From Liberation to Disappointment: Tracing the Feminist Arc

MarsCast Series on Feminism | Episode 1 of 3

Welcome to MarsCast, the official podcast of Mid-America Reformed Seminary. I'm Jared Luttjeboer. Today, we're beginning a three-part series that's probably going to challenge some of your assumptions. What we're going to be talking about in our series is about the women in your neighborhoods, women in your workplaces, and women maybe even in your churches.

Our guest for this series is Dr. Andrew Compton, professor of Old Testament studies here at Mid-America Reformed Seminary. Dr. Compton delivered a plenary address at our 2025 Center for Missions and Evangelism Conference on the topic of how Jesus meets women in their womanhood and how the church can do the same.

Now, I know what some of you might be thinking: here we go, another talk about women in the church. But before you hit that pause button, let me tell you what this series is not about. This is not about women's ordination. It's not about adopting any sort of woke ideology or intersectional feminism. And it's definitely not about compromising biblical complementarianism.

Instead, this is about evangelism. It's about understanding the cultural forces — particularly feminism — that have shaped how the women around us think about meaning and purpose. And it's really about recognizing that many women today are burned out not by patriarchy, but by feminism itself. This is really about learning how Jesus — the Jesus of Scripture, mind you — offers these women something infinitely better than what the world has promised them.

So in this first episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the history and development of feminist ideology. We're going to trace it from the Industrial Revolution through the radical feminism of the sexual revolution, all the way to today's intersectional feminism. We don't want to score any political points here, but we do want to understand what these women have been told will make them happy — and why it hasn't.

Why Is an Old Testament Professor Talking About Feminism?

Jared: With that, Dr. Compton, welcome to MarsCast. You teach Old Testament — so why are you qualified to talk about this very topic?

Dr. Compton: Why am I qualified? You know, it is funny. Somebody was asking me recently why I've been doing all this stuff. You think of [2024] at our CME conference, I talked about story, and even here on MarsCast we did a few episodes on fiction and apologetics, and now here we are doing something on feminism.

The CME talk I was asked to do — it does seem like in the time since my dissertation was completed, I almost needed something of a mental break. You get so focused on something very, very precise, very narrow — even narrow for Ezekiel studies. And I kind of just needed some mental space to explore some topics that I'd been hearing about and looking into.

What's driven me here is really just an interest in, and a concern for, a lot of what's going on in societal discourse — and especially how a lot of that societal discourse, as it relates to men and women, has made its way into the church.

Some of this came out of a sense that books were being written that were not simply urging men on to godliness, as we might have seen during the Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s. But books were coming now urging men to do things like divest themselves of their toxic masculinity. And I went, wait — what? No. It was just interesting that otherwise very reasonable writers were suddenly parroting a lot of this language and these categories.

And then after the events of 2020 with George Floyd, we saw race come to the foreground again, and it seems like social justice became just such an interest, even among many Christians — maybe it got legs it didn't have before, even in more conservative circles. That got many of us trying to do that audit. We had to look at things: How are we doing with issues of race? How are we doing with issues of gender?

That led me to start reading really broadly and effectively finding — as Thaddeus Williams put it — Social Justice A versus Social Justice B. Social Justice A being the more aggressive, the more intersectional, the more Marxist category. We've seen that make some disturbing inroads into the church and sort of co-opt our ability to even talk about honoring other human beings.

Anyway, there's a long answer to an on-point question. How did I get into this? Some of it was just the experience of what was going on, and in God's providence, I had some mental space following my dissertation. So here we go.

Jared: Thanks for that. And if you do get to know Dr. Compton even personally, you'll get to know that he actually does have enough mental space to acquire a new hobby once a month, if not even once a week — whether that's spit valves from a trumpet or harmonicas.

Dr. Compton: I was into sheepdog whistling for a while, but I never got any good at that.

Jared: That's awesome.

Dr. Compton: I just bought a sheepdog whistle that's in my car now. Love it.

Why Talk About Women Right Now?

Jared: Anyways, let's talk about your address. And by the way, if you haven't listened to it, please go to Mid-America's YouTube channel — you'll find Dr. Compton's address there in our playlist for the 2025 Center for Missions and Evangelism Conference.

In your address, you begin by acknowledging that talking about women in the church is difficult in confessional Reformed circles. And I think that's for good reason. We've seen the devastation of women's ordination debates and the slide toward embracing LGBTQ+ ideology in some denominations. But I think you're asking us to tune our ears differently here. So, help us understand why it's important for us to focus on women and feminism right now, and how this is different from capitulating to feminist ideology.

Dr. Compton: Yeah, that's a good question. Talking about women in the church has been very much affected by the debates on women in office — and I think those go even further back. Even at earlier times in history, there have been women who were involved to some degree or another with church work in controversial ways. I think of Aimee Semple McPherson, who was — before the sexual revolution proper — acting as a pastor in many ways. She was once asked by the press about whether women should be pastors, and if I'm not mistaken, her response was essentially, "Well, God told me to do this," so that kind of simplified things from her perspective.

But there's been this debate about women in office, and that has played itself out. And I think in many ways it really affects how we talk about women in the church. Then, when you start thinking about evangelism, I was asked to give this talk for an evangelism conference, and the thought was, how do we evangelize women? One of the things that really came to my mind was that many of the women we are evangelizing, or want to evangelize, have been steeped in the ideology of radical feminism since the sexual revolution. And so if we're entirely caught up with the debates on women in office, I don't think we're positioned to really understand the kinds of presuppositions that many women have in our culture — at least here in the West, here in North America. We're not really able to understand the kinds of things that they hear when we use ordinary biblical language.

So a big part of what I wanted to do was unpack some of those things that would help me think through: what are some of the pitfalls I need to be careful of when I'm talking with a woman about Jesus? And then, what are some of the pitfalls we need to avoid when we talk about ways of actually utilizing the gifts of women in the church?

In this present season of discourse and politics and all the things in culture that affect our witness, we always need to be making sure we're steering clear of pitfalls. We don't want to fall into something of a traditionalism about women. And the sad thing about much of that traditionalism is that even though some people have cited teachings from even before the sexual revolution, they can still fall into something of a reductionist approach to women. Much of our discourse on women participating in the church is driven by a reaction — I think it had to be fairly quick — to the sexual revolution, one that didn't exactly think through all the nuances. Of course, that's just how cultural things happen.

So that's one thing we had to avoid: that traditionalism. But at the same time, it's been really disturbing to see major critical Marxist social justice rhetoric — if not actual points of thinking — infiltrating even more conservative and confessional Reformed theological spaces. And that's not helpful to the church, and it's not helpful to women.

Jared: Yeah, that's really helpful framing there — to be careful that we're not talking about adapting our theology to culture, but about understanding culture so that we can evangelize more effectively. And I think, maybe with that foundation, let's actually get into the history itself.

A Brief History of Feminism

You trace feminism's development in your talk through several distinct waves or phases — from the Industrial Revolution through intersectional feminism today. Maybe walk us through that history. What were some of the key turning points, and what has feminism promised women at each stage?

Dr. Compton: Yeah, it's a big history, and honestly it's something I don't think I could really do full justice to in the talk — and even less so in a single podcast episode. So I think it would be helpful to just walk through a couple of key points that'll organize our thinking for future study on this.

If you're looking for a really helpful volume, Nancy Pearcey's book The Toxic War on Masculinity — subtitled How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes — I think you'll find that to be a very helpful volume. That has been very formative for me in thinking about this history and the different waves of feminism. There are a number of other resources, too — you'll hear about them in the talk if you watch the YouTube video, or the PDF transcript is located somewhere on the website as well.

But maybe what we could do is just frame some of the main things to remember.

As I said at the beginning of the talk, and I want to make it clear here: women aren't a monolith. Women in the church are not a monolith. Non-Christian women are not a monolith in the US and Canada. Even non-Christian women in Chicagoland are not a monolith. There are all kinds of different people, and we need to be nimble when we go about sharing our Lord with them.

But I think it's worth considering just how much feminism is in the air that we breathe. It's affected so many categories. And when you combine that with another modern movement — what Carl Trueman has popularized in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as "expressive individualism" — we see how feminism is part of a wider social turn toward the psychologization of the self and toward the expression of individual identities that we perceive to be most operative or most salient in our experience. And that really affects how we think about gender. Now we're looking at gender expression — and I don't mean just transgender gender expression, all that is a part of this too. But making individual expression of gender central: here is where feminism plays out. I say in the talk that feminism is a specific expression or application of expressive individualism to one's identity as a woman. That at least frames how we think about this going forward.

Now, when we talk about feminism and the history of feminism, most people recognize that sexual liberation is a part of it. At the same time, many highlight some of the major concerns of feminism — namely, male-only voting rights, male-only property ownership, women's suffrage, and all those categories. Those are part of the development of feminism as well, which may not directly relate to the plank of free love or abortion on demand that plays out in some expressions of feminism, although it also plays out really from the very beginning.

I go through all that background just to point out that when we get into feminism, we have to remember that even some of the initial mothers of the movement — Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, and her daughter Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and her son-in-law Percy, who was considered something of an early first-wave feminist — they saw free love, sexual licentiousness, as a key to living fully as a liberated individual. That's why abortion was so desired at its earliest points, because the idea was: you need to be able to engage in sexual behavior with no consequences. You need to have the same kind of perceived freedom that men had sexually. Women needed to have that, too.

The Industrial Revolution and the First Wave

The other thing that I thought was really helpfully developed by Nancy Pearcey was how important the Industrial Revolution was to upending social norms of men and women. No doubt throughout history, women — ordinarily being of smaller size and strength than most men, with obvious differences and obvious exceptions — have faced unique vulnerabilities and have been exploited by men throughout history. Rape is not something new. It's been around a long time.

But the Industrial Revolution really brought a lot of these concerns to the foreground and gave women an opportunity to push back against some of these abuses in ways they hadn't before. Mary Harrington's book Feminism Against Progress — another very, very helpful treatment, not a Christian treatment, and I think it's even got some choice language that makes it a little hard on some people's stomachs, but still a very useful analysis — she really gets at the point that the version of women's liberation that became dominant in many ways during the Industrial Revolution was a campaign to enter the labor market and to enter it on the same terms as men.

The Industrial Revolution took life, which used to be so interconnected — men, women, husband and wife, moms and dads living at home, engaged in their business in the home. Think of the blacksmith shop in the front of the home, the living quarters in the back — very easily going back and forth between childcare and chores, or between work-related things and home-related things, both men and women. With the Industrial Revolution, with the development of the factory and men going out to work — out to that dangerous place — that really changed the relationship between husband and wife, and the relationship that mothers and fathers had with their kids. And as that led to a whole slew of negative social byproducts that really were not good for children, not good for women, not good for men either, that drove a lot of the activism that brought about the first wave — looking for reform of things like voting rights.

The Second Wave: Radical Feminism

Then you had the second wave: radical feminism in the 60s and 80s, where they really started to use straight-up Marxist tactics. And then that poured into the third wave — intersectional feminism from the 90s all the way up until today. And that's not even primarily about women anymore, but about all victim groups defined by progressive ideologies.

Who Are the Women We're Encountering Today?

Jared: So let's talk about how, today, this plays out. You discussed the #MeToo movement and what Mary Eberstadt refers to as "primal screams" — that substitution of rage for reason. Who are these women that we're encountering today? What do they believe about themselves, and about men, and about what will make them happy? And why are they so angry and so disappointed?

Dr. Compton: Well, we have to cover some of the ground we jumped over. So much of that first wave of feminism was still driven by a classical liberal ideology of human worth and human value — effectively, of human beings bearing God's image, although some forms of that classical liberal approach don't necessarily have a distinctively Christian approach to the imago Dei. But nonetheless, there were classical liberal things that tethered those initial waves.

Of course, there were these exceptions of free love. I don't think we can state enough that even some of those early founders were very committed to sexual liberty across the board — the same kinds of things that would develop in the sexual revolution. But a lot of those early women were also very caught up with spiritualism and paganism. And I say this because there are people today who want to say, "No, no, no — I'm just a feminist in the sense of that first wave." And I want to say: if what you mean is that women's image-bearing has sometimes been insufficiently appreciated and overlooked — absolutely, I get that. But be careful invoking the first wave, because you're invoking a whole host of other things as well.

Radical feminism, of course, really did move — they took that sexual liberty and went to town with it. And again, the technological ability to make abortion much more common was also part of that. That trope from back in the day: safe, legal, and rare — or something like that. Well, it's never really proved to be very safe. And in spite of the fact that it is legal to some degree, well, the "rare" thing really fell to pieces, I think, pretty early on by design.

But the sexual revolution, which had been maybe tethered to classical liberalism, now in the 1960s when these kinds of things took off, moved toward communist and utopian goals, structures, and tactics.

And you can see this even in Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique — something of a manifesto. And the ironic thing is that she and those following her used this rhetoric of anti-fascism, right — we've got to fight against this boogeyman of patriarchy. The crazy thing is that the anti-fascist rhetoric is identical to the rhetoric of actual fascism. It was the Soviet Union that wanted free abortion, because they didn't want people encumbered by children when they could be working for the people. The Soviet Union was the one who wanted women out of the home, wanted the state raising your children so that women could do real jobs that would better benefit the people. The Soviet Union wanted women to view motherhood as a distraction from more important roles in society. And yet here you have these radical feminists using the same movements — especially these kinds of neo-Marxist consciousness-raising groups where groups would come together and talk about how they'd been wronged, how they'd been victimized.

Again, I'm trying to be careful here. There are real victims, and we've often done a very poor job of attending to them. But there's also this whole new victim cult — as Mark Milky even describes it, and as people like Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have noted in their study of the rise of victimhood culture and microaggressions. There's a whole new development of victimization that has come about.

And all of this work in the period of radical feminism kind of stoked discontent, which, like you said, has led into the present, into this intersectional feminism, which has just gone all the way in with Marxism — with this newer recent wave that some of us have tried to peg as beginning with the Clarence Thomas appointment to the Supreme Court and the allegations made by Anita Hill. When those were not sustained against Thomas, and he was in fact appointed, that was thought by many to be a backlash against feminism, which then led to this newer wave of intersectional feminism. That has played out sort of in the transgender movement of today. But keep in mind, this third wave has raced well beyond women. It's something of a shell game, because now you'll hear people saying, "I'm just concerned about women" — except what they mean is they're concerned about a particular kind of woman over and against another kind of woman.

The fact that the third wave of feminism is happy to turn on a woman like J.K. Rowling — who did not sufficiently champion the expressive individualism of transgender people, who said, "Wait a minute, there really are women, and there really are men, and they're different" — that gives a sense of where all this has gone. It has been driven by this perception of who the victims are and who is standing in power over those victims, and that has now driven the rhetoric. And so people are now being taught to identify themselves cheaply as those who have been wronged.

You mentioned the #MeToo movement — and I did address that in the talk. It's been a co-opting of that movement. The #MeToo movement had an important beginning. It was drawing attention to sexual extortion — if not dealing with outright sex trafficking, it was also dealing with really sketchy ways that men in Hollywood were behaving toward women, and drawing attention to how, throughout the business sector and in many different places, there were women being used and mistreated sexually by powerful men. There was the hashtag "Me too" — I too have been wronged in that way.

And yet, unfortunately, this neo-Marxist and intersectional definition of victimhood bled into the MeToo movement. Now we have this ever-expanding application of the claim "believe all women" — if a woman says, "When that taxi driver talked to me, that was mansplaining, that was a microaggression" — or not even a microaggression, that was an aggression — "therefore I am as much of a MeToo victim as," for example, the U.S. gymnastics scandal that, thankfully, Rachael Denhollander blew the lid off of, along with so many other girls and women who fought against that.

But look how this has really poisoned the rhetoric. It now says that all women are to some degree a MeToo woman, because all have in some measure been victims of these abstract boogeymen of the patriarchy, or the binary, or gender normativity. All of these are from Mary Harrington's work, where she's noting a lot of these different people and really what we're seeing now.

There used to always be what Mary Harrington called a "feminism of care" differing from a "feminism of freedom." The feminism of care was one that said: here you have women being wronged — physically harmed, emotionally harmed, physically mistreated, and malnourished because their husbands are not being faithful to them, are not working, are being lazy. Culture is not providing them with resources to physically do well. There was a feminism of care which sought to redress some of that. But then there was a feminism of freedom at the same time, working through expressive individualism. And ultimately, the feminism of freedom is what won out.

What has that done? It has created this generation of angry, hurt, broken, and disappointed women who don't know how to break the cycle of their disappointment — and what they're doing is trying even harder to achieve fulfillment along the lines of expressive individualism by committing even more to feminist ideals, feminist tropes, the whole feminist project, which has been a failure.

Eberstadt calls it "primal screams" — like you said, a substitution of rage for reason. And again, rather than thinking through how this rhetoric is dividing the sexes and how that is harming women when men are turning against them, they're now just engaged in a rage that divides them even further, makes them even angrier, and makes them even further... again, it's an awful cycle. And it has harmed women, it's harmed men, it's harmed everybody.

What's Next

Jared: Well, this is sobering, but very important for us to understand. In our next episode, we're going to turn a corner and look at how Jesus himself engaged with women in his earthly ministry and what that means for these women today who are so hungry for something better. Thank you for helping us see the landscape clearly here, Dr. Compton, and thank you for listening to MarsCast.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with your church leaders, small group, or anyone who's trying to navigate these cultural waters faithfully. I'm Jared Luttjeboer. We'll see you next time on MarsCast.

MarsCast is the official podcast of Mid-America Reformed Seminary. Find Dr. Compton's full CME Conference address and more at Mid-America's YouTube channel.