When Women Pay the Price: Why Feminism Is Still Necessary—and Why It Has to Be Real
The pattern hasn’t disappeared. We’ve just learned how to talk around it.
There has been a steady drumbeat of names over the past few weeks: Dr. Cerina Fairfax, Pastor Tammy McCollum, Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer, Barbara Deer, Ashanti Allen—among others. These women lived different lives in different places, some highly visible in their communities, others more private. Taken together, their deaths do not read as isolated incidents. They read as variations on a pattern.
And yet, alongside this pattern, another claim continues to circulate with increasing confidence: that feminism is no longer necessary. That whatever battles once justified it have already been won. That what remains is either excess or overreach.
That claim requires a certain kind of blindness. Not to individual cases, which can always be explained away, but to the structure that connects them.
What the Pattern Actually Shows
Across the United States and globally, women are most often killed by men they know—partners, former partners, or family members. According to UN Women, an average of 137 women and girls are killed every day by intimate partners or family members. The most common site is not the street, but the home. The most consistent predictor is not randomness, but prior control.
These are not fringe cases. They are not statistical outliers. They are the most common form of lethal violence against women.
If feminism were no longer necessary, this pattern would not be so stable.
Why This Keeps Getting Minimized
Part of the reason this pattern is so easy to dismiss is that it does not present as a single, unified crisis. It appears as a series of personal failures: a bad relationship, a troubled man, a situation that escalated. Each case is treated as its own contained story, disconnected from the others.
That fragmentation allows the structure to remain unnamed.
A framework that treats each instance as individual cannot explain why the same dynamics repeat across geography, class, and culture. It can describe what happened. It cannot account for why it keeps happening.
Where Softer Frameworks Fall Short
This is where the difference between liberal and radical feminism becomes less theoretical and more practical.
Liberal feminism tends to locate the problem in gaps—unequal pay, representation, access, opportunity. Its solutions follow from that: inclusion, advancement, visibility. These are not trivial gains. They matter.
But they do not fully address a pattern in which women are most at risk inside intimate relationships, regardless of status, education, or visibility. A woman can be professionally successful, publicly respected, and still be killed by someone with direct access to her life.
That is not a gap in opportunity, but a problem of structure.
A framework focused on individual advancement struggles to explain why proximity itself can be dangerous. It assumes that increased autonomy resolves risk. In many cases, particularly at the point of separation, that autonomy can increase it.
What a Material Analysis Makes Visible
A radical feminist framework starts from a different premise: that women are a sex class, and that certain risks are tied to that reality in ways that cut across individual differences.
This does not require rejecting relationships, family life, or motherhood. It requires looking clearly at how those relationships are structured and where power sits within them.
When you do that, the pattern becomes easier to see.
Women are most often harmed by men who have:
access to them
established relational authority
the ability to monitor, restrict, or escalate
The home is not just a private space. It is a space where those conditions converge.
This is not about assuming every relationship is abusive. It is about recognizing that the risk is patterned, not incidental.
When Control Cannot Be Maintained
There are cases that make this structure more difficult to ignore because they extend beyond a single victim.
In Shreveport, Louisiana, a man killed multiple members of his own family across two locations before being killed by police. The violence occurred in the context of an ongoing separation, with a court date imminent. By that point, the relationship had already entered a formal process of dissolution.
Research has long established that separation is one of the highest-risk periods for lethal violence. The issue is not the act of leaving itself, but what it represents within a relationship where control is a defining feature. When that control cannot be maintained, the response is not always withdrawal. In some cases, it escalates.
In incidents like this, the violence extends beyond the partner to others within the same relational sphere—children, relatives, anyone positioned within that structure. The scale changes, but the underlying dynamics do not.
This is often described as a “domestic incident,” a term that reduces the scope of what is being observed. The reality is that it reflects the same pattern seen in smaller-scale cases, intensified rather than altered.
Why This Still Matters—Even Now
The persistence of this pattern complicates the idea that feminism is outdated. It suggests that the underlying conditions it sought to analyze have not disappeared, even as other areas have changed.
What has shifted is how those conditions are discussed. There is more emphasis on identity, on expression, on individual autonomy as the primary measure of progress. Those conversations are not irrelevant, but they can pull attention away from material realities that have not moved as much as we might prefer to believe.
A framework that avoids naming sex-based patterns of risk will struggle to address them. It can adapt language, refine tone, and expand definitions, but it cannot resolve what it does not clearly identify.
The Question Beneath the Argument
At a certain point, the question is not whether feminism is still needed in the abstract. It is whether there is a framework willing to describe what is happening without softening it into something more comfortable.
A version of feminism that cannot account for why women are most at risk in intimate, domestic contexts is not incomplete by accident. It is incomplete by design.
This gap is not new. I’ve written before about how a feminism that prioritizes ideology over material reality struggles to meet women’s actual needs—particularly around family, motherhood, and safety. In Beyond the Ballot: How Radical Feminism Can Lead the Fight for Women’s Rights, I argued that what women need is not a broader definition of empowerment, but a clearer one. The need for clarity has not changed. Only the willingness to confront it has.
What Remains
The pattern has not disappeared. It has become easier to ignore.
As long as that pattern persists—across regions, across classes, across cultures—the need for a framework that can name it clearly remains.
The issue is not whether feminism is still necessary. It is whether the version being offered is capable of doing the work.