The newly released novel, Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, features a tradwife who gets transported back to the 19th century to live a truly trad life. Deeply humbled by her experience, the tradwife desires to return to the present day, replete with the luxuries afforded to her by the feminists she disdains. Already a New York Times bestseller, the novel is set to be adapted for film by Anne Hathaway.
It takes little imagination to anticipate how the film adaptation will go: Much like the dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale, it will amount to a scolding for those lacking gratitude for feminism. The implicit message is exactly what feminists have always insisted: conservative women who embrace domesticity are either frauds, victims, or too dim to know the difference.
I’ve been writing about feminism for more than a decade. The main opposition is almost always the same: tedious clichés and skimpy narratives. I’m told that I want women to be subjected to vile men with no way to escape or that I don’t think women should work or vote. And then, there is some effort to remind me how I have personally benefited from feminism — usually because of my doctorate, or public voice. These tired arguments, gracing comment boxes, social media, and a wide array of publications, are repetitive, unthinking, self-righteous.
Few realize that these exhausted sound bites were established decades ago to protect feminism from criticism. Media, academia, and vocal influencers pushed these talking points deeply into the culture. They’ve become so entrenched that they’ve scarcely needed adjusting from outside pressure and remain so dominant that Hollywood can bank on them. This novel and soon-to-be-movie will follow the same playbook.
What is not generally grasped is that, despite its self-assured bravado, feminism is actually a fragile ideology. Because it is not based on a solid foundation of truth, it can only survive through power, so it relies on perception, PR, and political force. In the face of decades of its corrosive effects, it can’t draw from scientific studies or even principled arguments to defend itself. All it has is a broad defensive perimeter of clichés and a tidy narrative of protection. Western women and men have been unwittingly supplying it for decades, allowing feminism to expand unchecked.
The effect has been that most people genuinely believe they are protecting something good, buying into the largely fictional narrative that feminism “is just about helping women.” Few realize its connection to the havoc now on display in the culture.
What Is Feminism?
In its simplest form, feminism is the belief in two things: Men are contemptible, and women should be just like them.
This definition isn’t a one-off found in some obscure, unknown feminist. Rather, it can be seen in the work of every major feminist leader for the last 200 years: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Gloria Steinem. What is their biggest enemy? The patriarchy. And what do they want? To have the power they believe the patriarchy has.
These two ideas — men are contemptible, and women should be just like them — have been cemented together to form the bedrock of western women’s views on sex and marriage, resulting in highly destructive consequences: an ever-widening gap between men and women and steep decline in marriages, women’s battle with their fertility and bodies, increased abortions, the birth dearth, the push for same-sex marriage, surrogacy, gender fluidity and the trans movement, and the rise of anxiety and depression.
Delusions of Adequacy 