Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Review Of "The End Of Woman: How Smashing The Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us"
Author: Mark R. Saucy

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 142

Review Of The End Of Woman: How Smashing The Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us

Mark Saucy

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

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

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 143

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 fe...