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Critics Of My Anti-Feminism Book Completely Miss The Plot On Mary Wollstonecraft

Reviewers of my book ‘Something Wicked’ wrongly criticize me for not heralding Wollstonecraft as an intellectual heroine for Christian women.

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Over the last few years, I have come to know the work of Mary Wollstonecraft intimately. Though hardly a household name, she has assumed a primary place in the conversation about Christian womanhood today. My latest books, The End of Woman (Regnery, 2023) and Something Wicked (Sophia Institute Press, 2026) engage her in varying degrees. While every author expects to deal with disagreement and criticism, the pushback against these books has been monotonously uniform. Aside from the recent criticism I received for being “too reasonable,” most every other negative review has criticized me for not heralding Wollstonecraft as an intellectual heroine for Christian women, as has Erika Bachiochi in The Rights of Women (2021) and Emily Dumler-Winckler in Modern Virtue (2022).

The negative reviews have been legion and from overlapping sources: See Elizabeth Grace Matthew’s “The Lives of Feminists” at Law & Liberty and Nina Power’s “Sexual Politics on the American Right” at Fairer Disputations. Public Discourse has four: Rachel Lu’s  “The End of Feminism,” Nathan Schlueter’s “When Anti-Feminism Isn’t Enough,” Claire Swinarski’s “Cultivating a Holistic Feminism,” and Beatrice Scudeler’s “Loving Both Mother and Child: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Case for a Maternal, Pro-Life Feminism.”

The basic arguments made by most was that I erroneously read the history of feminism because I am unfamiliar with, or do not engage the research of, Bachiochi and Dumler-Winckler on Wollstonecraft. For example, Matthew contrasts what she sees as my weakness with Bachiochi’s point of view: “In The Rights of Women (2021), legal scholar Erika Bachiochi offers a rich understanding of the early women’s movement that draws on Wollstonecraft’s writing and that of her like-minded intellectual heirs. Bachiochi shows that nascent feminism was far from a monolith.”

I took seriously these erroneous reviews and wrote responses to several, including  “Threading the Feminist Needle” at Law & Liberty, “The End of Feminism: A Response to Rachel Lu” at Public Discourse, and “Which Mary Should Catholic Women Follow?” at National Catholic Register. (There is not space to adequately outline each review and argument, but the links are provided for those who want to go deeper.)

In the midst of this,........

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