In The End of Woman, philosophy scholar Carrie Gress attempts to show that feminism is bad for women and always has been. B​​etween philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (whose 1792 Vindication of The Rights of Women is typically the first text taught in a collegiate Women’s Studies course) and modern feminists like Lena Dunham (whose HBO hit series, Girls, aired in 2012 to feminist acclaim for its raw portrayal of female sexuality), Gress ​sees​ an unbroken line of feminist thinkers. For going on 250 years, Gress contends, feminists’ monolithic commitment to women’s fundamental individualism and spiritual androgyny revolutionized Western culture ​and​ destroyed women’s happiness. Ultimately, for Gress, feminism is and always has been about “erasing womanhood altogether” by “making us cheap imitations of men” and leaving us “undefined in an increasingly progressive world.”  

Gress is correct that modern feminism’s strong emphasis on women as autonomous and sexually liberated individuals, and its consequent de-emphasis on our interdependence with men and families, has been catastrophic not only for women but for society as a whole. From the rising rates of female unhappiness and anxiety, to the feminization of poverty, to the sad reality of women bearing fewer children than they desire—a great deal of misery can be fairly laid at the door of a movement whose ostensible mission is to improve women’s lives.  

Unfortunately, however, The End of Woman does not offer any new or thorough understanding of these feminist wrongs or how we might right them. Instead, the book focuses predominantly on the two areas where Gress breaks with many of her fellow critics of modern feminism (myself included).  

First, Gress offers an inaccurate and incomplete understanding of the historical women’s movement and where it went off course. Her reading of Wollstonecraft’s writing is flawed, and her portrayal of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cultural influence is partial at best. Moreover, in her attempt to find tangential resemblances between the ideas of the earliest feminists and those of feminists today, Gress actually misses the more nuanced connections between the zeitgeist of modern feminism and the cultural landscape of the early women’s movement.  

Second, Gress supplies an incorrect and reductive answer to that hot-button query: “What is a woman?” Of course, mainstream feminists’ answer to this question (when they offer one at all) is nonsensical. They emphasize subjective self-characterization and collective gender norms over the objective biological reality that exists regardless of individual variance in preferences and personality. ​​Thus, most embrace the illogic of so-called transgenderism. For mainstream feminists today, a woman is whatever a given person who calls himself or herself a woman deems a woman to be at any given moment.  

Unfortunately, the monism of Gress’ answer mimics that of her supposed antagonists, differing only in which subjective self-characterization it elevates. For Gress, a woman is a “mother,” a “nourisher,” and a “holder.” Now, while it might indeed be better, for most women and for society, if more women aspired to be nourishing mothers and fewer aspired to be androgynous worker bees, the word “woman” is actually no more synonymous with “mother” than it is with “worker.” A woman is, per the end of Matt Walsh’s infamous documentary, “an adult human female.” ​​Contra this biologically accurate and fundamentally indisputable definition, Gress’ insistence on using what she perceives as traditional gender norms to define womanhood is just a different version of the same fallacy that animates the feminists she criticizes. 

In addressing each of the aforementioned flaws in Gress’ thinking, I hope to put forth a more nuanced and useful understanding of womanhood. One that might help those of us who share Gress’ well-taken critiques of today’s culturally dominant iteration of feminism to forge a new and better, pluralistic reality for women and men alike.  

In The Rights of Women (2021), legal scholar Erika Bachiochi offers a rich understanding of the early women’s movement that draws on Wollstonecraft’s writing and that of her like-minded intellectual heirs. Bachiochi shows that nascent feminism was far from a monolith. Indeed, any honest intellectual history of the nineteenth century reveals that the regnant iteration of (proto)feminism at the time rested on an understanding of women and men as human beings with equal dignity, and equal capacity for both vice and virtue.  

For Wollstonecraft, the overarching goal was to inspire both women and men to use their freedom not as an end in itself but in the pursuit of personal, familial, and societal good. Per Wollstonecraft: “To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.” Wollstonecraft is arguing, in other words, for a universal understanding of responsibility and virtue, which emphasis is antithetical to Gress’s characterization of her argument as one for women’s amoral freedom.  

​Looking at​ the nineteenth-century valorization of womanhood as morally pure, emotionally evocative, and domestically focused​, feminists have termed it​ the “cult of true womanhood.” A​​nd, on rare occasions, something is true even though feminists say it is.  

​​​So, contra Gress’s insistence that feminism has been one monolith of androgyny and nihilism from its earliest instantiation, Wollstonecraft did not seek androgynous, nihilistic individualism for women, nor did she presume women’s oppositional relationship to men. In fact, it was an understanding of women’s specific, embodied vulnerability—that is, inferior physical strength, capacity for pregnancy, and duty to care for unborn children—that led Wollstonecraft and many other early feminists to seek protection for women under the law. Precisely because human beings are sexed creatures, not androgynous ones, unvirtuous men pose a unique danger to women.  

Thus, early feminists campaigned for ​​women’s suffrage not as a way to marginalize all men but as way for women to create and reinforce legal bulwarks against some men’s lapses in virtue and the unique peril in which these lapses placed women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and many of their less well-remembered contemporaries sought to end “forced motherhood”—not through the interventions of artificial contraception and legal abortion (both of which they flatly rejected as anti-woman as well as immoral) but through cultural and legal campaigns against marital rape (and its common catalyst, male drunkenness). Those involved in the early women’s movement saw these measures, including calls for chastity among men as well as women, as strengthening the modern family, not destroying it.  

This pro-life, pro-family, pro-virtue understanding of the early feminists is not reflected in today’s iteration of feminism. But it could be reflected in tomorrow’s—if we see it clearly enough to resurrect it.  

By treating early feminism as a monolith rather than as what it was—a complex social movement with multiple strands—Gress fails to excavate the true rotten core of modern feminism, which did take root in the nineteenth century (​​but was antithetical to, rather than reflective of, Wollstonecraft) and which does need to be stamped out in order for society to thrive. 

The wrong turn in women’s culture began in the wake of one neutral economic development (industrialization) and two positive societal goods (abolition and immigration). The popular sentimentalism among and about American women that both these social changes engendered laid the groundwork for today’s feminist hegemony. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, American families moved off of farms and poured into cities, where most men and many women without means participated in the new wage economy. For the first time in history, a substantial portion of women were able to devote themselves solely to the domestic concerns of their own homes, rather than to the productive capacities thereof. Consequently, the home came to be viewed as a sacred haven apart from the sordid business of industrial production, rather than as the wholesome center of agricultural production (as it had been in the eighteenth century and before). ​This resulted in a​​​ new sanctification of white, upper-class womanhood—perhaps best exemplified by Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem “Angel in the House,” which enjoyed far greater popularity in America than in his native Britain. 

Today’s mainstream feminist literary scholars ​are deeply ​invested in the false idea that women’s history was an unremitting monolith of oppression until the 1960s (when second-wave feminism, in the name of women’s liberation, did all the damage that Gress rightly condemns)​.​ ​Looking at​ the nineteenth-century valorization of womanhood as morally pure, emotionally evocative, and domestically focused​, they have termed it​ the “cult of true womanhood.” A​​nd, on rare occasions, something is true even though feminists say it is.  

As bell hooks illuminates in her seminal 1981 work of Black feminism, Ain’t I a Woman, racism and classism were fundamentally constitutive of the nineteenth-century conception of womanhood and therefore influenced the era’s nascent feminism. For example, enraged that newly freed male slaves and newly arrived Irish men were likely to obtain the franchise before educated white women like herself, Stanton often advocated for women’s suffrage in language that, as Gress points out, heaped disdain on these racial and religious others. Partly as a result, the popular understanding of feminism would, in the ensuing century, depart ever more fully from Wollstonecraft’s universal understanding of virtue to embrace Stanton’s racist, classist, and gendered version of freedom.  

More broadly, in the nineteenth century, Black women, poor white women, and Irish immigrant women—all of whom had to labor like men in the industrialized economy, whether as servants in the homes of richer women or as factory workers—were culturally excluded from the newly codified conception of womanhood as morally superior and emotionally pure. Thus, ​the social and economic upheaval of the Industrial Revolution resulted in ​​the hyper-feminization of elite white women. This, in turn, resulted in the masculinization of less privileged women—which led to the near total exclusion of non-elite women’s needs and perspectives from what would become the feminist and progressive projects (a reality that is as relevant today as it was in Stanton’s time).  

Relatedly, the second major flaw in Gress’ thinking is her failure to depart from the myopia of her feminist antagonists in defining womanhood. Instead, she merely turns the same reductive, gendered lens toward a different end.  

​​​​In the American culture of ​150 years ago, ​housewives of means were​ lionized as the aspirational epitomes of womanhood. Today, by contrast, mainstream feminists deplore stay-at-home moms, while lionizing female CEOs. Gress, for her part, extols the kind of women modern feminism degrades: the “mothers, nourishers, and holders” whom she terms “fly-over women.” So, like her feminist interlocutors, Gress believes that there is one way—her way—to be a “true woman.”  

Gress’ notion of the “fly-over woman” as someone who “understands her womanhood and motherhood deep in her bones” and knows “that being a woman is synonymous with loving and nurturing someone” is reductive and fundamentally infantilizing.  

But any practicable, pluralistic, and true view of womanhood must move beyond both the feminist and antifeminist sides of this false binary.  

Contra both the mainstream feminists and Gress, we need to be able to hold three realities in our heads at the same time: First, women and men are biologically distinct and only women bear children. Second, women and men differ on average in a host of personality traits (i.e., women are on average more agreeable while men are on average more aggressive, and so on). These average personality differences lead to different modal tendencies in the sexes’ respective preferences when it comes to professional and familial orientations. More women pursue careers that focus on people and want to be primary caregivers for young children, while more men pursue careers that focus on things and want to be primary breadwinners. These average differences are primarily the fruits of biology and evolution, not of social conditioning. Believing otherwise, as many mainstream feminists claim to, defies all scientific evidence and is no less fantastical than believing in unicorns.  

Yet, third and finally, these differences between the sexes are represented on overlapping bell curves, in which the most aggressive women are indeed more aggressive than the least aggressive men—not in the kind of gendered absolutes with which Gress urges women to identify.  

For this reason, Gress’ notion of the “fly-over woman” as someone who “understands her womanhood and motherhood deep in her bones” and knows “that being a woman is synonymous with loving and nurturing someone” is reductive and fundamentally infantilizing.  

Doubt it? Ask yourself if we would ever conceive of manhood as an innate emotional identification in the same way: ​​A true man is someone who understands his manhood deep in his bones?  

No. A true man is an adult with XY chromosomes. And adults of both sexes have a duty to offer society, to the extent they can, the fruits of their virtuously wielded comparative advantages as mothers and nurturers, fathers and protectors—whether or not they feel the kind of deep emotional identification with those comparative advantages that makes fulfilling these vocational responsibilities come naturally.   

Take the fictional Jo March, the protagonist of Louisa May Alcott’s best-known novel, Little Women (1868). By the end of the novel, this rambunctious, defiant tom-boy, beloved by generations of readers, has her womanly priorities straight according to Gress: She is a wife and mother, and has put her “manly” professional pursuits on the back burner, to be taken up at a later date. Feminist literary critics have long lamented and tried to explain away Alcott’s ending to Jo’s story because, by their shallow lights, it is a feminist failure​. T​hey want Alcott to remain a feminist icon.  

But Jo must be a “fly-over woman” failure in Gress’ eyes, too. After all, she certainly does not have a “woman’s soul,” understood as “a shelter in which other souls unfold.” On the contrary, she has an unruly soul that longs for fame, freedom, and adventure; a hot temper that she masters only through great exertion; and a brash, tough​-​love approach to relationships with others. 

​​​How, I wonder, would Gress characterize a similarly talented and ambitious man who, like Jo, sacrifices his longings for individual freedom in deference to communal responsibility? Say, George Bailey in Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life? Typically, we all—feminists and antifeminists alike—unite in calling such a man a hero.  

Yet, when a uniquely talented and ambitious woman makes the same sacrifices, mainstream feminists dub her life unfulfilled​,​ while Gress deems her heart unwomanly.  

​​“​T​rue women” aren’t only those that feel a deep kinship with traditional femininity, as defined by Gress or anyone else, ​nor are​ “true men” only those that feel a deep kinship with traditional masculinity. ​It’s true that​​ well-lived, civically beneficent male lives will typically be different from well-lived, civically beneficent female ones, given the embodied reality of sexual difference and the distinct comparative advantages those differences usually portend. Males are typically the family’s physical protectors, for example, due to their greater average strength and their greater average willingness to inflict deserved suffering on others.  

Still, depending on the personalities of those living them, virtuous male and female lives may or may not feel indistinguishable from one another. And this is irrelevant. Because it is Wollstonecraft’s universal conception of virtue and Alcott’s unisex vision of self-sacrifice—not some mystical understanding of gendered souls—that paves the way forward to modern adulthood for both sexes. This is the path to a true womanhood and a true manhood that can benefit us all. 

At least, that’s what I—as unwomanly a character as ever existed by Gress’ definition—am teaching the three young sons for whom I am the primary caregiver. 

Presently, I am reading them Little Women.