{"id":2653445,"date":"2026-09-02T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignthe-story-about-lindsay-clancy-being-a-victim-comes-from-deeper-roots-than-1960s-feminism\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T07:57:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T11:57:18","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignthe-story-about-lindsay-clancy-being-a-victim-comes-from-deeper-roots-than-1960s-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignthe-story-about-lindsay-clancy-being-a-victim-comes-from-deeper-roots-than-1960s-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story About Lindsay Clancy Being A Victim Is An Old One"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignthe-story-about-lindsay-clancy-being-a-victim-comes-from-deeper-roots-than-1960s-feminism%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2653445&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The article discusses the disturbing cases of constance Fisher, who drowned her children in the 1950s and 1960s, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/sing-out-in-anger-washington-examiner\/\" title=\"Sing out in anger - Washington Examiner\">highlighting societal tendencies<\/a> to sympathize with or forgive women who commit such acts due to perceived mental health struggles. It critiques how cultural narratives have historically portrayed women as inherently weak,emotionally fragile,and in need of protection,linking this to early feminist ideas and social reforms that framed motherhood as oppressive and problematic. The author traces these themes back to the late 19th and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/no-requiring-id-to-vote-is-not-like-jim-crow\/\" title=\"No, Requiring ID To Vote Is Not Like Jim Crow\">early 20th centuries<\/a>, referencing works like Charlotte perkins Gilman&#8217;s &#8220;the Yellow Wallpaper&#8221; and developments in legal and social attitudes that pathologized womanhood and motherhood. The piece argues that this history has contributed to a contradictory cultural landscape where women are both empowered and portrayed as fragile victims, leading to confusion and contradictions within feminist and social paradigms. The discussion concludes with insights into current cultural conflicts over gender roles, accountability, and societal expectations, exemplified by recent incidents like Lindsay Clancy\u2019s case. The overarching theme is that ongoing debates reflect a deeper struggle to reconcile conflicting narratives about femininity, strength, and vulnerability in modern society.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In 1954, a New England mother named Constance Fisher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/article\/the-bangor-daily-news-constance-fisher\/104330595\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">drowned her three young children<\/a> in the bathtub. Her husband came home and found his children dead, and discovered that his wife had tried to kill herself. Everyone felt badly for Constance, because she was obviously going through a terrible struggle with her mental health. She escaped prosecution, was hospitalized and released, and then had three more children with the same husband, who had forgiven her. <\/p>\n<p>In 1966, for the second time, Fisher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/article\/sun-journal-constance-fisher\/104330568\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">drowned her three children<\/a> in the bathtub, after which she was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1973\/10\/09\/archives\/mother-who-allegedly-killed-6-children-found-drowned.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">sent back to the hospital<\/a>. Toxic empathy killed children with the predictability of sunrise. One mother, <em>six<\/em> murdered children in two decades: Oh, that poor woman! How she must have suffered!<\/p>\n<p>A much-discussed theme this week is that the sexual revolution and <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >1960s feminism caused social derangement<\/a> and a loss of values, or \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/SusanneRosh333\/status\/2094935110210732420\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">feminist victimhood dogma<\/a>,\u201d leading to the sick moment in which women dressed up in pink cultural uniforms like Manson Girls and fangirled for poor Lindsay Clancy outside the courtroom. But Constance Fisher was granted a shameful and dangerous forgiveness before Gloria Steinem <a href=\"https:\/\/nymag.com\/news\/politics\/46802\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">showed up<\/a>, and the roots of the story in which a mother who kills her children is really a <em>victim<\/em> go back a lot farther. Early feminism is intertwined with the story, but therapeutic culture and the assault on motherhood started well before the second wave feminism of the 1960s arrived.<\/p>\n<p>Two historical moments defined women as weak, given to emotional collapse, and in need of benevolent intervention. In the decades after the Second Industrial Revolution, the emerging status group of the management class wife was found to be afflicted with nervous exhaustion, or <a href=\"https:\/\/wttepodcast.com\/2017\/09\/04\/neurasthenia-cowboys-feminists\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">neurasthenia<\/a>. The cure was bed rest and resort vacations. The early feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew on her own <a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC12503072\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">postpartum neurasthenia<\/a> and confinement for bed rest to write the 1892 horror story <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/1952\/pg1952-images.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em><\/a>, about a woman locked in a room by her physician husband. Woman has a baby, is imprisoned by her husband, and goes crazy. Motherhood is sickness, despair, and oppression. This is now a <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2026\/08\/14\/the-left-has-no-idea-what-the-right-believes-about-babies-or-anything-else\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">well-established narrative<\/a> on the American political left. Babies ruin you, <em>handmaid<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Soon after, one of the towering landmarks of Progressive Era legal reform advanced the idea of women as weak creatures who needed an imposed benevolence. Arguing before the Supreme Court for the constitutionality of labor laws, the future justice Louis Brandeis delivered the then-unusual \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Brandeis-brief\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brandeis brief<\/a>,\u201d a long argument that drew on the language of supposed science as much as it talked about the law. State regulation of working hours was needed, Brandeis <a href=\"https:\/\/www.encyclopedia.com\/history\/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases\/women-industry-brandeis-brief-1903-louis-d-brandeis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">told the court<\/a>, because experts said that\u00a0\u201cwomen are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance.\u201d Sociologists have spoken, so government has to be more powerful.<\/p>\n<p>Crippled by the oppression of motherhood and their own weak spirit, women needed liberation, and society needed to rationalize and professionalize the female social role. This isn\u2019t 1960s girlboss empowerment. It\u2019s a deeply strange interweaving of contradictory themes in which the inherently weak female mind of the strong independent woman is set free from the toxicity of responsibility. <\/p>\n<p>Gilman shows up in that story again, <a href=\"https:\/\/digital.library.upenn.edu\/women\/gilman\/economics\/economics.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">writing about<\/a> motherhood and professional bakers: Bread used to vary in quality from house to house, she wrote, as different women used different techniques and produced a product of varying quality. But now, industrial-scale commercial bakeries have standardized the loaf. Taking a function out of the home made it more consistent. \u201cThe baker is not in the same industrial grade with the house-cook,\u201d Gilman wrote, \u201cthough both make bread. To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step. Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress, the organic methods of social life. They have been forbidden to women almost absolutely.\u201d Bakers make better bread, so credentialed social workers make better children.<\/p>\n<p>The historian Christopher Lasch <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Haven_in_a_Heartless_World\/QUFYneP-HQwC?hl=en&#038;gbpv=1&#038;bsq=socialization%20of%20reproduction\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">described<\/a> this professionalization of the pieces of motherhood as \u201cthe socialization of reproduction,\u201d replacing families and parenthood with the credentialed work of the \u201chelping professions.\u201d Lasch thought that the story of the twentieth century was about the long assault on the family as a social and moral center, the place where you learn to be a person.<\/p>\n<p>What we have now is a contradictory and incoherent muddle: the powerful woman who doesn\u2019t need a man because she\u2019s strong and fierce, but she collapses into an oppressed state if someone inflicts a baby on her hormone-addled mind. Women can have it all, women can do anything, babies absolutely destroy them. Feminism doesn\u2019t know what it wants to be when it grows up. In part, the Clancy madness is a manifestation of the war between second wave and fourth wave feminism, much like the conflict between pro-trans feminists and TERFS, or trans-exclusionary feminists. Several <em>different<\/em> movements marching behind the label of feminism have delivered us to a cultural condition centered on things that can\u2019t all be true: You\u2019re so mentally weak that babies will destroy you, powerful girlboss! And the contradictions are widely noticed.<\/p>\n<figure>\n<p><span><\/p>\n<blockquote data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">As a woman, I\u2019ve been following the Lindsay Clancy case closely, and this woman explains a difficult truth perfectly! &#8220;You can&#8217;t demand equal authority then ask for discounted accountability&#8221; \ud83d\udc9b <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/klRfPi7fk7\">pic.twitter.com\/klRfPi7fk7<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 G-MA &#038; G-PA (@GmaIndiana) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/GmaIndiana\/status\/2094641811465572680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 1, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>We\u2019re going through a period of reconciliation, in which the contradictions have to be cooked out so we can figure out where we\u2019re going. In Massachusetts this week, that cultural argument is producing some remarkably ugly spectacle.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at &#8220;Tell Me How This Ends,&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/chrisbray.substack.com\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1954, Constance Fisher drowned her children, then attempted suicide<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":2653446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/clancy-rally-scaled.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[49245,84295,44146,36174,84994],"class_list":["post-2653445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-controversial-cases","tag-lindsay-clancy","tag-media-narratives","tag-public-perception","tag-victim-story"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/clancy-rally-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653445"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2653449,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653445\/revisions\/2653449"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2653446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}