For decades, faithful Christians have been outraged about the many evils of the modern world — but, in some ways, they have been up in arms about the wrong things. Feminism is the third-rail issue among Christians; it’s the elephant in the room that cowardly men — out of a fear of being branded “sexist” or “misogynist” — choose to remain silent on. And, as a result, women in the Western world have lost their feminine identity, and the family has been desecrated.
Feminist protest
Every sane human being knows that child murder is evil. Every sane human being knows that sodomy is disgusting. And I believe it’s fair to say, at least with regard to the former, that good-willed Christians (i.e., practicing Catholics who believe all the Church’s teachings and invincibly ignorant Protestants who live a moral life and are open to the truth) have remained uncompromising.
Since Catholics have the fullness of the truth and, therefore, the proper tools to fight, they have naturally been the leaders in the culture war. But that does not render void the effort on the part of so many other Christians; rather, it points out the need for them to come home to Rome — because if they did this, their fire and zeal, accompanied by Catholic truth, would be an incredible and much-needed blessing right now.
That being said, good-willed Christians — again, both Catholic and Protestant — have been naive. They have collectively turned a blind eye to the root cause of the evils they’ve been fighting. The child-murdering society that Christians have been heroically pushing back against is a result of feminism, which Christians have not been heroically pushing back against.
Pope St. Pius X
The “misguided feminism, which seeks to correct God’s work,” which Pope St. Pius X condemned over a century ago, is a direct attack on the reality that “motherhood is woman’s vocation,” which Pope St. John Paul II affirmed less than a half-century ago.
In 1960, over 80% of married women with children under 6 years old stayed at home. By 2008, as “liberated” women and mothers swallowed the feminist pill, that percentage was cut in half.
Ignoring Scripture and Tradition, the so-called Christian feminist movement has sought, and stills seeks, to overthrow the Church’s immutable doctrines concerning patriarchy.
The Catechism of the Council of Trent defines the patriarchal order in the family: “Let wives never forget that, next to God, they are to love their husbands, to esteem them above all others, yielding to them, in all things not inconsistent with Christian piety, a willing and ready obedience.”
This doctrine, known through the light of natural reason and confirmed by divine revelation, has been, and continues to be, overlooked by the very people fighting against many of the evils in today’s civilization.
Because all of human history reflects patriarchy — and this order is unequivocally confirmed by Sacred Scripture and Tradition — to place oneself in dissent is a preposterous and dangerous decision.
The “rights” to use birth control, get divorced, kill babies, “marry” somebody of the same sex, “change” genders, and so forth, were all preceded and facilitated by the 19th-century feminist plot to overthrow the patriarchy.
In pro-life circles, early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are often given forced, token praise for their opposition to abortion. (Let’s point out how low the bar is for praise in the pro-life world — again, every normal human being knows that child murder is evil.)
These two, although opposed to the obvious evil of killing the preborn, were every bit as opposed to the traditional and properly ordered family.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the leading force behind the infamous 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention.
She also authored a blasphemous work titled The Woman’s Bible in which she falsely claimed that Sacred Scripture degrades women, sacrilegiously bloviating that the
Utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages [of the Bible] should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the most obscene minds of a barbarous age.
Stanton’s feminist dogmatism pushed her to harbor a seething animosity toward Christianity, particularly Catholicism. “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s emancipation,” Stanton stated.
Stanton’s close feminist collaborator was Susan B. Anthony. The two published a women’s newspaper in the late 1860s called “Revolution,” in which they further worked to upend the family. Pushing for more so-called rights in the areas of property, education and wages, Stanton and Anthony eroded marriage and promoted divorce.
Susan B. Anthony even stated at one point, “I do not consider divorce an evil by any means.” And, like Stanton, she degraded Christian doctrine on patriarchy in a general way, famously commenting, “You say ‘women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit,’ and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions.”
Throughout the 20th century, feminists, in seeking to annihilate the patriarchy, purposely dismantled the family. Women got the vote in 1920 in a sure win for the suffragist movement. But this was only a means to a further end, according to anti-suffragist Mrs. John Martin, who observed, “Between feminism and the family, there is an inherent and irreconcilable antagonism.”
This irreconcilable antagonism exists, inter alia, because the feminist ideology rejects the husband as the head of the wife (contra Ephesians 5:23) and as the chief of the family (contra Arcanum Divinae, §11). Anthony, for example, called for woman’s recognition as the “peer of the man” in “the home, the Church, the State.”
The family is the most basic community. It’s the foundation of all other societies.
To try and fight against the current societal problems without addressing the root cause is a losing battle. This is akin to saying abortion is wrong while accepting contraception; saying transgenderism is wrong while accepting homosexuality; or saying sex-trafficking is wrong while accepting pornography.
Obviously, these problems are all spiritual in nature — ultimately, a rejection of God and His order.
To dive deeper into this important issue, watch this week’s Mic’d Up, wherein David Gordon discusses feminism with Dr. Deborah Savage, professor of theology at Franciscan University.