There is a sense of ease that comes from being born after a war has been won. You walk through fields that were once battlegrounds and see only wildflowers. You forget there was ever blood in the soil.
I have been watching a wave of women (and used to be one), many of them young, many of them beautiful and articulate and sincere, declare themselves anti-feminist. Their reasons often move me. They love men. They want to be held, to soften, to mother, to be cherished as women. They feel that feminism told them they had to become men in order to matter, and that this cost them something precious. On much of this, I agree with them.
And still, something is missing for me. Because every one of these women is speaking from a microphone, a platform, a bank account, a body and a vote that feminism handed to her. She is denouncing the movement from ground it cleared. It is the easiest thing in the world to reject a revolution once you are living inside its victories.
That is the nature of privilege. It is invisible to those who hold it. We breathe it like air.
What our grandmothers bought us
The first wave of feminism, stretching from the mid-1800s into the early 1900s, fought for women to exist as legal persons. Before it, a married woman’s property, wages and often her children belonged to her husband. Here in Australia, South Australian women won the vote in 1894, among the first in the world, and federal suffrage followed in 1902. That victory was partial and stained: Aboriginal women were shut out of the federal vote until 1962. Every gain in this story was paid for unevenly, and some women waited far longer than others.
The second wave, through the 1960s and 70s, moved the fight into the body and the home. Until 1966, a woman working in the Australian Commonwealth public service was expected to resign when she married. Contraception, equal pay, no-fault divorce under the 1975 Family Law Act, the slow recognition of domestic violence and the criminalisation of rape within marriage all arrived within living memory. Your mother, or her mother, remembers a world without them.
The third and fourth waves widened the lens. They asked which women had been left out of the story, gave us the language of intersectionality, and through movements like #MeToo dragged into daylight what had been whispered about for generations.
So when a woman stands up in 2026 and says she does not need feminism, I want to ask her gently: which part would you return? The vote? The right to leave? The right to say no in your own bed? The money in your own name?
Where the critique is right
And yet. The women walking away from feminism are pointing at a real wound, one that I also see and it is a reason that I also, once dis-identified with feminism.
It is the part where equality began to be measured by sameness. Success for a woman came to mean performing well inside structures designed around the male body: the linear career, the unbroken working week, the twenty-four-hour hormonal rhythm, a life organised around output. We won entry to the game and quietly accepted its rules. Our cyclical nature, our relational intelligence, our intuition and our deep instinct to nurture were treated as inconveniences to be managed. I wrote a whole book on this. It is called Wild Business.
Many women are exhausted from this. They are exhausted from proving they can do everything a man can, while also doing everything a woman does. When they look at the softness, the devotion and the polarity they were told to give up, they feel grief. That grief is valid.
There was always another current inside feminism, one that honoured our difference. It ran like an underground river beneath the louder movement, and it is worth tracing, because the women now longing for the feminine are its unknowing heirs.
In 1982 the psychologist Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice. She had noticed that the dominant scale of moral development, built by her colleague Lawrence Kohlberg largely from studies of boys and men, consistently ranked women lower. Gilligan listened to women directly and heard an ethic of care: a morality grounded in relationship, responsibility and attention to the particular person in front of you. She argued this was a different kind of moral maturity, and that we had been measuring women with a ruler cut for someone else.
In France, Luce Irigaray went further. In Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, she argued that Western philosophy had been built around a single masculine subject, with woman cast as his mirror or his lack. She wrote of female pleasure as plural, diffuse and everywhere at once, and called for a culture that could finally hold two sexes, each with its own language, its own divinity, its own way of being in the world. Her colleague Hélène Cixous, in The Laugh of the Medusa, urged women to write from the body, to let the flesh speak in its own tongue.
Across the Atlantic, Audre Lorde gave us Uses of the Erotic, naming the erotic as a deep, feminine source of power and knowing that patriarchy had taught women to distrust. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, separated the lived, sacred experience of mothering from the institution that had been built around it to control women.
Then came the theologians and the priestesses. Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father asked what happens to a culture that imagines God as exclusively male. Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman and the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose interpretations remain debated, pointed toward ancient cultures that revered the Goddess. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance brought the sacred feminine back into ritual, circle and earth-based practice. Thousands of women began to gather in moon lodges and women’s circles, remembering a spirituality that lived in the body.
So why did this river go underground? Partly because the battles for law and money were urgent, concrete and winnable, and they demanded that women prove they were as capable as men. Partly because by the 1990s a new generation of theorists, Judith Butler among them, criticised difference feminism as essentialist, wary of any claim about what a woman inherently is. And partly because talk of the sacred feminine was easy for the mainstream to dismiss as soft or mystical. These voices were drowned out by the louder story of sameness, and they survived in universities, in women’s circles and in the quiet devotion of practitioners who kept the flame alive.
The wave that is coming
I believe we are standing at the threshold of a new wave, one that gathers up everything that came before and carries it forward.
I am writing a book about this upcoming wave. It is called God in a Woman’s Body.
In this wave, women and men are held as equals precisely through their divine differences. Equal in rights, in dignity, in worth before God and law. Distinct in their gifts, their rhythms, their ways of meeting the mystery.
The mystics have always known this. The Tantric traditions speak of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and creative power, each meaningless without the other. The alchemists wrote of the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, the union of sun and moon within the soul. Jung named the anima and animus living inside each of us. Riane Eisler, in The Chalice and the Blade, described a partnership model of civilisation that existed before domination became the rule.
In this integrative wave, a woman can look at a man and see the beauty in him: his devotion, his steadiness, his capacity to protect and to build, his own tender and unspoken grief. And a man can look at a woman and recognise her innate power, her cyclical wisdom, the way her body is a doorway to the mystery. Neither has to diminish to make room for the other.
The early waves secured our sovereignty. This wave can teach us sacred reciprocity. And sovereignty comes first, because you can only meet another in true union once you are no longer owned by them.
Kneeling to the grandmothers
So to the women who say they are done with feminism, I offer this. Love men fully. Soften, surrender, mother, adorn yourselves, choose the life that makes your body sing. All of that is your right, and it is a right that was won for you.
Before you walk forward, turn around for a moment. Look at the women who chained themselves to railings, who were force-fed in prison cells, who were burned, institutionalised and silenced so that you could choose. Kneel to them. Thank them. You can outgrow the shape their fight took while still honouring the fight itself.
The next wave will be built by women who carry both the gratitude and the vision: women who remember what it cost to stand here, and who are brave enough to dream of a love between the masculine and feminine that is finally free.
Our grandmothers fought so that we could become free. Freedom is the only ground on which true devotion can grow.
And perhaps we need a new name for it all together.
