But we do know how previous debates like this have gone, or how they’re going. Feminists were divided over surrogacy and commercialized fertility, but the opposition to both practices gradually dissolved, and now only eccentric conservatives notice the weird resemblances between California-style surrogacy practices and the handmaids and econowives of Gilead. They were divided over pornography, often bitterly — but over time the sex-positive side increasingly won out over the Andrea Dworkinish dissenters, even as the online realm was overrun with images and videos that more than justified her arguments. They were, and are, divided over prostitution, but it’s pretty clear that the version of feminism that supports the rights of sex workers to sell their bodies in the marketplace has the intellectual momentum.

Then, too, in a broader sense the most culturally important strands of American feminism have been the ones devoted to making women’s lives safe for market capitalism rather than the other way around — with “lean in” and egg freezing for Silicon Valley elites and the temporary sterilization of I.U.D.s and LARCs for the working class, both together encouraging the idea that professional goals are the heart of personal fulfillment, for the sake of which other female realities and aspirations must be managed or give way. (The rather important female reality of motherhood, a Guardian essayist noted recently, “comes up in less than 3 percent of papers, journal articles or textbooks on modern gender theory.”)

I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercise in trolling. (Did you know, feminists, that you’re all just slaves of capital? That you need less cultural Marxism and more of the genuine economistic article?) But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision.

For most conservatives this reforming vision is assumed to be religious — the Christian moralism that attacked the vicious capitalism of slavers and gentled the ruthless capitalism of robber barons and sustained nonmarket institutions like the family and the church across the long ascent of global wealth. But I am not under any illusions about the cultural position of my own faith in the late-modern West. At best, Christians may hope to build a counterculture, but in the wider landscape our ability to shape trends or resist them is at a historical low ebb.

Whereas feminism in this age of #MeToo inquisitions (I mean that in a good way) and “the future is female” ambition does have real capital to burn. So as feminists look around for places to turn their moral energy, the consumerist trajectory of their movement is worth contemplating, and the suspicious gaze that 1980s feminism once turned on the flesh trade in all its forms might be worth recovering.

At the very least it is a grave mistake for feminists to assume that because the moralism of the past was often patriarchal and sexist, they must always choose “consenting adults” individualism over a more holistic morality, a presumption for choice over a defense of human dignity, the logic of the market over more communitarian alternatives, a consumerist interchangeability of the sexes over a social architecture that respects their differences.

Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift. It might yet be a form of feminism — if feminists can stop going with a current that their foremothers wisely attempted to resist.