How can any decent, reasonable person not be a feminist in the 21st century? This is how many progressive and reasonable young people now see the question: If a feminist is not some bra-burning, hairy-legged man-hater, but simply someone who respects women as equal to men and wishes for women to enjoy the same opportunities that men do, then are we not all feminists now?

An older generation of militant feminists sees complacency and ingratitude in this now-prevalent feminism “lite.” From their point of view, the more easygoing attitude of younger women ignores the price paid for women’s hard-won gains. What seems to be simple common sense to younger beneficiaries of feminism is in fact the prize of earlier political and ideological battles.

Conservative critics of today’s feminism by default agree with more militant feminists that what now passes for common sense on the man/woman question rests on ideological assumptions that were vigorously contested not so long ago. Sure, everyone agrees with women’s equality, but as soon as we ask just what it means to value womanhood and to promote female flourishing, then we find ourselves groping through the tallest grass of political and philosophical debate.

Modern individualism proves a handy ideological machete to cut through this thick philosophical problem: Let each individual, man or woman (or, we have recently added, any other elective gender) decide for herself how she wants to be valued and how she defines flourishing. But this individualistic reduction of feminism merely conceals and displaces the hard questions.

No society can afford to be indifferent to the way individuals define success; every society holds up and incentivizes a certain understanding of human well-being and of what is shared and what is different between men and women. It is obvious, for example, that feminists do not typically measure their movement’s success by the percentage of women who devote themselves full time to mothering — hence the once-common feminist epithet for a more traditional “lifestyle choice”: “barefoot and pregnant.”

In this feminist framework, the motherhood and wifehood option does not deserve the honorific title of “choice,” precisely because it is seen as a vestige of a patriarchal tradition. A true choice, a truly feminist choice, is a choice of individual fulfillment over the maternal role that nature, bolstered by patriarchal tradition, so long imposed. A true feminist choice is an individualistic choice, precisely the kind of choice (professional status and sexual freedom with minimal familial obligations) that the modern, emancipated male first showed he could get away with. The slope from equality with men to sameness on male terms is not easy to resist.

But today’s easygoing feminist assures us that women can have it all, that there is no need to choose between a more traditional, family-centered role and a more emancipated, self-fulfillment model. Ah, if wishes were horses! In fact, the wish to have it all, the best of motherhood and the best of “liberation” on an equal footing with liberated men, is precisely the feminist-lite delusion that both radical feminists and conservative non-feminists contest.

Real feminists understand that to equalize women within the formerly male world of individualistic success and freedom necessarily requires various kinds of affirmative state action on behalf of the sex that is burdened by nature with the role of childbearing and child care (not to mention — goddess forbid! — husband care). For example: If women are handicapped in their rise up the corporate ladder by years distracted by motherhood, then work must be reorganized to put all on an equal footing, and the state must impose “equal pay for equal work” — of course defining “equal work” so as not to give the advantage to humans without wombs.

Speaking of wombs — for here is really the heart of the question — the ultimate equalizing strategy is, of course, abortion, the woman’s “right to control her own body.” Here the old feminists follow their logic more remorselessly than the younger lite feminists: If feminism is individualism, then it requires the liberation of the biologically female individual from the natural encumbrances of womanhood.

Now, if someone wanted to define feminism as aiming precisely at the flourishing of what is distinct in womanhood, thus giving due consideration to the life-giving womb, well, that would be a very different discussion. “Difference feminists” sometimes claim to start here, but to do so would overturn the whole feminist project as we know it. Unfortunately, neither radical nor lite feminists really question modern individualism or its basis in the model of the supposedly emancipated male.

Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of BYU.