The Abolition of Woman

A Review of "Feminism Against Progress" by Mary Harrington

Feminism Against Progress is perfectly pitched for this post-liberal moment. The tenets of liberal feminism have been the dominant societal position for decades and some of their fruits have been less than nourishing - and I say this as someone who has been a card-carrying feminist since birth. The book is not without its flaws and I certainly did not agree with everything Harrington writes, but the book was thought-provoking and insightful.

Harrington describes a young adulthood familiar to many; she pursued a life of self-actualization “freed from power, hierarchy, and all limits.” Eventually disillusioned by this lifestyle, in Feminism Against Progress she asks what the widespread adoption of this ethos has done to society. Ultimately, “Harrington is attempting to salvage a feminism that has turned against humanity.”¹

Harrington first outlines the dogma of our day: the belief held across the political spectrum that says the state of humanity is always improving. This belief is premised on the pursuit of an ever-receding goal of greater freedom, always progressing towards some undefined future goal of human perfection that we never attain and whose drawbacks are never counted - save as evidence of how far we still have to go. Harrington calls this dogma “progress theology” and she is not a believer.

Harrington argues that feminism is less a story of moral progress and more the outcome of women adapting to societal changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. This idea rankles me as it undermines the work of generations of feminist activists, but I think understand what she is getting at.

To put it simply, Harrington explains that before the Industrial Revolution many households had an “ambiguous complementarity” wherein the man and woman both worked in the home to make a living. After the Industrial Revolution, work moved from the home into urban centers and factories; thus, the productive household was replaced by uprooted communities and urbanized men and women in separate spheres -  men working in the world, women underpaid in factories or unpaid at home. Women lost status and were increasingly at the mercy of their husbands. (There is truth to this but I feel this summary glosses too quickly over many of the very real drawbacks women faced under the previous system and underplays many of the benefits they enjoy under the current.)

The feminist movement originally contained a healthy tension between what Harrington terms “team interdependence” (which emphasized the interdependence between men and women and the valorization of motherhood and caregiving) and “team independence” (which took on the ethos of the industrial era that said a good life is one in which unencumbered individuals have the liberty to work and make their life as they see fit). Working for a living outside of the home eventually became the benchmark for a “successful” life. This posed a problem for feminism’s “team independence” because women’s reproductive capabilities meant they could never quite meet the same standard of unencumbered freedom as men.

Over time this led to a viewpoint in which the female body’s reproductive capability was seen as a shackle that kept women oppressed. Unpaid caregiving work was deemed unjust and repressive. Eventually, motherhood itself was denigrated and having children compared to slavery. The female sex was rendered into perpetual victims in need of emancipation from biology itself. When the hormonal birth control pill was legalized in 1960, the deadlock between “team interdependence” and “team independence” was finished. Team Independence was victorious and it was their ethos that would shape the modern feminist movement.

Since then, Harrington writes that feminism has ultimately become a “war on embodiment,” while “progress” has come to mean the complete disconnection between physical reality and the inner self. Feminism has thus morphed into a movement focused on individual freedom premised on the ability of technology to liberate us from the “burden” of the body. Any limits put on the individual, whether societal, religious, or biological, are seen as untenable.

The birth control pill, according to Harrington, was the first transhumanist technology in that it rendered a normal human process into a problem to cure. I was surprised to learn that the pill, intended to prevent unwanted pregnancies, has actually increased the net total of unwanted pregnancies. This is because the pill so thoroughly transformed social mores that it led to a vast increase in casual sex, and because the pill is only mostly effective pregnancies still occurred. Harrington writes that the legalization of abortion then became feminism’s next crusade, because no unwanted obligation was to be accepted. Today, 1/5 of all pregnancies in the US and UK end in abortion.

Discussing both the surrogacy industry and the growing push for non-traditional child-rearing, Harrington delves into the ever-growing chorus decrying the traditional family unit as exploitative and inherently abusive. Harrington views the Marxist proposal of “family abolition” as a direct assault on the bond between mother and child. The claim that there is no such thing as “natural” maternal instinct, that it is merely a social construct, she views as a market-grab to shatter the most profound social relationship there is. The endgame of this discourse is something activists today openly advocate for, which is “‘gestational communism:’ a world where babies are not the particular obligation of family units, but ‘universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility’.”

Harrington argues that what we have accepted as feminist “liberty” is actually a template of freedom that primarily benefits the economy. The liberal feminist project of maximizing individual autonomy has not succeeded in maximizing human flourishing, she believes, but has resulted in a culture of chronic dissociation and the solutions it offers only exacerbate the problem. This has led to “widespread loneliness; abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes; substandard childcare; family breakdown; and the well-documented disadvantage experienced by children in one-parent families.” Harrington points out that while today’s feminism purports to fight on behalf of all women, in actuality it benefits a minority of elite women who are able to offload caregiving obligations onto the poor women hired to do it in their stead.

Turning her focus to modern dating, Harrington declares that the Sexual Revolution was not the beginning of the feminist movement, but the end. For thousands of years we have governed relations between the sexes via social norms, now that these social norms have been tossed out the age-old stereotypes of the sexes were not undone but made more antagonistic and commercialized. It was at one time believed that male violence against women was largely a product of suppressed sexual shame, and by eradicating shame male violence would decrease. Needless to say, this has not been the case. More than half a century on from the Sexual Revolution, Harrington reports that male sexual violence has become increasingly normalized in routine sexual encounters and women who feel displeased about this are counseled to stop “slut shaming” themselves and be more open-minded.

And “rather than preventing men from behaving badly, the assault on patriarchal constraints and hierarchies has delivered a ‘rivalrous’ society of ‘siblings’ in which those men who still want to misbehave are free to do so, without even the constraints afforded by those positive aspects of masculinity that once governed masculine excess: ‘the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion rather than simply places constraints on freedom.”

Next examining the rapid ascendancy of gender ideology, Harrington suggests that liberal feminism’s insistence on using technology to “liberate” people from biological limits has led to a belief system that denies the reality of biological sex and champions the sterilization of gender non-conforming children. Harrington writes that America has a long history of the medical industry doing questionable things to human beings in the name of “progress.” (The lobotomy, for example, was once considered cutting edge medicine endorsed by experts. The creator of the procedure was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.) In the US, the gender medicine and surgery industry is worth more than 200 billion dollars a year - more than the film industry. And it is an industry that Harrington believes is premised on maximizing profits with little regard for human well-being.

Those who speak out against this movement, Harrington notes, have been subjected to violence and death threats, lost their jobs, been expelled from university programs, and have been visited at home by police who advise a “change in thinking.” But Harrington speaks out because she believes that “reimagining our bodies as Meat Lego won’t free us from our bodies. Instead it will demolish what’s left of the cultural and legal norms that evolved over time to manage aspects of human nature that remain beyond our power to change or eradicate. And it will free the market to move into that space. People are being displaced from the “commons” of their own bodies, so they can be commodified by the market.”

Reading Harrington write about the bleak outcomes of “progress theology” I was reminded of CS Lewis. More than a century ago, Lewis witnessed the approach of the Machine. The operating framework of modernity, the Machine is as old as humanity itself but has come into its own in recent centuries. It can be found in the global push toward hyper industrialization, the technological tyranny of everyday life, and the sticky morass of philosophical subjectivism. The Machine is premised on scientism and dedicated to the pursuit of “progress” at any cost. Perverting the innate human desire for transcendence, it preaches an ideology of atomized liberty that purports to free people from limits of any kind, be they tradition, nature, even the human body itself.

In The Abolition of Man CS Lewis writes about trends in early 20^th century education that troubled him, trends that can be understood as part and parcel of the Machine. These trends include the denial of objective truth and transcendent reality. Lewis recognized that as classical virtues were removed from education, our view of human nature was being radically changed. No longer seen as being made in the image of God and called to discern eternal truths, people were seen as animals with infinitely malleable natures. Lewis believed this worldview would lead to people being ruled by their baser instincts while calling it liberation – thus the abolition of man.

Today, as we read in Feminism Against Progress, we are seeing the abolition of woman. Harrington recognizes that even as the idea of womanhood as a concrete reality has been abolished, as an amorphous concept it has been commodified and sold back to us as a consumer identity. None of this offers true freedom, she argues, all it does is alienate us from reality and dissolve social patterns formed over thousands of years. In so doing it primarily benefits the market. As Jacques Ellul suggests, the “revolution” becomes “the daily fare of our affluent consumer society,” and the individuals who see themselves as subversive champions of progress are perhaps better understood as foot soldiers of the Machine.

It is when detailing the ways in which the modern ideology of “progress” divorces people from their bodies and from reality itself, that Feminism Against Progress is at is strongest. That being said, I don’t agree with everything Harrington writes. For one, I cannot bring myself to be quite so black-pilled about “progress.” I continue to hope that human beings can find ways to live with its undeniable benefits while not letting it fully alienate us from reality. In Feminism Against Progress, the past is portrayed a bit too optimistically and there is also too strong a tendency toward technological determinism, which undermines human desire and agency.

That being said, to break the spell of secular modernity a radical counterweight may be necessary. That is what Harrington is attempting to do here with her “reactionary feminism”. It is impossible to read this book without becoming more aware of just how dehumanizing and dissociating so much of our contemporary beliefs are. Harrington concludes the book by offering a handful of tactics to guide us beyond this moment and at their heart these tactics are a call for us to acknowledge and accept limitations. In this, Harrington advocates for a return to a classical understanding of liberty, in which freedom does not mean being able to do whatever one wants whenever one wants whatever the consequences, but having the true freedom to understand that a life of pure indulgence is deadly to the soul.

Now that we have left the industrial era behind and are firmly ensconced in the digital age, Harrington argues that men and women will need one another more than ever. She argues for a rooted, earthy praxis, one in which sex-specific advocacy is critical to re-entrench us in healthy relationships. Rather than continuing to race toward an ever more disembodied conception of what it means to be human, she encourages us to appreciate the radical subversiveness of reality. Ultimately Harrington views men and women with deep compassion and urges us to find a way “to stay human together.”

1. Feminism Against Humanity