Feminism's Waves: Rejecting the Excesses Without Rewriting History

I suspect that if I were to release a statement to the effect of “Third wave feminism is a dumpster fire,” I would get very little pushback from upwards of 90% of my pretty versatile audience.

Most people who read my stuff are either Christian conservatives who mostly hate feminism anyway, radfem TERFs who are embarrassed by the trainwreck the women’s movement has been allowed to become, or just garden-variety reasonable people with enough common sense to immediately discern that championing men in girls’ locker rooms is lunacy and that “sex work” isn’t some glittery road to empowerment.

Drawing the line at third wave feminism costs me absolutely nothing. No one I truly admire thinks there’s anything about it worth preserving.

If I go back a wave and start scrutinizing the second wavers, though, that’s where feathers get ruffled. For most of us on the Christian right, second wave feminism is inextricably tethered to abortion, which we largely denounce as a moral catastrophe. The beauty of my particular brand of activism is that I made my abortion convictions very clear long before linking arms with anyone who opposes them. No bait and switch. No ambiguity. So when people find out I believe abortion is evil, they’re not shocked. They may disagree, but they knew what they were signing up for, and most have simply agreed to disagree so we can still get meaningful work done. Many TERFs, to their credit, have recognized that arguing over abortion “rights” becomes almost secondary if we lose the legal definition of “woman” altogether.

Of course, second wave feminism (roughly early 1960s through the late 1970s) did accomplish things I consider genuinely good. Some of their critiques of male sexual exploitation were necessary and overdue. I can appreciate voices like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon for their unflinching opposition to pornography and prostitution, and for naming the ways the so-called “sexual revolution” often benefited men at women’s expense.

Extramarital sex wasn’t invented in 1968. It was happening constantly; people were just better at hiding it, and women were expected to endure it quietly. A Florida researcher named Alan Petigny underscored this reality with his own research, utilizing government data rather than self-reporting. His research using U.S. Census Bureau statistics on premarital pregnancy found a sizeable increase in premarital intercourse during the 1940s and 50s, pointing to the unexpected conclusion that there was far more sexual activity during those decades than Americans were willing to admit. Petigny specifically identified WWII as a key catalyst, with 15 million young men thrust into the military and five million young women forced into factories, creating unprecedented social mixing that drove measurable rises in premarital pregnancy among both white and black Americans. Petigny convincingly argued the sexual revolution actually began during World War II, not the 1960s, but too many people are just blissfully willing to pretend it was the feminism that was to blame.

There’s a reason “Stand by Your Man” was a chart topper, and it wasn’t because the situation it described was a great one for the women living it. The revolution didn’t create male infidelity and selfishness. It just stopped requiring anyone to pretend like it wasn’t already rampant.

What the pill and the cultural shift actually did was remove the remaining incentives for men to behave responsibly and then market that removal as liberation. The insistence that freedom meant severing sex from relational commitment, much less any semblance of responsibility, wasn’t a neutral development. What followed was not some utopian landscape of liberated women, but a steady erosion of the family unit. Fatherlessness skyrocketed. Divorce became normalized. Children bore the brunt of adult self-actualization projects. And women and children were quietly expected to absorb the fallout (emotionally, physically, and economically) while being told this was progress.

To be fair, the pill wasn’t the only accelerant. Deindustrialization was quietly gutting the kind of stable working-class jobs that had made early marriage and single-income households viable, and nobody was talking about that. It’s easier to blame the birth control than to reckon with the economy. Even today’s calls for a return to “Leave it to Beaver” systems completely fail to contend with the reality of surviving in today’s economy. The demands they’re making (especially on mothers) are not feasible in many, many situations.

The cruelest irony is that the men most enthusiastic about sexual liberation were rarely the ones absorbing the consequences. Unintended pregnancies, single parenthood, the emotional labor of fractured families —those costs were distributed very unevenly, and not in men’s direction, which made continued feminist action almost imperative as a result.

Economic and workplace justice for mothers is another area where the second wave got it right. Maternity leave, fair wages, and childcare support are not radical demands; they are entirely compatible with, and arguably required by, a Christian ethic that actually values motherhood and family stability rather than treating both as inconveniences.

At the same time, I understand why some reject the second wave outright because of its ties to abortion. Many of these women bought the lie that, in order to achieve equality in a man’s world, they had to wage war on the one power unique to the female body: the capacity to bear life.

They weren’t wrong about the problem. Men were, in many cases, treating women like breeders and using children as a means of keeping them economically and socially trapped. That was real. It needed to be confronted. But the proposed solution, decoupling sex from consequence and framing motherhood itself as a liability, lost much of the evangelical world, and not without reason. I won’t defend that shift.

What’s been increasingly frustrating to me, though, is the growing insistence that all feminism, from its inception, is nothing more than occultic rebellion against the created order. I’m seeing that talking point everywhere, and what’s worse, I’m watching otherwise thoughtful people swallow it whole. From Matt Walsh to Joel Berry, from Doug Wilson to Joshua Haymes to Carrie Gress, the reductionist mantra is this: “Feminism is cancer. All of it. Burn it all down.”

That kind of flattening does no one any favors. It ignores the real injustices women have faced, the legitimate corrections that were needed, and the ways different waves of feminism have diverged, sometimes sharply, from one another. And if we’re serious about truth, we should care enough to make those distinctions instead of torching the entire category just because the current iteration is indefensible.

Earlier this week, I saw that Joe Rogan had hosted influencer Rachel Wilson on his podcast to discuss her pick-me-girl condemnation of feminism. I won’t waste much ink on Rachel or her husband Andrew Wilson. I think they’re awful people who behave terribly and try to wrap incel-adjacent philosophy in Christian packaging to sell it to the masses. They’re aggressively unkind, not particularly intelligent, and yet there is clearly a market for what they’re selling. That alone should concern us.

Rachel’s entire schtick is that feminism, at its core, has always been rooted in the occult and is therefore rebellion against God himself. Neither she nor her husband think women have any business voting, and the contempt for womankind is not even remotely subtle.

And this is exactly where the wheels come off.

Because that claim only works if you ignore history entirely. First wave feminism didn’t spring out of some shadowy esoteric movement. It arose in response to very real, very material injustices that women were living under. Women couldn’t vote. In many cases, they couldn’t own property. Under coverture, a married woman had no independent legal identity; her wages, her assets, even her children were legally controlled by her husband. There was little to no legal recourse for abuse. Educational opportunities were limited. Professional pathways were largely closed off. If a woman found herself in a bad marriage, her options were often to endure it or face social and economic ruin.

Those are not minor inconveniences, and true commitment to biblical living does not wink at this kind of oppression.

So who, overwhelmingly, began to challenge these injustices? Devout Christians. Quakers, Methodists, and evangelicals who believed, on explicitly biblical grounds, that women were moral agents made in the image of God and therefore deserving of legal recognition and protection.

Figures like Sojourner Truth and Frances Willard were not occultists. They were Christian reformers. The early suffrage movement was deeply intertwined with abolitionism and temperance, movements also driven largely by Christian conviction.

Yes, some suffragists dabbled in Spiritualism or Theosophy. So did plenty of people across every reform movement in the Victorian era. That was a cultural quirk of the time, not the theological foundation of the cause. Guilt by association is not a serious argument. By that logic, you could just as easily claim abolitionism itself was an occult enterprise.

And interestingly, no one making this argument wants to apply it consistently. Take Thomas Jefferson. He literally created his own edited version of the Bible, cutting out anything supernatural with a razor. Do we therefore conclude that the entire American experiment was, at its core, a demonic project? That none of the principles he helped articulate are worth preserving? Of course not.

Argue honestly or not at all.

That kind of flattening does no one any favors. It erases the real injustices women endured. It ignores the legitimate corrections that were needed. And it collapses wildly different movements, with different goals and moral frameworks, into one convenient caricature.

And this is where I think a lot of conservatives are making a catastrophic error in judgment. There is this persistent fantasy that if we could just rewind the clock to some mid-century “golden age,” everything would fall neatly back into place and the family would magically be restored.

But the truth is far less romantic. The conditions that gave rise to first wave feminism (and later helped fuel the sexual revolution) did not come out of nowhere. They were, in many cases, the predictable result of a system where women had little agency, limited protection under the law, and were often entirely dependent on the goodwill of men to survive. When that goodwill failed, and it frequently did, women and children paid the price.

You cannot fix the excesses of the sexual revolution by recreating the very conditions that made it appealing in the first place.

If you tell women that their safety depends entirely on male virtue, while stripping away their legal protections and social recourse, you are not restoring order. You are rebuilding the pressure cooker. And history has already shown us what happens when that pressure builds long enough. It doesn’t produce holiness. It produces backlash.

The sexual revolution was, in many ways, a deeply flawed and often destructive response to real injustices. But that doesn’t mean the injustices themselves weren’t real, or that the answer is to pretend they never existed.

If we actually care about strengthening families, we need something better than nostalgia. We need a framework that upholds responsibility, honors motherhood, protects children, and refuses to treat women as either disposable or dependent. We need solutions that factor in the reality of this present cultural moment, including an economy where most families cannot physically survive off a single income and many good mothers have no choice but to participate in the workforce outside the home.

We don’t fix error by embracing a different kind of error. If we care about truth, about women, and about the integrity of the family, then we need to be precise. That means rejecting what is broken without rewriting history, scapegoating an entire sex, or sanitizing oppression to get there.

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