Last week, The New York Times of all places gave two very smart conservative women an open microphone and one hour to passionately debate and critique modern feminism.
The event was hosted by columnist Ross Douthat on his “Interesting Times” podcast, joined by Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant. This discussion was launched because both women have written important new pieces offering distinct critiques of modern feminism.
Helen Andrews, a former senior editor at The American Conservative, caused a much-needed firestorm with her excellent article over at Compact magazine, entitled, “The Great Feminization,” in which she provocatively argues that “the pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminized.”
Leah Libresco Sargeant has just published a new book, entitled, The Dignity of Dependence, which makes the case for the unique strengths of being unapologetically woman. On the first page of her book, Sargeant posits, “When a woman’s capacity exceeds that of a man through her ability to bear life within her, her fertility is treated as disruptive – a problem to be contained.” She is pressured to become more male-like in her abilities and sensibilities.
Ross Douthat opens the discussion with this obvious statement, “Men and women are really different.” He follows that with one of the most important questions we must ask, “But what do those differences mean?” What Douthat is overseeing here is a spirited conversation, a debate actually, between what he describes as two “conservative writers, both critics of feminism, but they have very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like.”
The bottom line in this debate between these two women is they are disagreeing on their observations of the very real problems that modern feminism has wrought. They disagree with each other in this exchange, not on principle, per say, but on perspective.
They are both talking about the serious harms feminism has brought to important social institutions. Helen Andrew’s interest is the damage it brought to politics, the workplace, and the softer sciences of academia resulting in wokeness and hypersensitivity. Sargeant’s interest is in the harms feminism brought to family and home and how it encourages women to deny their femininity and act more like men when it comes to sexuality, fertility and labor.
While Andrews is speaking of the pathology of these things, Sargeant is speaking of the virtue of femininity, motherhood and that fact that family demands no small measure of dependence on one another. It also requires the soulful cooperation between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers as sex-distinct partners.
It truly is a strange thing to see an outlet like The New York Times host two conservative women talking about the objective natures and virtues of men and women and how the erasure of these truths and their complementarity has harmed so much that matters.
You can watch the whole interview here:
