OK, so there ARE references to death, lower down.

But they're highly inappropriate. Aside from anyone's position on abortion, which is really worse - happy, celibate singles (yes, they exist - even the diehard lefty, sex-positive writer/cartoonist Alison Bechdel has implied as much) or angry, unhappily married couples? Doesn't it take all kinds to make a world?

More importantly, which is better in the long run - a future world of 10 billion in which at least a third will only have muddy water to drink, or a world voluntarily held to 8 billion in which EVERYONE is well-fed, well-educated, and free to have - or not have - families? Not that it's going to be easy to build a world like that, of course.

(I have more comments, at the bottom.)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/killing-the-mother/

Carmel Richardson
Aug 18, 2023 12:03 AM

The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, by Carrie Gress, Regnery Publishing, 256 pages

Mary Wollstonecraft liked the sound of her own voice. Her eventual husband, William Godwin, would complain of an early meeting that “I…heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear [Thomas] Paine.” Despite her prodigality, however, both in spoken and written word, Wollstonecraft was not particularly lucid, prone to chatter and reason in circles. The ideology which she mothered would follow in her footsteps, forging its path through history with a similar excess of words.

Wollstonecraft’s story is where Carrie Gress begins her new book, The End of Woman (Regnery, August 2023). The book chronicles the history of the feminist movement with the goal of bringing to light its under-discussed flaws. A Catholic mother and author of several books, Gress is best known for her Theology of Home series and online magazine, a Christian response to pop culture lifestyle magazines. Gress is no mere “mommy blogger,” however. A fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. based think tank, and a scholar at the Catholic University of America, Gress has written a number of books on Christian womanhood, including The Anti-Mary Exposed, which explores the toxic view of femininity which has grasped the western world since the 1960s. Fittingly, Gress begins her new book with a study of another Mary, who, she argues, forged the way for this toxic ideology.

Gress is far from the first to chronicle the history of the women’s rights movement and its harmful elements, but she is among the few who identify those elements all the way back at its inception. Where other post-feminists suggest the movement went wrong during the Second Wave, or express dislike for the feminists’ controversial methods and ties to communism, but approve at least some of the results, Gress is not afraid to say that the problems with feminism were baked in the cake. The only way forward is to reject the philosophy whole cloth, starting with Wollstonecraft.

This is not the conservative orthodoxy some might imagine it to be. Erika Bachiochi, also a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has spent much time and effort to make Wollstonecraft palatable to conservatives through the Wollstonecraft Project at The Abigail Adams Institute, which Bachiochi directs, as well as in her book, “The Rights of Women.” But the virtues Bachiochi finds in Wollstonecraft’s thought are too absent, at least for Gress, in the mother of feminism’s life.

The proof, in other words, is in the pudding. This is a thread which Gress pulls on with each of the major feminist namesakes, from Wollstonecraft to Friedan: the girls led debauched lifestyles, many engaged in witchcraft and the occult, and the later women’s involvement in communist groups makes the purity of their intentions suspect at best. Most troubling of all, however, is something which even a strict survey of the founding texts alone cannot overlook: the fundamental goal of the movement was egalitarianism, and its attendant death of all hierarchies, which Wollstonecraft took issue with as fundamentally male.

Much of this trouble can be traced to an abnormally distressing family life, Gress argues, a common feature for every major female in the movement’s history. Wollstonecraft’s father abused her mother and Wollstonecraft herself twice attempted suicide; her daughter with free-love advocate William Godwin, Mary Shelley, spent most of her youth chasing the licentious Percy Bysshe Shelley around Europe. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father openly wished she was a son, while her domineering mother left her with a permanent antagonism toward authority. Betty Friedan had a discontented mother, too, who scolded her for her ugliness and large nose, and to whose presence Friedan attributed her own turn to feminism. These were not happy women, they were not raised by happy women, and they did not produce happy women.

“Lost girls,” as Gress refers to them, make bad role models..

Lost girls are also not nice. As each woman became embittered toward men, she broadcast her bitterness to bring countless other women down with her. Gress describes this as “destructive envy:” “It is a kind of envy, but also a hidden rejection of what it means to be a woman.” Which is another way of saying that the story of feminism is a story about mean girls. Moreover, their energy was not always commensurate with the wrongs done to them. Charles M’Clintock, noticing the time it was taking Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write the Declaration of Sentiments, apparently joked, “Your grievances must be very grievous indeed, if it takes you so long to find them.”

Wollstonecraft once wrote that “the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.” But what has come of egalitarianism, Gress argues, is quite the opposite. The girls who rage against the patriarchy—out of their own hurt, or due to a sense of sisterhood with other, angrier women—“have become exactly the type of man they love to hate: “negligent, narcissistic, aloof, unengaged…like players and cads.”

“We haven’t used our power properly,” Gress writes. For Gress, the problem baked in the feminist cake is that it asked the wrong question: How can women become men? Its conclusions, therefore, are wholly unsuited to reality. They have also led to death: death of unborn babies, death of female fertility, death of marriage, death of family, and death of womanhood itself in the face of the new transgender “science.” More to the point, all this death has not even been good for those who wanted it.

Is there a way which leads to life? Gress says yes. It requires restoring what has been destroyed, including, provocatively, “the patriarchy.” While Gress doesn’t flesh this out, it’s clear from her language throughout the book that her vision is neither slavishness for women nor egalitarianism. Instead, she proposes a grammar of womanhood which emphasizes the female creative role in harmony with men: “As uncomfortable as it is to say, we have to consider women as mothers—even if, of course, many among us aren’t mothers now or won’t become mothers,” she writes. This is because “all women are called to a type of psychological or spiritual motherhood in our relationship with others, where we look out for the best interest of others, mentor them, and help them grow.”

This grammar of motherhood involves women seeking to serve others, to take responsibility for our actions and behavior, to restore the art of homemaking, and to nourish and hold those in our care. We might describe this vision for women as replacing Mary, the mother of feminism, with Mary, the mother of Jesus. She’s a sight for sore eyes.

About The Author (of the review)

Carmel Richardson is a contributing editor at The American Conservative. She received her B.A. from Hillsdale College in political philosophy with a minor in journalism, and is a native of the greatest state in the union, Tennessee.

_________________________________________________

Groan.

Reading between the lines, I see, among other things, a push to return to the days when women were expected to do unpaid work (outside the home, that is) - and men WEREN'T. Why should a woman have less leisure time than a man? Even a woman who enjoys doing her own housework doesn't necessarily want to cook and clean for other people. (Nor should she have to do all her OWN housework even if she's a SAHM. After all, anyone with a baby or toddler likely doesn't get much sleep, unlike anyone who only works 40 hours a week.)

Not to mention that the trouble with expecting women facing unplanned pregnancies to have the babies, raise them and "learn to love" them is that the love very often never happens. Especially on the father's side. That does the children no good.

As Katha Pollitt pointed out, a woman has 30 years of fertility, so of COURSE half of all pregnancies are unplanned. (If any lesson should be #1 in comprehensive sex ed, I'd say it should be that even a couple that uses the Pill or the IUD, MUST use an extra artificial contraceptive - Every Time.)

And, of course, the "death of female fertility" likely includes women's REFUSAL to have as many children as the economy demands. If women WANT more children, but can't afford them, who can blame them for using birth control or even refusing to have sex? Sometimes pursuing the almighty dollar just isn't worth it, for multiple reasons - one being that a couple might not have any time to spend with the child that the couple can only AFFORD by pursuing the almighty dollar.

On top of that, women who never wanted children have ALWAYS existed, as Peggy O'Donnell Heffington wrote in her new book "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother." Those women are just getting bolder and more vocal - and will likely increase in number. (Would anyone accuse Grace Hopper of being "pro-death" just because SHE never had children? I doubt it, even though she was a Navy rear admiral.)

So grateful that you posted this well-written review, Lenona[.] !

I heard the author Gress on Dennis Prager's broadcast last week (not surprising, inasmuch as they're both published by Regnery, a religious house that seems to downplay the fact that every one of its books I've seen is highly critical of all secular society). Shameless microphone-hog that he is and the (self-described) Wise Man of Talk Radio, that blowhard Prager as usual never allowed we uninformed, lowly listeners to pose any questions (much less contrary comments) to Gress, as yet AGAIN Prager took no calls that hour; accordingly, Gress only heard Prager's shoddy-syntax-riddled cross-talk and questions, which of course were hardly challenging.

Regarding your point about sex ed, those (like Prager) who oppose its presence in middle-school curricula should know this: while pretty much every normal kid hears about the icky (at least to squeamish me, still) mechanics of sex from other (and usually older) kids on the street or playground, at least one 7th Grader did not know about it until that afternoon when a euphemistically-titled "health instructor" described things to him and his gender-segregated classmates in lecture in 1968. (Yep, I was such a square and misfit in those days--still AM in the eyes of many folks, surely--that none of my pals from the schoolyard playground bothered to fill me in on these things, or more likely, to a person made it a point never to clue in that weird Brian-nowadays-Bryan guy.) Point is, if I hadn't had that class in 1968, little ol' naive me may to this very day still not know where babies come from!

But I'm afraid I DON'T understand Katha Pollitt's point, which you enthusiastically cited: why would a roughly 50% unplanned pregnancy rate be a natural consequence of the limited human fertility window of 30-odd years? Could you kindly explain that cause-and-effect, Lenona[.], to a long-past-junior-high-school student (who apparently STILL is at least partially ignorant about procreation)?
Meanwhile, though I've read Pollitt here and there in recent years, I've not HEARD her of late at all--whereas better than a decade ago she was repeatedly a guest on Michael Medved's commercial newstalk radio broadcast (then nationally-syndicated, but nowadays only locally heard in the Puget Sound region over KTRH/Seattle) and otherwise frequently making the media rounds; any idea why she's laying so low these days?

I look forward to your reply.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida

On Sunday, August 20, 2023 at 3:07:39 AM UTC-4, Bryan wrote:
> So grateful that you posted this well-written review, Lenona[.] !

You're welcome.

> Regarding your point about sex ed, those (like Prager) who oppose its presence in middle-school curricula should know this: while pretty much every normal kid hears about the icky (at least to squeamish me, still) mechanics of sex from other (and usually older) kids on the street or playground, at least one 7th Grader did not know about it until that afternoon when a euphemistically-titled "health instructor" described things to him and his gender-segregated classmates in lecture in 1968.

You may enjoy this thread I started in 2021, elsewhere:

"Kids' bizarre reproduction theories"

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/z5xWk_nSAxM/m/-QYbmcR4AQAJ

It's somewhat strange that so many stories in the original Quora thread seemed to come from India. (Granted, the Indians who make the news these days tend to be highly accomplished, so it's easy to forget how much poverty there is.)

Note that *I* did not write any of them - I just was too lazy to insert quotation marks. As I said down-thread, I'm pretty sure I knew all the basics by age four, due to my parents' willingness to answer any question - and their determination that I not be misinformed.

But I was very much naive regarding matters of the heart, naturally. I distinctly remember being shocked, as a teen, when I read the slightly expanded story of Aeneas - that is, less tame than the family-friendly Edith Hamilton version, which I had already read - and I realized that Aeneas had abandoned Dido after three months of...SLEEPING with her! How could he do such a thing, I asked myself? Until then, I had just assumed that he was only her honored guest and so had every right to leave when he pleased.

Naturally, Hamilton's passage, below, was far too subtle for me, when I was eleven:

"(Venus) was quite willing to have Dido fall in love with Aeneas, so that no harm could come to him in Carthage; but she intended to see to it that his feeling for Dido should be no more than an entire willingness to take anything she wanted to give; by no means such as to interfere in the least with his sailing away to Italy whenever that seemed best."

And, like many teens, I didn't know that "just because a guy wants to sleep with a girl, it doesn't mean he likes her."

But I also found it beyond bizarre that Dido, in that day and age, would risk getting pregnant out of wedlock. (Then again, while I can't find anything that says how old she was supposed to be at the time, I suppose it's possible she was over 40, so that would make the scenario a little more realistic.)

To get back to my other thread, Paul S. Person, at Jan 22, 2021, 12:46:10 PM, posted a Calvin & Hobbes strip, in which...DAD explains how babies are made! (For anyone who doesn't know, Calvin's dad always liked to mislead Calvin - on any subject.)

> But I'm afraid I DON'T understand Katha Pollitt's point, which you enthusiastically cited: why would a roughly 50% unplanned pregnancy rate be a natural consequence of the limited human fertility window of 30-odd years? Could you kindly explain that cause-and-effect, Lenona[.], to a long-past-junior-high-school student (who apparently STILL is at least partially ignorant about procreation)?

Well, it's not that hard. But I'll post it again. (I spelled it out, here, a while back.)

Obviously, most American women do not want 30 children in a lifetime, even if they could afford that many.

And, according to a 2020 source, the American birth rate is...1.64 births per woman. (Granted, many women want more than zero, one, or two children, but can't afford them - or can't find the right mate, etc.)

So, even if a couple only has sex an average of 12 times a YEAR (ha ha), that means that a woman who plans on having only two children has to PREVENT pregnancy well over...300 times, with or without the man's help. Do the math.

(Granted, an average American woman gets married at 27, not 15, but for a couple, having sex at least once a week is also typical, and chances are they were sleeping together long before getting married anyway. Besides, plenty of women don't reach menopause until their mid-50s. So even a woman who doesn't have sex for years at a time could easily have sex 400 times before her fertility ends.)

300 versus 2. With that in mind, it's a little suspicious that ONLY half of all pregnancies are unplanned.

I'd say that it's likely that a woman who tells her doctor "I planned this pregnancy" (or stays silent) is more likely to be lying/dissembling, out of sheer embarrassment, than a woman who says it was unplanned.

>
> Meanwhile, though I've read Pollitt here and there in recent years, I've not HEARD her of late at all--whereas better than a decade ago she was repeatedly a guest on Michael Medved's commercial newstalk radio broadcast (then nationally-syndicated, but nowadays only locally heard in the Puget Sound region over KTRH/Seattle) and otherwise frequently making the media rounds; any idea why she's laying so low these days?

I don't listen to the radio much, so I had no idea she was lying low.

I'm pretty sure she writes as many columns for The Nation as she always did..

Just curious - was it the conservative figure of 300 that you didn't guess beforehand?

Or the fact that even a couple that uses the IUD (which she can't forget to use) could easily face more than one unplanned pregnancy, with that number?

(According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the TYPICAL failure rate for the IUD is 0.8. So that would come to 2.4 unplanned pregnancies in a lifetime.)

Here's a list of contraceptives, according to popularity.

The likely reason the IUD is not higher on the list is that it can be pretty dangerous - and often painful.

https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-method-use-united-states

No surprise - sterilization is at the top.

Or, if we assume she has sex an average of once a WEEK for 30 years (that's 52 times a year), AND wants two children, she still has to use birth control successfully well over...1,500 times.

Wow.

On Monday, August 21, 2023 at 1:49:40 PM UTC-4, Lenona wrote:
> Or, if we assume she has sex an average of once a WEEK for 30 years (that's 52 times a year), AND wants two children, she still has to use birth control successfully well over...1,500 times.
>
> Wow.

And, using those numbers, if she used an IUD, that could result in 12 unplanned pregnancies.