The Mutation of Womanhood
American universities and social networks, increasingly dominated by radical-left ideology, are now cultivating revolutionary women in significant numbers.
By Sasha Gong
When Lindsay Clancy’s trial began, a large group of women gathered outside the courthouse to support her. Clancy is accused of killing her three young children. Whether postpartum mental illness diminished her criminal responsibility is a question for the court, to be decided on the medical evidence and the law.
But some of her supporters appear to have delivered a verdict of their own. They present Clancy not merely as a mentally ill defendant but as a victim of motherhood, patriarchy, and society itself. Their sympathy flows almost entirely toward the accused mother. Her three dead children all but disappear from their moral field of vision.
I remember another mother who killed her children: Susan Smith. In 1994, Smith drove her car into a South Carolina lake, drowning her three-year-old son and his 14-month-old brother. She then claimed that a black man had abducted them. During Smith’s case, it sometimes seemed that more men than women sympathized with her. Many mothers could not accept the idea that womanhood should excuse the murder of one’s own children.
Thirty years later, the times have changed. So has the definition of womanhood—at least within the ideology that dominates our universities.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus popularized a traditional understanding of womanhood: Women fulfill themselves largely through love—love of children, family, parents, and community. Men and women are not interchangeable creatures. Biology helped shape their different social roles, while women’s care historically bound families and neighborhoods together. For most of human history, this was regarded as an obvious part of human nature.
Radical ideology seeks to transform not only institutions but human nature itself. Joseph Stalin wanted to create a “new man,” Homo Sovieticus. Central to that project was the remaking of women. Their loyalty to children and family had to be transferred to the party, the state, and the revolution. Private affection was denounced as backward selfishness; sacrificing one’s own relatives to the cause became proof of revolutionary virtue.
Every communist state followed some version of this path. The “communist woman” acquired a particular meaning: a woman prepared to abandon her family for the party and show no mercy toward anyone branded a class enemy—even her husband, parents, or children. Those who have lived through communist terror know that, once possessed by ideology, female enforcers could be even more vicious than men. They did not merely inflict cruelty. They believed that cruelty demonstrated love, justice, and historical progress.
Rozalia Zemlyachka, one of the highest-ranking women in the early Soviet government, became known as the “Fury of the Red Terror.” In Crimea, tens of thousands of surrendered White soldiers and civilians were reportedly executed. Accounts describe prisoners being tied to heavy stones and thrown into the Black Sea to save bullets; others were allegedly clamped between wooden boards and sawed apart. The precise numbers and details remain disputed, but Zemlyachka’s significance is unmistakable: Once human beings were designated “class enemies,” they ceased to be human at all.
China’s Cultural Revolution produced the same mutation. In 1966, four 14-year-old girls at Beijing No. 27 Middle School beat a 15-year-old female classmate to death. At the Girls’ Middle School Attached to Beijing Normal University, students beat Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun until she died. During that August alone, more than 1,700 people were killed in Beijing. Many of the perpetrators belonged to Red Guard organizations formed by the teenage daughters of senior Communist officials. The violence soon spread across the country.
I grew up in that China. I remember female Red Guards spotting children like me, children from families with the wrong “class background,” pulling off their belts, and beating us. They haunted my childhood—especially their hate-filled eyes. Those women did not believe they were abusing children. They believed they were defending the revolution and punishing class enemies.
Today, I see echoes of those eyes on the faces of America’s radical activists.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented women who participated in the Soviet machinery of repression. Their existence exposes a devastating truth: When ideology grants individuals an absolute right to punish, maternal tenderness can be twisted into meticulous, sustained cruelty.
This is the mutation of womanhood.
The revolutionary woman proclaims her love for humanity, the world, and the future while refusing to love the people closest to her. Children, husbands, parents, and neighbors may all become enemies because they retain ordinary human loyalties—and because they insist that moral responsibility applies even to the ideologically righteous.
Real love is always personal: being a mother, a sister, a friend, and a good neighbor. Revolutionary “greater love,” by contrast, is often envy and hatred in disguise. To love “the people,” one must hate the people’s enemies. To love the future, one may destroy those living in the present. To love the world, one may even kill one’s own children. Hatred is not merely excused; it is romanticized as compassion.
American universities and social media, increasingly dominated by radical-left ideology, are now cultivating revolutionary women in significant numbers. Their slogans are the same ones I heard while growing up in Communist China. Their violent language and aggressive tactics recall the Red Guards who reached for their belts whenever they encountered children with the wrong family background.
If America continues to call hatred compassion, exemption from responsibility liberation, and ideological rage progress, it will lose more than traditional womanhood. It will lose one of civilization’s most fundamental moral boundaries: a mother’s duty to protect her children.
Photo: Plymouth, MA – August 20: Supporters of Lindsay Clancy gather outside of Plymouth Superior Court on August 20, 2026. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
About Sasha Gong
Sasha Gong holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Born in China, she joined the pro-democracy dissident movement at the age of 17 and spent a year in prison for her activism.