Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement by Sue Ellen Browder
June 1, 2020
For June’s Book of the Month, we selected Sue Ellen Browder’s book, “Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement,” published in 2015. Sue Ellen Browder was a long-time freelance writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, writing pieces meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception, and abortion as the single woman’s path to personal fulfillment. Star-struck by the prestige of working for Cosmo did she misjudge how destructive her click-bait articles were for young women.
About the book…
Contraception and abortion were not originally part of the 1960s women’s movement. How did the women’s movement, which fought for equal opportunity for women in education and the workplace, and the sexual revolution, which reduced women to ambitious sex objects, become so united?
In Subverted, Sue Ellen Browder documents for the first time how it all happened, in her own life and in the life of an entire country. Trained at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to be an investigative journalist, Browder unwittingly betrayed her true calling and became a propagandist for sexual liberation. As a long-time freelance writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, she wrote pieces meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception, and abortion as the single woman’s path to personal fulfillment. She did not realize until much later that propagandists higher and cleverer than herself were influencing her thinking and her personal choices as they subverted the women’s movement.
The thirst for truth, integrity, and justice for women that led Browder into journalism in the first place eventually led her to find forgiveness and freedom in the place she least expected to find them. Her in-depth research, her probing analysis, and her honest self-reflection set the record straight and illumine a way forward for others who have suffered from the unholy alliance between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution.
Discussion Questions
In what ways can the Conservative Movement defeat the Left’s decade-long attack against Abstinence Only education, and reinvigorate the curriculum for healthy relationships in a modern, exciting way?
Sue Ellen Browder speaks often about, “Reclaiming the F-Word,” of course meaning, feminism. In her book, she traces the history of the American feminist movement and how it became entangled with the abortion-rights movement. In your opinion, is there a chance for conservatives to reclaim to word feminism, or does the word’s modern day meaning conflict too much with the pro-life, pro-women position?
Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!