Warning: It's that time of year again. International Women's Day. Time to admit, despite 40 years of astonishing progress for women, things are really rotten. Time to figure out whose fault that is.

Judy Rebick knows. "The triumph of neo-liberal/neo-conservative politics has dealt a mortal blow to a feminism that seeks economic and social equality," Canada's best-known feminist writes. "The gains we have made are threatened by the increasing impoverishment of women . . . the rise of racism, militarism and the security state; the monopoly of men on power . . . and the continuing scourge of war and violence against women and children."

If you are unaware of just how bad things have got, you can also consult the experts at York University, which is so feminist it even teaches feminist geography. Just in time for IWD, a helpful press release promises fresh insights on how women are being oppressed by globalization, by cutbacks in health care, by the male business establishment, and by non-inclusive pedagogies, whatever those are. If you want an update on "anti-racist, post-colonial and transnational feminisms," York's the place for you.

Story continues below advertisement

The trouble with these experts is that almost every claim they make is wrong. What impoverishment? What rise in racism? Women in the West, even minority women, have never been more economically and socially equal than they are today. Oh, sure, we still get stuck with the child-rearing and the dishes. But feminists must concoct increasingly exquisite grievances to make their case. The vast majority of women can only dream of oppression as exquisite as ours.

Yet, when it comes to women who really are oppressed, Western feminists have nothing useful to say. How can we help Afghan girls whose schools are being burned down by the Taliban, or women in South Africa who endure one of the highest rape rates in the world? What about the unwanted female children of rural India whose parents let them starve, or the millions of African women suffering from HIV-AIDS because of the deeply sexist sex habits of the men? And how can we help the millions of Muslim women who live under the worst kind of gender apartheid?

Sorry. If you want answers, don't call York or Ms. Rebick. They'll just blame Western imperialism.

Phyllis Chesler, one of the best-known feminists of the 1970s, has had enough. In a powerful essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, she argues that modern feminism has betrayed the very women it claims to serve. "It gives me no pleasure, but someone must finally tell the truth about how feminists have failed their own ideals and their mandate to think both clearly and morally," she writes. "Because feminist academics and journalists are now so heavily influenced by left ways of thinking, many now believe that speaking out against head scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female genital mutilation is either 'imperialist' or 'crusade-ist.' "

In other words, the feminist establishment has it exactly backward. Western values and institutions aren't the problem. They're the answer. We should be doing our best to spread them. Capitalism and globalization have done more to empower oppressed women of the world than all the NGOs on Earth. Peasants pulled up from destitution as India gets richer are less inclined to starve (and abort) their female children. Chinese girls who escape the serfdom of rural life to make goods for Wal-Mart are far freer and better off than their mothers ever were. And who are the most oppressed women in the West? They are, in large part, the immigrants who belong to certain subgroups that have rejected liberal Western values.

Ms. Rebick says she deplores the rise of militarism and the continuing scourge of war and violence against women and children. Well, who doesn't? Maybe she's referring to Congo and Darfur and other lands where tribal warlords run amok and millions of people are dead. On the other hand, maybe not. Those places don't count, because America didn't do it.

P.S.: It's not neo-liberal and neo-conservative politics that killed feminism. The feminists did.

Story continues below advertisement

mwente@globeandmail.ca