Mary Harrington is a contemporary British writer and essayist who came to prominence as a contributing editor at the online magazine UnHerd, where she developed a distinctive critique of what she calls the "progress theology" underlying modern liberalism. Trained in the assumptions of feminist liberationism, she has described undergoing a change of view after motherhood, which reoriented her thinking toward the material and embodied conditions of women's lives rather than the pursuit of ever-expanding individual autonomy.
Her central argument, set out most fully in her book Feminism Against Progress, is that the emancipation narrative of mainstream feminism has become entangled with technological and market forces that dissolve bonds of dependence and obligation. She contends that innovations celebrated as liberating — from contraceptive technology to the commodification of bodies and reproduction — can also serve capital by treating the self as an infinitely malleable, atomized economic unit. On this reading, the promise of limitless freedom obscures the ways women, and especially mothers and the less affluent, are left more exposed. She styles her position "reactionary feminism," deliberately reclaiming a word usually deployed as an insult to signal a defense of interdependence, embodiment, and the family against what she sees as a corrosive drive toward disembedded selfhood.
Harrington's work draws on and contributes to a broader post-liberal current in Anglo-American commentary that is skeptical of both progressive social liberalism and free-market individualism, and that looks to older sources of meaning — kinship, place, the body, limits — as correctives. She is a frequent essayist and podcast voice, and her arguments about surrogacy, transhumanist ambitions, and the effects of digital technology on human relations have made her a recognizable figure in debates about the future of the family.
Her stance is contested. Critics on the left argue that framing feminism as "against progress" risks naturalizing traditional gender roles and understating the real gains autonomy and reproductive technology have brought women; some also read her interventions in debates over sex and gender identity as unduly hostile. Supporters counter that she offers a materialist critique of liberation myths rather than a call to return to the past. Either way, she has become an influential exponent of the idea that not every extension of individual freedom is straightforwardly emancipatory.