Steelman or Strawman? Carrie Gress’s Something Wicked
Carrie Gress’s newest book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, has a noble ambition: to criticize contemporary sex-positive and abortion-promoting feminism. Such viewpoints, Gress asserts, belittle motherhood, encourage women to ape men (and their worst tendencies at that), and promote the lie that career advancement is a preferred replacement to loving relationships.
If only the book had stopped there.
As with Gress’s previous book, here too the argument is that there was no good version of feminism: even the “first wave” of feminism dedicated to suffrage and legal rights was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. This is because, she claims, feminism has a triple origin story, going back to its eighteenth-century beginning: occultism, hatred of men, and love of autonomy and unfettered sex. Gress’s formula for the flawed roots of feminism means that most of the challenges women faced—such as the inability of married women to own property, find legal recourse against an abusive spouse, or support a family financially when a husband drank away all the money—get only a passing mention in the book at best.
To make its case while persistently minimizing antiwoman social conditions, this book, like Gress’s last, theorizes instead about the internal motivations of individual feminists. This approach is regrettable for a few reasons. First, proving internal motivation is a tricky historical procedure. Second, the book’s picture of a monochromatic and anti-Christian palette of early feminist aims is simply false. Last and most importantly, the method tends toward ad hominem attacks.
Let’s take a key example of an external social ill. What about the lack of opportunity for women’s education, which Gress and I, and many others, as PhDs, have benefited from? Something Wicked deals with the question by implying that education was not actually lacking for women, because there were some girls’ schools and women’s colleges in the nineteenth century. Yet the overwhelming majority of women would have been hard-pressed to earn doctoral degrees from them. The number of known women anywhere who received doctorates before 1800 can be counted on two hands. By 1889, twenty-five American women had received a doctorate, but only at low-status schools and “at great human cost.”
Elsewhere, Gress has indicated that her education would have been possible without the women’s-rights movement because “all of those things [like women’s education] were happening already.” This is like saying that abolitionism didn’t help to cause the end of slavery because all of those things were happening already. The counterfactual is both unprovable and unlikely.
Through this dubious method, the book can conclude that the feminist conviction “that women have been oppressed by men” is false. Even more: it is contrary to “the Christian worldview.”
This is strange territory on which to plant a Christian flag, because biblical anthropology clearly promotes belief in the fallenness of all human beings, including men. Such fallenness is understood by Catholic social thought to be the ultimate cause of all forms of oppression, which include “every kind of exploitation and domination of women.” John Paul II singles out “the long and degrading history … of violence against women in the area of sexuality,” which is precisely a history of male violence against women.
But the book insists that the earliest feminists were anti-Christian. It argues this point by singling out the most radical activists on the women’s-rights spectrum (for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Gage) and presenting them as representative of all.
Even more, Something Wicked claims these early activists single-handedly destroyed Christianity and Christendom: “Feminism has been responsible for much of the decay of the Christian West over the last two centuries,” Gress writes. When Christianity is embraced by feminists, it is only because “it proved to be politically useful” (again a mostly unprovable motivation). The sincere Christian and ethical convictions of most women’s-rights activists, seen in such figures as the Grimké sisters, are not mentioned.
Others have pointed out Gress’s errors concerning the religiosity of the earliest feminists, so I will not rehearse the evidence here. It is worth noting, however, that Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and generally considered the first modern feminist, receives a great deal of undeserved ad hominem treatment in Something Wicked.
For example, the book contends that “a look at Wollstonecraft’s immediate disciples indicates that perhaps not all is fair in the world of Wollstonecraft.” She had bad fruits—literally, in the case of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and Wollstonecraft’s daughter. The text notes that Shelley ran away with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley and pursued some kind of ménage à trois.
That is all correct, but why are we talking about Wollstonecraft’s daughter at all? If your goal is to criticize my mother’s thinking, pointing out my many flaws does not get you there. This is true in Wollstonecraft’s case in spades, because she died while giving birth to Shelley (which the book mentions 150 pages earlier). Her only guilt concerning Shelley’s upbringing is being too dead to participate in it.
When the book does get Wollstonecraft right, such as the latter’s emphasis on education, the facts are given a sinister twist: “Education was key, as it was for all liberals of her era, instead of closer adherence to the Christian creed.” Was this ever a simple either/or? And is it intrinsically liberal to value female education? St. Thomas More would be surprised to hear it.
First-wave feminists are therefore to a woman rejected, and the sexual-revolutionary feminists that follow are read as their simple development. For instance, the book’s treatment of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, conveys some truth but unfortunately concludes that Sanger’s work “eventually left an imprint on” Hitler, whose “death machine” was “fueled in no small part” by Sanger’s ideas.
As a Sanger scholar, I weep over this sort of thing. Sanger was many things, most of them bad, so why pick the one thing she clearly was not? She was certainly a eugenicist, but Sanger detested Hitler. Insofar as Hitler thought about her at all, he reciprocated the feeling by burning her books. But too many activists have decided that “Nazi,” as the ultimate insult, must be used to define her, thereby opening up all of her opponents to the charge of manufacturing evidence even when they criticize her accurately.
The goal in making this claim becomes clearer when the book states the astonishing conviction that both Sanger and Simone de Beauvoir were actually first-wave feminists. Gress is surely the only person to understand the first wave in this way, because the term is meant to describe feminists who are focused on civil and political rights. But Sanger was completely indifferent, and even hostile to, such reform, including suffrage. For her, it was all a distraction, because she believed women are oppressed by their own fertile bodies. This is a revolutionary and catastrophic shift away from first-wave thinking.
Why, then, incorrectly put Sanger in the first-wave box? Though I cannot know Gress’s intentions, it seems clear that her categorization sets up the ad hominem equations we see emerging throughout the book: first-wave feminism = Sanger = Nazism, hence first-wave feminism leads to Nazism.
This kind of reductio ad Hitlerum is not just simplistic; it traffics in the opposite of truth, and it is jarring in a book that states that its only objective is to pull back the curtain on the wizard of feminism so that the truth can be seen by all. The informed reader starts to suspect that what is behind the curtain is the author’s own invention. Furthermore, this rhetorical move feels unfair: even Margaret Sanger should not be accused of vices she did not have.
Likewise, de Beauvoir’s views are much closer to Sanger’s than those of any first waver. But the book seeks a tidy end to the first-wave story in order to go ad hominem again, equating Wollstonecraft’s unusual marriage to William Godwin with de Beauvoir’s degenerate relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. “Beauvoir and Sartre are perhaps the culmination of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin vision, because they never married and were not ‘enslaved’ to each other.” Now the equation is Wollstonecraft = de Beauvoir = perverted sex.
This attack is truly objectionable, because Wollstonecraft’s maternal virtue ethics and even her tumultuous biography are light years away from those of the twentieth-century pair. De Beauvoir played Ghislaine Maxwell to Sartre’s Jeffrey Epstein in ways that are wholly discontinuous with Wollstonecraft’s vision, not (as the book argues) the inevitable unspooling of that vision if you give it 150 years. Further, one must ask if the book is really promoting the idea that marriage entails the enslavement of one spouse to the other.
The chapter titled “John Paul II’s New Feminism” promises to offer some desperately needed subtlety. Sadly, it does not deliver. The book states that because John Paul II only calls for a “new feminism” once, in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, “he was using feminist ideas without being a feminist.” If by “not being a feminist” one could mean “not pursuing false feminism,” this is precisely what the Catholic women she criticizes in the chapter are doing when they champion his “new feminism.”
But, because “feminism” in Something Wicked can only mean the trifecta of occultism–hating men–sexual revolution, the text makes another jarring claim: the pope is not actually calling for a “new feminism.” The book reduces his whole agenda to “minor mentions, literal blips on the radar.” Elsewhere, Gress argues that since the phrase is not in the earlier Mulieris Dignitatem, “he is not really using it, this isn’t his thing.”
This point is baffling. How many times does a pope need to call for something for him to mean it? Is the implication that someone else inserted the phrase against his wishes? And can’t a pope’s thought and phraseology develop?
The nonsensical conclusion that the new feminism “isn’t his thing” goes against the context and content of John Paul II’s life and writings, as Gress must admit, such as when he called himself “the feminist pope” to some of his female collaborators. Since a priori that cannot be, because “feminism” by definition can only be anti-Christian, John Paul II’s “new feminism” cannot be “his thing,” nor should it be anyone’s thing. Now the equation is John Paul II = opposed to “feminism” = opposed to his own new feminism.
Yet one of the most egregious misrepresentations in this chapter concerns legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. Of Bachiochi’s work on feminism, the chapter states that she argues “Mary Wollstonecraft offers the right vision for today’s Catholics.” This claim is a little odd, given that Bachiochi is not writing for a Catholic audience. But let’s assume the text means that Bachiochi wants to rehabilitate Wollstonecraft for debates around contemporary feminism.
Some of the thinkers Bachiochi covers in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision are indeed a mixed bag; they include, as Something Wicked points out, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. (Tellingly, Gress neglects to note that the modern hero of the book is none of these but the Catholic Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon.) A footnote quotes a sentence from Bachiochi: “Ginsburg herself would seem to be the leading icon of Wollstonecraft’s vision for women.”
That is all the discussion the chapter gives to Bachiochi’s treatment of the jurist, and the reader is left thinking that she approves of her; something similar is done with Betty Friedan. But that quoted sentence is part of Bachiochi’s assessment of Ginsburg’s antidiscrimination work, prefatory to a careful and ultimately devastating critical analysis of Ginsburg’s abortion jurisprudence, one that Something Wicked should be embracing, not dismissing.
In my experience as a professor, there are different possible reasons why students put forward an author’s “on the one hand” as her conclusion and never get to the “on the other hand.” Perhaps they didn’t read the whole thing, or they read it sloppily. Or perhaps they read it thoroughly, but they didn’t understand it. Or perhaps they understood it, but they want to misrepresent it. Regardless of the reason in this case, this kind of move is a significant lapse.
In any case, it’s not clear how much Gress has read of Bachiochi’s work, because this chapter does not engage the latter’s book substantively. Instead, the chapter spends much time trying to take down another Wollstonecraft scholar, whose work Bachiochi reviewed, before complaining that Wollstonecraft was not Catholic. Matters get worse when the text hurls another ad hominem stone at Bachiochi: She “does not have any kind of degree in philosophy” (she has a JD, as do most legal scholars, as well as degrees in political philosophy and systematic theology). This move is particularly ill judged, because Bachiochi’s book is a philosophical scalpel, while Gress’s is an apologetic sledgehammer.
That is the most tragic problem with Something Wicked. It chastises Bachiochi for “confused messaging,” but this presumes that nuance and charitable readings are bad. Bachiochi’s book is in fact much more apologetically effective than Gress’s, because The Rights of Women reads with charity those with whom the author disagrees. Her writing steel-mans their arguments, while Something Wicked—ironically, given the allusion to The Wizard of Oz—only straw-mans.
The difference between the two authors’ approaches is not simply that one writes academically and the other popularly. Something Wicked is, I am sincerely grieved to say, bad popularization. If Joe Smith writes X, it is bad popularizing to say he wrote not-X, or that he wrote X but meant not-X, or that you don’t have to think about X because Joe had a bad life or a bad daughter.
I am truly sad about this, because there are lovely passages about the dignity of motherhood and female distinctiveness in Something Wicked, passages with which I wholeheartedly agree. Not coincidentally, those are the least ad hominem parts of the book. Regrettably, Something Wicked is an exercise in dispatching straw men of its own making.