Carrie Gress begins her absorbing historical account of the so-called “women’s movement” by showing that there were indeed injustices committed against women through the centuries. She tells the story of Hester Vaughn, who immigrated to the United States during the 1800s, lured by a man who promised to marry her, only to find upon her arrival that he was already married. She obtained a job as a scullery maid, was raped by her employer and became pregnant. Unable to afford shelter beyond an unheated attic room with a broken window, she gave birth to her baby during a snowstorm, and the child froze to death. Hester was then tried for infanticide.

Gress writes: “Although we may not see such stark examples of women’s weakness in our wealthy society today, the vulnerability of being a woman has not gone away.... Our weakness is locked up in our fertility, our hormones, our bodily cycles, and all the functions required to give life to another. This vulnerability is what women have been struggling against since the beginning of time.”

But as the author shows throughout the book, the feminists’ answer to helping women is to have them become more like the men they allegedly hate, and to end the “patriarchy,” which has only served to make women dependent on the state to meet their needs rather than a father or a spouse. In addition, feminism has served to pit men and women against each other to the detriment of both and benefit of neither.

The End of Woman is fascinating and eye-opening, beginning with the first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived in Ireland and Britain from 1759-1797. While Wollstonecraft is considered to be “the mother of feminism,” Gress writes that the story of feminism actually began with the French Revolution. She describes the bloody “Reign of Terror” that took the lives of 17,000 people via the guillotine, many of whom were clergy, and another 10,000 who died in prison without trial.

The author explains that, unlike the American Revolution, which was fought against British rule for the sake of freedom, the French Revolution “was an effort to recreate and reshape society in a world without God.” It was an effort to erase the sacred and raise man and the state as the solution to the world’s problems. Many historical figures make Gress’s story come alive, including the father of sadism, the Marquis de Sade. It was the backdrop of the French Revolution and its aftermath that helped Wollstonecraft spread her feminist message through her writings, primarily her most well-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

While Wollstonecraft’s influence is still felt in the feminist movement today, like many of the feminists Gress writes about, she was a broken woman whose early life was filled with abuse, “crass cruelty,” and continual waves of poverty. After her death, her husband, William Godwin, himself a champion of free love and the godless tenets of the French Revolution, detailed her romantic relationships, her pregnancies, and her suicide attempts, which drastically lowered the public’s interest in her. Yet she has continued to play a significant role in the waves of feminist thought that have followed.

Gress does a masterful job of describing the various movements that have come into play since the dawn of feminism. Among them is Romanticism, which was “a reaction against laws, boundaries, scientism, and regimented ideas.” Romantics found the Enlightenment thinkers “sterile,” with narrow categories of reason. The only thing they agreed on was that there was no longer any room for Christianity. The Romantics were virulently anti-Christian and “saw freedom, no matter its expression, as the new creed.”

The author weaves fascinating details of the intertwining lives of Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, her daughters, and the poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley fathered numerous illegitimate children, and his creativity was “fueled by free love and drug use.” He left in his wake a trail of suicides, rancor, and sadness, and was constantly running from the debts he accumulated. But modern feminists praise his work, which wove together the writings and thought of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, including “a new icon of womanhood — free from men and children — developed in his poetry.”

Gress provides detail about the later feminist movement that began in the 1960s and ’70s. Most of the key figures from that era were Marxists or Communists, and the same ideology that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people in the Soviet Union drove the movement to destroy womanhood and the traditional family in the West.

The feminist Betty Friedan, author of the feminist screed The Feminine Mystique, was one key player who pretended to be a simple housewife with no career ambition and a righteous sense of feminist outrage. She tried to hide her Communist connections, but David Horowitz, himself an active Communist at that time, was so intrigued by Friedan and her secret leanings that he wanted to write a biography about her, which she refused. Horowitz wanted to show the damage caused by McCarthyism by telling Friedan’s story, and despite her refusal to grant him access to her personal papers, he was able to make a convincing case.

The End of Woman is a wonderful book, peppered with prominent historical figures and intriguing anecdotes. It rips the mask off the public relations spin that woman are victims of the oppressive patriarchy and shows that the main players in the charade are “lost girls” or “mean girls.” Gress reveals that most of the feminist movement’s leaders came from broken families, abuse, or suffered from various mental illnesses. And yet these are the women who have successfully convinced millions of other women to buy into the notion that they must be equal to or better than men in order to achieve success and happiness.

While many feminist leaders may have achieved success, few appear to have achieved happiness. Gress writes: “It is readily apparent when digging into the history of feminism that there is a remarkable absence of discussion about children, about what it means to be a mother.... Perhaps like their broken relationships with their parents, or with husbands and lovers, their relationships with their children were just as strained. But more likely, the absence is to steer their arguments toward their own agenda and away from the richness of authentic, deep, and selfless relationships.”

The book also addresses the issue of abortion, probably the most important item on the feminist list, which has taken such a toll on average women and feminists alike. Gress writes about the macabre celebrations of celebrities following their abortions, and she also delves into the toll being taken on young women today by the transgender agenda. She leaves no stone unturned in her revelations, leaving the reader breathless at the enormity of the evil perpetrated on women, men, and the nuclear family.

But Gress contends that that there is an army of what she calls “flyover women” who have religious faith, love their husbands and children, and fail to buy into the feminist notion of “power,” who get no attention. She writes that “women must recognize where our real power lies and understand how to use it well. We must also end the vilification of men and move to restore the family. If we do these things, the world will not come to an end—quite the contrary, like a barren garden, it will emerge slowly, coming back to life, to be reanimated with those elements that we have grasped at but missed.”

Women and men who are alarmed at the path our society has taken for the past five-plus decades should avail themselves of this amazingly informative book. Older women may recognize that they were hoodwinked in their youth by the appealing promise of freedom and equality, and young women may wonder why they are listening to the likes of bitter octogenarian feminists like the 88-year-old Gloria Steinem. One thing is certain, every reader will learn a lot.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com or Regnery Publishing to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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