For International Women’s Day, let’s also consider feminism’s impact on women, and recognize that it’s been very bad there too.

Not just radical feminism. Not just the hateful or fringe variety. The whole thing, with its sob stories and sentimental celebrations, its exaggerations and cover-ups, its relentless focus on the demands and alleged needs of one half of humanity at the expense of the other, has been a monumental disaster.

For over 50 years, the movement has been mired in fraudulent claims, myopia, special pleading, double standards, abandonment of principles, manifold hypocrisies, and emotional incontinence.
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Previous generations of women were taught that happiness related directly to virtue, and virtue consisted in living for others, being loyal, being a helpmeet to one’s husband, devoting oneself to one’s children, or in some other manner pursuing a good life—as a nun or a healer, a mystic or a scholar. Feminism deliberately turned such an idea on its head. Ideals of chastity, fidelity, self-sacrifice, self-control and loving kindness were, according to feminism, the imposed ideals by which men prevented women from pursuing their desires. Feminism was about self-fulfillment.

In the years since the 1970s, discussion of female goodness has essentially been ruled out of bounds. While men have always been measured (and measured themselves) against a standard of the good man—one who supports his family, including his wife, defends justice, achieves distinction in the public sphere, protects the weak, and defeats evil—the ideal of the good woman has become a pre-1960s relic. Ask a feminist what a good woman is, and she will either laugh scornfully and refuse to answer, or say that a good woman fights against patriarchy. In other words, she’ll give you an oppositional identity with little or no positive content. The real problem with feminism for women is that it destroyed the positive content of womanhood and replaced it with useless anger.