Hearthbroken: Chapter Two
The Feminism Paradox: Freedom and Disconnect
“The feminist project of liberation has failed if it merely delivers us into a different kind of servitude.” — Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress
The Good Feminist
I came of age in the Bay Area during a period of tremendous cultural upheaval. In 1963, the year that I was born, Betty Friedan’s controversial book, “The Feminine Mystique,” sparked a national conversation about women’s fulfillment beyond traditional homemaking. Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine, which made regular appearances on our family’s coffee table in the 1970s, reinforced this message: women must earn their own money in order to be complete human beings, rather than supporting characters in men’s lives. Meanwhile, as Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests raged in our streets, the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe versus Wade were being hotly debated in the news and around the dinner table.
Our television chronicled women’s shifting roles. Shows in the 1950s and 60s like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” cast women in the domain of home and family, their lives orbiting around husbands, children, and domestic perfection. Then, along came Mary Richards, spunky, single, and confidently navigating the professional world on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” She wasn’t just different; she was exhilarating. In the show’s iconic opening sequence, Mary confidently tossed her hat into the Minneapolis sky, a gesture that became a symbol of women’s liberation and independence in the 1970s. That simple act of joy captured what millions of women were feeling: the thrill of breaking free from traditional expectations and claiming their place in the professional world. She made the life of a single, career-focused woman aspirational for an entire generation of women.
The soundtrack was shifting, too. My mother would sing along every time Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman came on the radio, her voice rising with the chorus: I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore… I think I still know every word by heart. The culture I grew up in not only offered a permission slip to dream beyond the boundaries our mothers knew — it insisted on it. And for most of my life, I willingly complied. It never occurred to me that there was another way to be. I was a good feminist through and through. Until ten years ago.
A fraught business relationship with a powerful female colleague forced me to confront core questions about the nature of feminine power itself. Was I witnessing an expression of feminine power — or was I facing masculine power in women’s clothing? This unsettling question led me deep into the history of feminism, and what I discovered shook me to my core. Even though I had lived through sweeping cultural changes and earned a sociology degree, I realized how little I actually knew about the movements that had shaped my life as a woman, and how complex the very notion of feminine power truly was.
Excavating the Foundations
What began as a personal question and casual research turned into a kind of intellectual obsession. I discovered layer upon layer of theory, philosophy and political thought that had been silently directing women’s lives for generations. The myriad feminist theorists I encountered went well beyond advocating for women’s right to work outside the home — they were systematically dismantling the very concept of home and the care provided there. Reading their original texts, I was struck by the intensity of their antipathy toward domestic life. In many cases, they viewed the traditional family structure as stiflingly oppressive, a prison from which all women needed liberation.
Simone de Beauvoir set the philosophical foundation for this view in “The Second Sex (1949),” arguing that domestic life trapped women in “immanence,” the endless repetition of life’s maintenance, while men were free to pursue genuine achievement and creation. The daily routines of home life in her framework were tedious, existentially confining and keeping women from true self-realization.
Betty Friedan built on this philosophy, characterizing the suburban home as a “comfortable concentration camp” in The Feminine Mystique, and reflecting a deep conviction that domestic life was inherently dehumanizing. She argued that women could find fulfillment by joining the workforce, gaining education and achieving equality within existing systems, ideas that led to the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the rise of liberal feminism.
Radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone saw things differently. In “The Dialectic of Sex (1970),” she argued that women’s oppression was a direct result of our biology, specifically in pregnancy and child-rearing, which reinforced male dominance. She thought that the family unit was the source of women’s oppression and needed to be eliminated entirely. To achieve true equality, she envisioned a future where artificial reproduction and communal child-rearing freed women from these biological constraints. Groups like Redstockings and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) pushed these ideas further, rejecting gradual change and insisting that patriarchy itself had to be dismantled.
Socialist feminism, including groups like the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU), emerged as a middle ground between liberal feminism, which sought equality within existing structures, and radical feminism, which sought to dismantle patriarchy entirely. Socialist feminists argued that women’s oppression was deeply tied to capitalism. There were also significant Black feminist perspectives (from groups like the Third World Women’s Alliance) that critiqued the mainstream movement’s focus on white, middle-class women’s concerns while ignoring the intersecting oppression of race and class.
By contrast, cultural feminists like poet and activist Robin Morgan, author of “Sisterhood is Powerful” (1970), didn’t seek to dismantle patriarchy nor integrate women into male-dominated systems. Instead, they aimed to build an alternative feminist culture that honored women’s unique viewpoints and biology. Cultural feminists emphasized celebrating and elevating traditionally feminine values and creating women-centered spaces and institutions.
These different visions sparked intense debates within the women’s movement about goals and the very meaning of liberation. Despite their varied philosophies, most feminist thinkers converged on one crucial point: the limitations of domestic life. These ideas resonated deeply with college educated women, who increasingly saw paid work as a path to both independence and personal fulfillment.
But this narrative failed to capture the deep ambivalence many women felt about abandoning or devaluing domestic life. While most American women supported core feminist principles like equal pay and opportunity, many were concerned about the potential societal consequences of wholesale rejection of the domestic sphere. Given that relatively few women at the time had college degrees or professional career prospects, the call to leave home for working-class jobs held limited appeal.
I vividly remember this ideological battle playing out, not just on television, but in the conversations between my mother and her friends. At the time, I didn’t realize their debates were based in feminist theory; to me, they were simply part of the backdrop of my childhood. My mother’s best friend, Leslie, was the most educated of the group, unmarried and childless, a sharp dresser with an independence I idolized. She was my real-life Mary Tyler Moore, embodying a kind of freedom that felt both glamorous and a little mysterious.
Although I suspect they all identified as liberal feminists, Leslie would occasionally push the conversation further, venturing into radical feminist critiques of patriarchy. Yet for all their disagreements, there was one thing they all agreed on — Phyllis Schlafly was the villain. In their eyes, she was the awful woman standing in the way of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the obstacle to women’s full equality under the law.
At the time, I didn’t understand why Schlafly’s name triggered such outrage, but looking back, it’s clear she represented a direct challenge to the feminist movement’s vision for the future. Schlafly had emerged as the leading voice against the ERA, warning that its passage would erase legal distinctions between men and women in ways that could ultimately harm women. She argued that it would strip away protections like alimony, make women eligible for the military draft and dismantle workplace accommodations for mothers. Her core message was that feminism was not liberating women, rather it was forcing them to compete with men on men’s terms while undervaluing the roles many women still chose as caregivers and homemakers.
Ironically, Schlafly herself was no traditional housewife. A lawyer, author and political activist, she traveled the country campaigning against feminism while embodying the very independence feminists championed. But her framing of the debate had a lasting effect. As “family values” became synonymous with conservative values, many liberal women began distancing themselves from anything associated with traditional domesticity, including the choice to embrace homemaking as a full time calling. While conservative circles elevated an idealized version of homemaking and motherhood that often ignored economic realities, liberal circles increasingly viewed domestic life with skepticism or even disdain. Lost in this polarization was the possibility that valuing domestic work and supporting women’s broader opportunities need not be mutually exclusive.
The Marxist / Middle Class Connection
As I traced the ideological lineage of these feminist movements, I began to notice a deeper thread running through them, one that extended beyond the fight for women’s rights and into the realm of social revolution. The more I read, the more I recognized how deeply these feminist thinkers had been influenced by nineteenth-century radical thought, particularly the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx, the German philosopher and economic theorist, and Engels, his longtime collaborator and benefactor, had developed a comprehensive critique of industrial capitalism that would reshape world history. While Marx focused primarily on economic structures, Engels took special interest in how they affected family life and women’s position in society. In his groundbreaking work, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” Engels argued that women’s subordination wasn’t natural or inevitable but that it had begun with the rise of private property and the nuclear family. Just as Marx saw the proletariat as oppressed by capitalism, feminist theorists saw women as oppressed by family life. The solution, in both cases, was a radical restructuring of these foundational social institutions. The Marxist call for workers to break free from capitalist exploitation became the feminist call for women to liberate themselves from the “unpaid labor” of domestic life. Even the language of feminist theory echoed Marxist terminology. Women were a “sex class,” domestic work was “reproductive labor,” and the family unit was an instrument of “patriarchal capitalism.”
This intellectual foundation explains in part why the movement went well beyond advocating for women’s right to work outside the home. In their script, the housewife became a cautionary tale, her willingness to work at home without a wage misguided, her choices viewed as capitulation to patriarchal demands.
Things started to click for me. The more I learned, the more I realized how deeply disconnected many of its theories are from most women’s lives. The diffusion of these concepts from academic discourse into mainstream society has exerted subtle yet profound influences, across all classes but perhaps more so on educated, middle-class women. Their susceptibility to these narratives can be traced to several overlapping factors in their social and professional environments.
Middle-class women encounter feminist philosophical frameworks during their university years, a developmentally crucial period when they are forming their adult identities and life aspirations. University and early career choices coincide with their peak reproductive years, creating a tension between professional development and biological fertility. This exposure is continuously reinforced in their workplaces and social networks, which tend to celebrate career achievement and professional identity over motherhood and homemaking.
The economic positioning of middle-class women adds another layer of complexity. Unlike their upper-class counterparts who may have more financial flexibility, or working-class peers who might view work primarily as economic necessity, middle-class women often face dual pressures: maintaining or advancing their social class position through career achievement while lacking the financial resources to easily balance work and family life. This combination of educational, professional, social and economic factors helps explain, in part, why middle-class birth rates have fallen below replacement levels, while remaining more stable among both upper and working-class women.
The Legacy Continues
As I continued my inquiry, I found myself immersed in third and fourth wave feminism. Both waves’ reduction of female identity to a social construct that can be remade at will struck me as ironically anti-woman. While it is true that the biological realities of womanhood have been used historically in unfair ways to limit women’s opportunities, the wholesale rejection of the idea that a woman’s identity is connected to the body she was born with is significantly more problematic.
Third-wave feminist Judith Butler, whose work was shaped by both Marxist thought and feminist predecessors like Shulamith Firestone went ever further in her book “Gender Trouble” in 1990. While Firestone acknowledged biological sex differences even as she sought to overcome them, Butler questioned whether biology itself might be a cultural construct. Her theory of gender performativity — arguing that gender is something we do, not something we are, has left an indelible mark on contemporary feminist thought.
This theoretical lineage continues in fourth-wave feminism through scholars like Sara Ahmed. In “Living a Feminist Life “(2017), Ahmed synthesizes Butler’s theory with analyses of institutional power structures while incorporating Firestone’s concerns. These increasingly abstract approaches to gender theory and its practical application baffle me and most women I know.
The consequences of their theories have become abundantly apparent in recent years. When men who identify as women are granted access to women’s private sanctums and sports competitions, it crosses a critical line for most women. Claims about men experiencing periods or having the ability to breastfeed not only erase credibility but diminish the unique biological capabilities of women. While I remain committed to supporting individual authenticity and free expression, I cannot endorse frameworks that effectively eliminate or minimize women’s distinct biological experiences.
I think it’s clear that this progressive distancing from our biological reality in favor of purely social constructivist frameworks undermines rather than advances women’s interests.
Feminism’s Philosophical Crossroads
Early feminist thought offered a different starting point, one grounded in reason, dignity, and the belief that women’s nature and contributions, though distinct, were no less essential to the public good. Its earliest thinkers, like Mary Wollstonecraft, an Enlightenment feminist, sought a vision of equality that recognized women’s unique strengths while insisting on their rightful place in education, politics and public life. Wollstonecraft’s pioneering work saw dignity and purpose in both motherhood and women’s broader social participation.
Feminist philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, captured the tension between feminist theories in her 1994 book “Who Stole Feminism?” She writes “equity feminism” is based upon Enlightenment principles of individual rights and legal equality, while “gender feminism” rejects these ideals in favor of collective identity and power analysis. Sommers argues that gender feminism fosters a culture of victimhood, often disregarding empirical evidence in favor of ideological narratives about systemic oppression. She contends that disparities between men and women in areas like STEM fields or leadership roles are not necessarily the result of discrimination but rather a complex interplay of personal choice, biological differences and cultural influences.
A staunch advocate for free speech and open debate, Sommers has been an outspoken critic of modern academic feminism, which she believes has drifted away from rigorous intellectual inquiry and toward ideological orthodoxy. She emphasizes that the Enlightenment principles of individual liberty, reason and meritocracy have been historically essential to women’s progress, principles if abandoned, could ultimately harm the very people feminism aims to uplift.
Another powerful voice in the feminism debate is Camille Paglia, the prolific feminist scholar and cultural critic whose work defies conventional philosophical boundaries. A staunch defender of reason, science and individual rights, Paglia has spent decades challenging the postmodern feminist critiques that, in her view, have abandoned biological reality in favor of abstract social theories. She argues that the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual liberty and rational inquiry has been crucial for women’s advancement, enabling them to carve out intellectual and professional spaces once dominated by men. Unlike many feminists who focus on systemic oppression, Paglia celebrates the differences between men and women, asserting that these distinctions should be understood and embraced rather than erased. Her scholarship draws heavily on history, art and anthropology, offering a sweeping perspective on human sexuality, power and culture. While often controversial, especially for her sharp critiques of victimhood culture and her insistence that modern feminism has become authoritarian, her work remains a crucial counterpoint to contemporary feminist orthodoxy.
Helen Pluckrose continues this tradition of defending Enlightenment values in her controversial and fascinating book “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.” Co-authored with James Lindsay, the book traces how postmodernist thought, once confined to esoteric academic circles, has infiltrated mainstream discourse and reshaped the landscape of feminist and social justice activism. Pluckrose argues that abandoning Enlightenment principles like objective truth, universal human rights and rational debate, would ultimately undermine the philosophical foundation required for arguing against sex-based discrimination. Rather than true progress, she warns, the embrace of subjective narratives and power analysis as the primary lens for understanding social issues leads to intellectual rigidity, censorship and a corrosive culture of grievance. She offers both a critique of, and a call to reform modern activism, urging a return to the principles that historically propelled movements for equality and justice.
Waking up
I realized, after immersing myself in these women’s works, that the current tensions in feminist circles and indeed in progressive and conservative politics, largely reflect a fundamental clash between Marxist and Enlightenment theories. While I understand how early feminists might have been drawn to Marxist ideas about equality and collective welfare, particularly its compelling critiques of industrial capitalism’s human costs, history has provided sobering lessons about these theories in practice and their devastating human consequences. What began as a promise of liberation through social engineering and economic equality devolved into unprecedented suffering: authoritarian control by leaders like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro resulted in crushed individual rights, economic policies that generated widespread poverty, and social engineering that, in some cases, enabled systematic genocide.
It’s unfortunate that many third- and fourth-wave feminists regard Enlightenment values and capitalism as patriarchal tools of oppression, paradoxically rejecting the very foundations that, however imperfectly, enabled their own freedom.
Given its historical record, we must scrutinize the renewed embrace of socialism in feminist and academic circles and draw firm boundaries before entrusting them with shaping our daughters’ vision of liberation, gender, and motherhood.
The Impossible Choices
Today, young women face high-stakes decisions during their peak fertility years, with every path marked by sacrifice. Those who step back from paid work to focus on caregiving often find themselves marginalized, both culturally and economically, and may face steep barriers to reentry. Others pursue careers and delay or forgo motherhood entirely, often at great personal cost. Many who try to hold both callings at once find themselves stretched to the breaking point, operating within systems that offer little flexibility and even less support.
Despite decades of advocacy, the absence of meaningful family policy reform has left women expected to perform at work as if they have no family, and at home as if they have no job. This dissonance between feminist ideals and women’s lived experience has fueled what scholars now call a “care crisis”: the recognition that the necessary labor of raising children and tending to the home is more demanding than ever yet remains profoundly undervalued.
The consequences extend far beyond individual families. As domestic life has been devalued, the foundations of society have begun to erode, evident in rising mental health struggles, fragmented families, and fraying community ties. What began as a movement to expand women’s opportunities has inadvertently created new constraints, undermining not only women’s well-being, but our collective ability to nurture the next generation and sustain the biological and social fabric on which human flourishing depends.
This deeper strain is mirrored in the data. Despite unprecedented professional opportunities and material comfort, young women today report the highest rates of anxiety and depression ever recorded. The American Psychological Association reports that depression rates among women have risen dramatically since 2000, with the sharpest increases among those aged 18-35. At the same time, birth rates across the developed world have plummeted to historic lows, not because women lack the desire for children, but because they feel unable to reconcile family life with the demands of their careers. When surveyed, many women express a desire for more children than they think they can practically have. Tragically, a growing number of these women are facing unplanned childlessness, a consequence of the biological limits of delayed motherhood. Meanwhile, children’s well-being has declined by multiple measures, from mental health to basic developmental milestones.
These trends suggest that in our rush to be liberated from domestic life, we may have normalized patterns that work against basic human needs for connection, family bonds and the meaningful work of caring for others.
The feminist theorists who shaped my generation’s worldview were responding to real constraints and inequities but their solution to dismiss domestic life as inherently oppressive while elevating market labor as the primary path to women’s liberation is simply misaligned with human flourishing. The devaluation of homemaking was never an inevitable truth; it was a specific ideological position, deeply shaped by Marxist critiques of capitalism and the family.
This isn’t to suggest we should return to rigid gender roles or abandon the hard-won gains in women’s education and professional opportunity. Rather, young women deserve to understand the philosophical assumptions and cultural norms they’ve inherited through our education system. Just as importantly, they deserve to learn about their biological superpowers — and their time constraints — so they can make truly informed choices about their lives.
My sincerest hope is that young people will critically examine these inherited ideas about gender, recognizing that they stem not from substantive research on human fulfillment but from flawed assumptions about gender, family and home. It is our role now to ensure they understand that true liberation lies in having the intellectual freedom to choose a life that aligns with one’s authentic self, whether that means career, family, or a balance of both. Thankfully, a reckoning has begun, and many are finding their way home.
The Feminist Reformation
During my research, I discovered an emerging movement of feminist thinkers who are boldly reimagining what progress means for women. Like me, most of these scholars come from liberal backgrounds, and like me, they’ve been surprised to find themselves labeled ‘conservative’ for daring to question the dominant progressive narratives that have come to define contemporary feminism in our universities, media and corporations.
This new wave of feminist thought is particularly fascinating because it represents a return to Enlightenment and Christian values; not a conservative (or “trad”) backlash.
Mary Harrington’s “Feminism Against Progress” and Louise Perry’s “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” both challenge the assumption that all technological and social change automatically benefits women. Their work suggests that true progress requires inspection into how changes affect women’s biological realities and social well-being.
Legal scholar Erika Bachiochi takes this reconsideration even further by returning to feminism’s intellectual foundations. In her historically grounded book “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision,” she reveals how early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft envisioned equality not just in terms of individual rights, but through the lens of moral development and social responsibility. This perspective is enriched by feminist philosophers like Nina Power and Kathleen Stock’s careful examinations of contemporary gender politics.
What springs from these diverse voices is not a wholesale rejection of feminism, but rather its renewal. By weaving together the liberal feminist tradition, grounded in Enlightenment principles and exemplified in Wollstonecraft’s vision, with contemporary insights about human flourishing, these thinkers offer a compelling path forward. One that recognizes home, not as a site of oppression, but as a vital sphere of human achievement alongside our public contributions.
The Personal Cost
Looking back at my own life through this new lens has been both sobering and revelatory. While I embraced the feminist ideal of the independent career woman with enthusiasm, building businesses, earning accolades, living what appeared to be a thoroughly liberated life, I can now see how many of my most significant life choices weren’t really choices at all. They were more like a script I was following, written by others long before I took the stage. The pursuit of career achievement seemed like such an obvious priority that other desires for more children and for a deeper investment in family life were quietly set aside. My generation was sold a particular vision of “having” it all, “one that placed career achievement at the center, with family life arranged carefully around its edges. The workplace was where our real value would be found, where our true potential would be realized. Home and family were cast as supporting players in the story of our liberation.
Now, in my sixties, the personal cost of these unexamined choices has become clear. The house feels too quiet. My husband and I watch our friends’ lives overflow with grandchildren, their holidays noisy with multiple generations, their phones buzzing with family group chats and photos of new babies. Our success in the public sphere, while meaningful, has revealed itself to be a thinner sort of happiness than we imagined. But this is not a story of regret. I cherish my son and am deeply grateful for the life I’ve built. Rather, it’s a recognition that I made life-altering decisions based on a narrow understanding of what liberation and equality meant.
Like many women of my generation, I internalized feminism’s critique of domestic life without fully understanding its origins or implications. We were so focused on claiming our place in the public sphere that we never asked ourselves whether we might be leaving something equally valuable behind. I can’t help wondering about the road not taken, about the fuller family life I might have created had I understood that feminism’s critique of domesticity was just one perspective, not an inevitable truth.
Feminine Power in the 21st Century
What began as a personal inquiry into feminine power led me to a deeper reckoning with feminism’s unintended role in the cultural devaluation of the domestic sphere. Home, family life, our children’s well-being — these should never have been the price of women’s advancement. It breaks my heart to see a generation of young women either disillusioned by the idea of motherhood and homemaking or crushed by the impossible mandate to “have it all.”
We all know there must be a better way forward, one that honors both ambition and care, public contribution and private devotion. A model that restores dignity to the home without retreating from progress.
Women have both the knowledge and influence to write the next chapter of our story. We possess the education and resources in the public sphere that can transform our domestic spaces into foundations for human flourishing. We can build a culture that honors both our distinctive biological capabilities and our aspirations for equal participation in all spheres of life.
The home environment, far from being a place of limitation, can become a powerful platform for expressing this integrated feminine strength.
Cultural narratives don’t change overnight, but they do change. When the cracks in an ideology become too wide to ignore, metamorphosis follows. This is the moment we find ourselves in now, as many once-accepted feminist theories and the promises that were supposed to bring women freedom have left many feeling overextended and unfulfilled.
This moment calls us back to an elemental truth buried beneath too many layers of theory and debate: Women’s unique capacity to create and nurture life is the force that drives humanity forward.
No amount of innovation can compensate for a culture that fails to sustain itself. If we could truly take this in, not just intellectually, but viscerally, our narratives about home, motherhood, and care would change. They would shift from the margins of cultural conversation to the center of everything we do until we figure out how to set things right.
Note to readers: Looking for sources and deeper listening? See Footnotes by the Fire: Sources + Podcast Companion