Review of Carrie Gress: The End of Woman

Editor’s Note: The following book review appears in the Spring 2024 issue of Eikon.

Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2023.

In a time when dismayed observers of culture are treated to any number of fine accounts of how we got here, like Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022) and recently Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World (2023), Carrie Gress joins the conversation with a specific word for women.  Like a wise mother writing to her daughters on the ways of the world, Gress quickly helps us understand that the destroyed “us” of the subtitle is “all of us” in Western culture. Men must listen in on this conversation, too, and all are well-rewarded if they do. 

As the title indicates, it is the feminist agenda of patriarchy-smashing that earns Gress’s ire for the plight of women today, where “what it means to be a woman has dissolved and is now an unanswerable question” (128), where men in dresses and heels edge women from prized positions, and where women are statistically less happy than ever before (xxvi). But this is no misplaced etiological claim. Gress has the receipts and treats the reader to a well-written and accessible account of feminism’s calamitous beachheads in the war to overthrow the patriarchy, the so-called “last frontier of the masculine world” where men control women (118).

Along the way, readers meet the “Lost Girls” (Part 1) — the “broken women surrounded by awful men” — and the intellectual world they inhabit in their quest to “become free of the demands of men, children and family” (2). Indeed, half of the book is taken up by these “mothers” and leading lights of feminism. It is a well-researched tale revealing the tragic lives, choices, and ideologies that have shaped the feminist agenda to the present. Beginning with Mary Wollenstoncroft (d. 1797), who started it all, we learn of the moral and sexual perversion, occultism, atheism, and anarchy of the Romantic cads shaping her and other feminist founders (chapters 1 and 2). There’s the explicit anti-Christian, occultic spiritualism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d.1902) (chapter 3), the communism of Betty Friedan (chapter 4), the godless existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir (chapter 10) and much, much more.  

But these are no mere tales for salacious gossip. Throughout the book, Gress is keen to show how all of feminism’s foundational “isms” not only ruined the lives of their early promoters, but how they each gave shape to the present day where “woman” is gone. The chapters in Parts II and III, “Mean Girls” and “No Girls” respectively, continue the litany into more modern times of the Sexual Revolution where the pill and abortion provide the key external means of achieving the feminist utopia. Beyond that — and this is a decided strength of Gress’s work — she shows clearly the family tree of feminist narrative that brings us to modern “gender ideology” where the body is completely divorced from informing human identity of both men and women (chapter 10).  

The antidote to feminism’s ruinous contagion comes in the two chapters of Part IV, “The Way Home.” Here Gress offers a two-pronged remedy: (1) understand the battle of narratives we face (chapter 11) and (2) return to defining “woman” on its own terms, instead of just the “incomplete males” of feminism (Chapter 12, “Mother”). The latter means a return to and celebration of the essentialism of a distinct female maternal vocation God has given to all women. Like other recent Catholic voices on the topic, including John Grabowski (Unraveling Gender, 2022) and Abigail Favale (The Genesis of Gender, 2022), Gress fills in the maternal vocation with metaphors of “birthing,” that is, bringing forth human life whether literally or figuratively (180), “nourishing,” or trying to give others what they authentically need to flourish (181), and “holding” or being a “shelter in which other souls unfold” (182).  

The power and appeal of the beautiful difference God created in men and women shines in this book as Gress both exposes and recalibrates the ruinous effects of feminism on our culture. To my mind, just one point profits from more nuance for Gress to fully break free of the feminist alt-narrative she confronts. That is, Gress allows the feminist shibboleth patriarchy, actually of communist origin (67), to still control her narrative, at least on the surface. When she defines patriarchy as the “system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (xvii), the answer to patriarchy-smashing can’t be to “restore the patriarchy” as Gress claims (172). What she means to restore throughout and brilliantly expounds is a biblical essentialism where men and women are not reduced to interchangeable sameness (122), androgyny (159), or a competitive, zero-sum contest (125). This is not patriarchy, but biblical patricentrism as Daniel Block has helpfully expressed it (see his chapter in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, IVP, 2003). Restore this biblical vision and culture will return to its divinely intended means of flourishing. Carrie Gress offers us a readable and researched way forward.

Mark Saucy is a professor of theology at Biola University. He and his wife, Michele, have four married children and live in Brea, California.