A Sign of Feminist Failure, by Casey Chalk

By Casey Chalk, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 22, 2025

Casey Chalk is the author of  The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road Publishing), The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands (Sophia Institute Press) and Wisdom From the Cross: How Jesus’ Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die) (Sophia, 2026).

After fifty long years of feminism, women are finally more independent, more educated, more career oriented…and more miserable than ever.

Surely one of the most provocative conversations this year has been that sparked by conservative essayist Helen Andrews, whose October essay “The Great Feminization”—which censured what she describes as the feminization of Western institutions—went so viral that even liberal corporate media couldn’t ignore it. The New York Times welcomed her to write an op-ed on her thesis, and conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat brought Andrews onto The New York Times podcast to discuss it with conservative Catholic feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant. Writers at The Washington Post, Fortune, and Vanity Fair analyzed it.

Yet perhaps the most illuminating commentary on Andrew’s arguments appeared in a November Washington Post book review that, while ostensibly discussing Sargeant’s recent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, couldn’t help but pit Sargeant’s conservative feminism against Andrew’s “anti-feminism.” Its author, Becca Rothfeld, labels Andrews’ opinions “tenuous” and “perverse” and even claims that Andrews “stands in hell.” Sergeant, who spends much of the New York Times podcast charitably sparring with Andrews, is, however, not ultimately much better according to Rothfeld, who accuses Sargeant of a “subtler and more slippery approach” that is a “softened version of the same ugly hierarchy we have always had.” …

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