We Can Build Things

In 2013, I was one of five mothers who, unsatisfied with schooling options in MetroWest Boston, came together to found a Catholic classical school. Having matriculated twenty-five students into a cramped office space that year, St. Benedict Classical Academy now boasts 385 students, a beautiful classically inspired building, and long waiting lists. Despite the grueling process and personal toll this effort took on its founders, its fruits have made me a true believer in the American way. We can build things.

It is with this confidence in our capacity to build anew that I have found myself perplexed by the treatment of “feminism” on the right. Observing the choices that many young, college-educated women make today—for career over family, for travel over children—critics more often than not blame the women themselves, or worse still, women’s “nature.” Too few conservatives seem interested in providing an intellectually coherent, attractive, and dignified alternative to the progressive feminist narrative that remains hegemonic among elite women today. The problem is not just that progressivism has offered a false account of the good life. It is that our culture as a whole has neglected the formation that each of us needs to choose well among competing goods. 

There is a better way forward for women, and I think it’s time to build it. Last month, in Rochester, New York, the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at Arizona State University and its journal Fairer Disputations, in concert with Feminists Choosing Life of New York, convened nearly two hundred women to launch a new women’s movement. We heard from some of the sharpest heterodox female thinkers of our time, shared meals in a beautiful setting, and proclaimed our Declaration of Interdependence at Seneca Falls to lay out our shared vision—which others are now invited to sign.

Ours is not a political project, in the modern sense of politics. No speaker exhorted attendees to contact their representatives, nor were points won by bemoaning this adversary or that. Still, ours is a deeply political effort, in a far older sense. In my view, and as I described to the attendees the first night, we have lost sight of the Aristotelian sense of politics that helped animate America’s forebears, perhaps especially our young nation’s women. We have lost the hope that women and men, from different backgrounds and religious commitments, can come together with a shared purpose to solve concrete problems. And so, though our first gathering laid out high-level principles to which most in the room could assent, our aim now is to build broader coalitions capable of solving concrete problems together. 

The most fundamental problem our movement has the power to address right now is not widespread pornography usage, global surrogacy, or the unjust killing of unborn children, even as our declaration names and denounces each of these and will work to redress them. The real trouble is that too many young women (and men too) lack the guidance and formation they need to become just, courageous, temperate, and practically wise agents of their own lives. 

While modernity has wrought real goods, especially for women, the modern era has abandoned the West’s ennobling inheritance that once passed down to men and women real guidance for day-to-day living. And this cultural lacuna means that redressing the aforenamed injustices—not to mention the many other dehumanizing threats in modern life—is only going to get harder in the years to come, if we don’t each learn how to live human life better now, and help young people do the same.

Raised by a mother who married and divorced three times, and impacted deeply by the devastating suicides of two male friends when I was an adolescent, I lived through the trends that social conservatives warned would inhibit Americans from becoming the kinds of persons capable of self-governance, both personally and politically: widespread secularization, generational breakdown of family life, and the marked decline of liberal education, not to mention a culture that was slowly being corrupted by the advent of online porn. But I also have experienced the richest alternative to progressivism transform my entire life: day by day, one just action at a time. For while I worked alongside those mothers to build a school, I also worked alongside my husband to build a large and happy family. And for a woman raised with poor models and little practical guidance for living, this was the far more daunting endeavor. 

Today, many women have been raised more like I was than like my adult daughters were. Even those whose parents married or remained married have relatively little access, in our broader cultural environs, to the rich guidance for living that I found, or better, that found me, through my own profound suffering. 

It is this distillation of decades, or rather centuries, of lived experience that inspired our declaration. By looking backward, we move forward with a new purpose, informed by the reality of interdependence among men, women, and children and the embodied and transcendent nature of each and every human being.

In a culture where exemplars of charity animated by religious faith are rarely visible in public life, where robust communities knit together by thriving families are harder to come by, and where great books that might illuminate sacred paths go unread, of course women will be attracted by lesser goods. Men are too. 

Our times offer the proof of social conservatives’ decades-long warning. But losing the culture wars doesn’t mean all is lost. The human condition remains the same as when Aristotle wrote and Augustine preached, even as the problems we face are altogether new. Every heart yearns for real guidance for living, and providence acts in every age. There is no time to despair: We really can build anew.