Amusements Rick McGinnis
As the father of daughters, I always feel a bit guilty when I find myself railing against the excesses and absurdities of contemporary feminism. I mentally prepare myself for the counterarguments my position will invite: Don’t you believe women should have the same opportunities as men? Don’t you think equal work should mean equal pay? Do you want to return to a time when women were legally chattel?
You can respond that nobody wants to deny women opportunities, fairness or the basics of personhood but you know that there are millions, even billions, of people around the world fully supported by cultures and governments who believe precisely that, but for some reason nobody who claims to speak for women’s rights seems very interested in arguing the point with them these days, even behind the ramparts of Twitter.
What you end up doing is straying into an even greater heresy by suggesting that, far from arguing for equality, much of the energy of feminism these days seems to be spent enshrining in both social custom and legal statute the idea that women are better than men – or that men are, by nature, worse than women, and should be handicapped from birth by law, and that only this way will be playing field where both sexes meet (often imagined as something more like a gladiatorial arena) be rendered level.
Ultimately your heresy becomes unpardonable when you observe that, for all the furious effort and record of successes of feminism, people don’t seem an awful lot happier, and that the definitions of “fulfilment” and success seem to need re-writing on a regular basis.
If you often wonder where feminism took a wrong turn, you might want to read Sue Ellen Browder’s Subverted (Ignatius Press,) which comes with the helpful subtitle “How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.” Browder spent much of her career as a writer at Cosmopolitan, the periodical that was the trashy, consumerist yin to the earnest and activist yang of Ms. magazine. She spends much of the first half of Subverted recalling how she came to share the values espoused by Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo’s founder, and ended up working there as a staff writer and freelancer.
Browder wasn’t a leader in the mainstreaming of second wave feminism but a foot soldier, writing articles targeted at the ambitious, promiscuous, and chic woman that was both the ideal reader and mythological creation of Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan. Browder, a suburban mother in what she describes as a long, happy marriage, wasn’t anything like the woman she was both writing for and imagining in print, and as the years went by she began noticing that the women she knew who had come closest to this ideal were usually miserable.
One of the articles of faith of modern feminism that Browder never questioned was the great gift of abortion as birth control, fought for by her heroes and bosses and enshrined in law by Roe v. Wade. As a freelance writer married to another writer, money was always a problem and one day, when a third pregnancy presented itself during a brief period of financial anxiety, she did what many women with her ideals and milieu did, and booked an abortion. The decision would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Still, Browder persevered despite what her conscience and the evidence all around her told her, moving back and forth from coast to coast while writing for a variety of women’s magazines and penning titles like The New Age Baby Name Book as an author-for-hire. She and her husband Walter raised their children in the vague auspices of the Episcopal Church until they find themselves drawn, gradually, to Catholicism.
It’s as a Catholic that Browder wrote Subverted, trying to understand just where the empowering ideals of her youth turned so damaging and counterproductive. She manages to pin it down to a single man – Lawrence Lader, biographer of Margaret Sanger and author of the influential 1966 book Abortion – and the November 1967 meeting where Betty Friedan, very much under the influence of Lader, helped push through the decriminalization of abortion as a key plank in the policy platform of the National Organization of Women.
As Browder describes the moment, it was a conspiracy where a small but vocal minority managed to overrule the voices of conscience in the women’s movement and, by a narrow majority, make central to their cause what many thought was a marginal and dangerous program.
Still grateful to Friedan for her pioneering work giving birth to second wave feminism, Browder does her best to lessen Friedan’s culpability, painting her as a pawn in the game of Lader, a master pro-abortion propagandist, and tries to highlight moments of regret Friedan had later in life. (She even tries to lessen Margaret Sanger’s place in the eventual triumph of pro-abortion forces in America by recalling how abortion eventually forced a rift between her and Lader.)
Browder is more successful describing her own journey from one side of the abortion battle to the other, and the slow move to faith taken by herself and her husband, right up until the bittersweet epilogue that closes the book. There’s no doubt that Subverted will be an important book for pro-life feminists, but as long as abortion remains an article of faith at the centre of contemporary feminist dogma, it’s hard to imagine women on this side of the issue ever finding common ground with those whose whole belief system – with rich irony – rests on the life’s work of a man like Lader.
