The Catholic Culture Podcast: 167 – Early Feminism Was Worse Than You Think

Sep 15, 2023

Catholic critics of feminism often start with the assumption
that the “first wave” of feminism, led by 19th-century figures such
as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was basically a
good thing and compatible with Catholic teachings; only later in
the 1960s and 70s, according to this narrative, was the movement
“hijacked” by “radical feminists”.

The only problem is that when one actually looks closely at
feminism in its early form, whether that of Stanton and Anthony or
even earlier with Mary Wollstonecraft, one finds obvious
continuities with so-called “radical feminism”.

On the level of ideas, we find Enlightenment individualism,
rationalism, and egalitarianism attacking as oppressive the natural
institutions of marriage and family and the divinely ordained
hierarchies of the Church.

On the personal level, feminism was from the beginning the
brainchild of traumatized, miserable women who had deeply
dysfunctional relationships with the men in their lives – their
ideas eagerly championed by men like Percy Shelley, who “liberated”
women in order to exploit them.

Carrie Gress returns to the show to discuss her book The End
of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, which
tells the stories of feminist pioneers from Wollstonecraft,
Stanton, and Shelley to Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Links

Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy
Has Destroyed Us https://www.regnery.com/9781684514182/the-end-of-woman/

Dawn Eden, “Eve of Deconstruction: Feminism and John Paul
II” https://www.catholicity.com/commentary/eden/03324.html

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