From The Feminist Turned Housewife:
There was a promise made to millions of millennial girls all over the world. It came from our schools, our parents, our teachers, the sitcoms and movies we watched. It was baked into every future-planning worksheet, every scholarship flier, every career-day poster. Everywhere. All the time.
The promise was simple: Go to college, and you will have the life you want. Fail to go, and you will be left behind.
College was not just framed as a means of education. It was a moral choice. A rite of passage. The real life golden ticket. And for women especially, it was touted as the single most empowering decision we could make, the path all independent, successful, fulfilled, and respected women take. We didn’t just believe this. We built our lives around it. I know i did. Ever since I could remember, going to college was the number one goal in my life. It didn’t matter what degree, what university, what the cost would be. All i knew was i was going to college, and my mother would be making sure of it.
She always painted it as the thing all independent women need, that if only she had a degree herself she would be happier and better off. The college experience was always painted as THE event of my life. Not having children, not the wedding, or the marriage. The diploma. The college degree. That had become the new husband. The new family, the new family picture up on the wall.
But somewhere between the student loan debt, the gender studies degree, the soulless entry-level job, and the gnawing sense of “Is this it?”, a realization began to creep in. And we began to wonder…
We had been sold something… but it came with fine print no one told us to read. (Read more.)
Erasing Eve. Also from The Feminist Turned Housewife:
This tells us something: it is not really about confusion. It’s about an agenda hellbent on destroying womanhood.
Notice how there is never a “What is a man?” movement. No global campaign to replace “father” with “non-birthing parent.” No men’s sports leagues collapsing because they are being overrun by women. No activist push to rename “prostate cancer” in order to be more gender neutral.
When men are insulted or undermined, it is rarely by denying they exist. But women? Women are told they can be anyone, and anything, and therefore no one, and nothing.
Think about the language shift we’ve all witnessed. Mother became birthing person, breastfeeding has become chest feeding, and women’s health is now reproductive health care for all genders. For years, we were told our bodies didn’t define us and that biology didn’t matter. This message separated “woman” from “female,” and once that link was broken, it became easy for others to change the meaning, it became easy for everyone to become a woman, the door has swung right open for the true and actual erasure of women to begin.
Many don’t want to admit but the groundwork for the erasing of women was all laid by feminism itself. For decades, feminist thinkers argued that defining a woman by her body was oppressive. The female body, with its cycles, vulnerabilities, and reproductive role, was not the source of womanhood but a burden all women must escape. Second-wave feminism championed the idea that a woman’s value should not be tied to her biology. On the surface, it sounded like a good idea. But beneath lay an evil lie… if women must be separated from our biology in order to be truly free, and fulfilled how long exactly would it take for women to end up dreading their biological state? Well… not very long. By the time third-wave and gender theory arrived, the stage was set. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), argued that gender was performative something you do, not something you are. If gender was a performance, anyone could play the role. Anyone could be whatever gender they desired.
This was the philosophical bridge from “a woman is more than her body” to “a woman is whatever someone says it is.” (Read more.)
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