The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress.'
Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (2023) is a sharp blade that slays every sacred cow of today’s mainstream feminism in turn.
Feminist zeitgeist teaches us to view various contemporary trends—from the ostensible liberation of birth control and its marginalization of hands-on motherhood, to the acceptance of a transgender movement that erases embodied womanhood altogether, to the continued reliance on fairy tale romance that conceptualizes increasingly optional long-term heterosexual partnerships as more individualistically fulfilling than societally productive—through the lens of what Harrington derides as “progress theology.”
For Harrington, progress theology is the misplaced conviction that “we can and must go on getting better, forever.” That is, “that there exists a kind of axis along which progress can be measured, and that we’re inexorably moving along that axis, from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad.’”
In fact, Harrington argues, human progress is a belief (hence, a “theology”), not a provable reality. “Pick a subject,” Harrington maintains, “and you’ll find that some things are better, while other things have become worse.”
In Feminism Against Progress, Harrington picks life for women in the twenty-first century as her subject. Then, with both uncommon courage and creative brilliance, she reveals the profound truth from which mainstream liberalism teaches us to shield our eyes, lest it shake our faith in progress: as a result of modern feminism, a lot of things have become worse for most women, while getting arguably better for some elite women—but, mostly in shallow and ephemeral ways. Harrington explains that she learned this last lesson the hard way, after living for a time under the androgynous name “Sebastian,” dutifully avoiding marriage and pregnancy throughout her youth, and giving birth to her only child in her late 30’s without sufficient remaining fertility to have another.
Any feminism that seeks to make life better for most women today, Harrington argues, must reject progress.
How?
For starters, abolish “big romance,” and recognize that marriage isn’t primarily about the kind of “warm and fuzzies” that emerged as the popular narrative of partnership in the industrial revolution as a counterweight to women’s loss of economic agency, but about “an enabling condition for building a meaningful life” together. Moreover, embrace sex differences between men and women as part of a societal order in which people: first, enjoy some amount of sex-segregation that “returns a measure of mystery to the opposite sex;” and second, embrace fertility rather than sterility as a norm that “rewilds” sex by “reclaiming the danger” of pregnancy and thereby incentivizing women to be “choosy” about the joyful but risky intimacy of committed sex rather than “polite” about the fundamental non-eroticism of casual sex.
While I would sign on to these prescriptions without hesitation, I am not sanguine about any broader societal appetite for doing so. It’s obvious to me—as I believe it should be obvious to any thinking person that looks honestly at the state of sex, family, and society in the year 2023—that per Harrington we urgently need more not less acknowledgment of natural differences between men and women, more not fewer pregnancies and babies, and a society that facilitates both of the above through cultural acceptance of embodied realities that have emotional, spiritual, and civic implications.
Nevertheless, most women that suffer (as Harrington admits doing) due to the sexual and romantic mores wrought by modern feminism do not—even if they recognize some of feminism’s excesses as in part to blame for their suffering—go on to reject said feminism wholesale. This in part because, as Harrington acknowledges, many women with the kinds of social and socioeconomic advantages that she enjoys benefit in tangible and immediate (even if profoundly dubious, when applied at scale) ways from developments like birth control. In other words: the spoils of autonomy that today’s feminism offers to women at the top of the educational and socioeconomic hierarchy will always, unless there is some hefty framework that inculcates both self-discipline for a higher cause and other regard for women without the aforementioned advantages, induce large numbers of women to embrace as individuals the progress theology version of feminism.
The only such framework I can think of that has any record of militating against progress theology with any degree of success is organized religion.
Unfortunately, the treatment of religious morality and institutional religion more broadly is the weakest aspect of Feminism Against Progress. Despite her wide-ranging critique of almost every aspect of modern feminism, Harrington essentially accepts without much resistance the mainstream progressive view of conservative Christian sexual morality as a “purity culture” that insists on women being “free of sexual desire.” In the only lines of the book that feel both substantively and semantically reminiscent of the very feminism she so definitively rips to shreds, Harrington differentiates herself from the religious conservatives who laud “some imaginary state of feminine purity,” declaring: “Women get horny. Get over it.”
Now, there is indeed a high-visibility version of evangelical Christianity in which young girls attend purity balls and make virginity pledges. More broadly, there are indeed too many religious sex educators that stupidly (and, yes, misogynistically) advocate against premarital sexual activity specifically by likening girls to roses whose petals can be gradually lost through sex outside marriage, until only bare stems await their future husbands.
But this insistence, in some religious communities, that women “preten[d] to a ‘purity’ few of us feel” is a bastardization of Judeo-Christian religious teaching on sex, not an accurate representation thereof.
As Wendy Shalit wrote nearly a quarter century ago in A Return to Modesty (1999), which addressed from a conservative, religious perspective many of the same feminist shortcomings that preoccupy Harrington because they still plague us today: the fact that most women are interested in sex with men has never been up for debate among intelligent people, including those that penned our great religious texts. Shalit tried to untangle the concept and practice of sexual modesty (which both acknowledges women’s sexuality and guards their vulnerability) from that of sexual shame (which insists that good women are naturally innocent of sexual desire).
Sexual modesty, Shalit argues, is the foundation of healthy relationships between the sexes and thus of a healthy society; it is an antidote to shame, not a compliment.
Although sexual shame is indeed still wielded by some dimwitted religious educators in well-meant but often counterproductive attempts to protect girls by extending their virginity, such shame is at this point mostly a straw man of the feminist mainstream.
That Harrington falls for this shallow characterization of traditional religious teaching about sex reveals the ubiquitous power of this feminist lie, and the futility of all previous attempts to refute it.
Nonetheless, rapid secularization unto popular spurning of not just the private but also the public dictates of religion is, in my view, the root cause for progress theology’s current dominance. In a sense, Feminism Against Progress is a convincing argument for a framework that already exists within religious communities (i.e., modal church-attending young women in 2023 that have premarital but not casual sex, circa mainstream culture in, say, 1965), but is waning in societal significance to such an extent that an argument retracing its exigencies feels fresh and even revolutionary.
Nonetheless, I am fairly confident that the best hope for a turn away from progress theology remains a turn toward actual theology.
I may just be a more “reactionary feminist” than Harrington, but I would almost always recommend rehabilitating and adding onto a long-standing structure, if possible, rather than trying to build a replica from scratch.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is an Opinion Contributor at The Hill and a Young Voices Contributor. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, Fairer Disputations, Law and Liberty, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and FemCatholic.
Emina Melonic's contribution to the symposium: Nature's Progress
Rachel Lu's contribution to the symposium: Feminism's Alienation of the Body
