Life & Wisdom Quote by Tammy Bruce

Tammy Bruce’s line is built to sound like a lament, but it functions like a taunt: the insinuation that feminism once had legitimate, reality-based grievances and now runs on ideology, grievance theater, or institutional momentum. The phrase “Gone are the days” cues nostalgia for an allegedly more honest era, while quietly positioning the speaker as someone who remembers the “real” past and can therefore declare the present counterfeit. It’s a rhetorical power move disguised as regret.

“Reality fed the feminist movement” is the fulcrum. “Fed” frames feminism less as a moral or political project than as a creature sustained by external conditions; remove the conditions, and the creature should starve. That’s not neutral description. It smuggles in the premise that feminism is reactive, not principled; opportunistic, not structural. The sentence doesn’t have to prove that “reality” has changed or that inequality is over. It only has to imply that continued feminist critique is evidence of delusion, exaggeration, or bad faith.

The cultural context is the recurring post-second-wave claim that feminism succeeded so thoroughly it became redundant, then morphed into something else: identity politics, bureaucracy, campus activism, media outrage. Bruce, a conservative commentator with a background often cited as “former feminist,” trades on the authority of insider disillusionment. The subtext is less “women are fine now” than “the movement can’t admit it’s obsolete, because its power depends on insisting reality is worse than it is.” That’s why it lands: it offers listeners a clean escape hatch from complexity and a tidy villain for ongoing social friction.