A Conservative Return to Feminism
The introduction to my essay for Mathilde Magazine
It was only a few years ago that Milo Yiannopoulos was in vogue and edgy young right-wingers sported merch with slogans like “feminism is cancer.” And if you look at how feminism is mass-marketed in the mainstream media, it is as divisive as ever and clearly painted as a left-wing prerogative.
How times are changing.
Conservative women can be feminists, and in fact, where huge changes have been made, it was always because women (no matter their politics) united around a shared aim. The suffragettes were a coalition of women of varying politics, just as the anti-porn movement of the 1970s was famously a coalition formed by socialist feminist Andrea Dworkin and Reagan Republicans.
Feminism is once again uniting women across the political spectrum; this time to join forces against the growing momentum of Identity Politics, which directly attacks the meaning of what it is to be a woman.
Today, gender ideology has united women in opposition to the erasure of womanhood it creates, and has brought radical feminists and conservatives alike together. Even right-wing think tanks in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation, now host events with self-described radical feminists like Kara Dansky, who previously worked for an organisation that promoted abortion rights, the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment and other positions that traditional supporters of the Heritage Foundation would oppose.
This collision of conservative women with radical feminists has created some very interesting voices and ideas which are worth paying attention to. Not least because the feminists that have grown out of this new strange coalition between conservatives and radical feminsts actually talk to the issues that exclusively face women, such as motherhood, which the feminist movement almost seems at pains to forget at times.
It was gender ideology, which insists on putting biological men in women’s sports, women’s prisons and rape shelters, that peaked my interest in what the feminists opposing these moves have to say. As I started reading much modern (though not mainstream) feminist thought, I found it to be one of the places where the ideas are the richest, and real problems and solutions are being discussed.
I would urge women that have de-identified with feminism due to its excesses to explore it again, starting with thinkers like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, and Nina Power.
*** this is part of a long form piece I wrote for Mathilde Magazine, to read the full piece order here.