Feminism was supposed to make women stronger, happier and freer. But after several generations of liberation, maybe we’re finally old enough to ask an impolite question: did anybody bother to read the fine print?

Candy Thompson certainly has. She’s now in her 80s, and after looking back at her marriage and the Christian faith she walked away from and eventually returned to, she’s reached a pretty blunt conclusion: feminism failed her.

Thompson, who attended the University of North Carolina in the 1960s, said learning about feminism while in college helped lead her away from her Christian values.

“[Those values] didn’t seem to answer the questions that I was asking. And then I heard about feminism, and that was in the culture … It sounded good because it was about equality,” she added. – Fox News

I’m about to turn 60 myself, and I understand the looking-back part a whole lot better than I would have twenty years ago. The older you get, the more you find yourself reconsidering things you once believed and choices you once made and, occasionally, wondering what on earth you were thinking.

Feminism Sounded Pretty Good At First

There’s nothing particularly radical about a woman wanting to be treated as an equal human being. I’m rather fond of having my own opinions, making my own money and deciding what I want to do with my life, thank you very much.

But Thompson says something changed. She came to believe feminism wasn’t simply telling women they were equal to men. It was teaching them to see men, marriage, motherhood and even God as things standing in their way.

Her own life got messy. She suffered a miscarriage, married, had three abortions during a troubled first marriage and eventually divorced. Years later, she returned to Christianity, remarried and began looking at the choices she’d made very differently.

Now she says feminism “pitted us against men,” against having children and even against God.

Feminism was created to dismantle the family, not to liberate women. pic.twitter.com/SipAHFGtBl

— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) June 29, 2026

I’m Still Pretty Fond Of Girl Power

And for the record, I’m all about girl power. I just prefer the old-fashioned kind.

Give me the women who got together for a hen party, watched each other’s children, brought a casserole when somebody was sick, knitted together, held sewing and quilting bees, swapped recipes, helped with a new baby, passed down hand-me-downs and somehow knew when another woman needed an extra pair of hands without requiring a committee meeting about it.

Women have always been pretty darn good at taking care of each other.

Women supporting women back then didn’t require hating men or believing we needed to be exactly like them to be considered strong. We have our own unique strengths, and they’re meant to work alongside the different qualities men bring to the table. At least that’s how I see it. We were never supposed to be in competition with each other.

But we went astray; we took something women had been doing naturally for generations and decided that wasn’t empowering enough.

About That Pesky Fine Print

And this is where I think feminism started slipping a few extra things into the deal.

Women gained freedoms and opportunities that I’m grateful to have. But somewhere along the way, equality wasn’t enough anymore. Then came the lectures about the evil patriarchy and toxic masculinity, because apparently simply telling women we were strong wasn’t enough. We also needed somebody to blame.

And if you want to see how far the definition of feminism has wandered, listen to this debate between Pearl Davis and Bella.

At one point, Bella says she believes sex and gender are social constructs and that what we’re born with shouldn’t determine our roles in life.

How did we get from women deserve equal rights and opportunities to being a woman shouldn’t really mean anything at all?

Somewhere between those two ideas, feminism took one heck of a detour.

We weren’t simply told we could have careers, we started hearing that staying home with children was wasting our potential. Depending on a husband became weakness. Traditional marriage became suspicious. Christianity became patriarchal. Motherhood became something to escape rather than celebrate.

Feminism didn’t cause every bit of cultural craziness we’re dealing with today. But teaching women that so much of traditional womanhood needed dismantling absolutely came with consequences, and we’re living with them now.

Ladies, the good news is we’re allowed to change our minds. We’re allowed to look around, admit some of this went way too far and start walking a few things back.

The feminist revolution could use a little counter-revolution.

Feature Image: AI-generated illustration.