A feminism that promotes female flourishing cannot be found in a tech-optimistic future. It cannot be found in eliminating sex differences, nor in a return to one of the previous “waves,” nor even, as some conservatives have suggested, in the 1950s and its “Cult of Domesticity.” The path forward, argues Mary Harrington in her debut book Feminism Against Progress, is in a “reactionary feminism” that is so old it’s new: a future animated by a concept of female fulfillment that predates the Industrial Revolution. It’s a refreshing idea in a field that is crying out for living water. 

The core concept of reactionary feminism is that women ought to be the measure of feminism’s success. That means all women, not merely laptop class childless women, and in particular mothers, since mothering is the exclusive work of women, despite every technological attempt to the contrary. The ideal Harrington imagines is “a world where every baby is welcome, and this welcome is not in zero-sum competition with an understanding of personhood so atomized that mothers are by definition un-persons in the course of embodying that welcome.”