By Auguste Meyrat

What is a feminist? This used to be an easy question to answer. When feminism simply meant equal rights and opportunities for women, most people felt comfortable identifying as such. After all, who could be against women having the right to vote and owning property?

Even as feminists have broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling, however, it has become less clear what their goals are anymore. Worse still, the rise of transgenderism has undermined the core claims of feminism by questioning the objective reality of womanhood.

Perhaps the touted benefits of the movement were overblown, and its history and underlying principles deserve more scrutiny. Perhaps those currently embracing this movement should reconsider what exactly they have accepted.

One person to guide this reconsideration is Dr. Carrie Gress, a sometime TCT contributor, in her new book Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can't Be Fused With Christianity. Far from being an unalloyed good that has empowered and liberated women, without any tradeoffs, Gress exposes the very roots of the feminist movement, which make it incompatible with the Christian Gospel. As she dismantles the many myths of feminism, she opens up much-needed inquiries into what a true Christian feminism would look like for people today.

Gress begins her case with the founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, who applied the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality in her celebrated pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In line with her rationalist unitarianism, Wollstonecraft believed "that priests, pastors, or any kind of male authority – even Jesus – were an obstacle to female potential and divine life. Instead, reason. . . was women's access point to God." Thus, from the very beginning, the main goals of feminism were liberation and empowerment, and the main obstacle was Christianity.

Even so, Wollstonecraft and other like-minded feminists often made common cause with Christian social reformers like Hannah More, combating the evils of slavery, child exploitation, and mass alcoholism. Secular feminists, however, eventually came to dominate the movement, readopting a generally hostile view of Christianity. Many of them, including American heroines Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were even involved in spiritualism and the occult.

This in turn laid the groundwork for feminists afterward to equate true feminism with a total rejection of sexual boundaries and roles. Luminaries like Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan all concluded that sex was a social construct that was fabricated and reinforced by patriarchal institutions. Therefore, it was their job to dismantle these institutions, disempower men, and become their own gods. Autonomy, the "new idol" of the feminist movement, demanded nothing less.

Thus, a movement once associated with temperance, suffrage, and protecting the family degenerated into one dedicated to promiscuity, misandry, and witchcraft. Whenever this inevitably resulted in further misery and exploitation for women at large, feminists would reflexively blame systemic sexism and demand still more privileges for women to remedy the issue.

Beyond leading so many women astray with false promises and incoherent arguments, Gress shows how modern feminism has completely obscured the deeper realities of womanhood. Instead of compromising with this ideology, Gress recommends reframing the issue with non-ideological language:

Words like woman, anthropology, male and female, common good, complementarity, equal in dignity, subsidiarity and solidarity, and even patriarchy could be used with precision. It would also have the advantage of forcing us to find new ways to describe complex realities beyond sound bites.

In other words, women should stop trying to deny their own femininity by closing their eyes and trying to be the same as men.

Gress fits this idea within the Christian context as she confronts the effort...