On February 16, 2026, Leah Libresco Sargeant wrote a review of Carrie Gress’s book Something Wicked. Carrie Gress was invited to respond.
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s review of my book, “Something Wicked Leaves Readers Unprepared to Evangelize,” came as no surprise. It was the latest in a long string of attacks on my work related to feminism and Mary Wollstonecraft. See here, here, here, here, here, and here for others like it.
I have been writing for a long time, and I value critiques that are thoughtful, honest, and constructive. We all have blind spots, things we miss or even misunderstand. Sargeant’s review was not this kind of critique and lacked what can be considered a scholarly and impersonal evaluation, offering only one direct quotation, while neglecting the main themes of the book. Instead, the review focused narrowly on Wollstonecraft like those reviewers before her.
First, let’s start with the details related to Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Sargeant writes this:
[Gress] goes further, saying that Wollstonecraft should be judged not just by her writing but by the “bad fruit” her work bore in her disreputable daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, who ran away with a married man. Gress neglects to mention that Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after her daughter’s birth from complications of pregnancy. The book tempts readers to believe they can skip past deep examination of Wollstonecraft’s work, since Gress’s just-so story of “bad mother, bad daughter” gives permission to move on. In fact, they are exposed as evangelists without the armor of scholarship or charity. Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?
A more careful reading of the book would have avoided the many misinterpretations found here. The first error is that Sargeant says that I judge Wollstonecraft by her fruit, not her writing. Anyone who reads Something Wicked will see the numerous footnotes and quotations from Wollstonecraft’s work, as well as the effort to paint an accurate portrait of Wollstonecraft in situ—that is, in the context from which she came.
For Sargeant to write, however, in a Catholic publication that it is illegitimate for me to consider the fruit is shocking. It was, after all, in another Catholic publication that we are told we can discern the goodness of a movement by its fruit: “A tree is known by its fruit” (Matt 12:33). Roughly two hundred plus years of the feminist movement have shown us some very bad fruit, starting in the movement’s first wave, as I discuss in detail in Something Wicked.
The relevance to Wollstonecraft is that if she were truly following the Christian ethos, which contemporary apologists like Sargeant have assured us that she was, we would be able to see it in the lives of the women who followed her. So certainly, Mary Shelley is one of my examples, but not a standalone as Sargeant suggests. Here is the broader context from Something Wicked:
A look at Wollstonecraft’s immediate disciples indicates that perhaps not all is fair in the world of Wollstonecraft. Their lives are not marked by the fruit of healthy thinking and living. Certainly, Wollstonecraft’s own life had some moral flaws and failings—including premarital affairs and suicide attempts—as we have seen. Her first student, on whom she exerted great influence as nanny and tutor, was Margaret Mason, later Lady Mount Cashell. As an adult woman, while traveling abroad, Mason became involved in an affair with a fellow Englishman. The affair continued and she ended her marriage and abandoned her seven children, including her nursing toddler whom she was later obligated to return to her father, never to see again. Living near Pisa, Italy, Mason lived a second life with a second family.
Then there is Wollstonecraft’s own daughter, Mary Godwin, who ran away with the very married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her own stepsister (along with all the attending elements of scandal that go with a threesome in Paris). Eventually, Shelley’s wife committed suicide and Shelley and Wollstonecraft’s daughter were married. But scandal traveled with them, even after Shelley’s untimely death in a boating accident at twenty-nine years old.
Next are all the American women followers we met in chapter 1, who scuttled Christianity. Despite Wollstonecraft’s extensive talk of virtue, duty, and responsibility, there is very little evidence that any of these women—including Wollstonecraft herself—took these moral demands very seriously. (170—171)
Readers immediately intuit that this is scarcely Sargeant’s proposed “bad mother, bad daughter,” but is an important element in the scrutiny of a movement that Sargeant and others currently argue has a philosophical purity necessary for today’s Catholic women.
Sargeant also says that I don’t mention Wollstonecraft’s death. Again, a more careful reading would have surfaced this passage, which is a description of the relationship between Wollstonecraft and her husband, William Godwin, at the time of her death:
Unfortunately, we will never know what their relationship would have come to, because of Wollstonecraft’s untimely death ten days after delivering her daughter, Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Their family dynamic exemplified a commitment to egalitarianism, Enlightenment rationality, and the elimination of church hierarchy, authority, and tradition. (27)
It is a tragedy for any mother to die in childbirth, and I’ve wondered on numerous occasions what might have come had she lived. Sargeant goes on to say, “Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?” This line seems very odd since at no point in the book do I ascribe such an idea. Even if I had not mentioned Wollstonecraft dying in childbirth, my omission would be rather insignificant when one realizes that I wasn’t making a “bad mother, bad daughter” kind of argument in the first place.
But perhaps what is most surprising about Sargeant’s review is that she writes that my “book tempts readers to believe they can skip past deep examination of Wollstonecraft’s work, since Gress’s just-so story of ‘bad mother, bad daughter’ gives permission to move on.” The link found in the review is to this book: The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision by Erika Bachiochi. Truly, this is a significant oversight to suggest that I ignore Bachiochi’s analysis of Wollstonecraft’s work. In my book, I dedicate a full section, from pages 168—192, to engage directly with Bachiochi’s interpretation of Wollstonecraft. This kind of deep analysis, saturated with footnotes, is highly unusual in a nonacademic book. Moreover, this extended treatment of Bachiochi’s book is presumably where Sargeant contrived the “bad mother, bad daughter” argument. How did she somehow see my short mother-daughter reference but miss the twenty-plus pages of critique of Bachiochi’s interpretation of Wollstonecraft in which it is couched?
Sargeant goes on to say that her point is that “Gress is deliberately not engaging with the strongest arguments of her opponents.” Such posturing crumbles quickly when one realizes that the vision she paints of my book falls into this very error.
Sargeant is also critical of the way in which I define the feminist movement. She writes:
Gress aims to reveal the secret history of the many overlapping feminist movements, and argues they all are rooted in three principles: an embrace of promiscuity, a hatred of men, and attachment to the occult. Solid second-wave feminists like my nonreligious mother, who subscribe to none of these principles, are dismissed as peripheral or lying.
Aside from the reality that nowhere do I suggest that women are lying about their ideas on feminism, nor is there a “secret history,” this criticism, too, has a glaring prejudice. Sargeant contends that there are any number of feminisms. Because of the multiplicity, she maintains that only a particular dissection of each is allowed, while a general discussion of the feminist movement is impossible. My contention, in Something Wicked and in many other books and articles, is that there is an overriding feminist movement. Certainly, the movement has developed and expanded over the centuries, but most of the foundational pieces of the movement, which we see throughout feminism’s history, originate in the first wave.
This lack of rigor throughout Sargeant’s position crystalizes when we apply her approach to other movements or categories. We could not, for example, speak intelligibly of a “communist movement.” Only a particular discussion of each of the myriad types of communism would be permitted, so that we are left with only hyphenated communisms: Marxist-communism, Soviet-communism, Chinese-communism, North Korean-communism, etc. “Catholicism” and “Catholic,” too, would be illegitimate topics of investigation because of all the possible hyphens: TLM-Catholic, pro-choice-Catholic, cultural-Catholic, conservative-Catholic, etc.
Philosophically, Sargeant’s limitation fundamentally undermines all thought and speech. It denies the intelligibility of every genus (such as feminism, or tree, or happiness) because a genus can be subdivided into various species. So trees are out, but oak trees and pine trees are in. Except that there are many different types of pine trees, so they must be tossed out too, and the ten dozen or so individual species are in. But each individual tree within each of these species, like the western white pine tree, is a bit different, so we are left with only that solitary individual standing in my front yard.
And if that weren’t bad enough—and it is disastrous—Sargeant makes it even worse. Her general suggestion is that we can’t speak intelligibly of a feminist movement because it means different things to different people. To return to the trees, every person who encounters that lonely tree might attach to it a different meaning (great source of shade, obstacle to flying a kite, etc.). The objective tree has disappeared into the subjective consciousness of the individual.
Reality, as anyone not under the spell (consciously or unconsciously) of modern philosophy knows, is much different. Just as we can speak of trees and Christianity, we can speak of feminism. That’s why, in at least three books on the topic, I have been able to highlight the underlying philosophical principles of the movement, uncover the ideas that were seeded in the early days of the first wave, and demonstrate that they are still visible in the movement today. This is what philosophy does. And it can do that while also accounting for variations: The trunk of a definition can have diverse branches, just as a genus has its species.
At the end of the day, despite all this fuss over Wollstonecraft, Catholics remember that we aren’t trying to convince people of the existence of Mary Wollstonecraft, or even of her goodness. Evangelization is about a real encounter with the person of Christ. My scrutinizing of feminism is to remove the obstacles that prevent people—women even like Sargeant’s mother—from seeing Christ and themselves properly because of feminism’s poisoned prism. Despite Sargeant’s warnings that I’m doing it wrong, I’m seeing, in real time, people of all stripes and ages—including lesbians, trans, lifelong feminists, and atheists—converting or moving in various stages toward the truth. Hearts and relationships are being healed, marriages restored, and children are being born. Most are asking, “Why haven’t I ever heard this before?”
Why, indeed.