The Crashing Failure of the Feminist Movement

By Joan Swirsky | Am Thinker | Oct 24, 2025

Image via Pxhere.

Going back 250 years, the enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy the fledgling experiment of a democratic republic that our Founding Fathers had envisioned.  It was and continues to be clear to them that America’s strength is a function of three phenomena:

• A fervent belief in the God Who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
• An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of freedom.  Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
• The most passionate was the embrace, belief in, and allegiance to family — its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.

If they could destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government.  And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing — as their predecessors did — every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.

Astounding progress

The America-haters among us have already

• infiltrated our public schools and contaminated generations of students with anti-American propaganda, as well as explicit pornography and grooming, even in kindergarten!
• lured both Christians and Jews to abandon their faiths and to worship the new God of Social Justice.
• succeeded in the leftist — and, I believe, traitorous — infiltration of our military and intelligence services like the FBI and CIA…until, that is, the redemptive entrance of President Trump and his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth.
• rigged the 2020 presidential election, which political activist Dinesh D’Souza also proved in his explosive film, 2000 Mules.
• On and on and on.

Still, the family remains their most desired — yet maddeningly elusive — target.

Help along the way

That effort was generously helped — perhaps, at first, innocently — by the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Austrian neurologist-cum-psychiatrist who was wildly successful in convincing the relatively new and free-thinking American public that the genesis of neuroses, phobias, anxieties, obsessions, depression, psychosis, and general psychological malfunction not only took place in the first few years of life, but were to be blamed on the mothers.  Later therapists, like the sadistic psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, blamed “cold” mothers for their children’s autism.

Mission #1 Accomplished: Mothers are not good for children.

These psychological theories prevailed throughout the 20th century and up to today, embraced by generations of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists until 1998, when they were thoroughly debunked by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, where the Harvard-educated psychologist and editor of most of the psychology texts used in colleges and medical schools in America argued persuasively that a person’s peer group is the major influence of thought, feelings, and behavior throughout life.

The Next Step

In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the most world-changing medication in history, developed by Dr. John Rock, a Harvard professor and obstetrician-gynecologist with five children — along with Drs. Gregory Pincus, C.M. Phang, and Selzo Garcia.  Their creation was the birth control pill, AKA The Pill.  For the first time in world history, the narrative goes, women had control over their reproduction.

For millions of women, it was their own Declaration of Independence, and a huge relief not to have to worry every month about getting pregnant.

Mission #2 Accomplished: Now we can be just like men, some women reasoned, and have as much sex as we want without worrying about getting pregnant.  Thus was the Free Sex movement born, ushering in a complete redefinition of traditional morality.

Get out of the house!

Three years after The Pill, in 1963, a book by Betty Friedan, a housewife with three children from Queens, N.Y., shot to the top of every bestseller list.  In essence, The Feminine Mystique told women that they were simply too smart, too creative, too intrinsically or at least potentially powerful to be spending their time, actually wasting their time, changing diapers, folding laundry, and — the most colossal waste of time of all — raising children.

Friedan’s book resonated!

Mission #3 Accomplished: Multimillions of young women abandoned the once desired goal of early marriage and motherhood and instead enrolled in colleges and universities, where they pursued professional careers ranging from medicine and law and architecture to jobs like telephone linewomen to military combatants to firefighters to hedge fund managers to business executives, et al.

Coincidentally, ahem, an economy that once allowed men to work outside the home and support a wife and put children through college magically became an economy that only two working parents could afford.  It’s kind of like an economy that was completely energy-independent in 2020 under President Trump but quite magically became one in which President Biden had to beg foreign countries to sell him oil in 2021.

Reality sets in

The ’60s also ushered in the historically unprecedented rash of violent assassinations — live on TV — of

• U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (age 46),
• firebrand black activist Malcolm X in 1965 (age 39),
• Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (age 39), and
• former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (age 42).

All of a sudden, the idealized world of the newly emancipated women was shattered.  The world is out of control, they realized.  Is it any wonder that so many of them enthusiastically embraced (or attended) the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, with not only free sex, but a geyser of drugs for the smoking and snorting and injecting?

Mission #4 Accomplished: Many of these college-educated women congratulated themselves on avoiding marriage and especially motherhood, asking themselves, “Who wants to bring a child into this world?”

Only a few years later

In 1971, Gloria Steinem — “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” — and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin founded the first national feminist magazine, Ms.

Mission #5 Accomplished: The traditional nuclear family was being dismantled by a new generation of women who bought in to the notion that making money is infinitely more satisfying, meaningful, and important than raising children.

Marriage out — now babies out!

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in Roe v. Wade that all women have a “right” to an abortion.  To this day, that decision is the Holy Grail of millions of women who believe that “my body, my choice” starts after they’ve had sex and gotten pregnant with a baby they don’t want.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision for abortion back to each individual state.  Today, every woman in the United States who wants an abortion can get one, although some may have to endure the inconvenience of traveling to another state.  Forget about the inconvenience their embryos face of a death sentence!

Mission #6 Accomplished: The once most cherished accomplishment of both men and women — to be the parent of a newborn baby — was effectively reduced to ending that baby’s life in utero.  Today, in some states, abortion exists right up to the moment a full-term baby is delivered —  and in California, believe it or not, even up to the time a healthy thriving baby is 28 days old!  I believe that is called infanticide!

The ticking clock

Uh-oh.  After graduating from college and laboring in the workforce for over a decade, millions of women realized that this money-making thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  But looking for a good man — after stepping on their necks on the way up the ladder — was even more problematic.

Nevertheless, the new social phenomenon of women marrying in their mid-thirties and older took hold, and not coincidentally gave rise to a booming in vitro fertilization industry, as millions of these new brides learned that conceiving and carrying a child after the age of 35 is both a “high-risk” and extremely pricey enterprise.

Mission #7 Accomplished: Take the joy out of intimacy and sex, make it a mechanical act, and further erode both marriage and the family at the same time.

But what about my career?

Modern women have been told by the influencers of the day that they can “have it all”  — marriage, children, and career.  Since they wanted it all, they bought it!

Some women were lucky to have their mothers or mothers-in-law or even young grandmothers volunteer to raise their children, and a rare few could afford expensive nannies.

But most women had to rely on another industry that boomed like no other: the daycare business, where mothers dropped off their infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to paid workers who tended up to 20 or more children at a time, making sure those children were safe and fed, but not necessarily held, loved, comforted, taught, or nurtured.

This allowed the mothers to brag that the hour or so they spent with their child at the end of a day — in which both mother and child were exhausted — was, ahem, “quality time.”

Mission #8 Accomplished: Women out of the home, children being raised by strangers, the American family being dismantled piece by piece.

The genius Steve factor

There were two geniuses: Steve Case, the founding CEO of America Online (AOL) in 1983 (which really took off in the ’90s), and Steve Jobs, who invented, created, introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.

No need to elaborate on the degree to which these geniuses eliminated face-to-face communication and succeeded in riveting both parents and children to all the tantalizing distractions on these electronic devices that separate people and depersonalize intimate relationships, especially meaningful communication between parents and children.

Mission #9 Accomplished: Family concerns take a backseat to beeping texts, sexy emojis, Facebook invitations, Instagram images, Hollywood gossip, and horrifically graphic porn sites, which even savvy eight-year-olds can access with ease.

Worse, this has given rise to an entire generation of sociopaths who, understandably, have little or no human empathy, given the largely robotic care they’ve received.

And now we have an ad — since removed and eliminated from every search engine — that shows a child laughing and sharing an experience with her clearly delighted mother.  Both are on iPads communicating long distance.  The ad ends with a voice telling the mother, “You don’t have to be there.”

Right.  The mother doesn’t have to be there to raise and love and comfort and teach and tuck her child in at night, and the father doesn’t have to be there, either.  Only Big Government should raise their child to be a good little obedient communist.  That’s the message!

Mission #10 Accomplished: Father never mentioned, mother out of the picture, the actual premeditated murder of the American family.

And the crashing failure of the feminist movement.

I rest my case.

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author.  Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.