On that hazy June day in 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled that there was no constitutional right to abortion, one thing was clear: This had been a long time coming. Feminists needed to roll up our sleeves. We needed a long-term plan. And we couldn’t just assume that what we had been doing up to this point was working.

The court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson may have been designed to send pregnant people back to the 1950s, but the oral arguments surfaced an idea that could only be at home today. It was the idea that abortion was no longer necessary. Things had changed since 1973, one Supreme Court justice pointed out in their only question. There may have been a time when women needed the right to abortion, but not now. Today women were free.

But what hit me was not the familiar misogyny. It was hearing a staunch abortion opponent claim that women were free.

The source of this “freedom” was about as ghastly as it gets. “Safe-haven laws” allow birthing people to abandon their newborns in places like fire and police stations without facing criminal prosecution. If it was so easy to abandon a newborn, wasn’t the ability of abortion restrictions to “hinder women’s access to the workplace” … “take[n] care of”?

Much of this argument—its erasure of the pregnant body and trivialization of the experience of pregnancy and the adoption decision—was straight out of the conservative playbook.

But what hit me was not the familiar misogyny. It was hearing a staunch abortion opponent claim that women were free. Since when were conservatives saying that women were free? And since when did they seem to be conceding that we should be?

The idea that women deserved freedom was decidedly not from the conservative playbook. The conservative side in the abortion debate had long been spouting versions of the idea that women needed to stay where we belonged, whether that meant accepting the “consequences of our decisions,” remaining in the kitchen, or as the alt-right would have it, accepting that “America belongs to its fathers and is owed to its sons.” But instead, here was an abortion opponent suggesting that “forced motherhood” (yes, she used that term, and yes, it was a she) was not something women should have to undergo.

The only way I could make sense of this seeming about-face was to think about the person who had argued that safe-haven laws respected women’s “bodily autonomy” in the first place. She was a pearl-wearing mom of seven, drafted to the Supreme Court from a Catholic law school, known for seeming to weave a very demanding form of motherhood seamlessly into a high-powered career. It was these bona fides of traditional white femininity that made her popular with her conservative Christian base.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her supporters had long been presenting her as something other than traditional. Barrett, in the eyes of her supporters, represented a new kind of woman.

Barrett was the type of woman who made her own rules. She showed up to her confirmation hearing in a fuchsia-colored dress, as though to make a statement about how femme presentation belonged even in the halls of power. The conservative theater surrounding her confirmation hearing portrayed her as a gender warrior, someone who should be celebrated for not fitting into the conventional mold of what a Supreme Court justice looks like. Never mind that she had been part of a religious group that referred to women as “handmaids.”

Barrett’s embrace of freedom for women wasn’t from the conservative playbook. She was taking pages from the feminist playbook now. And any long-term strategy feminists were going to craft after Dobbs was going to have to face this fact.

Seemingly feminist ideas can be harnessed for causes like misogyny and white supremacy, and it’s not always obvious when that’s happening.

Feminist ideas are powerful, perhaps more powerful than they have ever been. This means, on one hand, that my daughter gets to grow up in a world where there are children’s books full of women, including queer women of color, doing amazing things. It also means, though, that there are plenty of women who, like Barrett, are doing amazing things without my or my daughter’s interests in mind. Seemingly feminist ideas can be harnessed for causes like misogyny and white supremacy, and it’s not always obvious when that’s happening.

When Barrett argued that the illegality of abortion was compatible with women’s freedom, she was using a feminist idea to justify throwing the majority of women under the bus. When she portrayed herself as brave enough to defy sexism, and when her supporters painted her as the victim of regressive gender stereotypes, they affirmed the idea that “representation matters.” The price the rest of us have to pay for that representation is not just lack of control of our bodies, but also judicial decisions that have eroded protections for workers, immigrants, and defendants.

If we want to understand how we got here—to a world where abortion is illegal in 14 states, where the final nail in the coffin was hammered by the “ultimate dystopian girlboss,” and where public support for feminism is at an all-time high—we need to understand that lines of reasoning like Barrett’s are not so dissimilar from those advanced by actual feminists.

Feminism has always included more conservative and more radical strands. It has contained within it, at the same time, people who believed that a feminist reproductive agenda was about keeping the “unfit” from reproducing, people who believed it was about keeping the government out of the doctor’s office, people who believed it was fundamentally about wresting control of our lives from men, people who believed it was about the right to parent, and many, many other things.

There have been people who believed that specific work protections for pregnancy and childcare were politically regressive because they undermined the idea that women could do any job men could, and people who believed that they were dismantling the assumption that men’s work was the only socially valuable work, and all kinds of people in between. Feminists converge on the idea that there is gender injustice and that we should fight against it, but we have not always agreed on what this injustice consists in or what should be done about it.n

But sometimes we have to agree on some fundamentals about what feminism is, and this is one of those times. It is either a goal of feminism to demand abortion rights or it isn’t; it is either a goal of feminism to fight for choice alone or to fight for more; it is either a goal of feminism to tell individual women to dream big or to question the economic system that makes dreaming big so important to begin with. In all of these cases, and many more, what feminism is depends largely on what we decide right now. 

In this moment when we are finally talking about the fact that many feminists have been active supporters of oppressive systems, we should feel very keenly that we don’t get to pick and choose. Many of the same feminists most of us were taught about in history books were at some point allies of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, ableism, cissexism, and homophobia, even producing as feminist goals ideas that supported keeping these other systems of oppression in place.

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt’s very public statements that women’s suffrage was compatible with (and could perhaps even strengthen) white supremacy to Betty Friedan’s claims that women needed to free themselves from “biological living,” as though no one would have to pick up the slack of caring for children or cleaning houses, feminisms for the few have been with us for a very long time.

But freedom feminism is not our only option. We can think toward something else—a feminism for the many. If there have always been many strands in feminism, this moment is an invitation to pick up another strand.

Excerpted from Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.