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.

Women are enslaved by their own liberation.

In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.

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.

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.

We think of a feminist as someone a woman becomes in reaction to personal indignities and social injustices. But the truth is, such inequities only awaken her to the feminist she has always fundamentally been - that is, a person who understands that her first responsibility is to her own humanity. That's why, for my money, the first known use of the word 'feminist' is still the best, appearing in an 1895 book review: a woman who 'has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.