written as objectively as possible, the argument may be controversial: it contends that feminism’s rejection of sexual difference, adoption of androgyny, and embrace of abortion has unintentionally obscured the feminine it once sought to honour.
Feminism and Its Contradictions: From Equality to Erasure
Modern feminism, though rooted in aspirations for justice and the recognition of women’s inherent dignity, has over successive waves evolved into a movement often characterised by contradictions and internal ironies. From the claim that women are fundamentally the same as men, to campaigns that rely on unequal treatment to achieve “equality,” to the adoption of male patterns of behaviour and language, and finally to the modern crisis of gender identity in which womanhood is no longer a stable or defensible category, the feminist movement has undergone a series of paradoxical transformations. This essay outlines those developments and considers their broader implications.
I. From Equality in Dignity to Sameness in Nature
First-wave feminism, emerging primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries, centred on legal and civic recognition for women based on their shared human dignity with men. These early feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Millicent Fawcett, fought for women’s suffrage, access to education, and rights in property and marriage law. Their arguments were often grounded in Enlightenment ideals of human reason and, crucially, in Christian anthropology, which affirmed that men and women were equal in the eyes of God, both made in His image.
The appeal was not for androgyny but for justice. Women, they argued, possessed reason, moral agency, and the ability to contribute to public life just as men did, albeit in ways proper to their own nature. Stanton famously wrote, “The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education… is the sacredness of her individuality.”¹ This assertion reflected a worldview in which difference did not imply inequality.
However, the second wave of feminism, emerging in the post-war years and gaining momentum in the 1960s and 70s, departed from this principle. Influenced by existentialist philosophy (especially Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), Marxist critiques of the family, and Freudian theories of repression, second-wave feminism introduced a profound conceptual shift: from equality of dignity to equality of identity and function. The new feminism no longer simply demanded recognition of women as rational beings but insisted that the distinctions between men and women themselves were arbitrary, imposed, and oppressive.
De Beauvoir’s claim that “One is not born, but becomes, a woman”² became the foundational maxim of this shift. It proposed that femininity itself was a social construct—something imposed by patriarchal structures and internalised by women through cultural conditioning. Consequently, traditional roles such as motherhood, domesticity, and nurturance were not to be honoured or protected, but deconstructed as instruments of female subjugation.
This philosophical shift led to a redefinition of liberation: not as the free exercise of virtue in accordance with a woman’s nature, but as the ability to transcend or reject that nature altogether. Women were encouraged to join the workforce, delay or avoid motherhood, and adopt a lifestyle shaped by autonomy, productivity, and sexual independence. In doing so, the standard of success subtly but decisively shifted to male norms.
Mary Harrington, a contemporary feminist critic of this trajectory, writes, “Sexual differences are now increasingly seen as obstacles to be overcome rather than truths to be understood.”³ The result was not the elevation of femininity but its functional elimination in public discourse. The distinctiveness of womanhood was not protected but traded for access to male-coded forms of power—often in the corporate or political sphere—thereby implying that traditional feminine contributions had no inherent value.
II. From Imitation to Erasure: Vice, Contraception, and Abortion
A significant and often overlooked turning point in feminist thought occurred when the movement shifted from challenging the moral failings of men to imitating them. Whereas early feminists critiqued male patterns of sexual irresponsibility, violence, and exploitation, later feminist rhetoric began to valorise these very traits—so long as they were enacted by women. The rise of “sex-positive feminism” in the late 20th century reframed promiscuity, aggression, and emotional detachment not as societal problems, but as marks of female empowerment.
This moral inversion was reinforced by the technologies and ideologies of the sexual revolution. The introduction of the contraceptive Pill in the 1960s was heralded as a means of liberation, allowing women to decouple sex from reproduction. But it also subtly transferred the responsibility for fertility management—and therefore the burden of consequence—entirely onto women. As Mary Eberstadt has observed, the Pill “allowed men to have sex without consequence, while encouraging women to behave as if their bodies responded to sex the same way male bodies did.”⁴
Rather than elevating womanhood, this dynamic incentivised women to conform to male sexual expectations. Chemical contraception suppressed the natural rhythms of the female body, and the culture surrounding it normalised emotional detachment as a precondition for social acceptance.
Abortion, presented as a safeguard when contraception failed, entrenched this logic further. It reframed the unborn child not as a person in need of protection but as an obstacle to autonomy. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous “violinist” analogy typified this view, likening pregnancy to involuntary organ donation.⁵ Motherhood was thus portrayed not as a natural vocation but as a contingent burden.
Feminism increasingly treated these technologies as essential instruments of freedom, yet their effects were structurally disempowering. Women were told they could be truly equal only if they suppressed or denied the very biological functions that make them distinctively female. In doing so, the feminist project turned against its own foundation.
As Erika Bachiochi has shown, the cultural result has not been greater solidarity between men and women, but a radical asymmetry in which women carry the full cost of a libertine sexual economy: “Abortion rights have enabled a cultural shift in which men are no longer expected to make lifelong commitments to women with whom they father children.”⁶
In short, the feminist embrace of contraception and abortion has not freed women, but has redefined womanhood itself as a problem to be fixed. What was once a cause centred on the dignity of the female body has become a movement dedicated to its management and erasure.
III. Linguistic Androgyny and Symbolic Self-Erasure
Language both reflects and shapes reality. It encodes not only social conventions but cultural values and metaphysical assumptions. Recognising this, second-wave feminists turned their attention to the structures of language as a site of “patriarchal dominance.” Words such as actress, hostess, stewardess, and priestess—once ordinary descriptors of female roles—were reinterpreted as diminutive or derivative. These terms, feminists argued, marginalised women by suggesting that the female version of a role was somehow lesser or secondary to its male counterpart.
This linguistic critique gained influence through the work of feminist theorists such as Dale Spender and Deborah Cameron, who insisted that “man-made language” reinforced a male-centred worldview and needed deconstruction.⁷ Their proposed solution was not to elevate feminine terms, but to eliminate them—replacing gender-specific titles with ostensibly neutral or male-derived forms: actor, chairperson, server, priest.
What appeared to be a linguistic reform toward neutrality was, in fact, an act of symbolic erasure. Rather than affirming and dignifying the feminine as something worthy of cultural articulation, feminism adopted a linguistic strategy that made womanhood invisible. In seeking to escape male dominance, it assimilated the male standard so thoroughly that female distinctiveness disappeared.
Roger Scruton captured the deeper implications of this move when he observed, “The desire to eliminate all traces of sexual distinction from public life often results in the masculinization of female presence rather than its dignification.”⁸
What this linguistic agenda reveals is not merely an effort to expand representation but to sever language from nature—an attempt to unmoor vocabulary from biological and ontological truth. The feminine is no longer spoken as something real and rooted, but recoded as a contingent identity to be included, negotiated, or erased.
IV. Positive Discrimination and the Paradox of “Equity”
Modern feminism increasingly embraced the politics of positive discrimination—seeking not equality before the law, but equality of outcomes. In contrast to the first-wave demand for impartiality and merit-based access, late 20th- and early 21st-century feminism embraced quotas, affirmative action, and preferential policies designed to correct supposed “structural imbalances.”
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 permits “positive action” under Section 158 when “persons who share a protected characteristic suffer a disadvantage, have different needs, or have low participation in an activity.”⁹ Feminist advocates have defended such measures as necessary to undo centuries of exclusion. Yet in practice, this often results in institutionalising the very inequality it claims to overcome.
Positive discrimination introduces a conceptual paradox: in order to achieve “equity,” individuals must be treated unequally based on group identity. The same ideology that insists women are just as capable as men simultaneously insists that women cannot succeed without structural advantages, special training programs, or legislative exemptions. Merit becomes suspect, and competence is often overshadowed by the optics of representation.
Moreover, these interventions are rarely symmetrical. Where women are overrepresented—such as in university admissions or certain healthcare roles—there is no equivalent push to redress imbalance in favour of men. “Equity” is selectively applied, always in favour of the politically dominant narrative rather than genuine balance.
The deeper irony lies in how this approach undermines both excellence and solidarity. Women who achieve success in male-dominated fields under quota regimes may find their competence questioned—assumed to be the product of policy rather than ability. Meanwhile, men excluded from opportunities on the basis of sex alone increasingly view feminism not as a pursuit of justice, but as a politics of exclusion and resentment.
V. Identity Politics and the Triumph of Male Over Female
The most radical and internally destructive development within modern feminism has come through its alignment with gender identity ideology. Having spent decades rejecting essentialist definitions of womanhood, mainstream feminism now insists that “woman” is a self-declared identity, untethered from biology. The contradiction is clear: in trying to liberate women from fixed categories, feminism has made womanhood indefinable.
In 2022, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define “woman.” She replied: “I’m not a biologist.”¹⁰ That evasive response symbolised a movement unable—or unwilling—to state what a woman is.
This has enabled biological males who identify as “women” to enter female-only spaces: sports, prisons, shelters, and awards. In athletics, men identifying as women now routinely outperform female athletes.¹¹ The very spaces feminists once fought to create for women are now occupied by male bodies.
Feminists who object—such as Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel—have been ostracised and branded transphobic. As Mary Harrington notes, “The trans woman is not a woman who has been freed from the constraints of her biology, but a man whose self-perception is prioritised above the reality of women.”¹²
Feminism, having unmoored itself from biology and nature, cannot now mount a coherent defence of the female. The category it once fought for no longer has meaning. Its enemies, long defeated, have returned—this time in disguise.
Conclusion: A Crisis of Self-Destruction
The historical arc of feminism—beginning with the pursuit of justice and recognition, and culminating in the denial of womanhood itself—presents not a story of unbroken progress, but a cautionary tale of conceptual unraveling. What began as a movement to affirm the dignity of women as women has, in its later stages, dismantled the very meaning of the term.
The irony is layered and devastating:
- In the pursuit of equality, feminism adopted sameness, erasing sexual complementarity.
- In the quest to overthrow male vice, it embraced and valorised promiscuity, aggression, and detachment, now recoded as empowerment.
- In order to secure freedom, it promoted contraception and abortion, tools that suppress or terminate the very powers unique to womanhood.
- In the name of equity, it justified inequality, institutionalising preferential treatment under the guise of fairness.
- In defending inclusion, it tolerated and even celebrated the invasion of male bodies into female spaces—thereby subordinating actual women to ideological projections.
Each of these shifts reflects not merely a misstep, but a detachment from reality: from the biological, moral, and metaphysical truths that ground a coherent account of the human person. Feminism, in its radicalised form, has become a project not of emancipation but of abstraction—one that seeks liberation from the givenness of nature and the responsibility of relationship.
That which is not grounded will not stand. A feminism that cannot define what a woman is, that cannot honour her nature, nor defend her spaces, nor elevate her role as life-bearer and nurturer, has lost its moral compass. Indeed, it risks becoming a tool for the very forces it once opposed.
What remains is a task not just for feminists, but for all who care about truth and justice: to rebuild an understanding of womanhood that is neither romanticised nor denied; one that affirms equality without erasing difference; and one that protects female dignity not through sameness with men, but through the honouring of what is uniquely and gloriously feminine.
Only a return to truth—biological, philosophical, and theological—can restore coherence to this fractured discourse. If feminism is to mean anything at all, it must once again begin with the reality of woman.
Footnotes
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, 1895.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 267.
- Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023), p. 45.
- Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (Ignatius Press, 2012), p. 19.
- Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1971), pp. 47–66.
- Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), p. 203.
- Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 87–91.
- Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), p. 88.
- Equality Act 2010, UK Parliament: Section 158 – Positive Action: General.
- U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, March 23, 2022.
- See World Athletics rulings on transgender competitors, 2022–2023.
- Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, p. 174.
Originally published on Selsey Substack
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