Journalist Kate Mulvey is the latest feminist to say mea culpa: “I paid a very high price for my so-called liberation“. Meanwhile, anti-feminism is spreading among young people.

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Blame feminism, says Kate Mulvey.

63 years old, a journalist and radical activist, she declares herself alone and childless and blames the ideology to which she devoted herself for years for a fate that today appears to her as a profound defeat.

 

“Feminism ruined me”

In a spare and direct account, Mulvey reflects on her life:

«I am convinced that the reason I keep booking a table for one at 63, instead of having found a partner, is because, as with many women of my generation, feminism ruined my love life».

Mulvey remembers her start in the women’s liberation movement at a prestigious English university, when «we spent lunch breaks soaking up the feminist mantras of Germaine Greer and Betty Friedman: “Behave like men”, they shouted while burning bras and demonizing housework and the family».

Mulvey describes her disastrous romantic relationships, when she got angry at every kindness received from a man, even if it was a bouquet of flowers. She reaches «deep regret» for the number of «casual flings» she had that left her each time «empty and used».

Yet feminists always encouraged “to have sex like a man” but this too, she writes, «backfired on us».

The greatest wound for women like Kate Mulvey, victims of feminism, seems to be precisely loneliness and the forced suppression of the maternal instinct.

Instead of guaranteeing power, she explained, «second-wave feminism made us believe that marriage and domestic life should be avoided like the plague and that men were enemies rather than partners».

She had always imagined her marriage, wonderful children but «I paid a very high price for my so-called liberation».

 

Is something changing?

Today something is changing and in the United States and on TikTok the phenomenon of so-called “Tradwife” is spreading, driven by anti-feminist women who praise role distinction, motherhood and family life.

Mulvey herself states that «the idea that women are different from men and that casual sex can be harmful to us is gaining ground».

As a reference she cites British journalist Louise Perry, author of the bestseller “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” (2022) in which she refutes arguments in favor of the sexual revolution.

In her latest book, “A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century” (2025), Perry shows with data in hand how casual sex, dating apps, pornography, the norm of premarital contraception and the normalization of sexual perversions put women at risk. She believes society would benefit from a return to traditional values.

Neither Mulvey nor Perry, of course, claim a patriarchal society or a submission to men.

Rather a valoriziation of the family where roles are traditionally understood, a society where motherhood is not opposed and where a woman can choose to favor the home and the family over a working career without being considered abnormal, submissive or neglectful.

 

Repentant feminists, also in Italy

Over the years we have given voice to these women, in 2022 for example we talked about Candace Bushnell, author of the famous feminist program “Sex in the City”. She too, same script: «We are all single women, childless. Before I didn’t think about it, now I feel lonely».

And what about writer Samantha Johnson? «When I became a mother», she wrote, «feminism disappointed me. We preach to girls that there is no value in motherhood, we promote the professional career as a symbol of success completely de-valuing the contribution of parents at home. We must tell women how important it is to be mothers».

In Italy this awareness is still slow to arrive.

We found it in a rare, stifled lament from Rossana Rossanda, communist founder of Il Manifesto, when she admitted: «Having had children? Now I would feel less alone and above all I would have the perception of having passed something of myself on».

In one of the few unmasked moments, radical leader Emma Bonino also expressed similar feelings.

«I have never been a wife, never a mother», she confessed the radical leader. «I have always been alone. Alone intimately, politically. I cry a lot, alone. On this sofa. I curl up here and cry».

The poet Alda Merini had already understood everything, in 2008 she was recruited without her knowledge by feminists in an appeal against the “obscurantist” Pope and she denounced it in an interview with Lucia Bellaspiga, adding:

«A woman’s true right is that of motherhood: the child is the greatest act of love and its mystery remains intact. It is blasphemy to deny all this in the name of a feminism that is the opposite of being female, in the highest sense of the term».