What has Feminism Ever Given Us?

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“What has feminism ever given us?” a very popular boomer Catholic writer snarks online.

I didn’t respond, but here’s what I would have said had I felt so inclined.

A tale in eight parts:

1 /

Lately, I’ve been struggling with being a voice for Catholic feminism.

My inbox and Notes replies are flooded with anger. People calling me stupid and swearing at me and asking if I’ve ever considered XYZ, all of the anti-feminism arguments that have been around since the days of Jesus himself. I am told online by an army of Very Pretty Influencers that my place is in the home and that I’m going against nature by having a job. I am told online by an army of Very Serious Substackers that feminism has done nothing for women and that we’re all worse off than we were in 1937. I am told in person that the back-to-school email went into my spam folder and am reminded of the importance of neighbors.

It builds and builds and builds until I am practically shrieking at my husband, ironically fulfilling every feminist stereotype in the book. I am the Overly Emotional Woman1. I tell him I’m exhausted and that I cannot take being The Catholic Feminist™ for another second. I want to spend my days writing mysteries for children and observing the fungi growing in my garden. I’ve been offered, quite seriously, three jobs in the past couple of months. I could take one of them. I’ve been doing this for almost ten years, and everything’s worse than when I started, I tell him. This feels very true: I literally can’t imagine starting a podcast with the word feminist in it right now.

And then I’m cleaning out a giant box of random crap in my closet. (Tell me you have one of these, too). I pull out a photo of me and my sister at the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. My mother took me there when I was ten, to teach me my history2. I am standing with an arm up, taking some kind of oath. I can’t remember what it was for.

2 /

This summer I’ve read and read and read. Piles of library books have accompanied me to my back porch, where I eat too many bags of popcorn and dive into other women’s stories.

One of these books was The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt. It’s a wonderful book about the women who worked in Walt Disney’s animation department in its early years. Women were usually sent to the Ink & Paint department, where they’d trace the work of animators, and most women were who applied to the story department were sent a letter that explicitly stated Disney didn’t hire women to tell stories. A few extremely talented females snuck through, though, even after Walt told them he didn’t like to train women since they’d just quit on him when they got families. Women were almost never included in the credits of movies they gave hours and hours to.

Another was Suffrage by Ellen Carol Dubois. She writes: “This belief in mutually exclusive masculinity and femininity was more than a set of prescriptions for men’s and women’s behavior. Without the antidote of woman’s selflessness, a nation made up only of ‘self-made men’ would have no center, nothing binding its members together. It would fly apart, torn to shreds by the individualism and vigorous competition of which Americans in these years were so proud. Here was the root of the lurking fear that women gaining their individual rights would come at men’s—and society’s—expense. Rights were a zero-sum game.” She writes about Susan B. Anthony’s tireless, unforgiving organizing: the doors slammed in her face, the assurances that were she to get married she’d be represented by her husband’s vote quite well.

The more I read books, the more grounded I feel. I brick my phone for hours at a time. I read books about Mary, books about Lucy Stone, books about St. Julien of Norwich. I read about Victorian boarding schools; I read about women who run the Underground Railroad. I read and read and read until my eyes are dry. I come back to myself with each turn of the page.

3 /

“What has feminism ever given us?”

Feminism has gotten us recognition as individuals beyond our roles within families.

Women have always, always worked. Since the dawn of time. Women have been farmers, healers, textile makers. Only the richest of rich women have “stayed home”, and it looked nothing like it looked today. These same women were not putting their children to bed with nursery rhymes and storybooks; they were attending social functions while some other mother was paid to do it for them. What we call “tradition” in 2026 is not, actually, traditional. They—Carrie Gress, Alex Clark, Pearl Davis—are selling you a myth. What feminism did was gave you a right to your own money instead of having it belong to your husband.

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1993 mandating the inclusion of women in clinical trials, meaning that women’s bodies would for the first time be properly studied when it comes to things like cancer.

Until 1993, women were banned from wearing pants on the US Senate floor. Two senators (Carol Moseley-Braun and Barbara Mikulski) had to force the issue by wearing pants in open defiance.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 prohibited employment discrimination based on pregnancy.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 gave you the right to get a mortgage to your own home, as well as the right to a bank account and credit card in your own name.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibited paying women less than men for equal work because of sex.

After three quarters of a century of organizing, women were given the vote in 1920. Universal suffrage was one of the earliest, earliest goals of feminism.

So, what did feminism fight for? Which parts of its platform has it achieved? The right to earn money for your work, the right to wear pants, the right to not be discriminated against by your employer for having a baby, and the right to vote.

Just some things feminism has given us, if you were curious, which I am slowly realizing you are not.

4 /

Well, maybe, but it’s given us this, too, they insist: abortion on demand. A massive uptick in divorce. Women having to drop their 6-week-old babies at daycare.

Here’s my question: what circumstances make women feel that ending the life of their child is the right choice? What circumstances cause a woman to leave a marriage? What circumstances force a woman back into the work force at 6 weeks postpartum? Would it not be productive to zoom out for a moment and consider those things instead of tossing the proverbial baby out with the feminist bathwater? We are our choices but we do not make these choices in a vacuum. We have agency, but when women are consistently at the end of their rope it’s worth asking just how long the rope was to begin with.

People are not simply victims of their circumstances and feminism has brought with it some negative effects. And yet: is there a feminism that carves out bigger solutions to these societal ills? Is there a chance that feminism does name a problem, even if we argue over the solutions?

No, some would say. The word feminism is poison. They have no moral imagination to picture anything different than the binary they’ve been handed.

5 /

In 2020, the US abruptly pulled out of Afghanistan. Think what you want—I don’t purport to be some kind of foreign policy expert. Here is what I’ll never forget, though: the women who hung onto the airplanes. Women literally held onto the wings of airplanes, hoping they could be flown out of there. They knew what was coming.

A prominent politician on TV told us that the US had been there long enough and worked with the Afghan government. Things were stable, and things would be okay for the women. Pardon my French, but hand to God, I turned to my husband and said that man is a fucking idiot.

Currently, women in Afghanistan are not allowed to leave their home unveiled, go to school, speak in public, work in government, or refuse planned marriages to Taliban fighters. Women in Afghanistan are not allowed to be feminists. Afghan women are not allowed to be anything, really, except creators of Afghan men.

(And this, too: according to the UN, every two hours an Afghan woman dies during pregnancy or while giving birth.)

“My husband would represent me in the booth fine,” a woman on Instagram with shiny teeth tells me. “I’m totally happy to give up my vote.”

6 /

Every single day I pray for specific virtues for each of my children. One of those is fortitude. Fortitude, I tell my children, is something that will get you through this life. (One of my children is not exactly a silent sufferer. We’re working on it.)

/ˈfôrdəˌto͞od/: the mental and emotional strength that helps a person face hard times with courage and hope.

When I am exhausted from having to explain and explain and explain things that should not require this much explanation, when I have to answer yet another person asking have you read the Anti-Mary Exposed??? What do you think?? I think of Dorothy Day being starved in prison. I think of Susan B. Anthony being arrested for attempting to vote. I think of the women who’ve had things thrown at them; whose names have been smeared; whose reputations have been raked through the mud. Actually, I think of Jesus, at the very first station: receiving condemnation for something he did not do.

I think of Saint Gianna Molla becoming a pediatrician, Saint Zelie Martin working tirelessly as a lace maker, Saint Margaret Clitherow running the supply chain at her husband’s butcher shop.

I think of telling them I was crabby because someone on the internet was kinda mean to me.

7 /

As a campus missionary, I once knew a girl named Sarah (her name was not Sarah). Sarah was, for lack of a better term, my white whale of evangelization. She was pretty and popular and interesting and fun and identified as Catholic but did not actually follow most of what the church taught. She didn’t think the Eucharist was Jesus and she didn’t think you had to go to church and she didn’t think God listened to prayers and she didn’t have a Catholic sexual ethic and she was pro-choice and she didn’t believe in confession and she used birth control and on and on and on.

But I was sure—sure—that if I said the right thing, if I prayed the right prayers, if I organized the right event, Sarah would come around. It had worked on me, hadn’t it? I hadn’t loved the church properly either! But a missionary helped me ~see the light~ and now I was saving souls! I would save Sarah! Sarah would be a success story! Sarah would be a saint!

Here was the rub: Sarah did not want to be a saint. At least, not in the way I believed and believe would make her one.

I shed real tears over Sarah that year, and they were not the holy mourning that should accompany sinfulness. They were bitter, selfish tears that I had “failed”. As if God was beholden to my 21-year-old ass. As if God would have only saved Sarah if silly little Claire had muttered the right words.

It has taken me many, many years to see that situation for what it was: a self-centered desire to have more power than I really did. Sure, part of it was generous3. Part of it was loving. But a large part was not. It was control that I wanted to have that I do not.

Today, I am not surrounded by college girls. But I am digitally surrounded by someone I like to call Joe. Joe thinks women are more abusive than men, because he’s read that 2/3 of child abuse is from women4. Joe thinks women can work if they have to, but it’s really better if they don’t. Joe thinks women are too emotional. Joe thinks Pearl Davis is harsh but she makes some pretty good points, you know? Joe thinks one-family voting is what this country really needs. (Joe needs Jesus and a qualified therapist, pronto. I have many questions about Joe’s relationship with his mother.)

I want Joe to understand what I’m trying to say, but Joe does not want to try and understand.

In Stephen Kiernan’s The Glass Chateau,5 there’s a character who is bitter and angry. They get kicked out of the glass factory because, to quote another character, “he was not ready to be done suffering”.

I (imperfectly) loved Sarah. But Sarah was not ready to be done suffering. Joe is not ready to be done suffering. They are carrying burdens that I have asked and asked and asked them to put down but they are making the choice to not do so, and I have to make peace with that.

I, however, am. I am ready. I am putting down these burdens that are not mine.

I am not writing for Joe. I’m writing for his followers who are reading what he says and nodding along with some of it but pausing at other parts going huh. That doesn’t feel quite right. Something’s…off, here.

As for Joe, my brother: go in peace. I hold no bitterness towards you6. Repent and believe in the gospel. I shake the dust from my feet.

8 /

When Jesus died on the cross, people were not exactly grateful.

We do not do the right thing because we think people will applaud us or think we’re rebels or give us donor dollars or invite us to fancy events or put our name in history books. We do the right thing out of a devotion to the One who made us. We try to make the world a safer, better, more joyful place for women not because we look really cool with protest signs on Instagram but because Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, died on a cross that all might come closer to his Father.

I do believe this, and believing it has cost me. It has cost me a lot. That cost, however, has paled in comparison to the gain.

We seek for women to have rights not for financial gain or glory, but because in doing so, they become closer to who they are. They more rapidly approach the dignity they were designed with, a dignity that is kept from them by those7 who say they should not have a say in politics, should not have a say in household finances, should not have a say in medicine, should not have a say in anything at all.

There are many times this all feels futile as hell. Not the this all of Christianity, but the this all of this particular platform. When I hear people I love talking about how real mothers would never hire babysitters, or real women know their “place” in the family, or real women should have lipstick on every night when their husband comes home from work. I am old8, multiple people on this website in the past few weeks have reminded me. A ~milennial~ who can’t understand Gen Z. They’ve put me out to pasture; sacrificed me on the altar of the Instagram GRWM reels. I cried last week because someone told me they’e9 been “following” me since the beginning of my podcast10 but now just think my writing is so “slapdash” and “out of touch”.

I feel as if what I tried to craft—a platform celebrating the church’s view on women—has died. But it has not died. It’s transformed. When I was slightly crashing out on the internet last week, Lore Wilbert told me that “If they can’t grow with you, they’re not for you. I’m forty-five and a friend told me a decade ago, ‘Bring the readers who want to come with you, with you. Show your hand, show how you’re changing and growing. If they can’t stick around, that’s not about you, it’s about them being unwilling to witness change and see virtue in it.’”

Good thing I belong to a faith that is based upon dead things coming back to life.

These are things I’ve read lately. They are not always positive reviews, and also, I have a very high tolerance for cussing/sin in my books that you may not have so your mileage may vary. Just because I like a book doesn’t mean it’s the gold standard of literature.

• Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol Dubois: If you’re interested in the topic of women’s suffrage and its connections with feminism, this is a great read, if a bit dry. I really wish some of the speakers out here selling the lie that the early suffragists were just a bunch of racist anti-marriage Wiccan harpies would read it, but they are Joe, and they will not.

• Grace Will Be There: Finding God in the Life We Aren’t Ready for by Katie Kelley : The absolute opposite of dry. A beautiful essay collection that would be a great companion for anyone walking through heavy suffering.

• Insane Facts About Women’s Health That Sound Fake, But Aren’t: Just consider this a PS to my entire letter. My favorite of these ridiculous facts: only 6.8% of OBGYN residents felt adequately prepared to help their patients manage menopause, a condition 50% of the population will go through.

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