Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.Readers of the Western Standard are probably aware of the recent mistrial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three young children, then left herself paralyzed from the waist down after jumping out a second-floor window in a botched suicide attempt.Though uncommon, horrifying female infanticides like this have happened before, and not just in the United States. In fact, as Janice Fiamengo shows in her new book The Goddess That Failed, women commit more infanticides than men. But what grabbed my attention about this trial was the phenomenon of Lindsay Clancy superfans, almost all women, who raised money for her, dressed in pink to rally outside the courtroom, and spoke endlessly to the media.I was mystified, even stupefied, by this behaviour until I read Fiamengo’s book. The author is a retired professor of English literature from the University of Ottawa. After retirement, she has built a new career with her video series, the Fiamengo Files, which exposes the lunacies of ideological feminism.Fiamengo is no intellectual lightweight. With a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and many professional publications to her credit, she excels at interpreting texts and setting them in historical context. Yet she writes with a light touch that makes her work accessible to all readers interested in the subject.Fiamengo’s history of feminism emphasizes the book by Karl Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). She quotes Engels: “the modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman... In the family, [the man] is the bourgeois, the wife represents the proletariat.”.Feminism as an ideology is thus another manifestation of the class struggle about which Marx and Engels wrote so voluminously. Their German word Klassenkampf is usually translated as “class struggle” but could also be translated as “class war.” And for ideological feminists, politics is indeed a kind of war, carried on by all means fair or foul, and devoted to the humiliation and even destruction of opponents.Let me mention a couple of things I learned from Fiamengo’s book that substantiate this claim. First, violence: the British suffragettes, who are idolized by historians today, did not just engage in public protest. Some of the best-known among them were terrorists, setting off explosives in mailboxes and even trying to murder male opponents. And dishonesty: Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique (1963) is acclaimed as the inauguration of modern feminism, fabricated her own life story. She wasn’t a lonely housewife trapped in the “comfortable concentration camp” of domesticity. She was a journalist and political activist who hired a housekeeper to look after her children. Let me riff on Fiamengo’s title, The Goddess That Failed. Readers of a certain age may remember a book entitled The God That Failed (1949), which contained six autobiographical accounts by prominent one-time Marxists of how they became disillusioned with their political faith. I remember being particularly affected by the chapter written by Arthur Koestler, whose novel Darkness at Noon (1940) had exposed the grim reality behind the Soviet show trials of those who harboured doubts about Stalin.Fiamengo’s title is a clever but obvious allusion to The God That Failed, but she chose not to explain it nor to describe her own story of deconversion from feminism. However, anyone who’s interested can easily get that story online from the Fiamengo Files.Growing up in Vancouver and educated at UBC, Fiamengo was exposed to feminist hectoring in the classroom from childhood onwards. She adopted the faith, espousing it throughout graduate school and the early years of her career as an English professor. But she couldn’t help noticing along the way that the university world she lived in was nothing like the world described by feminists. The men she met were kind and respectful, not driven by “rape culture.” The university itself favoured women at every stage — admission of students, recruitment, and promotion of staff, policing speech, and behaviour on campus..Her cognitive dissonance reached the tipping point in 2012, when she saw on television the spectacle of purple-haired feminists at the University of Toronto blocking an invited address by Warren Farrell, author of many books including The Myth of Male Power (1993). Then, to paraphrase St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from her eyes, and she switched from being a proponent to a critic of feminism.The object of her criticism is what I call “ideological feminism,” or “class war feminism.” It remains a malign presence on the intellectual and political landscape, but fortunately it has not poisoned everything. Most women still go about their lives in constructive relations with men. Happily married and loving their children, both boys and girls, they also pursue their jobs, professions, and careers. We are all better off because labour-saving devices invented by men have enabled such women to broaden their contribution to society outside the home. But the ideological feminists, intoxicated with the venom of class war, are never satisfied.The Goddess That Failed will help you understand the strange persistence of ideological feminism. In my retirement, I read two or three books every week, but this one is special. I found it more enjoyable and enlightening than anything I have read for months. Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.Janice Fiamengo, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War on Men, Families, and Civilization Itself. Nashville: New English Review Press, 2026.
