Why Modern Feminism Failed (And First-Wave Feminism Didn't)
Why Modern Feminism Failed (And First-Wave Feminism Didn't)
People ask me all the time whether I am a feminist. And the honest answer is yes, with a but. I am a first-wave feminist. I am a feminist from before I was even born.
Because first-wave feminism is the one that actually won, and the one I am grateful for every single day.
The feminism that worked
First-wave feminism fought for human rights. The vote. Keeping your own name. Opening a bank account. Owning property, signing a loan, seeing a doctor without a man escorting you. Being treated as an adult instead of a child or a piece of land.
"First-wave feminism was great, because human rights are human rights." — Marian
I am a thirty-three-year-old Canadian woman who can vote, own a home, run a business, and put things in my own name. That fight succeeded, and I would defend it to anyone. We still have work to do on basic rights in parts of the world, absolutely. But where I live, that war was won.
My but is about what came after.
Where it went sideways
Modern feminism stopped being about equal rights and became about something else: erasing the differences between men and women, and quietly telling women that if they want motherhood, a man to lean on, a home to build, they are doing womanhood wrong. That real liberation means a 50/50 ledger, a career ladder, and never depending on a man for anything.
And the loudest voices pushing that often are not speaking for the women they claim to represent. Most women are heterosexual. They love men. They want men. So when the message comes from people who fundamentally do not, it does not fit, and a lot of women end up unhappy chasing a life that was never theirs to want.
"The whole point of feminism was for you to have the right to choose." — Marian
Choose the law degree, or choose the home. Choose the corner office, or choose a man you admire and build a life beside him. The moment the movement started saying there is only one correct choice, it stopped being about freedom.
What the dying actually regret
Here is the part that stays with me. There is a book, Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by a nurse named Bronnie Ware, who sat with people at the very end.
"Women never regretted not working more." — from Bronnie Ware's hospice work
They regretted not spending time with their children. Not prioritizing their marriage. They remembered love, in big blinking lights. Not the promotions, not the medals. Meanwhile the things a man tends to regret at the end look completely different, more about what he built and achieved. Different creatures, different regrets.
It made me ask the obvious question. If feminism insists a woman's legacy should be her career, isn't that just handing her a man's script and calling it freedom?
2,400 life stories
Then there is Janette Bertrand, a Quebec feminist icon who is a hundred years old now. During the pandemic she started a project called Écrire sa vie, write your life, inviting older people to send in their memoirs. She expected maybe fifteen. She received 2,400.
"82% of the autobiographies were written by women." — Marian, on Bertrand's project
It was open to everyone. The men barely sent any in. And when you read them, the women wrote about family, feeling, daily life, the texture of love and community. The handful of men wrote about careers and accomplishments. Same prompt, two completely different instincts. Some of those women, who had lived through genuinely hard, restrictive times, even said they missed it, the years of being a homemaker without the modern pressure to also go out and earn.
"Women value connection, and men value power." — Marian
What feminism should be
I am not saying go backwards on rights. I am saying first-wave feminism nailed the assignment and modern feminism overshot it, trying to flatten two genuinely different natures into one neutral person. It did not work. You can see it in the tradwife revival, in Gen Z quietly wanting traditional roles again.
We live in a patriarchy, nearly everywhere on earth, across cultures that never spoke to each other, which to me suggests it is closer to human nature than to some grand conspiracy. So women who love men should not be taking direction from people who do not. They should be following feminine, empowered, intelligent women who genuinely like men and can show them how to thrive as themselves.
That is my whole answer. Keep first-wave feminism, the human rights, forever. And for the rest, stop trying to make women into men, because the women I meet do not actually want that. They want to be women, fully, and to be happy doing it.
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