By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · June 2026
I support feminism.
I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the rest of this essay will be difficult and I am not interested in being misread. The project of equal rights, equal political voice, equal access to public life, equal protection under law — these are not controversial to me. They are axiomatic. The documented history of what women were denied, and what they fought to claim, is one of the most important stories in American civic life.
I am also a man who was called a misogynist, a woman-hater, a racist, and an antisemite by a campaign that was organized and executed almost entirely by women, in the name of the very principles those words are designed to protect.
What follows is not an attack on feminism. It is a documentation of what happens when the tools and vocabulary of a liberation movement are captured by a social enforcement mechanism and turned against the people the movement was supposed to protect — including, in the end, women themselves.
A Brief Map of the Waves
The feminist wave model is a simplification, as the historical literature acknowledges, but it is a useful one. The first wave — roughly the mid-nineteenth century through suffrage — fought for women's legal personhood: the vote, property rights, education, access to public life. Its great achievement was making women visible as political subjects. Its great limitation was that it often centered white, middle-class women and left the structural questions about power untouched. Getting into the room is not the same as changing what happens in the room.
The second wave — roughly the 1960s through the 1980s — widened the scope dramatically. It treated sexism not just as a legal problem but as a social system embedded in family life, labor, sexuality, reproduction, and culture. Its most important contribution, for the purposes of this essay, was its analysis of social enforcement: the way patriarchal structures maintained themselves not primarily through law but through the threat of social consequence for women who stepped out of line. Speak up, break ranks, challenge the consensus — and your reputation, your relationships, your livelihood would pay the price. The mechanism didn't require a law. It required only a community that understood the threat and acted on it.
The third wave — emerging in the 1990s — expanded who got to speak and complicated the category of "woman" in ways the second wave had resisted. Intersectionality, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, became the framework for understanding that race, class, and sexuality change how oppression works. The third wave's weakness was fragmentation — an emphasis on identity that sometimes made symbolic recognition a substitute for material change.
The fourth wave — the 2010s and #MeToo — brought digital tools to the project. Social media changed the speed and reach of feminist activism. It made it possible to publicize harassment, expose abuse of power, and connect isolated experiences into visible patterns. Its strength was undeniable: it made structural harm impossible to dismiss as isolated bad luck. Its documented weakness — now visible enough that serious feminist scholars acknowledge it — is that digital outrage can flatten context, reward amplification over accuracy, compress nuance out of the public square, and turn complicated disputes into viral moral theater where the first narrative to go wide wins regardless of its evidentiary basis.
A possible fifth wave, which some observers are beginning to identify, may be defined by a reckoning with exactly that weakness. It asks harder questions: how do institutions evaluate competing claims when multiple parties invoke harm? How do movements keep their moral force without becoming performative? How do activists avoid reproducing the exclusion they oppose? These are the questions that define the moment we are in.
The Bridge of Flowers Committee: 98 Years and Counting
The Bridge of Flowers Committee is a subsidiary of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club. It has managed the Bridge of Flowers — a public landmark built on the bones of a 1908 trolley span, transformed into a flower garden by volunteer labor beginning in 1929 — for approximately ninety-eight years.
In ninety-eight years, it has not had a male member.
I want to state that plainly because it is the foundation of everything that follows. The committee that manages a public civic asset — maintained in part with public funds, serving a public space, exercising governance over a public landmark — has excluded men from membership for nearly a century. Not incidentally. Not informally. Structurally. As a matter of organizational identity.
When the 2020 petition called for the removal of my public art from the bridge — art I had installed and maintained for seventeen years, including the Pothole Fountain with the Black Stones of Africa that I had built nine years before a petition called me a racist — the committee responded immediately. Secret Zoom meetings were held. I was never contacted. My seventeen-year professional relationship with the bridge was ended without a phone call, an email, or a single attempt at due process.
The women who ran those meetings, who made those decisions, who endorsed the petition, who installed an anti-racism plaque three feet from my anti-racist installation without acknowledging its history — those women deployed the vocabulary of feminist liberation and racial justice in service of a governance mechanism that had practiced gender exclusion for ninety-eight consecutive years.
The irony is not subtle. The committee that accused me of being hostile to women had spent nearly a century being hostile to men — not through malice, perhaps, but through structural exclusion as complete and as long-standing as any such exclusion in the valley's civic history. The same committee that mobilized around the language of inclusion had never once opened its membership to the other half of the community it serves.
This is what the second wave called out: not the absence of women from positions of power, but the reproduction of exclusionary structures by whoever holds power regardless of gender. Power that uses the vocabulary of justice to insulate itself from accountability is still power that uses the vocabulary of justice to insulate itself from accountability. The women in those Zoom meetings were not practicing feminism. They were practicing the same governance by consensus enforcement that second-wave feminism spent decades identifying and resisting — with a different demographic in the chair.
The Campaign: Fourth Wave Tools, Second Wave Mechanism
The 2020 campaign against me was a textbook deployment of fourth-wave digital tools in service of a mechanism the second wave would have recognized immediately.
An eighteen-year-old uploaded a selectively edited thirteen-minute video to Facebook. It reached twenty-two thousand people in hours. A petition was filed by an eighteen-year-old who had not attended the protest she organized around. It gathered six hundred signatures in three days before being removed by Change.org for defamation and misinformation violations — a fact the Greenfield Recorder never reported. The comment thread that followed called me a KKK member, a child predator, a Grand Wizard, an antisemite, and a woman-hater. No evidence was required for any of it. The fourth-wave mechanism — rapid digital amplification of a social verdict — did not ask for evidence. It asked for momentum.
The women who led this campaign did not consider themselves to be reproducing a patriarchal enforcement mechanism. They considered themselves to be protecting the community. They were using the language of safety, inclusion, and anti-racism — the vocabulary of the liberation project — to enforce a social verdict against a man who had questioned a road closure on a pandemic Saturday.
But consider the mechanism from the perspective of any woman who knew me, had worked with me, had commissioned me, had watched the whole thing and understood that what was being described was not the man she knew. What were her options?
She could speak up. She could say: I have worked with this man for years, I have seen his record, this description does not match the person I know. She could sign the counter-petition. She could write a letter to the Recorder.
And then what?
The community had just watched what happened to a man who stood on a public bridge and asked questions. His studio was shuttered. His commissions were severed. His name was in two front-page articles. His public art was the subject of a removal campaign. A false accusation of antisemitism was circulating to twenty-two thousand people.
Any woman who spoke up for him would have been next. Not through a formal process. Not through law. Through the same mechanism: the thread, the petition, the whisper campaign, the social exclusion from the networks where commissions originate and reputations are maintained. This is not speculation. This is the mechanism the second wave documented in exhaustive detail as the primary tool of patriarchal social control. Break ranks and you will pay. The pronoun changed. The mechanism did not.
The women who stayed silent — and some of them knew better, I am certain of it — were not silenced by men. They were silenced by other women wielding the tools of a liberation movement as an enforcement apparatus. That is not feminism's achievement. That is feminism's failure mode, and the feminist literature is increasingly honest about the fact that it exists.
The Specific Irony of "Silence Is Violence"
The protesters on the Iron Bridge in June 2020 carried signs that read Silence Is Violence. The phrase, popularized in the fourth-wave digital context, means that remaining silent in the face of injustice is a form of complicity — that failure to speak constitutes harm.
The women who carried those signs subsequently deployed a campaign that enforced silence around the injustice being done to me through the same mechanism that had enforced women's silence for centuries: social threat.
Anyone who spoke up for me risked what happened to me. The community had watched. The lesson was visible. You do not have to issue an explicit threat when you have just publicly destroyed someone's livelihood and reputation for asking questions at a protest. The implicit threat is already in the air.
Silence is violence as a slogan, deployed by people whose campaign enforces silence through social threat, is not a contradiction they appear to have noticed. It is the fifth-wave question in its sharpest form: how does a movement that identified silence-enforcement as the primary tool of oppression avoid becoming a silence-enforcement mechanism itself?
The Bridge of Flowers Committee has ninety-eight years of an answer, and it is not a comforting one.
It Is Not Only Women
I want to be precise about this because the piece is not an argument that women are the problem.
The mechanism is ideological, not gendered. Men who knew me stayed silent too. Male officials did not respond to my communications. Male editors and reporters did not cover the Jenkins qualified immunity denial. Male select board members did not answer my emails.
The irony is sharpest when applied to the women who led the campaign, because they claim the mantle of feminist liberation while practicing social enforcement that would have been recognizable in any decade of the past century and a half. But the mechanism itself — silence through threat, consensus through consequence, the destruction of anyone who breaks ranks — belongs to no gender. It belongs to power.
What makes the feminist frame relevant is not that women are uniquely guilty of it. It is that this particular group of women claimed unique moral authority on the basis of their feminist identity, deployed that claimed authority to run a campaign that reproduced the oldest enforcement mechanisms in the book, and are now — some of them — facing criminal prosecution for the endpoint of that campaign, while the institutions that were supposed to protect against exactly this dynamic said nothing.
The fifth wave, if it exists, has to be the wave that asks: what happens when the liberation movement becomes the enforcement apparatus? What happens when the tools built to protect the vulnerable are turned against the dissenter? What happens when the vocabulary of justice is captured by the mechanism of conformity?
What happens is what happened in Shelburne Falls between June 2020 and November 30, 2025.
The Women Who Were Watching
I want to end with the women who did not speak — not to accuse them, but to name what their silence cost and what it meant.
Some of them commissioned my work. Some of them knew me for years. Some of them, I believe, watched what was being done and understood that the description in the thread did not match the person they knew. They had the information. They had the history. They had, in some cases, the professional standing and the institutional voice to say something that would have mattered.
They did not speak.
I do not believe most of them were acting in bad faith. I believe they watched what happened to me and understood, at some cellular level of social self-preservation, that speaking up meant risking what had happened to me. The threat did not need to be stated. It had already been demonstrated.
The women who organized the campaign against me did not need to threaten anyone explicitly. They had already shown the community what dissent cost. Every woman who stayed silent in the years that followed was responding rationally to a demonstrated social threat — the same rational response that kept women silent for a century and a half before the liberation movements gave them language and solidarity to resist it.
The difference is that the liberation movement was supposed to protect people from exactly this mechanism. It was not supposed to be the mechanism.
The first wave fought for the right to speak. The second wave identified the social enforcement that prevented it. The third wave expanded who got to speak. The fourth wave gave everyone a microphone.
And then in Shelburne Falls, a group of women used those microphones to run an enforcement campaign that silenced a man, threatened anyone who might speak for him, and produced — at its logical endpoint — a sidewalk assault, a criminal arraignment, and six years of institutional silence from every body that should have known better.
The fifth wave has its work cut out for it.
The archive is at johnsendelbach.com.
The women who are ready to speak can start there.
John F. Sendelbach is a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape designer based in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. He is the originator of the Cold Cruel Sidestep behavioral framework and the lead designer of the Pocumtuck State Park proposal. The complete documented archive is at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.