Why Feminism Failed: The ideology of feminism—which sought to achieve material equality of the sexes—was always going to lead to this.

For every conservative woman who rejects feminism, there’s a female pundit who says “but only what it has become.” There are many, it seems, who want to hold on to the idea, or perhaps even just the appearance, of political equity between the sexes, even as they reject what it has brought about.

Far be it from me to expect women in politics, whatever their affiliation, to openly reject the worldview that birthed their careers. But for the sake of intellectual consistency, it should be said that this position is as untenable as its preferred outcome is unlikely. Not only will American feminism never return to its First Wave iteration, but if it were to do so, we would only end up here again. “Here” meaning “birthing persons” protesting abortion laws in uterus hats and men getting snipped as “an act of love.” The logic of feminism has always been totalizing, even if its more radical threads were once hidden to convince the less observant public to back its initial political battles.

One of the best examples of this is in the suffragette movement. Some of the biggest names driving the fight from the beginning—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her daughter Harriet Stanton Blatch, Charlotte Perkins Gilman—were real radicals. Stanton authored the famous “Declaration of Sentiments” at the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, which insists “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” In her books Women and Economics and The Home: Its Work andInfluence, Gilman argued that the home was inherently oppressive to women, and they would never reach full health and personal growth until the house was professionalized—that is, all the tasks of the mother, from rearing to homemaking to childhood education, were sold out to professionals, to allow the woman to pursue her own interests. Meanwhile, Blatch organized militant street protests to reinvigorate working-class women for the suffragettes’ stagnating cause in the 1910s, a direct-action approach to politics that the black nationalist movement would later adopt.

But their argument to the public and to the key politicians, both in England and America, masked these more radical aspirations. Never asking the most important question—whether expanding the voting pool would actually be good for the nation, or good for women—they asserted that without votes for women, some 50 percent of society was effectively dehumanized. It’s a tactic that likely looks familiar to our 21st century eyes. Using targeted violence to add muscle to their mantras (“blowing up buildings, shouting down public speakers, pouring acid down pillar-boxes, slashing priceless paintings, horsewhipping ministers on the street,” details TAC’s Helen Andrews) the radical minority succeeded not because the majority of women felt disenfranchised without casting a ballot, but because the majority of male politicians were tired of being nagged. And what could be so bad about letting a couple ladies vote?

In the end, the suffragettes succeeded because they commanded the narrative. The counterarguments that women’s suffrage would politicize women’s issues and create a war between the sexes—consequences predicted by the anti-suffragettes which are becoming reality a century later—were not nearly as catchy as “Votes for Women!” But their goal, though less visible than later generations’, was hardly less radical.