Human wellbeing requires a reassessment of “progress”
Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington. Regnery Publishing, 2023. 256 pp., $29.99
In recent years, the conservative intellectual world has seen the publication of several “genealogies of feminism.” Scholars like Erika Bachiochi and Abigail Favale have traced the evolution of the feminist movement from its initial motivations to its present iterations. Many conservatives succumb to the temptation to place the blame for the cultural and social decay of recent decades entirely at the feet of women’s liberation. However, these scholars—who describe themselves as feminists while distancing themselves from many of the tenets currently associated with that label—would push back against any attempt to paint with such broad brushstrokes.
Those who seek to recapture feminism from its increasing radicalization claim myriad labels. Some describe themselves as “Catholic feminists.” Others advocate for “sex-realist feminism.” British writer Mary Harrington describes herself as a “reactionary feminist.” What exactly is Harrington reacting against? Is there anything good that we can salvage from contemporary feminism? And how can ordinary men and women join forces with her? These are some of the questions that drive Feminism Against Progress.
Harrington wasn’t always a “reactionary feminist.” She describes a youth spent observing the discrepancies between the domestic workload of her mother and that of her father, followed by an adolescence marked by the allure of the digital world. As an English Literature student at Oxford, she heard the siren song of critical and queer theory. Shaped by these experiences, she entered her adult life shaped by “a visceral aversion to hierarchies, a fierce defensiveness against anything that felt like someone trying to wield power over [her], and an equally fierce determination to make the world a better place.”
Everything would soon change: first because of the financial crisis of 2008 and then again because of the birth of Harrington’s daughter. The former event led Harrington to question her belief in the infallibility of progress; the latter opened her eyes to the deleterious effects of mainstream feminism on contemporary understandings of relationships, motherhood, and the human body itself.
Harrington formulates her vision of a new and improved feminist movement against the background of what she terms “Progress Theology.” Progress Theology is the conviction that human beings ought always to be pushing towards a hazy goal of “absolute human perfection” and overturning existing mores and norms in the course of this pursuit.
Central to Harrington’s own historical account is the conviction that feminism was born not from the brave forces of moral progress but from the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. As the market became the measure of a person, women’s ability to participate in it became key. But as the industrial age has given way to the technological one, the perils of this mindset are becoming more evident.
Harrington identifies three key hostile divisions Progress Theology attempts to inflict upon its victims: between men and women (particularly regarding sex), between mothers and their children, and between each of us and our own bodies. This culminates in a philosophy that Harrington calls “Meat Lego Gnosticism.”
Gnosticism was a heresy of the second century AD. It sought to transcend the physical body by means of enlightened spiritual knowledge. Our culture’s neo-Gnosticism seeks to escape the limitations of physical reality with technological assistance. This leads to the reduction of our bodies to interchangeable, unremarkable “meat Legos”:
For if everything that makes us human resides in our consciousness, and there’s nothing natural or integral about our bodies, then we really are just meat. And inert, soul-less meat—living or dead—can legitimately be hacked, spliced with fish-skin or pig or monkey DNA, chopped and remodeled at will, or dismembered for commercial or political ends . . . I don’t want to live in this world. It’s one in which a few will flourish and many suffer. It’s also one that holds many sex-specific nightmares for women, whom the new era is already working to dismember, both culturally and legally.  Â
Progress Theology—and the feminist movement that it spawned—has wounded Harrington, just as it has wounded many of her readers. But she is quick to recognize that most of her readers are, like herself, members of a kind of elite. And though progressive feminism does harm us, it is especially detrimental to the less prosperous members of our communities. While upper- and middle-class women continue to reap at least some benefits from contemporary advancements of the feminist movement, the suffering of lower- and working-class women is only exacerbated.
This is perhaps most evident when it comes to the progressive drive to sever the intimate bond between mother and child from gestation to birth to rearing.
Just as it did for Harrington, the transition into motherhood revealed to me that I had bought into some of the gnostic tendencies of Progress Theology. Before I became pregnant, I tended to view myself almost as a disembodied brain; it was easy to float from one bookish activity to the next, sometimes forgetting meals and often neglecting sleep. I struggled, too, with the realities of human interdependence, having been immersed in the worship of self-sufficiency that the Industrial Revolution made my birthright.
This emphasis on the inheritance of progressive feminism’s norms is a key part of Harrington’s vision: She is eager to emphasize that the maelstrom of sexual, parental, and gender confusion in which we find ourselves cannot simply be attributed to the fault of womankind as a whole. We cannot—as some might suggest—simply shrug our shoulders and proclaim glibly that women got themselves into this mess. The cultivation of a better, more equal, more compassionate society makes demands of us all.
Harrington’s proposed solutions focus on the intimate, familial scale; political and legal solutions are not her primary concern here. Her plan of action is threefold: Abolish “Big Romance” by rethinking the role of marriage in our lives and communities; reintroduce and affirm the importance of single-sex spaces; and “rewild sex” by relinquishing the contraceptive pill. I will focus primarily on the first two elements here, since cases against contraception, though still controversial, have been made more frequently (whether for religious reasons or medical ones).
Most of us who have dated in the twenty-first century know it can be a fraught endeavor. It seems harder than ever to meet a spouse—despite the proliferation of online dating services purporting to make it easier. Even putting aside our culture’s warped attitudes about sex (which Harrington discusses in some detail), it is difficult to maintain a healthy view on relationships in a dating milieu dominated by what Harrington refers to as “Big Romance.”
In the Industrial era—as women became dependent on their husbands for political and economic standing—it made sense to emphasize the emotional aspects of marriage; if a suitor showered a young woman with affection, she could reasonably expect that he would not abuse her dependent position. Now that women have gained economic independence, however, we have taken this understanding of love as emotional fulfillment and divorced it from its culmination in marital union.
Reactionary feminism calls for an embrace of the freeing limitations of marriage. “[Women] who are mothers flourish in a less liquid social fabric,” Harrington writes. A culture that sees romance as just another form of self-expression tends to see marriage as a kind of jail. But it provides a stability that no community program can replace. This is the stability that children need to flourish, but it also helps men and women.
Harrington readily pushes back, though, against those who would suggest a return to June Cleaver-esque visions. This kind of “traditionalism,” she claims, is not nearly traditional enough, stemming from the values of the Industrial Revolution and not from older forms of life. She calls for the cultivation of “a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s.” This means a restoration of the household itself as the locus of work, child rearing, homemaking, and friendship and love between husband and wife.
My husband and I are both bookish types, and it is not unusual for dating and engaged couples of our acquaintance to ask us for reading recommendations as they prepare for marriage. I’ll normally recommend one or two before my husband breaks in with his advice: Do the dishes together. “You spend a lot more of your marriage washing dishes than you do talking about books or staring into one another’s eyes,” he always says. He is often met with confused laughter, but he makes an important point, and one with which I think Harrington would agree. Marriage, in its day-to-day realities, involves relatively few sunlit walks on the beach and intense debates over Thomas Aquinas. But the joy of building a life together—with all of its sweeping and diaper changing and paperwork—provides for spouses and their children alike a kind of stability that those who seek only the emotional high of romance tend to overlook.
Harrington is also a realist. She is quick to acknowledge that many families in the twenty-first century cannot, for example, afford to live on one income. And though she is critical of the influence of daycare on young children—and denounces the condescension often displayed towards stay-at-home mothers like me—she admits that her own daughter has spent time in third-party care arrangements without terrible detriment. We are all somewhat limited by the social and economic realities of the time in which we live.
Another—perhaps surprising—tenet of Harrington’s “reactionary feminism” is an emphasis on the importance of single-sex spaces, both for men and for women. Headlines in recent years have been rampant with stories about the battle to preserve all-female spaces amid debates over transgenderism.
It is not only women and girls who suffer from the loss of single-sex spaces and institutions. The trials of boys and men in our society form the subject of Richard V. Reeves’s recent book, Of Boys and Men. While a select group of men still dominate in professional roles that are high in status and power, many struggle in educational settings and with mental health. Harrington notes that working and lower-middle-class men have suffered “a devastating loss of agency, purpose and dignity.” The steady increase in deaths of despair among men is often chalked up to economic strictures. Harrington, however, suggests that the crisis in male friendships might be to blame. Fifteen percent of American men admit to having no close friendships, five times as many as in 1990. Meanwhile, seventy-five percent of deaths by suicide in the UK are men. But men—especially straight white men—who exhibit distress are all too often dismissed by opinion-makers because of their “privilege.”
What does any of this have to do with feminism? According to Harrington, plenty. On the most basic level, it is simple human decency for women to care about “the well-being of a large part of the world’s population.” These men who are suffering from loneliness and depression are the same men whom many of us call brothers and children and friends. Furthermore, women’s lives are better when the men with whom they build those lives are stable and fulfilled. As Harrington writes, “a brute calculation of ordinary women’s interests should also support a call for more and better jobs for men; more dignity; less porn and video games; more responsible men forming families.” When men are characterized as either pathetic or toxic (or both), is it any wonder that young men are turning to puberty blockers, afraid of their own testosterone?
Strong, responsible, capable men are formed, in large part, through the influence and support and encouragement of other men. In Harrington’s view, women who want a world in which men step up to the plate as loving husbands and caring fathers need in turn to “step back a little, and let them create one another.” If that means, on occasion, being excluded from an all-male society, well . . . so be it. Reactionary feminism, unlike some other forms of feminism, does not need to diminish the well-being of men in its efforts to protect the interest of women.
Harrington makes an excellent contribution to the growing genre of genealogies of feminism. Using the paradigm of society’s shift from industrial to technological, she highlights the many ways in which contemporary feminism has attacked women’s relationships and women’s general wellbeing. She wields humor, sharp cultural awareness, and sometimes shock value (the more sensitive among us should tread carefully, especially in the chapter about the “war on relationships”) in order to illuminate the contradictions and failures of a movement that purports to bring women freedom and happiness.
It is not the sort of book that leaves one passive and depressed at its close, feeling that only legislators and tastemakers have the power to enact the proposals therein. Harrington’s reactionary feminism is one for every woman (and man!) who has the creativity and courage to embrace it.
Abigail Wilkinson Miller writes from northern New York state, where she lives with her husband and son. She recently completed an MTS in Moral Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her writing can be found online at publications like Public Discourse and The European Conservative and at her Substack, Little House in the Adirondacks.