A brave manifesto for true womanhood

Mar 16, 2023 by Jill

by Francis Phillips, TCW:

Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington; Forum (March 2023) £16.99.

MARY Harrington is a rare woman: clever (a First from Oxford in English Literature) and arguing from a secular standpoint, she brings formidable powers of analysis and intellectual clarity to the feminism she embraced unthinkingly in her youth (she was born the year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister) and entirely demolishes the ideology behind it. My (trivial) complaint is that she still describes herself as a ‘feminist’. I think she should ditch residual loyalty to this word, with all the distracting, unhelpful baggage that comes with it, and simply call herself a ‘woman’. For what emerges powerfully in her book is a re-examination of what it means to be a woman: a woman in relation to man. A Christian would quote Genesis here: ‘Male and female he created them’. Harrington has reasoned herself into a similar position, but does so outside religious faith.

She begins with the birth of her daughter. Other honest would-be feminists and mothers will recognise her surprised admission: ‘Having a baby changes everything.’ In particular, it brings her straight up against the impenetrable feminist mantra of ‘self-realisation’. She discovers both that ‘I didn’t want to be away from my baby for any length of time’ and that babies ‘need responsive and devoted care’ from a loving caregiver, something that impersonal nursery care cannot provide. ‘Individualism’ and ‘relational bonds’ come into conflict. Harrington terms them ‘Team Freedom’ versus ‘Team Interdependence.’

Alongside feminism, the author brings forensic attention to the word ‘progress’. As a student, influenced by post-modernism and the idea of non-binary sexual fluidity, frankly admitting that ‘my own “liberated” youth left me with a wagonload of sexual trauma’, she reflects that humanity has not reached the anticipated ‘ever greater freedom and equality’. After all, ‘Warfare hasn’t gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, want or human degradation.’ Just as G K Chesterton quipped that the evidence for the doctrine of Original Sin lies all around us, Harrington knows from observation, personal experience and wide reading (the book includes 25 pages of references) that technological and scientific progress do not go hand in hand with the moral or social progress of mankind.

The second part of the book makes especially thought-provoking reading.

Read here

Why ‘Progress’ is Bad for Women – Mary Harrington, Triggernometry interview