Had I a dollar for each time someone told me they were a feminist, well, it’d be about two grand. Back in my Washington days, being feminist was a badge of honour, especially among young men in political jobs. Women approved, so it helped your social life. Proclaiming fealty to feminism was politically correct, thus beneficial for professional advancement. It was the “in” thing. As for young women, how could they be anything but? Their mere presence in the political class was feminism incarnate.

Semantics and politics

I looked up “feminism” in the dictionary. Seems I am also a feminist. Britannica says it’s “the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.” I’m on board with equal rights for all, not just women. Wikipedia says: “Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.”

“A range of socio-political movements and ideologies?” How did equal rights get so complicated? That’s how PC politics works. First, take a noble cause and make it your own. Then apply a generous coating of Cultural Marxist spin about oppression, etc., and soon enough you have a special interest power base.

That’s what happened with civil rights, which morphed into affirmative action, DEI mandates and speech police. Public health became shutting down churches and family businesses while leaving Walmart and gambling casinos open for business. How about environmentalism? The green gestapo extracts millions from the economy to comply with whimsical “climate change” mandates. Feminism morphed into “women’s liberation,” denigration of motherhood and overt misandry.

Each of these worthy causes were co-opted, or rather hijacked by woke leftists.

Establishment feminism

The other day a disturbingly painful piece by Petronella “Petsy” Wyatt in the London Telegraph hit me like a ton of bricks. The grief-stricken headline: “Feminism has left middle-aged women like me single, childless and depressed”.

Ms Wyatt is a distinguished UK journalist. The daughter of an MP, she is a seasoned, sophisticated political insider. She had a years-long affair with Boris Johnson before he was PM. Lying about the affair cost Johnson his shadow cabinet post in the Tory opposition.

When she was 13, Margaret Thatcher visited their home. She says Ms Thatcher lectured her about coming of age as a woman:

“The gist of her address would have been greeted with hosannas by every feminist of the age; in summation, a woman’s career superseded by far her relations with the opposite sex.”   

Ms Wyatt’s piece is so profoundly compelling that her message cannot be conveyed short of quoting her at length:

“At my private school, St Paul’s Girls’ School, we children of Thatcher were similarly educated out of marriage and distaff pursuits. I recall an occasion when Shirley Conran [Dame Conran, strident feminist journalist and author] attempted to upbraid us with the words, “Paulinas do not cook, they think.”

“But the world has changed in a way the early feminist would find incomprehensible and grotesque – indeed, she would view today’s flag bearers as hollow and preposterous nothings. I sometimes think the West has outgrown the feminist philosophy entirely and should cast it off.”

“Incomprehensible and grotesque.” There you have it. That is the hijacking of feminism. The drive for equitable legal status for women morphed into PC ideology, generating social discord for political gain.

“Where, for instance, does it leave women like me, when we have reached the age of 54, as I have, and find ourselves both single and childless? Hugging the collected works of Proust, or engaging in furtive sojourns to the pub that bring remembrances of things pissed? One in 10 British women in their 50s have never married and live alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.

“I do not know one single woman of my generation who lives such a life and actually likes it.

“Feminism made the error of telling us to behave and think like men. This error was a grave one, and women like myself are paying for it, like gamblers in a casino that has been fixed. We are not men, and in living the single life, with its casual encounters, we play for much higher stakes and have more to lose.”

Ms Wyatt nails it. There is no misconstruing her heartbreak and pathos. She has my utmost respect for courageously speaking out. It strikes me that she is undergoing that fifth stage of grief, acceptance. We’ve been sold a bill of goods with the lure of personal autonomy and material well-being. Those temporal temptations are as fleeting as time. Family is not.

Ms Wyatt’s essay is a powerful signal that those chickens from the anti-family contagion that came of age in 1960s are coming home to roost. By denigrating motherhood and traditional family life, society has been so grievously sabotaged that broken homes, below-replacement fertility and moral relativism are the norm. Is it any wonder that social pathologies are off the charts?  

The feminism described by Ms Wyatt has been publicised by a compliant media as the popular path to feminine fulfilment, with tragic consequences.