The relentless quest for pleasure, power, or money gnaws at relationships, rotting responsibility and love. The family, for modern men and women, often feels smothering or enslaving, instead of enlivening.

It is hard to speak of these three groups – weak men, tough women, and unprotected children – in a cohesive way. They no longer resemble a family but walking wounded. Order has been obliterated.

The trans movement is in full bloom. Many are scratching their heads as to how we got here. A survey of the last two centuries reveals that it was long in the making, with deep roots found in feminist ideology, as discussed at length in my book, The End of Woman. Feminism ushered in significant shifts in thinking about women, fundamentally changing the way Western civilization considers biology, language, and law.

After the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, it was only a matter of time before legislators found new ways to level the playing field so that couples who were not made to conceive children could have children.

During the Roe years, while pro-lifers chipped away at the Supreme Court decision legally, the pro-abortion side fought a different front: the side of culture. Their success hinged upon one thing: the wholesale adoption of the ideology of feminism.

What the intelligentsia doesn’t yet realize is that the winds have changed, and the blather about women popping out babies and worshiping their husbands just doesn’t land the way it did 50 or even 10 years ago. Feminism fatigue has set in: Women who have been groomed for three generations to crave power and control at the expense of family are now reprioritizing.   

How, then, did we get to this place where fewer women are having children, and the mere mention that other women have children is triggering? As I explore in detail in my book, The End of Woman, Americans adopted five basic second-wave feminist pillars, marketed to appeal to the independent spirit of the American woman. What is generally not known is that these ideas were perpetuated largely by the Communist Party, which was trying to use the angst of women to achieve its own specific goals for a cultural revolution. Slowly, but surely, and most unwittingly, we have adopted and adsorbed them wholeheartedly, on the left and the right. The culture went from understanding that motherhood was about loving and serving others (however imperfectly) to an ethos of power and control.

The left, through strong visuals, has masterfully undermined our most reasoned arguments and best compassionate pleas. Rather than finding a different way to communicate, we can often be like my father decades ago speaking to our Japanese exchange student: We just speak louder. Higher volume, as the blank face of our exchange student made clear, doesn’t mean anyone understands any better. We need a new approach.

Feminism, based on the explicit vision of its leaders, can be defined as an ideology characterized by three things: 1) free love or the end of monogamous marriage; 2) the occult; and 3) restructuring society, or what is now known as “smashing the patriarchy.” What I discovered in my research was that all these elements generally thought to have developed in the second wave were in fact seeded in the first.

Christ and His saints have redeemed suffering, not to make it disappear, but to reveal it as the hidden way.

We live at a time when we have few examples of deep, wise, and compelling women. Ours is an age of the screen, and it is very hard to see the deep wellsprings that women have to offer. Flash and flesh are much easier to convey. But there is something qualitatively different about a wise and mature woman who knows she is made in the image and likeness of God. We see so few of them, raising the questions: How could we start to help these women to be seen?

For decades now, that maternal image, as it relates to both women and the Church, has worn thin. Our modern conception of motherhood has narrowed to include only the biological birthing or adoption of children. This is not due to lax or scandal-ridden pastors and clergy, activist bishops, or even a confusing pope. Motherhood has become threadbare because feminism has successfully supplanted the Christian creed and its connection to motherhood with the communist vision of a genderless worker.

The idea that Catholics must embrace feminism to engage non-Catholic women has been repeated so frequently that it’s simply accepted as a truism. But is it actually working?

Why would a free black man go to the South during the time of slavery? And not just to visit, but to paint numerous landscapes, risking life and limb? This was a question art dealers Michael and Julie Meyer asked themselves when they started collecting the paintings of 19th-century landscape artist, Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872). Duncanson was a black man and a highly regarded artist in the Hudson River School (HRS). The HRS was made famous by the father of American landscape art, Thomas Cole. Artists associated with the HRS featured the virgin forests and landscapes of the wild and untouched American terrain.

Writer Rachel Lu recently penned an essay in these pages that engages my book as an example of what she calls “anti-feminist” work. Lu draws some surprising conclusions about my book that, I think, are not representative of my work. She makes four overarching points to which I would like to respond.