It all looked so beautiful, the glossy images plastered across magazines, the television shows that came alive, and the rousing slogans; but they were all lies, an alluring cover to the evil that lay beneath the smoke and light.

Feminism was a poison apple; one that Western Civilization was all too happy to swallow. Is it any wonder that Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of Britain, said, “I hate feminism. It is poison.” No one can seriously claim that she was anti-woman.

Feminism was a gateway to more than just equality. In fact, its goal was never truly equality. Instead, feminism’s dreams were far darker. Feminism’s goals were to remove the concept of woman and destroy the traditional family.

One might be tempted to believe that it was only in recent years that feminism has been focused on eliminating the concept of female; this is not true. In 1949, the influential second wave French feminist Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a book exploring the question, “What is a Woman?” Beauvoir concluded that man and woman are socially constructed hierarchies, not biologic realities. She wrote, “The female is a woman insofar as she feels herself as such.”

It’s clear when looking at Beauvoir’s writings that the destruction of the concept of woman began long before the twenty-first century; unfortunately, that same idea persists today. In a Stanford encyclopedia published in 2018, leading feminist philosophers wrote, “Feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: the binary view of gender.” How can feminism, the idea marketed as equality for women, seek to destroy the very concept of woman?

As if destroying the concept of being a woman wasn’t enough, feminism also seeks to destroy the family. In recent years, this goal has crystallized in the public sphere. Dr. Sophie Lewis, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, has written multiple books on abolishing the family including Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation.

Dr. Lewis claims that even people who call their family relatively “happy” should sign onto demolishing the nuclear family. Further, during second wave feminism Shulamith Firestone, a feminist writer and a proponent of abolishing the family, wrote, “Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.”

And who would suffer the most from the “abolition of the family?” We see the evidence already from the demise of the two-parent home throughout American society: the harm falls most heavily on children. According to the NIH, “Children who grow up with two married parents tend to fare better than others.” In other words, abolishing the traditional family structure harms children and widens inequalities.

True femininity was sacrificed on the altar of feminism’s dark goals. While many women who currently claim to be feminists have the best intentions, few know the true nature of this insidious ideology. They believe they are fighting for equality of opportunity, a noble goal. Unfortunately, the feminism handed down to the modern woman was a poison pill hidden under colorful rhetoric. Rhetoric that at long last is being peeled back to reveal the devil hiding within its deep-seated roots.

— Sophia LaRue is president of the Turning Point USA chapter at Southern Kentucky Community and Technical College. She is a dual-credit student with a passion for politics and debate.