The Great Feminization (Did Women Cause Wokeism?)

Women ruined everything. In the most watched talk ever given at NatCon, and a follow-up viral essay for Compact, Helen Andrews makes the case that the secret to the rise of wokeism is what she calls the great feminization. The theory that cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. Wokeness, she says, arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped off. from majority male to majority female. As more females entered the workforce through the 80s and 90s, the era of political correctness, a pre-woke work culture, also took off.

Gender parity was achieved in many fields in the 2010s and the early 2020s. Women overtook men among college-educated adults. Law schools hit 50-50 male-female. In 2017 to 2018, women made up 50% of enrolled medical school students. The rise of women in the workforce, the feminization of everything, according to Andrews, is both when and why all hell broke loose. Everything you think of, she says, as woke involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine, empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

Andrews explains that wokeness is just how women as a group are hardwired. We bury conflict in layers of compliments and listening sessions, and then we work behind the scenes to isolate and ostracize our social enemies. Feminine woke behaviors, she theorizes, optimize the female of the species to protect our offspring and hearths. But it also, she says, makes women deadly to the institutions that uphold civilization, especially The law. So it seems like she's onto something. Men and women are, as groups, different.

Undeniable. Our institutions and professions are moving toward or are already majority female. Facts. This demographic shift coincided historically with the rapid decline of the West's foundational institutions. Yes, agreed. But does that mean her conclusions are valid? Not necessarily.

Andrews claims that it is the key to the woke cancel culture, that it, quote, really does unlock the secrets of the era we're living in. She says, if wokeness is the result of demographic feminization, then it will never be over as long as the demographics remain unchanged. Fix the demographics, fix the problem. Reduce the number of women in the room, and we are on the way back to a rational, truth-based civilization. Helen is so close, but she is just She's not seeing the big picture.

She attempts to get to the root cause of an obvious problem we all experience, but she actually stops short of getting to the heart of the matter, and I'm going to tell you why. But first, how about some Holy Heroes? We are called to pray for our enemies, but do you know how? New from Holy Heroes comes another prayer card to help. This large prayer card includes two prayers requested by Jesus himself. One, to pray for your enemies by name. The second, to pray to sincerely forgive all those who trespass against you.

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The great feminization theory, as explained by Andrews, traces our woke Cancel culture back to the rise of women in the workplace, but its roots go much farther back. When we talk about wokeism and woke battle tactics, we mean a whole mindset and movement, from corporate DEI hiring and training, to activists tearing down Columbus statues, calls to defund the police and the 1619 Project, and yes, firing dudes because they're sexist. It's a Marxist ideology that sees Every human relationship as a power struggle, oppressor versus oppressed.

Woke cancel culture is one symptom of our spiritual pandemic, a virus, a bacillus that entered into its host culture hundreds of years before wokeism triumphed. Contemporary female thinkers like Mary Eberstadt and Noelle Mearing have traced wokeism back to 19th century Europe, to the philosophy of Hegel and his disciples, Marx and then Lenin.

The modern obsession with power and identity grew out of their ideas, the notion that history moves through conflict, and that utopia comes only after violent revolution, of which American cancel culture is actually one of the more benign expressions. A key moment in our American story arrived, literally, in 1935, when the German Frankfurt School fled to New York City. These intellectuals brought with them critical theory, an approach that redefined education itself. With the help of American philosopher John Dewey, often called the father of modern education, the Frankfurt School's ideas took root at Columbia University's Teachers College, the faculty of which were, I will point out, 73% male at the time.

Critical theory rests on three key dogmas. First, the individual must submit to the group. Second, the intellect must give way to emotion and will. And third, power must replace legitimate authority. The elite must, as Noel Mearing puts it, sell them on their despair, while also convincing them that, quote, our reason for existence is expression, to acknowledge, reveal, and live out our authentic selves based on our personal desires. Especially our sexual desires. True freedom means accessing, celebrating, and acting upon our passions and raging against anyone who represents authority, innocence, or virtue.

That's how this goes. For the woke, truth belongs to the victor. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci expanded Marxism's target from economics to culture, arguing that Western institutions, namely the church, The family and education had to be subverted first. Frankfurt school leader Herbert Macusa proposed a, quote, long march through the institutions, waging a slow, cultural revolution across politics, education, and media. Andrews is right that our institutions are under siege and increasingly incapable of performing the tasks for which they were designed. And yes, one of the largest natural groups in human society, The women who make up 51% of the population inhabit historically unprecedented positions of power in those institutions today.

After all, women were one of the victim groups carefully cultivated and targeted by the revolutionaries as avatars of Marxist victory. So far, tracking with Andrew's theory. But now we have to ask as well, is cancel culture unique to our moment? Not at all. It is a timeless impulse wielded with equal brutality by both sexes, King Herod, Ivan the Terrible, Andrew Johnson, and the Macbeths. Women today may have a louder platform to cancel opponents, but men have hardly been champions of free speech.

Across history, both sexes have shown the same irreverent attitude toward law and truth that Andrews blames on women. As my friend Ivana Greco put it, the urge to rally your tribe and exile your enemies is a human problem.

Civilizations long struggle to define the rule of law, the freedom of the press, and the public square proves it. Canceling enemies, whether by exile, ruin, or execution, has been humanity's favorite weapon since Eden. From Henry VIII's monasteries to Mao's revolution, Both sexes have destroyed institutions in the name of progress. Yet, if sin is equal opportunity, so is virtue. History teems with flourishing institutions led by men and women, especially within the Catholic Church. The great abbesses and saints Hildegard of Bingen, Clara of Assisi, Teresa of Avila might admit that women can fall into cattiness or manipulation, but they would also point to their schools, their hospitals, and convents as proof of women's creative genius.

Civic peace has always been rare, achieved only through the shared heroism of both sexes. America's exceptional order is fragile precisely because it rests on this cooperation. There is no single villain or grand theory. History is too messy for that. Andrews is right that we must name root causes, but she does not go far enough. Defanging the HR ladies and restoring law may help, but the state and the marketplace are not civilization's foundational institutions. The real battleground is not the workplace. It is the family.

To quote Mearing again, the corrosion of the family is intrinsic to the agenda of woke ideology Precisely because of the way the family is meant to uphold the dignity of the person and serve as a bulwark against political tribalism. Central to the family is, of course, the mother. Yet, the great feminization Andrews blames for everything has been largely an anti-mother feminization. We didn't trade toxic masculinity for balance. We swapped out madmen for sex in the city. Our woke cancel culture is new, not because institutions changed beyond recognition, but first because women did.

One revolutionary technology made it all possible, the pill, which enabled us to join the workforce en masse by adopting male patterns of sexuality. Most powerful women succeeded in male-shaped spaces, not by transforming them, but by reshaping them. to fit in. To thrive in workplaces built around male norms, women adopted behaviors foreign to their nature. Using birth control that chemically alters the female brain and hormonal rhythm.

Working longer hours to afford daycare for our infants barely six weeks old. Embracing male-patterned sexual behavior, promiscuity repackaged as empowerment, which many women instinctively find empty. Philosopher Helen Roy writes, Be it through contraception, abortion, gender transition, boundless careerism, or the outsourcing of the maternal relationship, the mutilated bodies and souls of women and children became the sacrifice to false equality. The result? A hollow gender equality and anxious, unfulfilled women. As Reese Laverty notes in First Things, women are far less likely to be mothers now than when they first entered public life.

Their maternal impulses haven't vanished. They've been redirected. In the absence of children, many now see themselves as the special trustees of minority groups. Women do change the institutions they enter, but millions of us changed ourselves first. So, no, I do not believe that changing the demographics back to predominantly male will save our institutions or America. We can't adopt a Marxist framing to fix a Marxist problem. There is no path back to the imagined men's paradise of the 1950s. The degenerate Don Draper of Mad Men, he's a relic of the past, and good riddance.

We can't go back. We can only go through. To do that, we need to re-feminize as women. We need a feminine revolution where we embrace our legitimate and immutable biological sex differences from men. That's not unfair. That's not women are better or women can do everything men can do. That's called complementarity. Eliminating sexual differences in law, in the courts, in our own female bodies, is just code for saying the best human life is an inherently male life. Radical feminism's efforts to force equality with men by imitating men is absurd and self-defeating.

A flourishing human life is a family life. Man, woman, and child. It's a communion of persons in which the unique female form is essential for herself as an individual, as a mother, and as a member of the human family. Not all of us become physical mothers. That is not what I mean. But all women carry the form of the bride and the mother. Physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Pope John Paul II sketched out what this could mean practically. He said, Now, that's not limited to physical motherhood, of course, either for an individual or for human cultures. There is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman, wrote Edith Stein, the Catholic philosopher martyred at Auschwitz. But into every profession we enter, we must bring our whole selves, not checking our femininity at the gate. Otherwise, we as women deform ourselves into something like Carrie from Sex and the City, who I will just point out.

is not a real person. The truth is, until we as women are welcomed to the table as women, as mothers, there is no saving America. And for this to happen, men and women will have to work together. Ladies, we need to rediscover what it means to be female. Guys, we cannot be good mothers unless you are good fathers. The truth is, because of the sexual revolution, We haven't even tried feminizing the workforce yet. So, yes, like Helen Andrews, I am worried about truth and free speech and the rule of law.

And yes, I agree that as a group, women are less prone to objectivity and problem-solving, but we don't have a monopoly on idiocracy, and men don't have a monopoly on civic virtue. Instead of the defeminization theory, let's try a re-feminization theory. That's a project both men and women need to get behind quickly. We can't be mothers without fathers, and men can't be real men without a family to fight for. We need each other to rediscover what it means to be masculine and feminine.

Helen Andrews is wrong. Our window to do something about wokeness is not closing rapidly. It is already shut and locked. The institutions have fallen, and the only way to take them back is by offering something radically new. We must transform them from the ground up, based on the firm foundation of the family, child, father, and mother.

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