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.