Breakpoint
Author: John Stonestreet
How is it that a movement that was originally aimed at equal rights and protection for women became a movement of men demanding access to women's private spaces and opportunities in scholarships and sports? Eventually, the feminist movement will have to reckon with this legacy of undermining itself, and the irony of males appropriating female identity in its name.
The history of feminism is often described in various “waves.” “First-wave feminism” was primarily aimed at advancing and ensuring equal rights, including the right to vote. These early activists were often motivated by the belief that women were left vulnerable by men not living up to their moral responsibilities. For example, many were also involved in the temperance movement because when men became alcoholics, they often abandoned and abused their families.
First-wave feminism was a movement built on an essential understanding of what it means to be human. Because men and women shared an essential nature, both were morally responsible agents, including to each other. It’s no surprise, then, that first-wave feminism was led by women who were pro-life. They understood abortion to be a “get-out-of-jail-free" card for men, who should be morally responsible for their sexual behavior. Men were responsible for the children they fathered and to the women they fathered children with. Abortion would only increase the tendency of men to misbehave sexually and dodge the consequences of that misbehavior.
Second-wave feminism is personified, in many ways, in the life, times, and legacy of Gloria Steinem, who died last week at age 92. In its second wave, feminism stopped being a movement of moral responsibility and instead became a movement of autonomy. Women, in this view, should have the right to behave and do whatever they want, just like men.
Steinem famously said that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” As much as anyone else, she led feminism’s second wave, which could be summarized as “Men have screwed up the world; so it's time for women to act like men.” Rather than call men to a proper measure of moral responsibility, she sought to free women of theirs.
And so, abortion was not only accepted by second-wave feminism; it increasingly became the essential defining characteristic of second-wave feminism. Women should have the same sexual freedom, autonomy, and absolution of responsibility and consequences as men.
This shift away from moral responsibility required a shift away from thinking of men and women in an essential way. Whereas first wave feminism was about equal rights, second wave feminism was about demanding an interchangeability in all roles. This required denying that there were any essential differences between men and women, untethering dignity and value from our God-given design and leaving it instead to the loud demands for “liberation.”
Genesis 3 describes what is often called “the Curse.” In it, God lays out the consequences for Adam’s sin, some of it punishment, such as the snake being forced to crawl on its belly, and some of it the inevitabilities of living in a good world that has been corrupted. What God says to Eve is more of the latter than the former: women will try to rule over men, but men will actually rule over women. There may not be a better confirmation of biblical account of the human condition than feminism’s third and fourth waves working out exactly as God predicted.
If feminism’s second wave was co-opted by the sexual revolution, its third was co-opted by the oppression and victim narrative of critical theory. But in its fourth wave, having been detached from any essential understanding of what it means to be human, specifically a human female, men trapped in their own narcissism simply appropriated female identities, and demanded access to women’s spaces and victim status.
Men taking a position or scholarship or championship from a woman, or demanding the right to undress in a women's locker room, or denigrating the title “Mother” to “birthing person” could have never happened under feminism’s first wave. The move to detach feminism from the moral responsibilities unique to men and women in their created designs and instead hitch feminism to sexual autonomy, including abortion, is the most significant part of Gloria Steinem's legacy.
Having committed her life to advancing and protecting women's rights, she instead enabled the erosion of those rights. Hers is an example of sawing off the branch one is sitting on. Her vision of feminism is an example of what St. Augustine's said of sin, incurvatus in se, that sin curves in on itself and, like a snake feasting on its own tale, becomes self-destructive.