When Feminism Devours Its Own: Has It Lost Its Way in the Pursuit of Women’s Liberation?

By Hisham Yusuf Abdelrahman

In recent weeks, social media has circulated a striking post about the experience of British journalist and writer Petronella Wyatt, bearing a thought-provoking headline: “I’m single, childless and alone… Feminism has failed me and my generation.”
What caught my attention was not simply the confession of a woman past fifty who feels lonely, or her regrets about choices made earlier in life. It was the deeper paradox of a woman raised on feminist thought, who embraced many of its propositions, only to question the very ideas that shaped her understanding of life, marriage, and family.
Because material circulating on social media is sometimes exaggerated, selectively quoted or reshaped, I went back to the original source to establish what the British columnist had actually said.
The story, it turned out, was no invention of a social-media commentator. It drew on an opinion article Wyatt herself published in the British Daily Mail on 20 May 2024, under the title “I’m single, childless and alone. Feminism has failed me and my generation.” Its meaning is unmistakable:
“I’m single, childless and alone. Feminism has failed me and my generation.”

What is striking is that the original article is more substantial and revealing than the circulating post. Wyatt does not merely express personal disappointment; she critically revisits her intellectual and social upbringing and the messages she and other women of her generation received about independence, professional achievement, marriage and motherhood.
Wyatt describes meeting a group of female friends every Monday at a London restaurant. They are women in their mid-fifties, united by advanced education and professional careers, but also, in her account, by an emotional and social void: all are unmarried and have no children.
She recalls growing up with feminist ideas. At thirteen, she was given books by Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir. Her educational and social environment also placed a premium on career success while treating marriage and traditional family roles as less valuable than individual independence.
Wyatt recounts a friend’s reflection that the feminist discourse she had absorbed led her to see conventional femininity as a stereotype devised by men to subordinate women. She became hostile towards men and pushed away opportunities for relationships, only to find herself now bearing the cost of those convictions.
Another friend describes postponing motherhood until her career was established, only to discover that her reproductive years had passed and that what seemed a temporary personal decision had become an irretrievable loss.
Wyatt ultimately calls for what she terms a “cultural reset”, warning that future generations may pay a similar price unless certain feminist assumptions are subjected to scrutiny.
The issue thus extends beyond the personal experiences of Wyatt and her friends, opening the door to broader and more pressing questions.
What if some of the ideas advanced in the name of women’s liberation have ultimately weakened the human bonds on which family life depends?
Is it not paradoxical that entire generations, after decades spent pursuing individual independence and professional success, might discover that they gained many rights and opportunities without always managing to reconcile them with their emotional and family needs?
And have some contemporary feminist currents gone astray by encouraging a relationship between women and men defined more by competition and conflict than by partnership and complementarity?
Then comes the most consequential question: Can a society continue to advance economically and technologically while the desire for marriage and children declines, family ties erode, and loneliness and isolation become more widespread?
Important as Wyatt’s testimony is, it cannot, on its own, condemn feminism as a whole or establish that the movement is directly responsible for contemporary demographic and social change. It does, however, offer a compelling human starting point for examining particular feminist currents, especially those that have treated family life and motherhood as obstacles to women’s liberation.
This is where the real issue begins: not with a British journalist’s regret over her personal decisions, but with the need to reassess certain feminist ideas that have redefined the relationship between women and men, freedom and responsibility, self-fulfilment and the continuity of human life.
Was the aim to free women from injustice—or to free them from the family itself?
From Liberating Women to Liberating Them from the Family
No fair-minded observer can deny that feminist movements, at important stages of their history, fought legitimate battles against discrimination, exclusion from education, employment and political participation, and forms of social and legal injustice that diminished women’s humanity and rights.
Those struggles were necessary. Their achievements should neither be denied nor belittled.
But when did the struggle for women’s rights become a challenge to the value of family roles themselves? When did independence come to mean dispensing with men rather than escaping dependence and injustice? And how did some feminist discourses come to portray marriage as a threat to freedom, motherhood as an impediment to ambition, and raising children as evidence of a life without achievement?
Who decided that a woman running a major institution is necessarily more successful than one who chooses to build a family and raise children? By what measure has economic output alone become the yardstick of human worth, while the social and human value of raising future generations has been pushed aside?
Here, in my view, lies one of the most serious intellectual distortions within certain strands of contemporary feminism.
Instead of freeing women from constraints that prevent them from fulfilling their aspirations, one set of pressures has sometimes been replaced by another. Where older traditions pressed women to become wives and mothers, some modern narratives pressure them to demonstrate independence by distancing themselves from those roles or diminishing their significance.
What value does liberation have if it ends by restricting women’s aspirations to marriage and family life, just as tradition once restricted their aspirations to education, employment and personal fulfilment?
The Family Is Not a Patriarchal Invention
Before feminist movements, before the modern state, and before industrial economies and capitalism and globalisation, the family was the primary human institution around which societies took shape.
Within it, people are born and learn their first lessons in language, values and belonging, along with responsibility, solidarity and mutual support. Through it, experience passes from one generation to the next, human life continues, and the bonds that hold society together are formed.
The family was never merely an economic arrangement or a passing social contract. It has been, and remains, one of the principal institutions through which society reproduces itself—not only biologically, but culturally, morally and civilisationally.
Certainly, the traditional family was not always just. Its history includes domination, violence and discrimination. Yet the question is unavoidable: Should we address these failings by undermining the family’s standing, or by reforming relationships within it on the basis of respect, justice, and shared responsibility?
To what extent can the institutions of the state and the market, however powerful, fully replace the care, emotional security and sense of belonging that healthy family relationships provide?
Human beings cannot live by individual rights alone, any more than they can live by money and work alone. We are social and emotional beings who need love, connection and companionship as much as freedom, dignity and independence.
In its healthy form, the family is neither a prison for women nor a privilege reserved for men. It is a human partnership in which responsibilities are shared, and roles complement one another without diminishing either partner’s worth.
When Complementarity Gives Way to Conflict
One of the most troubling tendencies in certain radical feminist currents is the inclination to interpret relations between women and men primarily as a struggle for power, at the expense of the partnership and complementarity those relations can embody.
Under this view, a man becomes less a potential life partner than a representative of a historical structure of domination. Marriage becomes less a shared undertaking than an arena for negotiating power. Motherhood ceases to be regarded as a human experience with value in its own right and is instead treated as a burden that may obstruct individual independence.
Yet how can love flourish when hostility between its two partners is assumed from the outset? What family can thrive if a woman and a man enter it believing that one must inevitably defeat the other?
And what happens to society when the psychological and cultural divide between the sexes widens, commitment begins to look like a liability, separation becomes easier than understanding, and personal freedom is detached from mutual obligation?
None of this means that feminism alone is responsible for these changes. Economic pressures, rising living and housing costs, changing patterns of work, consumerism, weakening networks of social solidarity and the failure of many men to adapt to an equitable model of partnership all play a part.
Recognising those factors, however, does not absolve intellectual movements that disparage the family of the responsibility to examine their rhetoric and its cultural effects.
Ideas do not remain confined to books and conferences. Over time they become social values, then individual and collective behaviours, and ultimately consequences that may exceed anything their proponents envisaged.
The Commodification of Women: When Liberation Becomes a Market for the Female Body
One of the most striking paradoxes in the evolution of certain contemporary feminist currents is that a discourse originally concerned with freeing women from being reduced to their bodies and exploited has, in some of its manifestations, come to coexist with new forms of commercialising the female body—and even to confer moral legitimacy on them in the name of personal freedom, economic independence and an absolute right to bodily autonomy.
How did we move from demanding respect for women as fully dignified and autonomous human beings to sometimes celebrating the conversion of their bodies, images and intimacy into products to be bought, sold and promoted in digital markets?
How has what was once criticised as the commercial exploitation of women come to be presented, in some narratives, as economic empowerment and an expression of bodily sovereignty?
Anyone examining cultural change in Western societies can see that consumer capitalism has done more than absorb the language of liberation. At times, it has successfully turned that language into an extraordinarily effective marketing instrument.
Advertising, fashion, beauty and entertainment industries—and now digital platforms enabling the sale of intimate content—can present the female body as an economic resource, turning exposure and display into commercial activities marketed under the banners of independence, choice and empowerment.
Here lies the central moral paradox: Is a woman’s consent to the commercialisation of her body sufficient to make it a triumph of her dignity? Or does human dignity extend beyond individual consent and financial return?
And how free is a choice when it is shaped by economic pressures, market-imposed beauty standards, the pursuit of fame and social approval, and algorithms that reward provocation and turn human attention into profit?
Has a woman truly escaped the male gaze that reduces her to her body, or has the market reproduced the same outlook under more modern and appealing slogans?
Fairness requires us to acknowledge that the commodification of women did not begin with feminism, and that many feminist movements have fought, and continue to fight, sexual exploitation and the treatment of women’s bodies as commercial goods.
That does not, however, remove the responsibility of those currents that have reduced liberation to individual freedom of action without adequately questioning the economic and cultural structures that turn such freedom into a source of profit and exploitation.
It is important to distinguish three levels of responsibility: a consumer capitalist system seeking to turn bodies, images and intimacy into sources of revenue; narratives that invoke individual empowerment to justify these practices without sufficiently examining their economic and social conditions; and other feminist currents that continue to oppose reducing women to their bodies and exploiting them, arguing that women’s freedom cannot be separated from protection against unequal power relations. These actors do not share a single position or bear equal responsibility, even though they interact within the same cultural and economic landscape.
Not everything done in the name of freedom necessarily brings liberation, and not every income-generating activity amounts to genuine human empowerment.
More troubling still is the possibility that a woman’s worth, in the social imagination and the media, becomes tied to her ability to attract attention, arouse desire and generate commercial returns, rather than to recognition of her as a whole person—with intellect, ideas, feelings, dignity and a social contribution that reaches beyond appearance and the body.
We are therefore confronted with a paradox demanding serious reflection. Generations of women struggled not to be regarded as men’s possessions, only for some aspects of modern consumer culture to present women once again as products in a marketplace—with different language, methods and beneficiaries.
What kind of liberation transfers women from the authority of tradition to the authority of the market, from the constraints of social domination to the pressures of commercial consumption?
What kind of human progress is achieved if freedom comes to mean, in some of its applications, that everything is for sale—including privacy, intimacy and the body?
Genuine women’s liberation cannot be achieved by confining women once again to traditional roles, nor by turning them into commodities in modern markets. It requires safeguarding their dignity and freedom of choice, protecting them from exploitation, and enabling their full participation in life without reducing their worth to their bodies, incomes or family roles.
A woman is not a man’s property, not merchandise for the market, and not merely a means of reproduction. She is a human being entitled to full dignity, rights and responsibility.
Perhaps most alarming is the prospect that freedom, which was supposed to protect women from exploitation, becomes the very language through which that exploitation is justified and sold.
When the Reassessment Comes from Within American Feminism
This criticism does not arise solely from conservative movements opposed to feminism from the outside. Western—and particularly American—intellectual life has itself witnessed vigorous debates among feminist thinkers and activists about the outcomes of liberation, the limits of individual independence, the commercialisation of women’s bodies and the nature of relations between women and men.
In 1994, American philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers published her controversial book Who Stole Feminism?, sharply criticising what she called “gender feminism”. She accused some of its proponents of moving away from the original demand for equality and justice towards a discourse that depicts relations between the sexes as a permanent struggle and regards social institutions, including the family, as instruments perpetuating male domination.
Sommers advocates what she calls “equity feminism”, centred on equal rights and non-discrimination, in contrast to approaches she believes exaggerate the extent to which society and gender relations are defined by domination and conflict. Her criticism of those approaches does not amount to rejecting women’s rights or denying the discrimination women have faced.
Her underlying question was this: How did a movement established to defend women’s rights come to promote a discourse that might deepen antagonism between women and men instead of fostering more just and humane relationships?
From another perspective, American legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon has offered a radical critique of sexual exploitation and the commercialisation of women’s bodies, arguing that certain forms of pornography cannot be understood apart from relations of power and control. The paradox is that MacKinnon herself is among the leading theorists of radical feminism. Her position demonstrates that debate over the commodification of women is not simply a contest between feminism and its opponents, but a profound disagreement within feminism over the meaning of freedom and the limits of choice. Citing her here concerns her critique of reducing women to their bodies and exploiting them sexually; it should not be taken as an endorsement by her of the traditional family model or of broader attacks on radical feminism.
The late American thinker bell hooks, meanwhile, sought in her writings to restore the importance of love, care and responsibility in human relationships. She rejected the reduction of feminism to hatred of men and emphasised relationships free from domination and violence, grounded in mutual respect. Her work therefore offers an important contribution to thinking about human partnership, without implying that she endorsed the traditional patriarchal family or defended unequal relationships within it.
A further question arises: If influential feminist voices have warned against reducing women to their bodies, exploiting them and fostering antagonism between the sexes, why do some aspects of consumer culture continue to present the commercialisation of the body as empowerment and relations between women and men as a battleground?
The differences among these thinkers in their premises and conclusions do not diminish the value of their perspectives. Rather, they show that feminism is not a single, uniform school of thought and that its internal disagreements and reassessments deserve attention.
The larger lesson may be that liberating women must not become a means of liberating markets from ethical constraints on their exploitation, or of liberating human relationships from affection, responsibility and mutual care.
If old injustices diminished women’s dignity in the name of tradition, it is no more acceptable to diminish that same dignity in the name of freedom and empowerment.
From a Crisis of the Family to a Crisis of Societal Continuity
Many societies today are undergoing profound demographic changes: declining fertility rates, delayed marriage and childbearing, rising life expectancy, and growing numbers of small households and people living alone.
In some countries, falling birth rates have raised serious concerns about shrinking workforces, mounting social-care burdens and the long-term sustainability of pension systems and public services.
Are we witnessing unqualified social progress, or a transformation containing contradictions that may threaten its own long-term sustainability?
If modern civilisation has succeeded in extending human life and improving living standards, how do we explain the difficulty some of the world’s wealthiest societies face in creating conditions that encourage younger generations to marry, have children and form stable families?
Paradoxically, some societies that have carried the ideal of individual liberation furthest are now seeking policies to support fertility, offer financial incentives to families, expand childcare provision and reconcile employment with family life.
Intellectual honesty, however, demands that we distinguish correlation from causation. Falling fertility cannot automatically be attributed to feminism; it is also associated with urbanisation, education, living costs and economic change. Indeed, some policies promoting gender equality help women and men combine employment with parenthood.
Analytically, the coincidence of changes in feminist discourse with declining marriage or birth rates is insufficient to establish a direct causal link. Demonstrating such a link would require comparative studies across societies and periods, separating the influence of cultural ideas from housing, employment and care costs and broader demographic shifts. The criticism advanced here is directed primarily at ideas that diminish the value of family, motherhood and partnership, and at the need to examine their possible cultural consequences—not at claiming they are the sole or decisive cause of today’s family challenges.
Nevertheless, a philosophical question remains: Has modern civilisation so exalted individual independence that it has overlooked the fact that society’s continuity also requires a willingness to form bonds, make sacrifices and assume responsibilities towards others?
A society that celebrates individual success without creating the conditions for family formation may discover that it is securing short-term gains at the expense of its human future.
A Woman Is Not an Economic Project—and a Man Is Not an Existential Adversary
One of the gravest errors in modern thinking is to reduce human worth to economic productivity, as though a woman’s success were measured solely by her position and income, and a man’s solely by his financial capacity.
A woman is not simply a unit of labour to be mobilised for the economy; nor is she merely an instrument of reproduction and the survival of the human species.
She is a person with full agency and rights, entitled to learn, work and create, to marry and have children, and to combine these paths when circumstances permit.
A man, likewise, is not merely a provider of income or a symbol of authority to be overthrown. He is a partner in family responsibility, child-rearing, care and the shaping of the future.
It is hardly fair to ask women to return to the family without also asking men to return to their responsibilities within it.
If we genuinely wish to safeguard the family, we must rebuild relations between the sexes on more just and humane foundations, so that women are not forced to choose between their dignity and independence on the one hand and marriage and motherhood on the other.
Family life should not come at the cost of a woman’s sense of self, just as self-fulfilment should not require abandoning the family.
Is It Time for a Fundamental Reassessment?
The real significance of Petronella Wyatt’s account is not that it constitutes a final indictment of feminism, but that it opens the door to a long-overdue intellectual reassessment.
To what extent can contemporary feminist movements distinguish between freeing women from injustice and freeing them from the human bonds that give their lives meaning?
Where is the intellectual courage to revisit slogans that have gone too far in portraying individual independence as an end sufficient unto itself?
Conversely, should conservative movements not acknowledge that protecting the family does not mean reproducing domination and discrimination, but establishing justice, respect and equality between spouses?
One paradox worth reconsidering is the insistence on presenting women with two supposedly incompatible choices: independence and achievement, or marriage and motherhood. Combining them is a legitimate aspiration, and the appropriate social and economic conditions should be made available to support it.
Does a man not also have the right to succeed professionally without losing his human and emotional presence within his family?
The reassessment we need should not mean a victory for men over women, or a defeat for feminism at the hands of social conservatism. It should be a victory for a deeper principle: genuine freedom is inseparable from responsibility; equality does not require the erasure of difference; and self-fulfilment need not mean turning away from human relationships.
Finally: When We Forget the Fundamentals of Life
Perhaps the most important truth to remember amid this long debate is that human beings were not made to live in isolation, and societies were not built on individual competition alone. They were also built on love, compassion, solidarity, procreation and the continuity of generations.
Human beings knew family life before they knew social theories, motherhood and fatherhood before schools of thought emerged, and the need for a companion before relations between women and men became a subject of ideological conflict.
It would be unwise to dismantle these human foundations in the name of progress, just as it would be unjust to preserve them in the name of tradition without correcting the injustices and failings that have marked them.
The family is not the opposite of freedom. Marriage is not a defeat for independence, and motherhood is not a withdrawal from life—just as education, work and professional achievement do not contradict a woman’s nature or her human purpose.
The real predicament begins when freedom ceases to be a means of improving life and becomes a doctrine that sets individuals against the very bonds that give their lives continuity and meaning.
Perhaps the most urgent question for thinkers, policymakers and social movements is not how to make women more independent of men, or men more independent of women.
It is this: How can we build a society in which women and men can be free and equal without losing the capacity—or the desire—to build a life together?
Civilisations endure not merely through what their factories produce, the wealth their banks accumulate or the technological advances their institutions achieve, but also through their ability to renew human life, generation after generation.
Whatever differences people may have over the meaning and limits of liberation, they should not forget a truth older than any movement or theory:
Life cannot be sustained by the individual alone. The family, however circumstances change and relationships within it evolve, will remain one of the foundations of human civilisation. Women and men are equal partners in building and sustaining life, until God inherits the earth and all who dwell upon it.

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