Nearly a year has passed since conservative journalist Helen Andrews’ essay “The Great Feminization” ignited a cultural firestorm. Her first paragraph ran as follows:

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym ‘J. Stone,’ argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire ‘woke’ era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The Summers incident occurred in 2005 during a speech to a private academic conference in which Summers addressed the disparity in numbers between male and female entrants into STEM professions. He remarked that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might account for the larger number of men. Someone leaked his off-the-record statements and offended women twisted their meaning and nuance. Despite an apology from Summers, the ensuing hue and cry, again driven largely by women, forced his resignation.

In “The Great Feminization,” Andrews writes of Stone’s article:

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis … Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

Stone sparked Andrews’ thoughts, and Andrews in turn lit a fire in podcaster Roni Fouks, whose YouTube video, “The Great Feminization,” reiterates, sometimes word for word, Andrews’ thesis and supporting evidence. “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” says Fouks, echoing Andrews.

Just as Andrews received her epiphany from Stone’s essay, so I received mine from Fouks’ podcast, changing the way I now look at some things. At the time I came across her podcast, I was also following Lindsay Clancy’s trial, the mother who allegedly murdered her three children. Everything Andrews and Fouks discussed – the prioritization of empathy over reason, the replacement of law and reason with courtroom therapeutics, the mob instinct at play in the cancel culture feminists – appeared daily in the news.

But I would also tweak some of what these commentators said, for the groundwork for the Great Feminization was laid over the previous three decades to the 2005 Summers debacle. Those of us in college in the 1970s remember the talk even then about the “patriarchy” and the ongoing oppression of women. From the ’80s on, girls were given special attention, reflected in the popular “Take Your Daughter to Work” movement.

At the same time, the refrain, “The world would be a kinder, better place if women were running things,” was repeated in the media and ordinary conversations.

Moreover, I realize the pitfalls in applying The Great Feminization to all situations. That movement explains much about today’s culture, but painting with too broad a brush ignores all those women – and I know plenty of them – who resent leftist feminism, especially when it claims to speak on behalf of all women. They’re sickened by the Clancy supporters, for instance, who gathered in the streets outside the courtroom, donated over a million dollars to her GoFundMe, and applied an agenda rather than logic in coming to a verdict.

Andrews and Fouks view the Great Feminization as a threat to civilization, advocating a return to real meritocracy as the solution. “Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men,” Andrews says. “It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.”

The goal of social engineering to which Andrews refers was never hidden. It was the deliberate attention given to girls and women in classrooms from kindergarten through professional schools and the workplace. During this same time anti-discrimination laws bestowed minority rights on women. Consequently, females are today the majority in colleges and law and medical schools, and will likely dominate these professions just as they do already in publishing. “Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose,” Andrews notes.

By taking “our thumb off the scale,” Andrews means we need a true meritocracy, where sex and gender don’t determine winners, yet the odds against any such change are high. With women paramount in academia, law, and the media, we will see no reversal of decades-old discrimination laws, meaning we will see no change in hiring and workplace practices.

Given that improbability, change must begin inside the family. Mothers and fathers must supply their sons with the tools for success, the understanding that intelligence and hard work are their keys to happiness, and the possibility that they may face a systemic prejudice against males. These same parents must instill in both their sons and daughters the importance of family and children, of home, devotion, and love. They should also allow and encourage their children to develop those traits fundamental to males and females.

These different natural strengths of men and women aren’t meant to be at war. They are a design to bring men and women together, to complete and strengthen one another.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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