‘Les Femmes’: Moms and Wives Defending Marriage and the Family

Among the books in my collection is Judith Martin’s Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, in which the author addresses “lapses in civility.” I dip into this hefty volume from time to time, less for edification than for the pleasure of her tart observations.

In the last three years, several female writers—wives and mothers for the most part—have also sought to rescue civilization, not just from social gaffes but from the radical ideologies infecting our culture and threatening the ruin of marriage and the family. On my shelves are a half-dozen or so of their books, and these I do consume as food for thought and enlightenment. In case you’ve missed meeting these gallant women, here’s a quick introduction.  

Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War by Peachy Keenan, a pseudonym, tells the story of one woman’s turning away from agnosticism and the “women can have it all” promises of our culture to a religious faith—Keenan becomes Catholic—and a mother and wife who champions domesticity. To fight radicalized feminism and its muddle of critical theories, Kennan declares, is relatively simple. “All you must do is remain authentically female, as in, the timeless ways of being female: as a daughter, mother, and wife.”

If you’re looking for zip and wit, and a pen dipped more than occasionally in acid, read Peachy.

In Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids, podcaster and writer Liz Wheeler takes apart the ongoing assault on America’s children and the traditional family, dissecting the damages done by the teacher’s unions, Planned Parenthood, critical race and queer theory, woke corporations, and more. Wheeler’s warehouse of information arms us with the knowledge necessary “to fight this existential battle for our children.” She writes, “If we cast off our blindfolds, we will have what it takes to win this war.”

Though I have yet to read in full this next selection, Oxford graduate and British journalist Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress tells the story of her loss of faith in progress and “the right side of history.” Harrington coined the term “reactionary feminism,” meaning, among other things, resistance to the commodification of sex, the war on relationships, the influence of tech and digitalization on human nature, and “the tyrannical glare of compulsory gender-neutrality.” Particularly insightful for our present circumstances is her comment near the end of the book: “There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.”

Like Liz Wheeler, Joy Pullman, the executive editor of The Federalist, addresses cultural Marxism in her 2024 book False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America. Pullman focuses our attention on identity politics and what she calls sexual Marxism, which “is not love, but hatred. It’s hatred of fatherhood and motherhood, children, and all natural human connections.” The Pride flag she describes as “a symbol of unfettered license.” Like the other writers here, Pullman concludes by reminding readers that “it is up to all of us who desire national greatness to bring it forth from ourselves and our children.”

On the flyleaf of Carrie Gress’s The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us are these words “Feminism doesn’t empower women. It erases them.” An extreme example of that erasure is occurring today in the world of sports, where transgendered females are allowed to compete against biological females. To make her case, Gress escorts us through 200 years of several ideologies, including feminism, of which she writes “Feminism, perhaps second only to Marxism, is currently the most powerful brand in the world.” At the end of her book, Gress issues this cri de coeur: “It’s time for us to come home: to come home and love our children … to come home to our husbands and to work with them against a common enemy instead of making them the enemy. And it is time to come home to ourselves, as women and mothers.”

Finally, there is Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. An associate professor and mother of eight whose marriage first brought her six other children, Pakaluk and her team of researchers interviewed 55 college-educated women from across the United States who along with their husbands chose to have five or more children. Though not as overtly concerned with Marxist feminism as the previous books, the women who tell their stories here “took childbearing to be the purpose of their lives and the meaning of their marriages.” In an age when American birthrates have cratered, Pakaluk performs an invaluable service by introducing readers to thoughtful women who have found joy and purpose in being mothers.

These countercultural writers speak for all men and women who wish to break the shackles and chains lately imposed by woke radicalism. We can take hope from their books and inspiration from their courage for standing against those who have for so long attempted the destruction of those foundational blocks of civilization, marriage, and the family.

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