From its title onwards, Feminism Against Progress puts forward a counterintuitive proposition – feminism as it is generally understood has been so pervasively associated with the progressive agenda that one might as well talk about cheese against biscuits or Ant against Dec. Yet Mary Harrington’s book is part of a growing movement of feminist writers surveying the state of the sexes and questioning – as in Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution – whether the alliance between feminism and liberalism (characterised by a focus on individual autonomy and the transcendence of bodily limits, especially in matters of contraception and pregnancy) has been positive for women.
Harrington calls herself as a key witness for the prosecution: a lapsed progressive who “liberalled about as hard as it’s possible to liberal” before the birth of her daughter reaffirmed for her that embodiment – being and living in a female body – is central to the experience of womanhood. This experience anchors Feminism Against Progress as it explores the interplay of “memes and material conditions”, which has governed the way that men and women have lived together under different forms of technology – from the cottage-industry interdependence of the medieval era to the “cult of domesticity” of the Victorians, in which women’s exclusion from the industrial workplace was compensated by primacy in the domestic sphere. The book’s Big Bang comes with the 1960s and the invention of the pill and the legalisation of abortion. The removal of the principal embodied difference between men and women – women’s ability to get pregnant and bear children – was a purported levelling of the playing field, enabling women to pursue careers and sexual partners alike on the same terms as men, without the drawbacks of unplanned pregnancy.
Harrington’s thesis is that the “progress” achieved through such developments has come with trade-offs that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The deregulation of the dating marketplace has brought about “sexual Reaganism”, where intimacy is replaced by competition and consequence-free sex brings with it bad behaviour and alienation; with endless potential partners, relationships become a vehicle for self-actualisation rather than an opportunity for mutual companionship and growth. Ultimately, the erasure of sex differences makes being a woman a matter of feeling rather than biology, a mindset that can have horrific consequences: Harrington explores disruption of mother-child bonds through the outsourcing of childbirth and childcare, and looks unflinchingly at the damage caused when young people terraform their sexed bodies to make them conform to their desired gender.
Lucidly, directly and urgently written, Feminism Against Progress is a difficult book to summarise; it mingles personal testimony, history, social and political theory and philosophical writing, and employs a dazzling breadth of reference to do so, with citations from Horace to anonymous Twitter users and quotations from Pride and Prejudice and unrepeatable rap lyrics. The terminology Harrington uses (including multiple coinages of her own) is dizzying and at times bewildering – readers will be introduced to biolibertarianism, cyborg theocracy, Meat Lego gnosticism – but then it is describing developments that are themselves dizzying and bewildering, reflecting the disorientation caused by the abolition of limits in the name of “progress”.
Faced with the troubles besetting what used to be called Women’s Lib, Harrington proposes a “reactionary feminism” that eschews freedom and autonomy for commitment and care. Her solutions are radical at times, and some may not be unattractive to readers of the Catholic Herald: abolishing the “Big Romance”-inspired illusion that marriage is about self-fulfilment rather than mutual flourishing, or “rewilding sex” by – among other things – doing away with the pill.
There is not a great deal of room for the sacred in Feminism Against Progress, but it has much for Catholics to reflect on. The book’s account of how “progress” has led men and women to misery in the name of equality, and suggestions on how the relationship between the sexes can be remade and redeemed in the digital age, provide a useful analysis of how the Church can address gender relations at a time when this field of enquiry feels replete with landmines.
Dr Philip Sidney lives and works in London and Kent
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