Feminism is Over, But I'm Still Here

Grieving for a diminished movement.

Up until about a month ago, when a police raid on a pro-Palestine solidarity encampment at Columbia University set off a wave of campus anti-war activism unprecedented in recent decades, it was fashionable to say that a recent historical era of protest was over. The journalist Vincent Bevins argued in his 2023 book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, that an age of popular uprisings around the world bracketed the 2010s, beginning with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and ending with the George Floyd uprisings in the summer of 2020—and that ultimately, these social movements failed. This sense of regret and finality has been echoed elsewhere. Last month, British historian Hannah Proctor published Burn Out: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, something of a psychiatric history of radical movements, that recounts militants’ methods of mourning—or failures to mourn—at moments of backlash or political retrenchment. And last year, the Notre Dame professor Sarah Marcus also published Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis, a critical account of art produced by radicals in the wake of defeat, that charts the innovations, insights, and unexpected solidarities that emerge at such moments of regretful reckoning—a sort of instruction manual and cheer-up coda for disappointed activists of our own time.  

I’ve been drawn to these books recently for what might be an obvious reason: feminism, the political movement to which I have devoted my life, is in a moment of acute failure, loss, and dissipation. The past six years have delivered the cause of women’s liberation a series of seismic defeats. Me Too yielded a backlash that has encouraged men’s resentment, delegitimized women’s critiques of sexual violence, freed high profile sexual abuse felons, and encouraged harassment of survivors. The pandemic pushed women out of the workforce disproportionately, and its months of quarantine exposed the persistent gendered inequality of domestic and caregiving labor in most marriages—leading overwhelmed women into a state of rageful frustration that The New York Times memorably termed “the primal scream.” Then, there was the catastrophe of the Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion right nationwide: diminishing women’s citizenship, endangering their health, and humiliating them on a historic scale. These events, coming in quick succession, have rapidly reversed the fortunes of a once-ascendant feminism, emboldening misogynists and placing women on the back foot. Their long term effects are likely to narrow and warp women’s lives in ways we still cannot fathom.

You could argue that each of these events—the Me Too backlash, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women, and Dobbs—were structural problems, not cultural ones, and claim that they don’t reflect an ideological shift towards antifeminism. But much of culture also seems to be taking on an antifeminist project. Social media, for instance, has perfected a peculiar form of pop-reactionary gender politics. YouTube serves men endless videos from the incel world of embittered mouth breathers. Algorithms promote them dispatches from the manosphere, where muscular, shiny-headed influencers in sports cars tell them that women have usurped men’s rightful place, and that the solution to this problem (seemingly, the solution to every problem) is for men to vindicate themselves by treating women with as much violence and contempt as possible. Women, too, are being fed a media diet of reactionary slop: I can’t open Instagram without being served a video of a blonde, unblinking tradwife holding a rolling pin, or a white woman in yoga pants telling me to stop taking birth control, lest it take me out of sync with the moon.

Meanwhile, political candidates and public intellectuals on the right have reorganized the conservative project around male gender grievance. They pass more and more restrictive abortion bans, compelling women into pregnancy and forcing no small number of them to incur disabling injuries and avoidable deaths. They inveigh against no fault divorce, hoping to turn marriage into a trap from which women cannot escape. They decry daycare facilities and refuse to fund them; they write books encouraging women to get married, give birth, and stay home—or risk being blamed for all social ills. And they have launched a massive, virulent campaign against trans rights, explaining their bigotry with essentializing invectives about sex, nature, and destiny that not only ravage the lives of trans women, but also make it extremely clear how little they think of the cis ones.

And so it is not just a few accidents of history that have turned against feminism: the law and the culture have, too. We are in a moment where women’s status is being rapidly and dramatically degraded. And large swaths of America seems to approve.

Feminism has faced previous moments of backlash and retrenchment. But if the movement has long had powerful enemies, it has perhaps never had so few friends. In this moment of feminism’s defeat, it often seems that, to many of those who might have historically supported the movement, feminism now appears—well, a bit absurd. Liberals have a distaste for feminism’s strains of radicalism and anger; leftists distrust its capacious mission and point to feminism’s vulneriblity to cooptation. Intellectuals, meanwhile, are completely allergic to feminism; even academics in the gender studies field have moved away from the question of women’s inequality in recent decades, preferring to focus on more abstract and less controversial themes of identity formation. Activists working on issues central to women’s dignity, opportunity, and status—like reproductive rights, paid leave, or childcare affordability—have shifted to speaking of their causes in terms of facially gender-neutral values, like bodily autonomy, medical justice, or family wellbeing. And then there are the queer activists, who as fellow struggles against a hierarchical gender system, logically ought to be feminism’s natural allies. But queer and trans rights movements have been radically disillusioned by the appearance of so-called “gender criticals,” or TERFs, particularly in the UK—and so have often come to distrust feminism as politically suspect.

Most alarmingly, as the forces of backlash have gained momentum, no popular feminist movement has emerged in the U.S. to counteract the broader antifeminist turn. There has been no mass mobilization for women’s rights and dignity; no revival of feminist organizing; no reanimation of infrastructure, fundraising, or even rhetoric.

These days American feminism is incapable of producing such a movement: the notion that Americans would flood the streets for women’s rights, as they have for many causes in over the past five years, seems almost laughable now. But it was not always obvious that American feminism in the 21^st century would fail to produce street mobilizations. For much of the 2010s, it seemed likely that it would. Campus organizers at the opening of that decade exerted tremendous and ultimately successful pressure on the Department of Education to change its policies regarding campus sexual assault, deploying not only lawsuits but also a large number of targeted and impassioned student demonstrations. A long series of public anti-rape agitations both on and off campuses followed, notably including those by activists Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller, and these prompted a wave of online consciousness raising. This ad hoc but steady accumulation of feminist popular support led to the explosion of the Me Too movement of 2017—a crucible of feminist activism so intense it felt doomed, but which was briefly and thrillingly capable of making swift, effective, and meaningful challenges to those in power.

If these American examples seem relatively tame, consider that large-scale street mobilizations for women’s rights swept through multiple countries in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The Ni Una Menos movement, which began in Argentina in 2015, expertly connected struggles for abortion rights and against rape and domestic violence, spreading across Latin America into Peru, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, and extracting concessions from national governments. In Ireland, years of mass legal and street campaigns against the nation’s abortion ban culminated in 2018 with the success of the Repeal the 8^th movement—whose success was secured, in part, by the mass return of Ireland’s sizable expat community to vote on referendum day. In Poland, a series women’s strikes and church sit-ins erupted in 2020 and 2021 in response to new abortion restrictions, and this movement helped build the coalition that unseated the ruling Law and Justice party in 2023. And in South Korea, an ambitious and unshrinking feminist movement has emerged in the years since Me Too, advancing a feminist politics of greater radicalism and moral clarity than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Years ago, there was some reason to hope that America would rank among these countries. After all, the Women’s Marches that characterized the early years of the Trump era swore vengeance and uprising if Roe was overturned, if the sexual abuse of women went unabated, if women were further insulted in their public role or further degraded in their civil rights. The Women’s Marches have been swiftly and thoroughly delegitimized in the intervening years—it is hard to reference them without evoking the marches’ unsexy, aging demographic of middle aged white women, or the saccharine earnestness of the little pink hats—but it is worth remembering that when the first marches began, in January of 2017, their size and number broke records. This early success suggested a vast reserve of feminist sentiment in America—one just waiting to be organized.  

But now, all of these things that the Women’s Marches warned against really have come to pass in America. Sexual violence has been restored to its pre-Me Too state of quiet tolerance. Women’s ability to lead productive, dignified lives independent of male approval or support is under greater threat than ever. Roe was overturned. And the promised mass mobilization on American women’s behalf has not materialized.

Feminism has not come back to avenge women’s reduced status and wounded dignity: it has instead dramatically receded. When Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned, the public largely shrugged. When a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual violence, he fundraised off it. Even after Dobbs, the street protests fizzled out within a week or two; abortion funds now report that the surge of donations they experienced after the decision have dried up. As a political movement for women’s liberation, feminism has perhaps never had such scant practical power or so little popular purchase.

Feminism, that is, is largely over. And since a revival of the movement is not coming any time soon, most feminists—or just those whose political commitments shape their lives—might well reason that their efforts are best spent elsewhere. Many of those millennial intellectuals who seemed most invested in feminism during its 2010s heyday have made a tactful exit, grabbing their coats and shuffling for the door. Which raises the question: what am I still doing here?

For years now, I’ve experienced a distinct sense of intellectual isolation as a feminist, a feeling of being positioned somewhat outside the main current of political thought. There’s a rhetorical asymmetry at work, in which the right is eager to avow a punishing and prescriptive program for women’s lives, but the left is comparatively unwilling to vocally advocate for women’s equality and freedoms in gender equality terms. I’ll admit this has confused and frustrated me. As has the failure of my peers, many of whom I know share my values, to more openly avow their feminist commitments, or to insist on feminism’s centrality in their work. In my ungenerous moments, I wonder what they’re waiting for. Because to me, it seems that feminism is more politically necessary than it has been at any point in my life: gender and its contradictions have become the animating anxiety of the American right, and a desire to reaffirm gender’s hierarchy—with men at the top, and women at the bottom—has provoked widespread degradation, danger, and violence for women nationwide. It also seems that this is a reality that few intellectuals or activists in my own milieu have been willing to name.

But not so long ago—within my adult memory—feminism appeared to be on the ascent, gaining influence and resolve, and making a different future appear possible. The future I imagined back then, in that optimistic past, is very different from the future I can anticipate now. The future you looked forward to in the naive past—that was called hope. The one you can look forward to now is called disappointment. What happened to all those happy anticipations, those investments in the more equal, free, and dignified world for women that feminists had sought to build? What happend to our attachments to the feminist future, to all our hopes? What do I do with them now?

What does it mean for me to still be a feminist in 2024? That is, what does it mean to invest my intellect and hopefulness in the political project of women’s liberation at a moment when the rest of my world seems to have largely abandoned it?  

The philosopher Jill Stauffer has named the feeling of “ethical loneliness”: the sense of being isolated not just in your moral claims but in your ideals. Stauffer called ethical loneliness “the feeling of being abandoned by one’s world, and not heard,” and she writes extensively about trauma. But in her framing, ethical loneliness is not only about having been wronged. It’s more precisely about a kind of hermeneutic isolation, the wrongness and hurt you feel when your moral worldview is rejected by others. Stauffer argues that inhabiting a common humanity requires the individual to be able to believe that their suffering, dignity, and essential worthiness are intelligible to others—and that when this intelligibility is diminished or refused, the resulting moral injury can lead the ethically lonely person into a state of devastating moral injury. Sometimes now, as a feminist in an antifeminist age, I feel what I think can be called an ethical loneliness: a sense that my moral investments and hopes are not shared, and that this isolation in my moral aspiration is part of a broader isolation from humanity itself. This can be a hopeless feeling indeed.

But it can also, I should admit, be an absurd one. At a bar with some colleagues a few weeks ago, I joked that I was the last feminist left on Earth, and it was not just loneliness but a twinge of humiliated alarm that I felt when they all seemed to agree. Loneliness, after all, contains the implication that others have rejected you, the sense that your own choices and behavior have been judged are socially wrong. Persisting in these choices anyway can imply that you’re different from your fellows in some fundamental way. But this difference need not be honorable. You can think of persistence in the face of social isolation as noble and principled, or you can think of it as a somewhat myopic failure to consider that maybe everyone else—the people who are making different choices—might understand something that you don’t. In my less self-serious moments, I think maybe my feminism is a bit

like a meme I saw once, a video of a man dancing frantically and gracelessly in his friend’s empty living room. “The party ended an hour ago,” the caption reads. “And he’s still here.”

Feminism—that desiccated husk of a social movement—can be difficult to mourn. That’s partly because feminism is so difficult to define. It can be a political commitment, an academic discipline, a critical lens, or a personal identity. Feminism has meant different things to different people—even the most basic of its tenets will be debated—and it is somehow both fractious and incoherent within, and tenaciously influential without. In short, it is something with all the contradictions inherent to feminism’s insane, impossible, and profound ambition to articulate the condition of half the world.

Feminism is also something that, if we’re honest, American women perhaps never really had. Despite the clear and dramatic advances in women’s status over the course of the 20^th century, American women never achieved a robust and meaningful equality—partly because women’s gains were so heavily mediated by stratifying factors like race and class, and partly because the gains they did make turned out to be so conditional and impermanent in the first place. Each successive iteration of feminism has been replete with the flaws and contradictions inherent to such an expansive political project, and often beset by leaders with too big egos and too narrow visions. There are reasons why feminism’s popularity has subsided, and not all those reasons can be reduced to the influence of simple misogyny.

And yet witnessing the regression of women’s rights in my own era has left me disconsolate, at times despairing. I feel rage at the indignities inflicted on women, incomprehension at the lies told about them, a preemptive sorrow—deeper and more barren than I had expected—at the lives of women that will be smaller, more violent and less honorable in this new era. Maybe what I’m feeling, then, as I grieve feminism’s absence, is less like mourning than it is like what Freud called melancholia—a sadness that can never quite resolve, because it’s a sadness at the loss of something you never really had.

Why am I still a feminist when other people aren’t? If I’m honest, part of it is personal: I have hurt—that is, I have been hurt—a great deal over my loyalty to feminism, and through this pain my loyalty has been forged into a cornerstone of my identity. Abandoning feminism is harder for me than it is for some others, because for me, to leave feminism behind would be to admit that all that hurt had been for nothing. (I call this persistence “integrity”; other people have called it “throwing good money after bad.”) But still, I believe there is honor in feminism, even if I can see that there is also foolishness. It is something the world has abandoned, grown bored with, moved on from. It is also something the world clearly needs.

But I find that in my feminism now, I do less imaginging of a utopian future. I think less often about what reproduction and the family will look like when dependence and coercion are no longer cornerstones of reproductive life; I don’t often bother trying to imagine ways to disentangle sexuality from its scourge of eroticized contempt. Those are the projects of the future, and they lay on the other side of a horizon I might never reach. Instead, I often find my feminism is loyal to women of the past—to the notion that the dignity and ill treatment they suffered because they were women was undeserved, and to the principle that the violence they suffered because they were women was wrong. I have a loyalty to these women of the past—and to the woman I was in the past, too, both when I was hurt and when I was hopeful. This loyalty to the past, and the effort to avenge it with an ongoing struggle, might be fairly criticized as nostalgia. You could also call it faith.