When contemporary Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a "traditional" and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan leftist feminists; it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women's emancipation and progress. In this paper, I juxtapose invocations of the "traditional, pious but egalitarian" father figure with that of "the failed and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional" in order to denaturalize the feminist repudiation and problematization of tradition; explore the relationship between salvaging modernity and disavowing tradition; and think about the demands of modern, progressive subjectivity. I argue that the tragedy of leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it is predicated on locating the possibility of women's progress and feminist politics in the repudiation of the very tradition that makes it possible in the first place; and that this constitutive disavowal comes in the way of a more generous ethos of intergenerational and intersubjective engagement. This paper is based on two years of field research among founding members of the feminist movement in Morocco whose activism emerged out of their immersion in and subsequent disenchantment with the Moroccan left in the 1980s. By taking feminist constructions of tradition as an object of inquiry, this paper seeks to contribute to a non-teleological study of feminist thought and politics, and to the anthropological study of secular and progressive subjectivity.