Editor’s Note from Serena Sigillito:
This week, we’re proud to present a three-part dialogue between Catholic theologian Angela Franks and radical feminist philosopher Kate Phelan, offered in friendship and a mutual desire for truth.
First, we’re republishing Angela’s November review of Kate’s 2025 book, Feminism, Defeated. Kate’s book is a full-throated defense of second-wave feminism, arguing that a paradigm based on Marxist analysis, which sees men and women as sex classes, is far superior to the defanged postmodernism of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and their followers. In her review below, Angela drills down to their core disagreement, taking metaphysical questions head on. Next, Kate offers a spirited response. Finally, Angela offers her rejoinder.
Can Second-Wave Feminism Be New Again?
Angela Franks
Phelan is right to critique the postmoderns, but her resistance to grounding womanhood biologically or metaphysically undercuts her claims. Further, her reliance on the political friend/enemy distinction imagines that we live in a world in which authentic heterosexual love simply cannot exist.
On Loyalty: A Reply to Angela Franks
Kate Phelan
I ask Franks: if I am wrong, then what is the explanation of women’s condition? Why do women suffer a distinctive—a specifically sexual—abuse at the hands of men? Why does prostitution exist? Is prostitution not imagined as consolation for unmarried men? What does this reveal about the male entitlements of marriage? Why is marital rape practically inconceivable? Why do wives feel that they have a sexual duty to their husbands? Why do they believe that they must have sex with their husbands to show them that they love them? Why are they afraid of their husbands doubting their love?
Why Feminism Needs Judeo-Christian Anthropology: A Response to Kate Phelan
Angela Franks
This vision of politics requires two anthropological factors: an understanding of the dignity of the human person, coexisting with his or her capacity for vice. I draw upon Christian theology for this vision. A non-Christian vision could also come to the same conclusions simply by attentively trying to make sense of both the grandeur and the misère of the human being, to quote Pascal.
This anthropology undergirds my conviction that the intrinsic physical difference between men and women does not mean that men are irretrievably violent. It does mean, however, that they have a particular responsibility to become virtuous in their self-restraint, because their fallen impulses can lead them astray.
