Book Review: “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us” by Carrie Gress

We have always lived in a dark world. Ever since Eden, that’s been our only option. As a result, humans have understandably sought ways to make this darkness more bearable. But because the darkness has also entered our minds and hearts, all too often our understanding of the way forward has brought even darker results.

In her recent book, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, Carrie Gress provides a disturbing case study of this process. As have many others, she once assumed feminism began as a worthy cause, genuinely seeking opportunities and privileges for women that made sense, things like giving them the right to vote or improving their access to education. It was only after that, during feminism’s second wave, that the more radical ideas were thought to have hijacked its once benign goals, transforming it into something quite different.

However, as she probed more deeply into what actually underlies all of feminism, Gress learned two significant things. First, she discovered that the vision of the earliest feminist writers was unlike what she had presumed. Second, she realized that even in its earliest iterations feminism embraced a fundamental error.

Feminism’s failure, at its root, is its misdiagnosis of what ails women. Feminists have worked hard to mitigate women’s suffering…by trying to eliminate our vulnerability, by making us cheap imitations of men, and by ignoring our womanhood. Setting off in the wrong direction, the prescribed fix can’t really fix anything. Instead, it has erased women one slow step at a time. (xxiv)

Feminism’s Roots

Gress is not the first to credit the inception of feminism to Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 1792. Two of its essential messages were that “society must be fundamentally restructured away from male hierarchy” and that “females need to be reclassified to ensure that their dignity is respected.” (13) That reclassification, of course, meant that females were to be regarded primarily as humans rather than as women.

What Gress discovered through her research was that Wollstonecraft wrote this in reaction to the degrading and even violent aspects of manhood she experienced in her own relationships with men. She was further swayed by the prevailing egalitarian ideas that also spawned the French Revolution. However, a third and perhaps more damaging component of the early feminist wellsprings actually came through the contributions of her daughter and son-in-law.

The daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (a novelist most famous for Frankenstein), was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was one of England’s premier poets and a highly immoral man. Shelley and his wife were caught up in the romanticism of their day, which was “vehemently anti-Christian and saw freedom, no matter its expression, as their new creed.” (24) Shelley also developed a deep fascination with the occult, and chose to explicitly invert the moral order. “The Shelley reading of Genesis 3 makes the serpent…the highest authority, Eve next, with Adam last, and God ignored altogether.” (28)

Turning next to first-wave feminism in America, Gress found that the popular images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and especially Susan B. Anthony might actually be misleading. She writes, “During their own time, Stanton worked hard to craft the myth that she and Anthony were the first and only pioneers of the women’s movement.” More specifically, “There seem to have been efforts made to keep what might appear to be unsavory details about these two women out of their legacies.” (40) 

For example, Stanton—whom Gress says “has long been considered the intellectual engine between the two, with Anthony serving more as her mouthpiece,” (40)—deliberately dismissed her Christian upbringing, being drawn instead to various aspects of spiritualism. She and others eventually wrote The Woman’s Bible, whose ideas reflected those promoted in theosophy, a movement closely tied to various mystics.

Feminism’s Fruit

In the next chapters, Gress shows how feminism became a powerful narrative in the cultural understanding of Western women and how the women’s movement was integrally connected to things like the gay rights movement. In fact, she writes, “Feminism, perhaps second only to Marxism, is currently the most powerful brand in the world.” (xxvii)

But as her title suggests, feminism’s ultimate goal and the most important key to women’s freedom comes as they are able to remove all vestiges of masculine oppression, encapsulated for them in the concept of patriarchy. As Gress observes, “Women have been fed the idea that we are victims simply because we are women, and men are oppressors simply because they are men. Even if we aren’t unhappy, we should be.” (120) Betraying its close resemblance to Marxism, the goal isn’t peace or even justice. Rather, the intended outworking is activism, which historically has always resulted in violence and increased oppression.

Yet even in calmer seasons, the ongoing damage to men continues. Gress notes, “The [feminist] mantra has changed slightly: Not only are we as good as men, we are in fact better at being men than they are.” (119) The fallout is evident everywhere, and few can describe it better than Anne Kennedy. In a recent substack post, she writes:

Look around at the United States and you will quickly see the devastated ruin of apathetic, drug-addled, miserable young men who have no gainful employment. I have just spent many days reading articles and books about male loneliness, hopelessness, and suicide. Where could this have come from? One big place is not accepting that certain cultural conditions have to be present in order for young men to develop a sense of agency. But those conditions have largely been chucked into the dustbin of history. Instead, parents, teachers, and experts have managed to do all the wrong things for boys, like extending their childhoods long past the time of its usefulness, like treating them like girls, like demeaning their interests, like imagining that more therapy is always the solution, like erasing all adventure and difficulty from their lives, and worst of all, condescending to them and then being upset about their passivity on the one hand and their aggression on the other.

Contending with the Darkness

Everyone can agree that a key component of human darkness centers on the broken relationships between men and women. Furthermore, partly because men’s mistreatment of women tends to be highly visible, whereas the violence a woman can do to a man is often more subtle, men have been predominantly targeted. But what can be hard to understand, as feminist ideologies have been increasingly normative in society, is why people don’t seem to notice that nobody is becoming happier, life is not working better, and the darkness continues to expand. 

It seems there are two primary perspectives on how to contend with darkness. Feminism and other such views seek to identify a guilty class of people, the suppression of whom will correspondingly free those who are its victims. In short, this method uses one form of darkness to push back against another darkness. The other view, with which Carrie Gress concludes her book, realizes that darkness only flees to the extent that light actually increases.

Her final chapter is a beautiful celebration of one of womanhood’s primary identities, that of being a mother. She writes, “Mothering and motherhood are essential pieces of womanhood. This is what keeps the species alive. It is vital and essential, and up until recently, it was recognized as the most tender and natural of relational bonds…There are few things that elicit the strength, courage, patience, perseverance, fortitude, and innovation of a mother’s love for her child.” (181)

Although the darkness will continue to be with us until the Light of this world (John 1:9) returns to finally destroy it, we as his emissaries can offer glimpses of his redemptive light to those who are truly seeking it. We do this in part by realizing that no human is the ultimate source of darkness (although of course, we all participate in it), but rather that it rises out of the deep and sinister lies that flow from the father of lies (John 8:44). 

So as we are able, and as God equips us, we should live out his light in all aspects of our lives. And as part of that endeavor, we should seek to honor others—including men if we are women and women if we are men—as potential bearers of light, encouraging them to understand the truth and beauty of who God has created them to be and what he has designed them to do.