Feminism: ‘worst attack on femininity that has ever taken place’

In the 2003 interview with Zenit, von Hildebrand described academic, Marxist-based feminism as a kind of “trap” producing little more than misery. She said that the unintended consequence of feminist thought was to convince women that it was bad to be women.

The “amazing thing” about feminism, she said, was that “instead of making women more profoundly aware of the beauty and dignity of their role as wives as mothers, and of the spiritual power that they can exercise over their husbands, convinced them that they, too, had to adopt a secularist mentality”. This mentality, that she describes as “utilitarian” holds that human value is derived only from work and external accomplishment.

Women “let themselves become convinced that femininity meant weakness. They started to look down upon virtues – such as patience, selflessness, self-giving, tenderness – and aimed at becoming like men in all things,” von Hildebrand said. This, she said, sparked the “war” between the sexes that we are all still suffering from today.

“Those who fell into the traps of feminism,” she continued, “became blind to the fact that men and women, though equal in ontological dignity, were made different by God's choice: Male and female he made them. Different and complementary.”

While the adversarial model of feminism insists that the non-biological differences between men and women are mere “social constructs,” New Feminism proposes that the two are designed to work through life together, each offsetting the other’s weaknesses. In contrast, secular feminism, a development of the anti-Christian secularist thought of the 18th and 19th centuries, has created a world in which women are at war with men and all human beings are at war with their natures.

“The whole is topsy-turvy: Marriages break down; many do not even consider getting married; partnership lasts only as long as it satisfies one. Unnatural relationships so severely condemned by Plato are fashionable and claim their rights to be put on the same level as those that God has ordered,” she said.  

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