All of women's aspirations--whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination--ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

The women's movement. . . has proved women's own worst enemy.

As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.

Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

I've never believed that women have some special, essentialist qualities, or were more nurturing, cooperative, and morally superior.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.