The Right Has a Woman Problem

There’s a reason women are flocking to the Left.

American politicians are expert wordsmiths. Usually, they are most adept at keeping words like “abortion” and “immigration” out of their vocabulary once election year rolls around. But sometimes, with all their wordsmithing, our two parties can become completely blind to the needs of a specific demographic, blind to their ultimate destruction at the polls. On the Left, that demographic is the poor, specifically the poor, white, working class. On the Right, it’s women.

Many women I know feel like political wayfarers, with their stance on abortion remaining the dividing line for whether to vote red or blue. Besides a biannual kibitz over abortion, almost no politician is considering the questions women truly care about: how will I be able to raise my children at home, how will I be protected from wayward men, how will I achieve an equal footing in the workplace, how will women’s health care be improved, etc.

The Left at least has answers to these questions. They are not good answers, but they are answers. Liberals put forward state-run childcare, the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment education, DEI and board diversity, abortion, and contraception as the solutions to all of women’s woes. Like I said, horrible solutions to the struggles women face. But on the Right? All I’m hearing is crickets.

It does not help that real misogyny lurks on the Right. It’s there, especially in the rigorist religious spheres and anywhere else where young conservative men are lamenting their inability to get a date. Pundits preaching to disaffected men even declare that women should not work outside the home. In addition, they decry abortion, contraception, and no-fault divorce, all while not sparing a drop of empathy to consider why women would seek these options in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong; I think abortion, contraception, and divorce are grave evils, and their effect on men is usually ignored. As a child of divorce, I am intimately familiar with the damage that such a rupture can have on a family. However, my self-righteous attitude towards these wrongs has been tempered over time by the real-life stories of women I have met who were married to a physically abusive man, a man who exposed their children to pornography, or a man who left her in the night.

As Erika Bachiochi lays out in her book The Rights of Women, because of industrialization, women who want to raise their children are more dependent on their male partners than ever. Previously, men and women were interdependent — they worked on one homestead or participated in one industry together. Now, pregnant and stay-at-home women are entirely at the whims of their husbands. In this vulnerable situation, predatory men can wield total emotional, financial, and physical control over their wives.

The Right does not have solutions for women in these situations. Instead, they toy with the idea of putting women in jail for procuring a first-trimester abortion. While some states are doing a good job in the wake of the fall of Roe v. Wade to support women’s ability to choose life, there is a striking silence about the fathers who are not taking responsibility for their children who drive women (sometimes literally) to the Planned Parenthood clinic. Tacitly, it seems that it is the woman’s job to be morally pure, submissive, and obedient, no matter the cost, while the “boys will be boys.”

In other words, the one party who formally paid lip service to Christian values does not even bother to recommend such values to the men in their midst. I would like to see conservatives condemn strip clubs and men who seek out prostitutes as much as they do women who seek an abortion or do OnlyFans. I would like to see male senators fight for their wives and women in their constituencies, instead of hosting orgies and committing adultery. 

For myriad reasons, I believe that conservatives have largely given up on Gen Z women, believing them to be vapid, male-hating harlots. I’m not denying that such characters exist, but I do not think we should give up so readily. Gen Z women are going down the liberal path partly because that is what their broken homes, universities, and social media apps have socialized them to do. Climbing the corporate ladder is presented as the only option to achieve security in a world of untrustworthy, low-earning, and porn-addicted men.

For its part, The New York Times recently claimed that Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign, #MeToo, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade have contributed the most to women’s prominent leftward shift since 2016. I will not deny that the Dobbs decision had many women I know in hysterics. After all, abortion is the last resort, the end-all-be-all “right” to one’s “own body” that ensures women will never be inconvenienced by their biology. Abortion is the secular sacrament that keeps women competing with (and beating) men in every sphere we can measure.

Here’s where the Right falls flat. Conservatives correctly highlight that women in the marketplace are trouncing young men. Men’s ailing prospects are a critical issue, one the Right does a better job of addressing than the Left. However, the Right’s seeming solution — to put women “back in their place” — will not bring back a renaissance of manhood. The movement to revive men’s prospects can never succeed without a concurrent renaissance of femalehood.

Unfortunately, due to its liberal, Protestant background, the evangelical Right does not have a healthy, strong vision of womanhood on offer. Instead, we have two sickly variations on the submissive housewife: there is the 1950s-era, hair-in-rollers dame and the farmhouse trad wife. Of course, neither are realistic standards for our age. The 1950s housewife had most of her productive work stripped from her by appliances. Plus, she was discriminated against in the workplace and couldn’t get a credit card in her own name.

Unlike the 1950s housewife, the farmhouse trad wife has all the benefits of first and second-wave feminism: the vote, joint property rights, and protection from discrimination. However, she eschews all of them, claiming they’re unnecessary because men have got everything under control. As an example, the amount of women I see today advocating for the repeal of women’s right to vote is truly staggering. Similarly, I routinely see videos of conservative women arguing that their fellow sisters should not be president because they are too emotional.

These narrow views of what women are “good for” (i.e. cooking, cleaning, and birthing) only serve to disparage the cornucopia of women’s potential contributions to the social, political, and economic spheres. To make matters worse, America’s Puritan history and our current pagan revival are completely commensurate with this narrow view. This comedy of errors bodes women’s return to second-class citizen status, and that is what women are worried about.

As C.S. Lewis keenly points out, the devil “always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites” and “relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.” The errors he is talking about are abject totalitarianism and complete individualism. We find ourselves in a similar place: the Right’s hatred of third-wave feminism has led them to the error of hating women entirely and wanting dominance over them, while the Left’s embrace of radical individualism has led them to discard the dependent mother and child in favor of counterfeit “women.”

In contrast, an authentically Christian view of womanhood is personified by the Virgin Mary, who was autonomous, courageous, emotionally stable, and also vulnerable, maternal, and feminine. Her husband is the perfect prototype of a dedicated father: he was a protector and worked a tough, manual job to provide for his family, but also was exceedingly gentle and chaste. Mary and Joseph were not in a continual battle for dominance like the Right and Left portray men and women today, and they did not succumb to either group’s errors.

We often forget that the fight for women’s rights is young and more fragile than other civil rights movements. Joint property rights, workplace protections, maternity leave, Title IX, and the vote are huge wins for us. However, we can’t expect to keep these rights and privileges if we do not acknowledge that women's and men’s needs are different and that we must act to address those needs. It is our job to engage in the political process, whether by pestering our representatives, writing articles, joining our local school board, or having these conversations with others. 

We women have work to do.