Feminism sells itself as liberation, a path to empowerment, equality, and fulfillment. In reality, it has produced generations of angry, discontented, and often deeply unhappy women. As Janice Fiamengo compellingly documents in her recent essay "Bad Choices, Anger, and Mental Illness," the movement's leading lights have long exhibited patterns of personal chaos, bitterness, paranoia, and outright mental breakdown. Far from outliers, these troubled pioneers reflect an ideology that systematically cultivates ingratitude, grievance, and rage.
Modern data bears this out. Liberal and feminist-identifying women report higher rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and antidepressant use than their non-feminist counterparts. They are, by many measures, among the least contented women in the West. Feminism does not merely attract the discontented; it actively breeds and sustains that discontent by framing normal life, marriage, motherhood, biological reality, even personal responsibility, as oppression. The result is a toxic feedback loop of bad choices justified as rebellion, followed by anger when reality fails to conform to the ideology.
Founders and Foot Soldiers: A Legacy of Unhappiness
The historical record is damning. From Mary Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts after disastrous romantic entanglements, to Emmeline Pankhurst's embrace of militant violence, to Simone de Beauvoir's ethical lapses, Valerie Solanas's attempted murder, and Shulamith Firestone's schizophrenia, feminist history is littered with personal wreckage. Betty Friedan built a career on exaggerations and falsehoods about domestic life. Andrea Dworkin and others became consumed by fantastical victim narratives. Phyllis Chesler, a Second Wave veteran, later admitted the movement was rife with "petty jealousies," bullying, ideological purges, and mental breakdowns among its most prominent figures; yet still blamed "patriarchy" rather than the ideology itself.
These were not incidental tragedies. Feminism's core narrative, that women are perpetual victims of systemic male oppression, that traditional roles are prisons, that fulfillment lies in career, autonomy, and sexual liberation at all costs, encourages precisely the behaviours that lead to isolation, regret, and despair. When relationships fail, children are delayed or foregone, and careers prove less satisfying than promised, the ideology provides a ready scapegoat: society, men, "the patriarchy." Personal agency is minimised; grievance is maximised.
Modern Evidence: Depression, Anger, and the Victimhood Personality
Contemporary research confirms the pattern. Women overall report higher rates of depression and anxiety than men, roughly twice as high in many studies, with feminist-aligned worldviews correlating strongly with poorer mental health outcomes. Liberal women, in particular, show elevated loneliness, dissatisfaction, and psychotropic medication use. Feminism amplifies this by promoting rumination on perceived injustices, "silencing the self" in relationships while externalising blame, and framing ordinary setbacks as evidence of systemic victimisation.
The "tendency for interpersonal victimhood": a documented personality construct, fits feminist subculture perfectly: constant rumination on wrongs (real or imagined), low empathy for out-groups (especially men), and justification for hostility or revenge. Outward anger expression, encouraged as "speaking truth to power," appears to correlate more strongly with later depression in women. The ideology turns normal human disappointments into proof of cosmic injustice, trapping adherents in cycles of rage and despair rather than resilience or acceptance.
This is not empowerment. It is psychological poison. By pathologising marriage and motherhood while romanticising "independence" (often code for instability and casual sex), feminism steers women toward choices statistically linked to higher regret and mental distress: delayed marriage, higher divorce initiation rates (often after children), career-primary lifestyles that clash with biological clocks, and a rejection of complementary sex roles that evolved for good reason.
The Cultural Machine Amplifying the Harm
The education system, media, and institutions like the ABC reinforce the script from kindergarten onward. Girls are taught to see themselves as oppressed rather than capable, to view men as threats or competitors rather than partners, and to outsource responsibility to abstract "systems." The result is a cohort primed for anxiety and anger, quick to medicalise normal emotional turbulence and slower to build stable families or communities.
Feminism's promise of sisterhood collapses under its own logic. When victimhood is the currency, competition for most-oppressed status breeds the infighting, backstabbing, and purges long observed within the movement. True contentment, rooted in meaning, relationships, responsibility, and realism about human nature, becomes unattainable.
The psychological toll is not an accident; it is a feature. An ideology that defines women primarily by their grievances against men and tradition cannot deliver happiness. It can only deliver clients for therapists, pharmaceutical companies, and activist NGOs.
Women (and men) deserve better. Rejecting feminism's counsel of perpetual discontent does not mean returning to rigid 1950s stereotypes. It means embracing evidence-based realities: the protective effects of stable marriage and motherhood for mental health in many women, the value of complementary strengths between sexes, and the dangers of delaying family formation. It means fostering gratitude for the unprecedented opportunities Western societies already provide, rather than manufacturing new oppressions.
Feminism did not liberate women from unhappiness. It industrialised it. The rising rates of female depression, anxiety, and anger are the predictable harvest of bad choices dressed up as ideology. The cure begins with discarding the feminist poison.
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/bad-choices-anger-and-mental-illness