Feminists against progress

On feminists with 'second thoughts'

© Alamy / Shutterstock / Prospect

“I painfully and reluctantly ended up reaching the conclusion that actually the sexual culture of the 1950s was pretty good,” the British journalist Louise Perry told Bari Weiss’s Free Press podcast in February last year.

The complaint that feminism has gone too far is something one grows used to hearing from certain men. It is more unusual to hear the same language from a woman. Yet that is precisely what an increasingly prominent group of female writers, including Perry, is claiming. It is the contention of these “reactionary” or “postliberal” feminists that the progressive movement for women’s rights has failed women. In its place, they push for a new kind of feminism which, to many readers, won’t sound like feminism at all—a bit like a member of the Conservative party declaring themselves a socialist.

Perry and fellow British commentator Mary Harrington have built significant followings by arguing that the liberation promised by the sexual revolution and liberal feminism more generally has failed the majority of women. To varying degrees, they claim that contraception, gender fluidity and the erosion of traditional family life have left women in a more precarious position, further exposed to male power.

Judging by the effusive cover blurbs on Feminism Against Progress, an influential 2023 text by the 46-year-old Harrington, a contributing editor at UnHerd, reactionary feminism has its fair share of admirers. Self-described “gender critical” journalists such as Helen Joyce and Suzanne Moore, and the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, all provided generous praise for the book, as did the former cabinet minister—and now editor of the Spectator—Michael Gove, who refers (rather fittingly for a tome railing against hook-up culture) to its “penetrating insights”.

Harrington’s thesis draws on some familiar conservative tropes: progress is an illusion; human nature is ineradicable; and all reform leads to revolution. Though her arguments are frequently anecdotal, she likes to cloak her work in the vernacular of the left. She discusses “class” and “materialism”—at one point in her book, she even invokes Marx and Engels. But the class struggle is always sublimated beneath admonitions to accept the world as it is. The only thing that can be done is to steel oneself against it, get married and have children.

Right-wing media has long been keen to utilise liberals with “second thoughts”. Their role in the reactionary ecosystem is to persuade those on the fence that it is the political left they should be worried about. Even better if they can find women and minorities who themselves believe the most reactionary arguments. It can be a lucrative business for all involved. Becoming the “thoughtful” left-winger who is unafraid to confront unvarnished truths about one’s own side can open up a new stratum of influence. Invitations flood in for comment pieces, podcasts and speaking gigs, many of them well-remunerated. I peered over the edge of the precipice myself during the Jeremy Corbyn era of the late-2010s, when I was regularly asked to share my doubts about the then-Labour leader.

As a movement (if one can call it that), reactionary feminism similarly comprises “independent thinkers” who have been “mugged by reality”. The 34-year-old Perry has a degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies and was a member of the Labour party until 2023. Perry has insisted she is not a conservative; yet in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, she writes that sexual liberalism has seen society “smoothly transition from one form of feminine subservience to another,” repackaged as emancipation.

Nowadays Perry describes herself as a Christian and, in 2023, spoke at the National Conservatism conference in London, alongside JD Vance, Douglas Murray and other leading lights of the new right. She has written glowingly of Elon Musk as a “visionary” whose “goal is to save humanity… from our own lethargy and cowardice”. Like Musk, she has become intensely interested in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal—10 years after it was first reported. She frames the sexual abuse that took place in the language of racial conflict. “There is no disputing the fact that the motivation for these crimes was—and is—explicitly anti-white,” she has written.

Perry and Harrington had solid middle-class upbringings: the former in London, the latter in the home counties. Perry’s parents—an academic and a lawyer—read the Guardian, which she would also read on the way to school. These days Perry is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where her lacerations of the progressive left dovetail neatly with the instincts of the newspaper’s conservative audience.

Harrington, meanwhile, studied English literature at Oxford before “mutinying against every form of normal”, as she writes in her book. She devoured Judith Butler, founded an “ethical” startup and possessed a “fierce determination to make the world a better place”. In her twenties, Harrington experimented with gender fluidity, even changing her name to Sebastian at one point. Shortly after giving birth to her first child (and nearly dying in the process), she realised she no longer believed in progress.

Much of her advocacy today boils down to the claim that contraception, gender fluidity and the erosion of traditional family life have not freed women but left them at greater risk, vulnerable not only to male power but also to the vicissitudes of the market. As with Perry, this journey rightwards is presented as a reluctant form of political apostasy. “Like many kinds of revolution, losing my faith happened slowly, then all at once… I’d bought uncritically into the idea that individual freedom is the highest good, that bonds or obligations are only acceptable inasmuch as they’re optional, and that men and women can and should pursue this equally,” she writes in her book.

Despite some occasional nods to Marxism, beyond her own protestations there is little in Harrington’s backstory to suggest a noble mind overthrown. Instead, it seems as if, while dabbling in some progressive affectations, she was drawn to a reactionary politics. She has cited Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple as the first book to “transformatively challenge [my] assumptions about how the world works”, having formerly believed “all the official progressive ideas.” This book is standard conservative fare in which the welfare state and a “culture of poverty”—rather than material deprivation—are blamed for the plight of the poor.

Perry cites Harrington as an inspiration for her own politics and both have trodden a similar ideological path in recent years: liberal feminism is the God that failed. Both have also found a niche repeating social-conservative arguments while presenting themselves as fearless heterodox truthtellers. Perry has argued, for instance, that “feminists should cut themselves loose from both left and right, since both political traditions were until very recently entirely dominated by men and male interests.”

Another rising star of the reactionary feminist tendency is the writer Freya India, a 25-year-old blogger who seems ubiquitous on Substack and the right-leaning podcast circuit. India also writes for After Babel, the newsletter launched by the bestselling author Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist campaigning against phone-based life. Where Harrington and Perry operate at the level of theory and polemic, India represents a younger, more personal register through which these ideas are now circulating. The Modern Wisdom podcaster Chris Williamson as “the blonder, younger Louise Perry”.

An admirer of Jordan Peterson—who rails against “the modern whores of Babylon” (i.e. pornstars and egirls) —India has built a profile with her critique of liberal “choice” feminism. “For years now I’ve seen mainstream feminism march onwards, steadily over-correcting, shedding all meaning, insisting that everything I do is empowering whatever the effect on my long-term wellbeing or those around me,” she wrote in a 2023 Substack piece entitled “Empowerment feminism failed us”. She goes on to argue that consumerism has moved us further from our “authentic” selves and that young people are wallowing in a cult of victimhood.

There are elements here that the political left could plausibly endorse: critiques of atomisation, capitalism and objectification. Yet the reactionary feminists frame the appropriate response in an unmistakably traditionalist key. India too describes herself as a “social conservative”.

Western society has a tendency to recycle the same moral panics about “feminisation”. In his 1903 essay “Le Romantisme féminin”, Charles Maurras argued that decadence and romanticism had “feminised the souls and minds of French people”, reflecting a wider fin-de-siècle anxiety among nationalist thinkers that cultural feminisation signalled a loss of masculine vigour. Around the same time, the novelist and fellow countryman Maurice Barrès went so far as to suggest that an increase in women’s power would leave men dispossessed of their manhood. Plus ça change.

The 1990s saw an explosion of pop science literature lamenting a feminism that had “gone too far”. Many of these, such as the bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), depicted men and women as inhabiting entirely separate mental worlds.

More recently, the conservative political commentator Helen Andrews claimed in Compact, an antiliberal new right magazine, that the growing number of women in universities and company boardrooms in the United States presented a “threat to civilisation”, a case she had first made at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC last year, alongside evangelical Christians, Trump administration officials and blood-and-soil nationalists (the speech was called “Overcoming the Feminisation of Culture”).

Such interventions feed into a growing backlash against societal gains made by women. In common with the reactionary feminists, Andrews draws on evolutionary psychology to give a patina of science to her nostrums about men and women. Both Perry and Harrington are keen to emphasise a supposedly hardwired human nature. Perry writes of “evolved psychological differences between the sexes”, often passing off contested assumptions about male and female nature as empirical common sense. “Cancel culture is girl culture,” reads the title of a representative Substack article (subtitle: “Part 1: How feminine aggression works”) . These biological “facts” are then grafted onto a romanticised account of the past.

Biological explanations (including evolutionary language) have historically been used to justify social hierarchies. At least one study suggests that privileged groups are more likely to treat social outcomes as the inevitable product of evolved traits. Perry may present herself as someone who has broken with the assumptions of her class and upbringing, but biological explanations have an obvious appeal to the bourgeoisie. If it’s all in the genes, equality is always a chimera and reform is bound to fail. Jordan Peterson speaks in a similar register, telling his followers to set their own “house in order” before criticising the world, and insisting that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of inequality.

In common with the work of other conservative thinkers, Harrington and Perry’s ideas are suffused with pessimism. Harrington cites Horace’s warning: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.” Perry, meanwhile, suggests that hierarchy and violence are “baked in” to the human condition.

What Harrington retains from Marxism is determinism. The contraceptive pill leads inexorably towards what she calls “meat Lego Gnosticism”, a dystopia in which human beings have ceased to be human at all.

And yet a paradox runs through reactionary feminist thought: human nature is said to be fixed and unalterable, while also being perpetually threatened by progressive reformers bent on “de-sexing and disembodying us all”. If nature is truly immovable, one wonders why it requires such vigilant policing.

Accepting things as they are presumes a clean separation between one’s own prejudices and material reality. Yet it is always wise to guard against projection. Not all of us share the same “preference for our own genetic kin” that Harrington posits as natural. Gender essentialism has an unfortunate tendency to shade into race essentialism.

On X/Twitter, Harrington is a prominent voice in the increasingly racialised discourse around Britishness and Englishness. She uses the term “Yookay”, a right-wing neologism, to deride multiculturalism. During the 2024 Notting Hill Carnival, she speculated about an “unusually high number of men without characteristics stabbing people at random”. On a panel in Cambridge in February 2025, she declared: “The English are an ethnicity, if you have eyes you can see that… I fear [the creedal-nation experiment] won’t end well.”

During the English riots of 2024, Perry warned that Britain was “entering a period of sectarian violence that could develop into outright civil war”. On Substack, she has described Englishness as a “biological phenomenon” and human beings as “fundamentally quite xenophobic”. On the Rotherham grooming scandal, Perry has claimed that “the racists were right”. She has also written that “immigration restrictionism is the antipogrom position”. In the Wall Street Journal she has described Lucy Connolly, who during the disorder of 2024 wrote on X/Twitter that rioters should “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards [asylum seekers]”, as a “mother and babysitter with no criminal record” who fell afoul of “Two Tier Keir” (Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for inciting racial hatred).

Despite her article for the Critic in 2020 arguing that feminists must “reject left and right”, Perry’s recent podcast guests read like a Who’s Who of reaction. These include Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book which argued that race and intelligence are linked. In early 2025, Perry sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a hard-right activist who believes people “without native British ancestry” should be banned from sitting in parliament.

Reactionary feminists have a tendency to depict the 1950s as a biscuit-tin idyll of rugged paterfamilias and happy homemakers tending to a winsome brood of children. Such claims may ring hollow to the numerous women whose domestic lives were ever punctuated by violence. Marital rape was not recognised as a crime in the UK until 1991; illegal abortions accounted for 17 per cent of maternal deaths in the US in 1965. No-fault divorce laws, for which feminists advocated, have allowed many women to escape abusive marriages. In this context, progress seems less illusory than reactionary feminists suggest. In the US, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled between 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy magazine in December 1953, an indication that heterosexual marriage in the 1950s was not as picture perfect as such postliberal feminists like to suggest.

Political converts tend to lapse into moral absolutism as a way of repudiating their former selves. As Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher once observed of reactionary ex-communists, the hatred of a former ideal can curdle into hostility towards any ideal at all. For some, every act of formerly acknowledged pleasure must carry deferred “consequences”. Harrington, in particular, is hostile to many of the practices she once embraced. The hardening of private renunciation into public moral severity is a familiar phenomenon. Former pickup artists demand chastity; ribald comedians discover God; and here, the onetime founder of a social enterprise startup urges society to undergo a “freedom haircut”.

Quite what this shearing might entail is rarely spelled out, though there are hints. In a 2022 interview with the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Harrington said she was “on the side of Caesar”, musing that the prospect of technomonarchs with “untrammeled power” was “far from the worst option currently on the table”. She later declined to condemn the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. Perry, for her part, has written that sexual asymmetry must be accepted “even if that means curtailing our freedoms”. She opposes no-fault divorce and urges young women to marry and remain married.

A science-fiction trope is to treat scientific instruments as gateways to “secrets man was not meant to know”. Reactionary feminism is animated by a similar fear: that modernity has revealed too much, permitted too much and unsettled too many hierarchies.

This worldview is antimodern rather than anticapitalist. Though it borrows the language of Marxism and feminism, this vocabulary is quickly abandoned once it has served its rhetorical purpose. Despite the lip service paid to materialism and class in Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, for instance, structural explanations are given short shrift. Indeed, she ultimately blames Marxism for displacing the nuclear family.

Moreover, while they may profit from ideological crossdressing, reactionary feminists are less keen on the real thing. The transgender movement is a particular target of opprobrium: for Harrington, as she writes in her book, its aim is to “replace every single-sex group with a unisex jumble of meat-parts, segregated by unfalsifiable ‘identity’”.

To paraphrase Thomas Carlyle, industrial society dissolved all social bonds except those of the cash nexus. The 20th century produced two broad responses: some clung to race, hierarchy and myth; others sought emancipation through collective struggle. Two decades into the 21st century, reactionary feminism belongs firmly to the former tradition. Its answer to social disintegration is not reform, but enclosure—withdrawal into the home, the family, certain gendered roles and an imagined moral order, policed from above.

And yet Harrington is herself perhaps the ultimate expression of the very encroachment of technology she bemoans. Her online intellectual persona is resplendent with internet neologisms—the result of “thousands upon thousands of hours of committed posting and scrolling”, as the academic David Klemperer and the writer Morgan Jones astutely observed in a 2023 review of Feminism Against Progress for Renewal.

That this worldview is now articulated in the name of feminism is the movement’s most striking innovation. In reclaiming the label “reactionary”, Harrington and Perry reject the idea that feminist history is a story of progress. What feminism does claim as progress, they dismiss as a trap. What they offer instead is a politics of limits, hierarchy and resignation—a boilerplate conservatism, repackaged for a gloomy age whose prevailing emotion is fear.