Great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment,” wrote infamous communism co-founder Karl Marx in 1868. Interestingly, too, it was a convention in 1848—the same exact year Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published—that is often cited as marking “first-wave” American feminism’s birth. So the ideology has been around a long time—some would say, too long.
Commentator Matt Walsh recently stated on an interview with Benny Johnson that “Feminism is the most destructive movement in human history.”
“And I don’t say that as hyperbole,” he added.
Walsh elaborated: “Well over 60 million human children have been killed in abortion. … There’s nothing else you can point to that’s had the death toll that feminism has had … the effect it’s had on the family, basically destroying the institution of the family; nothing comes close to feminism. And with feminism, it was like that from the very beginning.”
Walsh referenced the Lindsay Clancy situation as one of the movement’s “terrible fruits.” In his social media post following the interview, he concluded: “Feminism is a death cult.”
This is not Walsh’s first such remark. Last July, he stated in a podcast that “feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb.”
Beginning with abortion, prominent feminists have sacramentalized prenatal infanticide. In reality, if women (and men) wholly observed an actual sacrament—marriage—abortion wouldn’t even be an issue. It is important to many primarily because free sex is a sacrament to them; they want prenatal infanticide available as an escape hatch from its consequences.
This likely explains why first-wave feminists, still raised in an age of chastity, sometimes opposed abortion. Later in her life, suffragist Alice Paul (1885–1977) called abortion “the ultimate in the exploitation of women.”
Pope John Paul II described the family as “the basic cell of society.” If the family begins cracking, the government will step into the breach. The state may provide mothers with funding, filling absent fathers’ roles; or child care, filling that of absent mothers. If the family is healthy, however, government is unnecessary and often unwanted. As the pope noted: “so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
Feminist-encouraged abortion attacks the family by destroying who would be its youngest members—the little ones who give the husband-wife unit a tangible reason for being. But feminists have also explicitly attacked motherhood and the family.
Over decades, this agitation has had its effect. There was a time when a “stay-at-home mom” was simply identified as “a mom.” Today, that status is impugned. Consider Democratic political strategist Hilary Rosen’s 2012 remark: she claimed that Ann Romney, wife of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, had “actually never worked a day in her life”—despite her devotion to raising five sons.
Crisis magazine noted at the time that such sentiments are uncontroversial within Rosen’s milieu and common in contemporary society.
Feminism’s destructiveness here is obvious. Convince women that their primary role isn’t wife and mother, and you destroy the family. Destroy the family, and you destroy society.
The irony is that motherhood represents the highest calling—a holy one—vastly superior to workaday drudgery. Philosopher G.K. Chesterton observed: “How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?”
For sure. An employer might have numerous employees; yet no matter how gifted one may be, the boss can replace him as if he were a factory machine cog. A woman upon retirement might have a going-away party but ultimately passes away from thought. A good mother does not go away and is remembered even after death—thus the film “I Remember Mama” rather than “I Remember Call-center Worker Debbie From Cubicle C.”
A woman who has imbibed this tragic lie believes that raising a child molds a divine creature—a being born of a deific spark. Doing it correctly means creating saints of the future.
More could be said about feminism’s destructiveness, such as how it paved the way for the “trans” agenda. The designation itself is arguably the silliest: if a man called himself a “masculinist,” one would look at him as having slipped a gear.
To paraphrase economist Herb Stein, “If something can’t go on, it won’t.” Feminism craters birthrates and crashes populations; its future belongs to those who show up for it. Feminism will not show up. The question for our civilization, however, is: Will we?
Or will we keep indulging feminist fantasies?
