Feminism Against Humanity

Review: Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington

A+ cover.

Discussed in this review essay: Mary Harrington, Feminism against Progress (Regnery Publishing: April 25, 2023).

“My boyfriend's cancer battle was ruining my mental health so I left him – now I'm running a marathon in his honour,” read the headline of a recent viral story from the “Femail” section of the Daily Mail. An example of what now seems to be a developed genre in the mainstream press, the piece celebrated a 32-year-old woman’s choice to move to Thailand and prioritize her self-care over her long-term partner’s actual care.

Interestingly, this year the UN’s annual State of World Population report, published at the same moment as the Daily Mail story, also struck an oddly strident note on the moral primacy of choice. Titled “8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities: the case for rights and choices,” it decries growing concerns about rapid demographic collapse across the developed world as highly problematic. “Interventions aimed at influencing fertility rates” are “never the answer,” it says, as, “Population ageing is a sign of strong economic and social progress,” and this “is a march of progress that must continue.” Dubiously assuring us that “societies can thrive, whatever their fertility rate may be,” the report is adamant that all other possible considerations must remain secondary to the “essential goal of empowering women and girls to exercise choice over their own bodies and futures.” The real issue, says UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem, “is about rights and choices. Who has them? Who doesn’t?” I.e., “can everyone exercise their fundamental human right to choose the number and spacing of their children?”

Sometimes, as when reading trendy accounts lauding selfishness as empowerment, or on learning that the official global position is now that even extinction would be preferable to any possible discouragement of infinite autonomy, some of us can’t help but wonder if, somewhere along the line, liberal feminism might have gone a bit off the rails… and whether this could even have something to do with its hegemonic obsession with “rights and choices.”

Enter UnHerd columnist (and Upheaval interviewee) Mary Harrington with her daring new book Feminism Against Progress, which tackles this question head on (and is now available in the United States and UK). Many readers here may already be familiar with Harrington’s style, including her unmatched skill at compellingly using the personal as a springboard to dive into and surface much deeper political, cultural, and material undercurrents at play in our society. This is exactly what she does with characteristic brilliance in Feminism Against Progress, investigating just what, when, and why something may have gone wrong with feminism, and how it might be maneuvered back on track. Herds of sacred cows are wittily and mercilessly machine-gunned along the way. Unfortunately, things also necessarily get rather dark.