Last week, I shared on Notes that I was refusing to write about Lindsay Clancy.

It is a horrific story, and to this day I haven’t read a single article about it. I have stopped reading every social media post I’ve seen on the story before finishing. This comprises the entirety of what I’ve read about the case.

The truth is, the murders are so awful and disgusting — and the response to the murders has been pretty awful and disgusting, too.

On all sides.

However, in the days since, I’ve started to feel like I have an obligation to address what I feel like no one else is saying:

Lindsay Clancy has become 2026’s George Floyd.

Now, we may ask, what do the years 2020 and 2026 have in common?

You guessed it — they’re both election years.

Did you really think they were going to pull another summer of rioting off and keep the American public engaged?

Of course not.

As you may recall if you’ve followed me long enough, I was a political writer during the first Trump term and most of Biden’s presidency, although I’ve largely checked out of a passionate interest in culture war politics as of late.

However, I could start to see the signs almost as soon as I declared I wouldn’t touch the Lindsay Clancy story with a 10 foot pole — a massive culture war battle was brewing.

These sorts of things have been promulgated and fanned on social media since the Arab Spring, and we’ve gotten so used to the dystopian nightmare that is the digital age that we forget how easily stories are leveraged and spread to manipulate and enrage public opinion to the advantage of many with none of our best interest in mind.

It’s not a shadowy conspiracy so much as a raging industry of elaborate psychological manipulation, one that has been thriving in American politics for decades yet exploded into the grotesque show it has become since the advent of the website formerly known as Twitter.

Politics is business, and so is social media.

They all benefit from us being horrified, angry, and pointedly convinced that the “other side” is the enemy and not the sick apathy and cynicism that has settled in so deeply in the collective American soul.

We’re being manipulated. And on this season of Election Year, they’re leveraging the ghastly murders of three children and the science and psychology of postpartum mental illness to do it.

I could truly not be sicker.

So, no, I still refuse to obsess over the details of the case and try to determine for myself what God’s avenging justice can only ever truly cover.

I refuse to play the part of judge and jury when I am not qualified or authorize to do so, all the less so to make judgements about millions of women suffering from postpartum depression or psychosis who have been unnecessarily attacked in all this.

I refuse to point to women claiming to identify with Lindsay Clancy to make a win against the libs, and can’t possible observe this sick cultural phenomenon with anything but horror and desperate pleas to God for mercy for these many very troubled souls.

I believe it is a grievous crisis in our nation that so many women identify with a woman who murdered her babies, but I do not, in fact, blame feminism — at least, not in the way that you may think.

In the same way that George Floyd became innocent by virtue of the fact that he died being physically detained in police custody, Lindsay Clancy has been made innocent by the fact that she killed her children while “suffering from motherhood,” as it were.

Millions sympathized with Floyd because we have been subject to decades of propaganda favoring an anti-authoritarian view of law enforcement and a liberation theology view of the justice system, and it is for exactly the same reason that women now claim to relate to Lindsay Clancy.

If you’ve been convinced for years that the police are tools of a nefarious conspiracy to brutally oppress people of color, you will easily believe that every black person who dies at the hands of police was a victim of intentional racism — which was the massive assumption that everyone made about George Floyd because Derek Chauvin was white.

If you’ve been convinced for years that it was once a nefarious conspiracy to “force” women into motherhood and staying at home with their children, you will easily believe that when you feel trapped or isolated as a mother that this is victimhood.

Here’s a third, less popular proposal, however, which highlights why I really, really didn’t want to write about this case in the first place:

If you’ve been convinced for years that the people who easily accept such premises are “libtards” or “man haters,” you will very easily become puffed up on pride and hard of heart towards the real reasons that people very easily succumb to these faulty lines of reasoning:

Fear.

People believe that the police are out to get people of color because they’re afraid that this might be so. Of course millions of black people identified with George Floyd and galvanized his memory; they’ve been afraid of legitimate oppression all their lives, because they live in a country where they’re told that it is very real. And, considering the fact that we did very literally have slaves in our country less than two centuries ago, this isn’t a wild fabrication.

Women believe that motherhood and tending to the home are oppressive because they’re afraid of being oppressed by men. Of course women feel terrified when they experience just how much motherhood demands a woman give up herself and her freedom to her child.

If you’ve been raised to believe that life is a meaningless series of feelings-based choices, motherhood is going to be terrifying and oppressive.

I can’t speak to the Clancy case, and I won’t, because as I say, I refuse to gawk over something so awful.

I can speak, however, to what life is like when it feels like the world is out to get you, rather than designed with a particular order in which motherhood is both sacred and deeply natural and inherent to a woman.

It takes so much propaganda to convince women that motherhood is scary and vulnerability wrong.

It is a terrible state of affairs when free American citizens are living in fear of a police state in the most truly liberal country that has ever existed.

It is a horrific state of affairs when wealthy, privileged American women are convinced that infanticide is relatable.

It is a sad state of affairs when we can’t recognize how this fear and this degree of mental illness is being leveraged and manipulated to make a political point.

Fear is the tool of the enemy, and it is also the tool of our great American political sporting event that we call free democracy.

Do not let anyone leveraging it for their own advantage win the battle for your mind.

So, my oldest son has been telling me about The End of Oak Street for months.

He is beyond obsessed with dinosaurs and had heard about the film on the dino enthusiast coconut wireless, which filled his head with many important questions.

Would it depict dinosaurs accurately? Would it be woke? Would it be stupid? Would the cute dog from the previews die?

Well, all his questions and more were answered over the weekend as my husband took us all to town to see the much-anticipated science fiction action flick, which premiered last week.

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I have to say, one of my greatest prides as a parent is having children who can both be discerning about media and also enjoy its value without being overly influenced by the obvious messaging embedded in 20th- and 21st-century American media.

So, it was without much consternation that we’d all anticipated the film would both depict dinosaur research that my son hotly disagrees with (dinosaurs very likely did not have feathers) and also be tinged with plenty of Hollywood wokeness.

It definitely had both — but it also had something more that made the clear “woke” intent of the film almost laughable, and definitely caused it to fail.

At the center of a movie that heavily flirted with overt feminism and sexual liberalism is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, lovely story of making marriage work and keeping families together.

Inside:

• Full review and analysis (it’s a good story)

• Ample spoiler alerts (I gotchu)

• What I didn’t like (wokeness that almost broke it)

• Exactly what parents need to know (please read before taking kids!)

This essay is the much-anticipated premiere of my Film Club series, which is available for the paid subscribers who make this publication possible. Right now, I’m offering 40% off for life for summer upgrades, if you’re considering taking the plunge!

Here’s what you can expect:

• Freestyle Book Club for busy homemakers and other working women

• Film Club guides for movies and shows that demonstrate timeless values

• The full subscriber chat where you can start threads and ask questions at any time

• The Voice Notes Podcast — raw, personal homemaker chit-chat from my back porch

• The growing library of downloadable ebooks on homemaking, personal study, + spiritual practices (new resources uploading soon!)

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I’ll see you on the other side!

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Hey friends,

As we began our read-through of Something Wicked earlier this summer, I had the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this more traditional book club format just wasn’t going to stick.

You see, we used to do a freestyle book club in the past that was a lot of fun and brought all the well-read bookworms in our community together.

We shared titles we were reading, shared book recommendations, and inspired many essays expanding on the themes I write about on this page.

It was a breath of fresh air for busy homemakers and other working women to be able to connect over a love of books without being tied down to deadlines or remembering to make Zoom dates.

As classic literature and reading great books has (dare I say?) been trending among the youths as of late, I’d love to bring this back into our book club space! So, we’re launching today.

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Right now in the chat, we’re discussing what we’re currently reading, setting goals for the upcoming year (I see you, homeschool moms), and getting recommendations for newbies from seasoned book lovers.

We’ll do a little grand re-opening for free today, with our study guide and ongoing subscriber chat continuing on behind the paywall.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Freestyle Book club and upcoming book and film study guides and essays

• The full subscriber chat where you can start threads and ask questions at any time

• The Voice Notes Podcast — raw, personal homemaker chit chat from my back porch

• The growing library of downloadable ebooks on homemaking, personal study, + spiritual practices (new resources uploading soon!)

Can’t wait to see you all over in the chat! Happy reading.

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I feel like there’s something few people actually say out loud, but it is clearly raging all around us.

The entire feminist premise is that men have something that women don’t, and women can’t be satisfied until they have it.

I’ve often thought that it’s like the ideological expression of an embittered, emotionally immature couple fight:

“You get to go out and see the world while I’m stuck here at home, slaving away!”

With all the radical social change that’s taken place over the last 100 years, with all the aggressive normalization of women in white-collar professional roles and in government, flaunting their promiscuity and abortion in well-funded and illustrious public spheres of society, most women (if Instagram is any indication) still complain to their husbands about how little they’re appreciated and how much better he has it.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in what we might call the “relationship studies” space, you’ll notice that most modern men sound exactly the same way, as a matter of fact.

These women themselves will tell you that their husbands’ response to their complaints is usually blame-shifting and evasion, and the most common negative couple cycle that’s probably occurred throughout human history continues.

This is why it is particularly sick to stigmatize men and marriage as a class and as a tool of patriarchal oppression, and to demand that men change their entire temperaments and personalities to make a woman feel safe in a relationship, rather than treating the relationship in the same way that we treat everything else in life: a common challenge that can be overcome with mutual values and shared compassion for one another, and a willingness to change, take responsibility for our actions, and maintain wise boundaries.

We need to name clearly that modern women, just as “traditional” women, often feel and genuinely are emotionally and physically abandoned by men who are not rising to their expected duty as husbands and fathers.

This is a real, verifiable fact for which I require no further proof than the evidence of human nature and sin and the wide array of types of people out there today, who vary in their degrees of virtue and sin.

Clearly, there are good men out there, and clearly, there are men who should once again be hotly stigmatized by society as no-good, vagrant rascals who abuse their families through abandonment or overt, open cruelty.

It is the good men who feel a sense of disgust at the idea of men abandoning their families and mistreating their wives and children who keep men good. Who raise good men. Who tend to their wives’ needs. Who lead and rule with benevolence, selfless devotion, and a sense of something higher than their own individual needs.

But where do we get men like this in a culture where there is no longer any sense of shared values around marriage, sex, and child-rearing?

How can we expect modern men to have the emotional maturity and discipline to be selflessly devoted to their wives when they’ve been raised in a culture that catechized us into believing that lifelong marriage is unrealistic, casual sex is inconsequential, public achievement is the most glorious aim, and telling other people what to do is antisocial and bigoted?

Women are loudly complaining about how the men they’re not supposed to need to depend on aren’t dependable, and they are never even making the connection.

As much as feminism has been a politically subversive attack on the fabric of the postmodern, formerly Christian world, it has been a personal hysteria of fear, accusation, distrust, and broken hearts.

And at the center, women are still screaming, we need things from men, and it freaks us out when we can’t get them from them.

The basic, guttural, embodied truth of life as a woman, as many a feminist will heatedly explain to you, is the fear of being without male protection.

Of course, what they’d tell you is that it is the fear of being overpowered and destroyed by a man.

But as you can clearly see in the vein of social media content inviting women to complain heatedly about their husbands and ex-husbands, women are also incapable of maintaining intimate relationships with men who do nothing to participate in their households. As a woman with a very devoted husband who was raised by hard-working, aggressively personally responsible midwesterners and had a full-time SAHM for a mother, I can’t even comprehend the degree to which many modern men seem to willingly check out of family life. (While I certainly believe that it takes both men and women to make a relationship work; stop picking sides in the gender wars, y’all.)

Just as the porn and human trafficking epidemics are directly rooted in the ideology of “women’s liberation,” the unshackling of the shared social zeitgeist from the traditional expectations of chastity, modesty, covenantal marriage, and chivalry, the very real existence of so many modern moms bearing the weight of the mental load alone is a product of feminism, certainly not a cause for more of it.

You don’t get to completely untie our shared values from a coherent definition of marriage and then complain that men who married independent women for love don’t know how to husband.

An entire generation’s school system was deliberately organized around giving girls a bigger advantage, leaving boys in the dust. Many men today grew up in schools that prioritized female needs and deviated from the type of discipline and social pressure that little boys tend to need. I highly recommend Christina Hoff Sommers’ refute of Reviving Ophelia, The War Against Boys which provides a heartbreaking look into how this was done (you can find it through my affiliate link here if you’d like).

Our boys were raised to believe that their masculinity was a curse and a threat to the women around them. They grew up in a culture with fragmented values and no real objective sense of what was “right,” let alone how important it is to keep dishes going and laundry moving and the trash taken out regularly in a modern, shared family home.

They married the women who probably didn’t expect that much of them, until the reality of running a household together sank in and these women needed much more from them.

When feminists are demanding things from society, they are demanding things from men. They may have perfectly legitimate reasons to be afraid. Rape. Abuse. Oppression. Abject dehumanization.

But they are, at the end of the day, requesting that men provide them with what they need, and that is the safety and security of good, moral men who will take care of them and not abuse or neglect them.

They think it comes through being treated the same as a man in society. I happen to disagree. Men treat each other pretty badly, too. Humanity is prone to do wicked things to one another, not the least of which is to treat those we are duty-bound to protect and take care of badly.

Feminists want women to not be treated badly, but this requires men to be duty-bound to treat them well.

You cannot do this with feminism. You cannot do this by demanding that men and women are virtually the same. We’re clearly not.

Feminism taught women to call dependence oppression. But dependence was never the problem. The question was always whether the people we depend on are bound by love, duty, honor, and God to treat us well.

Women do not need a worldview that pretends biological sex is irrelevant. We need good men — and a culture that expects men to be good.

As an advocate for traditional roles, I’ve been told countless times over the years, “but women back then had the village to help them!”

I want to pause here a moment and clarify that women people say this to me, they are saying that it was easier in a bygone day to take care of a house and children because your mom or sisters may have been around to help more often.

Women talk about the “village” when they mean help with housework and childcare because they think it would make it easier.

But we are typically talking about a “back in the day” era when running water and refrigeration were in rare use or not yet in existences.

It’s never been easier to prepare and cook food, do laundry, or clean up after human refuse. It’s never been easier to keep house or keep children physically safe, nourished, and fed.

Now, let me be clear, there is a very real need for women to have a “village” community, a network of trusted women family members and friends with whom they can share the burdens and joys in life, and it’s delightful and very beneficial to do this in community.

This is a whole other topic I’d love to delve into more in the future because I feel so strongly that this need and tendency women have to connect with other women is actually one of the most powerful generating forces behind society and civilization.

What I’m talking about today is the victim mentality that “I am a victim of being born in an era without villages.

You may, my dear, have been born in a place or time without a village, but if you’re a woman, you are the village. Are you blaming the other members for not being around, or are you “villaging” yourself and those around you?

Let’s consider how different a true “village” culture would be from our culture today, in which it’s actually quite stigmatized to have an opinion on how someone else should live their lives.

I’m not sure millennial women could handle a real village, at least not without first addressing the parts of them that bristle when coming into contact with other people’s opinions and demands.

The village, let’s be real, was nosy. The village was judgmental. The village knocked on your door unexpectedly, and making walked right in without being invited. The village expected you to act a certain way. The village wondered why you’d gained weight. The village told you how to do things right.

The village “shamed” you, a lot.

The village was mothers and mothers-in-law who tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Jealous sisters who wish they’d gotten married and not you, making eyes at your husband or telling you that you looked fat after having a baby.

Spinster aunts or annoying neighbors who talk your ear off while you do your laundry together by the river.

Neighbors who eavesdropped on your weakest moments or gossiped about your most difficult struggles.

The village was close, it was intimate, it had few social boundaries we take for granted today. It was multiple families living together and on top of each other with the expectation that everyone interacts with others every day and if you didn’t, you’d be far more socially isolated than you are today, hiding behind your phone, complaining about the village, and listening to podcasts you can pause at any time while you do your laundry.

The women today who want the “village” can’t even handle strangers asking them when their baby is due or how old their kids are. Would they really be able to handle authentic village life, when modern conceptions of privacy and individualism had existed before?

Again, women need community, it’s essential to our wellbeing. But is the community we need really the community we want? Is community really about lightening our own load, or is it actually about sharing the load of life together while living in geographic intimacy?

You don’t want the village. You want to feel less stressed in your home. The village can definitely support you. But you’ve got to be willing to be vulnerable enough to let the village in.

MUST MENTION: This is exactly the kind of big girl inner work we’re doing over at Created Female, my personal blog and femininity space.

This summer, I’m challenging myself and the community to exercise radical responsibility over our attitudes, nervous systems, resources, and how we show up in relationships. I just dropped an extensive toolkit to help you learn to regulate yourself, hold stress more calmly, and design a life you love that supports you in the ways the “village” is coming up short.

If you want to be a healthy villager and woman, come join us!

Created Female

My initial impression of marriage was always inextricably linked with its potential to end, and my childhood defined by the living arrangements I was required to have because of my parents’ divorce.

Over the years, I’ve obviously spent a lot of time considering the moral implications of divorce as well as the reasons society usually says we “need” divorce.

To these reasons, I am not remotely unsympathetic. Far from it. We need protections for women who are abused or neglected within marriage, as well as men who suffer real abuse and mistreatment by their wives.

I did, however, spend a long time after my initial conversion to Christianity believing that when a person left their marriage, it was because they simply didn’t try hard enough or believe in lifelong marriage devoutly enough.

Life, as it happens, has proven me wrong here. Maturity is realizing that your starry-eyed ideals don’t always explain things that happen in real life, to real people.

I know now from many years of experience that oftentimes someone might leave a marriage because the other spouse has already walked away from their vows.

Children need married parents, which means they need parents who are committed to marriage.

The parent who seeks separation because their spouse is unrepentantly and abjectly neglecting these vows is not the reason the marriage broke. It was broken already when they decided to walk away.

Yes, divorce is often complicated and the reasons why people separate are not always objectively all one person’s fault.

And to be clear, I do morally oppose divorce. That doesn’t mean I blame the woman who walks away from the man who beats her or refuses to stop cheating on her, or that I blame the man who walks away from the woman who never apologizes and never takes responsibility for her own actions.

I’ve now known enough people who have gotten divorced to know that one spouse sometimes simply can’t help it if the other spouse is not maintaining the marriage and openly refuses to do so.

This sometimes won’t change, and whether someone believes in moral divorce does not change the fact that the marriage is already broken, and sometimes a couple can no longer live together as husband and wife without perpetuating a system that is cruel and wrong.

And yet, children still need married parents. Even if they do not and cannot realistically have them.

This is still their need, and they still will be impacted by the choices their parents make.

It doesn’t mean that children are doomed for the rest of their life; every single human being can take the cards they’ve been dealt in life and make wise decisions that honor their human dignity and that of others.

Those of us who grew up with divorced parents may very well have been blessed in many ways by (as was my case) a loving extended stepfamily that treated us like one of their own, parents who prioritized our well-being and made us feel important, and the resources to heal and build healthier relationships in our own adult life than the ones we were spawned from.

We still needed married parents. It still would have been better to have two parents who were committed to staying married and making it work. Because this is what children need. Not one spouse willing to hang on when the other has dishonored them without regret. Two parents who will always regret it when they mistreat their spouse, and who will keep working to make it right.

The institution of marriage is referred to “matrimony” because it is the “making of a mother.” Marriage produces children, and exists as a sacred, mysterious, and yet still extremely practical and sorely needed institution for the production and cultivation of the next generation of spouses.

This is why traditional marriage and family piety are the foundation of civil society, of moral society. It is the nucleus in which we learn to live with others.

We are all born of the most intimate act that two human beings can engage in, and this is why Christian society has historically and rightly seen the institution of marriage as being so sacred.

Even secular biologists contend that we live for the primary purpose of reproduction; creating a human person together is the most amazing thing human beings can do, and it is the principle point of all human life.

This is at the center of everything I’m always saying when I’m refuting feminism or defending traditional marriage.

It is not because I harken back to an era when feelings were repressed and human life seemed more strictly orderly. Life was still messy, chaotic, and human back then, and certainly many people through history have suffered sorely within marriage. We simply can’t deny that.

But what we also can’t deny is the purpose of marriage and the need children have to exist within a loving one.

Every single time this is denied a child, it proves the child’s need to have married parents.

This is a hill I will forever die on, since I’ll never go back to trying to convince myself that it was “fine” for my parents to not be married as I grew up.

I lived, learned, and had my own children, and that’s when I discovered how much I needed my husband, and how much my children needed me to be able to depend on him.

We’ve had our ups and downs and at times even felt like we were walking through hell itself trying to make a relationship that inherently requires selflessness to work for two people whose own inherent needs can often feel, to one another, like selfishness.

This has become the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had and has resulted in love that dwarfs the fuzzy butterflies that I always thought as a teenager would be the defining mark of a good relationship.

But the culture we grew up in very much lied to us:

Good relationships don’t always make you feel good. They require you to be good. Which is feels exponentially better than butterflies in the long run.

At the end of the day, not everyone can assure that their spouse will meet this requirement for marriage and parenting. But it is always within our power to do so ourselves, whether we or our children have what they really need. God will always meet us where the world stops short of meeting our needs.

But His ideal for the human family will always and forever remain the same.

Children need married parents.

Want to go deeper with me into the history of feminism and how attitudes towards marriage and family have changed over the last century? Upgrade to paid to join our book club, where we’re reading Carrie Gress’ latest book on why feminism can’t be fused with Christianity:

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When I was a little girl, I used to wonder why I’d been privileged enough to be born in the United States of America.

I couldn’t believe that among all the people on earth now and throughout history who had lived through miserable living and working conditions, mass genocide and war, extreme poverty, not to mention the millennia of pre-industrial infrastructure, I had been born living in the wealthiest, most powerful, most unique, and most free nation on earth.

How? It blew my mind.

As you may know, I was born into progressive, bourgeoise bohemian circles from San Francisco and grew up in the 90s, and yet I still considered the U.S. to be the best nation on earth.

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I find it so poignant that there’s a trend of 90s nostalgia during an incredibly patriotic season of American culture after a decade of painful disillusionment, because this was the period of time when even leftists understood what they had in the United States and the last great period before the ubiquity of the internet engulfed the flow of American politics and culture like a tidal wave.

Of course, my perspective was tinged with left-wing cynicism about capitalism, as well as a distain for globalism that I largely still relate maintain, but before the 21^st Century, it was not political to be grateful to live in the U.S. and grateful for and adherent to the Enlightenment values that it was founded with.

I also wonder if someone will read the first two paragraphs of this missive about my country and wonder if I’m writing with nostalgia or irony, because the United States has been weakened so much from the giant that it was in the 1990s, when the world was a so very different place. My views towards the United States have also changed in many ways and remain still nuanced and textured.

The fact remains that because of the American experiment and what it was, I was born into the most privileged class of people that have ever lived on the face of the earth – white American women.

America has been beneficial for women because it was founded on values that recognized the inherent dignity of men and women as being created equal, which is a moral and religious statement that implies the existence of a creator.

Christianity is what made America great. Christianity is what made my life so incredibly blessed and privileged.

Enjoying these values unmoored from conscious knowledge of Christian objective truth is what made them so detrimental to my heart, and my spirit, and my moral character.

America, as many Europeans are discovering while visiting our great nation for the World Cup on the occasion of our 250^th anniversary, is a beautiful country.

Americans are incredibly American-centric because our country is truly “great” in the sense that it is huge. It has been wildly successful. It has blown every other civilization out of the water in terms of economic and military expansion. It has held relative stability on the world stage for decades after saving Europe from imploding on itself as the old systems crumbled (although yes, many rabbit trails we could go down there, I highly encourage such exploration).

It’s also gigantic. We have massive mountain ranges, gorgeous coastlines, expansive prairies, wild, mountainous desert wilderness, all of which you can drive through for hours without hardly passing more than a few gas stations and Podunk towns with population counts in the dozens. All this is spread out between all of our massive cities and sprawling suburban complexes the likes of which the world had never known or seen until American industry took full flight (for better or for worse).

This is what the European mind can’t comprehend, as the meme goes. It was only as an adult that I realized that to those hailing from across the pond, the United States’ sheer size alone is often a surprise, all the more so the distance many of us drive to work or the grocery store each day (60 miles each way, in my rural-dwelling family’s case).

And let’s not forget that much of this was originally settled first by pilgrims willing to settle in a completely foreign land with their families for a chance to have a community all of their own, and later by families that carted all their belongings halfway across the continent in carts, risking all manner of danger and uncertainty for a small plot of land to call their own.

This is the American dream, and millions of people from around the world still live it — and seek it — to this day.

Our country is huge, our expansion has been exceedingly impressive, our potential seemingly limitless, and our land is also beautiful beyond description.

The natural beauty of this geographically vast nation is also endlessly breathtaking, and constantly reminds you what it really means when we call a land “God’s country.”

But if a nation is to be God’s people, it must not only be great, and not only beautiful, but good.

I recently listened to Whitney Houston’s stirring rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner from 1991, a performance which only gets more poignant in time as one considers how much our country and the world has changed since her famous Super Bowl recording as well as the sad personal story of the singer herself.

As my eyes stung with tears at her passionate rendition (I am physically incapable of listening to this recording without crying), it occurred to me that the beauty of our great nation is much like the beauty of Houston’s own legendary vocal skills.

She sounds like a woman whose entire soul has been thrown into the words of our famed National Anthem, there is no questioning the immense feeling behind the belting lyrics. This is why it always makes me cry. This is why the crowd erupted into deafening cheers. This is why it’s gone down in history as one of the most famous performances of the anthem in history.

Houston is, herself, the epitome of the American dream. A woman with extreme natural talent that stirringly reflects the goodness of God’s design, the liberty and excess she enjoyed as a wildly famous singer were no match for the spiritual demons that followed her throughout her life and all the way to her sad end.

In the same way, our nation has achieved greatness never before imaginable by mankind, enjoying resources that the European mind cannot comprehend. And yet, all our excess, all our wealth, all our sense of dogged determination born in the miraculous defeat over the British empire at the hands of a ragtag army of merchants and farmers, has not directly contributed to our goodness.

It has played as much a part in our decay, in our ugliness, as it has in the things that are truly beautiful and good about our nation.

That is because true greatness, true beauty, and goodness are defined by and come from God.

We are fond of saying that this is God’s country; our national motto is the declaration In God we trust.

Yet…do we? Has the growth and expansion of our great nation striven for goodness as much as it has goodness? Have we reaped the fruit of submission to God, or do we step all too often on the rotten fruit of materialism, postmodernism, and cynical free market capitalism?

These are the questions I continue to ask myself as a God-fearing American who loves her country, believes in her goodness, and is enraptured by her beauty – yet longs for more of the goodness that can only come from God to once again infuse our great land and our uniquely American culture.

America, the beautiful, I love you.

“America the Beautiful”

Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Full original poem here

Truthfully though, my homesteading journey is so intertwined with my content here even if it’s not always named out loud, because it has taught me so much about men and women in relationship and society and what it means to live in a way that honors our divine design.

So, I created this free episode of The Voice Notes Podcast, sharing what I’d tell you about how to go about becoming a homesteader if we were sitting together on my back porch.

This is the kind of stuff I love to use Voice Notes for, so please let me know if you have specific questions about homemaking, homesteading, family life, or anything else! I’d love to address them in future episodes, since this is where I chat about the more intimate and personal side of A Homemaker’s Manifesto.

Most of the time, this podcast is behind the paywall, but please enjoy this coupon for 40% off for life to get started. This special promotion will be gone at the end of the summer so take advantage if you’ve been thinking about upgrading. For less than the price of a new book, you’ll get access to:

• Summer Book Club (we’re reading Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity)

• The full subscriber chat where you can start threads and ask questions at any time

• The Voice Notes Podcast — every episode, not just occasional free ones

• The growing library of downloadable ebooks on homemaking, personal study, + spiritual practices (new resources uploading soon!)

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The podcast shares everything I’d do to prepare for homesteading before you have land, because I believe it’s more essential to work on these skills first than be handed land right away!

I meant to mention in the podcast as well that this post would be a great companion piece, as I believe firmly that cultivating these skills of personal stewardship and sensible self-care are also essential skills for homesteaders, homemakers, or any other working woman:

I hope you enjoy the podcast and look forward to talking to you all more about homesteading, stewardship, and how these intersect with our discussions on culture and traditional values.

Happy listening! 🤍

I often get comments from readers who share my views on feminism but believe that First Wave feminism was “good” or “necessary.”

I want to say that I support and understand this view, but the truth is that feminism was never good, and it has also never been inconsistent with the Christian worldview.

Quite the opposite.

While many Christians assume that First Wave feminism was “just about” securing the vote for women, in reality it was a movement founded by women with avid interests in occultism, heretical theology, and alternative sexual lifestyles.

From its inception, feminism has always been directly aimed at destroying traditional Christian social structures that honored and protected women for centuries and has always named it plainly (when not watering down its language to appeal to the culturally Christian masses).

This is the plain history laid out in Carrie Gress’ Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity, which we are going to be reading together this summer and discussing over the next five weeks (and I’d appreciate if you purchase with my affiliate link!)

Gress expertly outlines the radicalism of early feminism, as well as the heretical leanings of many of its original founders, the most orthodox of whom were Trinity-denying Unitarians, while many of the average “Founding Mothers” of the feminist movement were abject occultists and spiritualists determined to undermine Christian traditions and patriarchy.

Here is an excerpt from the book’s description:

Feminism has quietly captured the minds and hearts of women by mimicking aspects of Christianity. Through its own “commandments,” “virtues,” “evangelization,” and even “a sacrament,” feminism has become an exceedingly powerful megachurch.

While Christians have targeted the specific products of the feminist ideology, such as abortion and transgenderism, we have missed the bigger picture of how feminism’s shadow church has captured the psyche of Western women.

Feminism is all too often perceived, even among Christians, as something virtuous that affords women true equality and freedom. Dr. Gress overturns this misconception, smashing the idol of feminism and exposing its deeply anti-Christian origins.

I know you’ll find it as enlightening and challenging as I have so far!

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All for less than the cost of a new book – even less if you take advantage of this coupon for 40% off for life:

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Here’s the schedule we are going to follow:

This week (June 30-July 6):

Get your copy of the book, say hello in the subscriber thread (we’ve got an introduction thread going here), and familiarize yourself with Gress’ work and background if you’re interested (you can follow her on Substack!)

July 7-July 13 — Part I: The New Woman

July 14-July 20 — Part II: The Shadow Church

July 21-27 — Part III: Christian Feminism

July 28-August 3 — Part IV: Restoration

We’re going to be discussing each section on Tuesdays in the subscriber chat, where I’ll post some of my reflections and discussion questions (so make sure you’ve downloaded the Substack app).

I can’t wait to get started and hear what you all think about the book, Gress’ work has been so influential on my own writing and I know you all will appreciate her work as much as I do.

Happy reading!

Sometimes it’s OK that there are double standards for men and women.

Obviously, I know that’s a provocative ideological nuclear bomb to drop on the internet, so I hope you’ll respect me biding my time in going down this route. At any rate, buckle up, because here we go:

I don’t know how many people are ready for this conversation, but the conservative lament of double standards between men and women sometimes completely misses the point of what’s wrong with feminism in the first place.

To be clear, I firmly believe that the cruel cynicism, blindness, and hypocrisy of feminism within a liberal framework is agonizingly awful and that the widespread impact in our culture of such sick and dehumanizing views towards men is one of the greatest ills of the 20th Century (which is really saying something). As I hope you well know at this point if you’re familiar with my arguments.

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It can be plainly hypocritical for women to fail to hold themselves to the standard they’re holding men, and I think any honest, mature woman would agree we’ve all done this ourselves many times.

It’s the dire need within us for love that loves neighbor like we love ourselves, which is why the principal commandment of our Lord is to do so, as this is the same with loving Him. I’ve repented of failing this standard more times than I can count.

It’s only by His grace that we can do this. This is the Gospel for all men and women, each of us unique and binarily sexed image-bearers of the Christian God.

So, it is right and good to have this primary, foundational standard between men and women.

But the fatal error I believe a lot of people make (and I used to a lot, too) is to inadvertently argue for men and women to be held to the same standard by society as a whole, all the time, when feminists are not doing so themselves.

This is an argument made from the stance of what Christina Hoff Sommers calls “equity feminism,” the original belief that men and women should have all the same rights in society. I don’t believe feminism ever stood for this, while Sommers does, but you can check out her book and the ones I agree with more on this list to delve more into the history of feminism:

Personally, I do not believe in feminism because I think it’s wrong to seek equality, i.e., blindness to sex in all matters of law and social standards. I think this is very wrong and an impossible standard with which to achieve rights or justice for women.

So, when someone tells me, “I believe in real equality, like women being drafted if they want to vote.”

I do not believe in “equality” between the sexes because I don’t think it’s possible. There is always going to be a different standard for men and women in a society that acknowledges that men and women are different, and that women are not weak, but certainly weaker and more vulnerable than men.

The reason women shouldn’t be in combat is because it’s far more dangerous and they’re simply less useful. It’s wrong. The issue isn’t that it’s unfair that men have to be drafted and women still get to vote. The issue is that it’s wrong to put women in the military unless they voluntarily choose to do so, and even then, it does not make any earthly sense to put them in combat.

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We’ve also seen very naturally assumed “double standards” play out, and rightly so, in the outrage over people who identify as transgender playing in girls’ and women’s sports, with little attention given to the likely far biological females trying to compete in boys’ and men’s sports.

We all understand that it is far more barbaric and wrong to allow a fully mature man to compete against women, because we all understand that men have significant physical and hormonal advantages over women.

We all understand that allowing men into women’s private spaces is worse than allowing women into men’s private spaces, and while I think both sexes need private spaces that the other ought to be disallowed from without anyone getting offended, it is for different reasons.

We do not want men in women’s locker rooms because we do not want them to assault the women.

We do not want women in men’s locker rooms because we do not want the men to assault the women.

In both of these cases, the reason is to protect women from the overwhelming power men have over women, to violate their dignity if they so choose.

Of course a woman can violate a man’s dignity too, and one of the sickest forms of feminist double-standard is the joke crass modern women make of literally sexually harassing or sexually assaulting men.

At the same time, the reason that society is generally less offended by women being vulgar and inappropriate towards men is that men can usually more easily physically overpower a woman than a woman can a man.

And here we arrive at the core lack of logic in feminism as a whole, actually: much of its grievances are based on the very fact that men are clearly stronger and more powerful than women.

Both feminists and adherents of traditional Christian ethics like myself believe that men should not abuse that power.

That is why there are going to be double standards for men and women sometimes, and they’re not always going to be wrong.

Women are always going to need certain protections in society, and so they are always going to have certain privileges. Men are always going to be stronger than women in society, and so they are always going to have a distinct advantage. Trying to fight against this is the ultimate barbarism of all the succeeding barbarisms that try to treat women as though they are the same as men.

I need to start with a serious disclaimer that I am, more than ever, emphatically in favor of traditional values and I hope I can safely say that most of my readers will know this. It’s kind of my whole thing here.

I believe that the values that were consciously and purposefully challenged and overturned by feminists^[1] throughout the 20^th Century are rooted in the Christian worldview, which alone upholds the true dignity and worth of the human woman, and this is the worldview I firmly, and unto death, hold.

I believe that both feminism and distorted religious extremism violate inherent feminine dignity.

That is why I also write about what I’ve started to call “feminine wellness,” a broad term I’m using to explore the spiritual, mental, and physical health of the Christian woman living in a dystopian, anti-female modern world.

The major reason for this is that after over a decade in the “trad” space on the internet, I’ve observed just how many men and women alike are being drawn within it with good intentions and a massive misconception about what it looks like to actually live “traditionally.”

In a culture broken by the sexual revolution, the allure of “traditional values,” where a masculine, confident husband protects and provides for a soft woman who joyfully submits to his leadership in keeping the home and raising the children, can be positively toxic to women who have ideologically rejected and not healed from feminism.

How do I know?

This was me for years.

As a woman with a strong passion for ideas, intellect, and arguments and a raging sense of pride about my ideology, when I became a Christian and left behind the progressive, feminist values of my youth, I took for granted that intellectual assent to the Christian faith and the sensibility of traditional gender roles was the same thing as “being free” from the impact of being raised in a sexually permissive culture with a broken view of humanity and the family.

I thought that being able to identify the “wrong” of the way I behaved and the beliefs I had as a young adult was the same thing as repenting of my sins and was the same thing of being healed from them.

Far, far from it.

Psychologically speaking (and psychology and the Christian worldview are totally consistent, sidenote for another day), intellectualizing my pain kept me completely trapped within it.

I struggled for years with anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and the constant sensation of hypocrisy and failure at what I believed I was called to do as a Christian woman.

I couldn’t simply shove my feelings down and feel happy when I experienced anything other than complacent, peacefully resolved contentment with my life or perfect “success” as a homemaker, like I (thought I) was “supposed” to do.

I believed, knew, and understood all the right things. Why was I so bad at actually doing them?

Why was it so difficult to just keep my cool and manage my children if I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother and couldn’t imagine not being home with them all day?

Why did homemaking still feel so difficult and overwhelming if I knew it was such important work and that my ancestresses had managed it under far more difficult conditions for millennia before me?

Why was marriage just as confusing and difficult as every other relationship I’d ever had, if I believed the right things about sex and marriage and we were clearly committed to each other for life?

Well, after years of confusion and internal anguish that I know thousands of women out there experience, I answered these questions and experienced tremendous physical relief when I finally surrendered to entering my “healing era” as the kids say, after stumbling across somatic work in the context of feminine healing.

I learned how to simply sit with my feelings and express them without the guilt or resentment I’d adapted to off-set the limiting belief that experiencing feelings was wrong or bad, as I’d believed as a younger Christian.

As I saw conversations and real-life experiences play out in the online niche of which I’m a part, it slowly began to dawn on me that the “trad” values I’d always championed (and continue to do so today, to be clear) could be really, really toxic for women still trapped in a performative mindset.

Here’s what I mean:

When I was a progressive liberal, I had an ingrained sense if idealism about right and wrong. Yes, I absolutely believed in the postmodern concept of moral relativism, as this is not a consistent worldview.

Everyone who professes a belief in relativism also absolutely believes in a kind of right and wrong, just usually a different set of right and wrong than a fundamentalist Christian would.

I went from moralizing about how we shouldn’t assume gender stereotypes to moralizing about how we should.

I went from moralizing about not telling someone else what to believe to moralizing about how others should believe in Jesus.

I went from moralizing about how marriage is just a piece of paper to moralizing about how marriage is a lifelong covenant that should never be broken and that people who got divorced just didn’t try hard enough.

In other words, I was the same person, I just had a different set of beliefs.

The same is true for how I viewed myself and how my wounds and trauma were defining my beliefs and experiences.

I want to be clear that I had genuinely experienced the love of Christ by this time, but I was a brand-new, baby Christian. The contemporary evangelical church doesn’t really have a lot of tools to address what I was struggling with (although I do think this is changing, thankfully).

I went from thinking I was supposed to be hot and unattainable and not commit to or trust any man, to thinking I was supposed to be perpetually sanguine and submissive and never doubt or disagree with my husband or men in general.

As I rejected my old ways of believing and living, I also rejected any language that would have encouraged me to have compassion on the woman I used to be, and the girl who believed she’d failed the world or conservative evangelical culture’s standards for who she was supposed to be.

The love of Christ had so much more work to do in my life than merely to convince me that Christianity was real and that the values of the world I was raised in were immoral.

I was so ideologically opposed to the concept of “self-love,” I was initially resistant to the full depth of His love for me. I subconsciously assumed I didn’t deserve love for the parts of me that failed the ideological ideal.

I would go on to experience the depth of His love for me not only in my sin, but also in my brokenness, my pain, my yearning for love and acceptance. This was through the profound, immutable Word of God, through other Christians and the stories of great saints through history, and through professionals who were able to support me in alignment with my worldview.

I learned that God designed my psyche and that, when those who know Him put the “logos” in “psychology,” we only discover more of His design for us and can far better address the ways that our separation from Him through the Fall can hurt this good, perfect design.

For years, I’ve heard from thousands of traditional Christian women who long to be the woman or the wife they believe God wants them to be, but they’re fighting against their own humanness, stigmatizing their own emotions as “disobedience” or struggling with their husbands who have their own baggage to carry and expect to be healed by a marriage that looks like the robots from The Stepford Wives.

The ideal of traditional values is toxic if you’re expecting it to satisfy what the world didn’t.

If you’ve been hurt by feminism, believing something different about it isn’t going to heal that hurt, so getting married and having a big family and making all your food from scratch in a cute apron with a blue-collar husband certainly isn’t, either.

This is true for all humans, regardless of their past or their beliefs. If you are looking to your own works, your own status, your own lifestyle to provide what you’ve not yet learned to let Christ provide for you, you are going to spin your tires in misery and wonder what’s wrong with you.

Because this is the ultimate act of feminine submission – letting Christ heal the wounds you won’t let anyone else touch. Letting Christ provide the validation and the status that the world hasn’t given you (or that it has, and you find it still wanting).

Traditional values are rooted in the objectively good, true, and beautiful Christian worldview, and I will defend them until my last dying breath.

But I get to experience the fullness of them so much more in the process of letting Christ truly heal me from the inside out.

You can’t heal the culture if you’re not letting him lay His hands on your own wounds, and you certainly won’t heal through relationships with your husband or children if you don’t.

This is my invitation to all the men and women alike out there who yearn for the ideal of marriage and family to accept the ultimate Christian tradition of being made perfect in Christ through the process.

^[1] I’ve been reading about the overt anti-Christian views of the first wave (yes, first wave) feminists in Carrie Gress’ book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity (affiliate link) which we will be reading together in the book club this summer!

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Whether you share my extremely conservative beliefs about women, marriage, and homemaking, or you’re a blue-haired leftist who wants to “fight the patriarchy,” it’s probably impossible for you to deny that mom burnout is a serious issue in our generation.

We could speculate all day as to whether or not women have always felt this way and now it’s just being highlighted on social media, and if you’re in the blue-haired category, you’d probably argue that “the patriarchy” simply silenced women’s voices before, so it only seems like a new problem.

I’d argue that the tendency for human beings to feel overwhelmed by their work is hardly a new phenomenon, but the ability for human beings to spend copious amounts of time publishing polished pieces of media expressing their burnout in the context of emotionally charged feminist culture wars is definitely very novel.

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Whatever the case may be, however, mom burnout is a very real thing that is happening to many women, regardless of their socioeconomic class or political beliefs — at least, here in the West.

I believe that mom burnout is a national crisis not merely because it is so common, but because of the fallout I anticipate from this widespread victim mentality.

What is going to be the result of millions of mothers experiencing extreme emotional strain during motherhood? This is the environment in which the next generation is growing up.

Imagine the ramifications of a generation of men who have been raised by women who believe that motherhood means accepting misery and poor self-care.

And as I’ve shared before, it didn’t start with feminism — it started with the Industrial Revolution. This was when the shift away from the family (and the village) began, and “work” became something you went away from your home to do, rather than something that was naturally woven into your everyday family and community life.

The entire concept of human identity has been drastically altered in the last 200 years.

So, of course the entire concept of being a homemaker, the matron of a household, has become fragmented too, and has become entirely overwhelming to women who were raised in classrooms, daycare and after-school care, and countless extracurricular activities, largely alienated from the organic, traditional heartbeat of people-oriented homes.

Regardless of the origins of this mom burnout crisis, however, the fact remains that it is a crisis in which millions of young moms experience motherhood as a wild blur of messy mom buns and leggings, drop-off lines and busy schedules, overstimulation and self-doubt, and a toxic comparison culture that has them convinced they’re the only ones struggling.

We lament the lack of the village as though we’re bound to suffer in misery as moms.

Instead, we need to recognize why women needed the village in the first place.

Women are communal creatures. While many a social radical will try to dispute that women are inherently different than men, they still are, and most people with any experience at all interacting with other humans will know that women are significantly more interested in feeling connected to other people than men are.

This, of course, makes perfect sense biologically, as we are the ones who carry and nurture children, and it also makes sense theologically to Bible believers, as woman was created because “it was not good for man to dwell alone.”

We exist to diffuse loneliness in the human race—and this includes other women!

It’s easy to forget that not all pre-industrial women lived in villages. Many lived in isolated conditions, but generally, human beings have lived in some form of tribe—a large, extended family. We are incredibly family oriented, and women are the sex that produces and orbits around family.

Before the village was the family, and we all know how much women love their families and play a very active and unique role in creating the activities and traditions that bond families together. (As I wrote around Christmas last year, this is not actually because men don’t care about these things, like the victims of mom burnout glorification culture cynically assume.)

When women do not have families that they can rely on to ease the load of young motherhood, they suffer.

And far too many women these days are raising families with little help from extended family members, because we simply do not live in a culture that is oriented around family anymore.

Many live far away from their parents, either 45 minutes or an 8-hour drive away and, either way, too far to experience the real support of family.

Some may be right next door to their parents, but who are we kidding? Our parents did not grow up in pre-industrial villages, immersed in the collective cultural practices that bond humans together and provide women with the social support they need.

They grew up in the sexual revolution, and many live just as fast-paced, modern, fragmented lives as we do.

I do not write all this to lament that modern moms suffering from burnout are out of luck—far from it. But I do want to acknowledge that it’s not as easy as saying, “be the village” or “have a family member help you” when you’re struggling with burnout in isolation.

I see you, I recognize the challenge, and I know it is a very real one. You were not meant to survive on caffeine and cortisol 20+ miles away from your tribe.

At the same time, you are not a victim.

You are a woman who was created to “be the village” in her own home, to her immediate family members, and the village is not made up of self-pitying cynics who blame all life’s woes on men and refuse to work in collaboration with them.

We’re not exactly “breaking generational curses” here by treating the overwhelm of motherhood as a personal and political attack by men without taking responsibility for understanding and tending to our needs as women.

And the best way to tend to our needs as women is to be realistic about what women actually are.

Let’s be brutally real right now — moms are struggling and suffering because they live in a culture that is entirely antithetical, by design, to the needs of mothers and women.

It presents motherhood as a “choice,” not as something that we were actually designed for and are perfectly capable of adapting to and mastering, regardless of our social or physical limitations.

Women who lived before the Industrial Revolution also had incredibly difficult lives.

It’s probably pretty easy to avoid comparison culture and anti-male cynicism when the work you do every day could be the difference between surviving a rough winter or dying of dehydration and malnutrition in the summer.

That’s the dirty little secret about the past that we tend to idealize—it was also really difficult. It may have been more meaningful, simple, and wholesome in ways we feel very disconnected from, but we also simply don’t live back then.

We live now, and thankfully, we have incredible technology to lighten our physical loads, if we would only use it wisely and be diligent to learn to lighten our mental loads as well.

This feels like the right place to start explaining how, but I didn’t intend to create a “how to” post out of this. (We do talk a lot about nervous system regulation and feminine wellness over at Created Female if you want to go down that rabbit trail.)

Today, I’d like to end by simply encouraging you that you can bear the load of motherhood, and you can do so gracefully. Mentality is everything in a life where the mental load is our biggest burden.

You do not have to live forever in the exhaustion of burnout, and you should definitely not accept it as a matter of course for young motherhood.

It’s a sign that you need tending to, and you’re worth putting that time and energy into. Reach out to your friends, let yourself relax sometimes, prioritize connection over productivity, work on addressing your triggers, and tend to your physical health.

Perpetual burnout is no way to live.

The people we’re raising are the future of this nation, so we need to address this national crisis head-on in our own homes and hearts first.

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Ironically, I spent entirely too much time thinking about what the first Voice Note should be about before realizing that the whole point of these is to just get to know you all.

In this inaugural return to the Voice Notes podcast, I talk a little about why I’ve been overthinking the…

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I do not have an issue with the fact that many young people have realized the adulteration of the family unit that followed the industrial and sexual revolutions, and are seeking a return to a simpler, more organic, inherently family- and community-oriented lifestyle.

Quite the opposite.

How do I know?

I actually live this lifestyle.

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Fun fact: I came to know the Lord and met my husband when I was living off-grid in Hawaii in the 2010s, where I had moved on purpose to learn how to garden. So, it’s been a dream of mine to homestead since long before it was cool (although in my world, the “slow food movement” was popular and influenced me a lot as a young adult).

Now, the online ideal is just that – an ideal. The homesteading housewife life is not all cottage core photoshoots, homemade bread, and wildflowers (although there’s a lot of that too, if you want it).

It is possible, however, and it is incredibly rewarding, so today I thought I’d tell you all more about how my husband and I have achieved it (and you can, too!)

First of all, I’ll explain a little bit about what I mean when I say we’re homesteaders.

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One of the most common messages I get is a request for book titles that will help my followers learn more about the history of feminism.

I love this question and am always happy to share my favorite titles that directly address feminism (which I’ll include at the end), but the truth is, in order to truly combat feminism in our culture, we need to understand the underlying history and ideology at play behind the movement.

Here are five books I recommend reading if you’re curious to learn more about the history of feminism as well as the underlying ideas that led to the dominance of the feminist movement and the broader movement of materialism, modernism, and later post-modernism that has so drastically altered our society in such a short period of time.

This post contains affiliate links that support these authors and my page.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self — Carl R. Trueman

One of my favorite books of all time, as longtime subscribers will know. Trueman’s rigorous examination of how the modern idea of “the self” was formed and how expressive individualism came to dominate our moral, sexual, and political imagination totally changed my brain chemistry.

He traces the philosophical and theological roots of today’s identity crisis with refreshing clarity, refraining from polemic, explaining why the modern world feels so hostile to objective truth and why the household has become one of its primary casualties.

The God Who Is There — Francis Schaeffer

This classic apologetic work is a powerful defense of the Christian worldview against the prevailing relativism of our age. It will shock you it was written so long ago, but this only serves to highlight the very recent, very drastic beliefs that have shifted the modern zeitgeist away from the classical Christian worldview to postmodernism.

Pairing this with Trueman’s book make up for an excellent mini-course on the history of philosophical thought over the last 200 years, and how we got to where we’ve arrived as a culture today. If I could assign you pre-requisite reading for studying feminism, these two would be it.

The End of Woman — Carrie Gress

What you’ve all asked for — my top recommendation for understanding the history and moral ramifications of feminism. (who is on Substack!) traces the intellectual and cultural forces that have reduced women to interchangeable, disembodied creatures, severed from fertility, relationally, and embodied purpose. My favorite thing about this book is how much compassion she shows for the most influential feminists whose ideas have been so destructive to our culture, rather than just angry rhetoric.

Gress also recently published Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, which I have only just begun reading but feel confident recommending all the same, because she is an author I very much admire and trust!

By the way, we are now reading through this for our book club series:

Love Thy Body — Nancy R. Pearcey

I love, love, love this book, which is a sensitive and intellectual examination of Christian values about the body as contrasted against contemporary dualism and the devaluation of the human body.

This is a very important read to re-wire the way we think about sex, sexuality, and the idea of “gender,” and expose how much of our own thinking may still remain rooted in materialism, as contemporary Christian beliefs often still are, even the most conservative and/or fundamentalist.

The Privilege of Being a Woman — Alice von Hildebrand

This short but impactful book is a profound meditation on the dignity, vocation, and spiritual power of womanhood against the backdrop of the post-feminist modern world.

Much of this book echoed convictions I had already begun to form on my own, giving language and structure to truths that felt intuitively real but rarely articulated. It is a quiet but radiant treatise of woman as she was created to be. Another one to re-wire our view of womanhood and “biblical roles” in a more accurately Christian framework.

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OK, but what about refuting feminism?

Now that I’ve shared the books I believe you should read first, let’s talk about the best titles for the receipts, refutations, and historical fact-checks of feminism!

First, here are some of my own posts that refute some of the most common claims made by feminists:

BOOKS

OK, OK, so to be totally honest with you all – I don’t have a log list of handy history guides teaching you how to refute feminism! That’s actually why I have this blog and have a few books in the works myself, but I do have a few titles to recommend that influenced me a lot in my early career and gave me a good framework on which to elaborate with my own research.

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women? Christina Hoff Sommers

This is the best book by a feminist about the failures of modern feminism. Simply by criticizing what she calls “gender feminism,” Sommers has been blacklisted by the left and empowered a lot of young people to combat feminism, for better or worse. This book will still always be a favorite of mine and essential for understanding the culture wars of the late 10s and early 20s.

Feminist Fantasies Phyllis Schlafly

This classic by the GOAT Phyllis Schlafly is a collection of her columns written in real-time during various cultural battles over feminism in our nation’s history, of which she was an instrumental part.

The Flipside of Feminism Suzanne Venker & Phyllis Schlafly

Niece and aunt collaborated on this excellent treatise on the ways that feminism has failed women. This remains one of my most recommended books against feminism, and I also highly recommend ’s Substack page, as she’s still writing and one of my favorite people to see in my Notes feed every day!

Their Angry Creed Herbert Purdy

I’ve been working my way through this book for years and it is certainly a very historically-rich refutation of feminist beliefs. It can be a rough read, as it exposes the real radicalism and depravity of mid-century feminism, and also contextualizes it well in the post-war period in Britian in particular in a way that was really compelling to me.

The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity Carrie Gress

I’ve already recommended two of Gress’ books above, but I had to throw this one in as an honorable mention because it’s quite good. It is written from a distinctly Catholic perspective and for Catholic readers, yet all readers can appreciate the close examination of history and the underlying radicalism of contemporary feminism.

These are by no means all the books on this topic you could read, only the ones I have read and recommend! I’d love to hear other related titles that you’ve learned a lot from, please share in the comments.

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In our modern approach to health and wellness, the idea that our body is broken and in need of repair is the downfall of far too many women.

Human beings before the age of industrialism and materialism lived and breathed “wellness” in the purpose they found in their work, the devotion they exercised to family and community, and meaning they found in their place in their culture.

Women would have centered their lives around the members of their immediately family and/or household, and in collecting water, cultivating and processing food, tending livestock, keeping a fire going and food cooking.

These would have been time-consuming, physically demanding tasks even for most of the middle and upper classes, who would have overseen the management of the whole household — no small job, as any modern homemaker knows all too well.

Women’s lives would have been active, oriented generally around “self-care,” with much of their exercise and life-extending movement built into their daily duties. Because taking care of your household is taking care of yourself.

I do not profess to live the way a woman living before the advent of electricity and indoor plumbing would have lived and remain among the most privileged of women who have ever lived, as the wife of a blue-collar man living in rural America in 2026.

As a homesteader, however, I’ve had a small taste of what it looks like to have “wellness” be part of your daily life. Walking, carrying, lifting, rising with the sun, cultivating my own food, living with the seasons; a more “natural” life like the one I’m blessed to live affords me with much of the kind of movement and naturally stress-reducing activities we modern people would like to have more of anyway.

A beauty and wellness routine is not primarily about the creams or supplements you use, but the way you are honoring your body in relation to your Maker.

If you believe your body is flawed, you are going to treat it like it is a problem.

If you believe your body is good and useful, you’re going to take care of it like you need it for daily life.

It’s very easy to live as if we don’t need our bodies today. We can sit all day, even as we travel great distances, and do almost all our work either sitting or standing. Modern food production and storage methods mean that much of cooking can be done by simply chopping and stirring food, rather than spending long hours kneading, grinding, beating, churning, etc.

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We do need our bodies though, and it is thankfully still extremely easy to live as though your body is good and important in the modern era, if you stop listening to all the noise and focus on the timeless, traditional wisdom of biological womanhood.

This post contains affiliate links to products I personally use and love!

Embrace Your Body

Living traditionally as a woman means being at peace with the fact that your body is different than a man’s. This is a beautiful and sacred thing! As Christians, it is a form of devotion to God to steward our bodies and tend our unique nervous and reproductive systems according to how He made them.

I have worked with my good friend Kayla Brooks to tailor my workouts and lifestyle to my feminine cycle and the seasons for two years, and it’s truly changed my life. I highly recommend her Flex Your Feminine program for unique, Christ-oriented feminine wellness coaching that you won’t find from anyone else.

Her workouts and wellness guidance are all geared around the feminine cycle and physiology. She gives us movements that strengthen the movements I use every single day as I lift, hoist, sweep, bend down, rake, drag, scrub, and all the other little daily movements of a homesteader housewife. It is so much more than just workouts and “diet” though.

The way we breathe, our relationship to food, the choices we make each day, and the thoughts we cultivate present us with unique opportunities to exercise stewardship and obedience – or succumb to fear and sinful pride. This has been such a healing and profound experience for me and I truly wish it for each and every one of you!!

Kayla is one of my besties and very favorite people ever and has been kind enough to give y’all 10% off Flex Your Feminine when you sign up! Just use the code “Isa10”.

Tend your home

As we’re discussing, there is so much to be said for embracing your daily duties as self-care! Keeping up a simple, manageable household routine (strive for done > perfect), making your home beautiful, and keeping it clean and tidy do wonders for physical and mental health, as I’ve written about here.

My prescription for a minimalistic, flexible household routine is to prioritize getting the dishes done, meals planned ahead of time, one load of laundry each day, make the beds, and wipe down the sink, toilet, and bath/shower area. Life can and will whizz around you in a swirl amid this, but if you focus on this simple routine as the main “train tracks” of your day, you’ll have a set of don’t-even-have-to-think-about-it habits that get done virtually every day and keep the house standing. Without decision fatigue or overwhelm, these practiced chores can generally be done in a few hours (without including cooking time) every day, allowing for all the other expected and unexpected demands of a homemaker’s busy life.

Now, as you can imagine, I am naturally not a big fan of using harsh, endocrine-disrupting chemicals to clean though. This is one reason I was delighted to find American Maid — this is an awesome, small, family-owned company that creates an amazing and versatile non-toxic household cleaner and shares your home-oriented values. Shop their products here.

Guard your rest

In the hustle and bustle of modern life, rest is something that can often make us feel like we’re failing or being left behind – but it is essential for a traditionally healthy lifestyle.

Guard your bedtime fiercely and try to get up and go to sleep at the same time each day. Think how much easier it must have been to maintain a healthy circadian rhythm without artificial lighting? We’ve got to intentionally work against the disruptions that artificial light and an unnatural lifestyle can create.

Something I do is make myself wind down even when I don’t feel like it (which, this time of year, can often mean its still broad daylight!)

I try to use my PranaMat in the evenings to simulate a massage; the spiky mat uses ancient wisdom to release tension and improve lymphatic flow — yes, it’s like a bougie bed of nails for healing era millennials and I love it, and yes, you can save 10% with the code “homemaker” here!

I also heartily endorse the use of calming nourishment and herbs to regulate your system.

I’ve recently cut caffeine and am only using lightly caffeinated adaptogenic coffee at the moment (I don’t have a link but it’s Ryze mushroom coffee!), and I often wind down with tea made from herbs I’ve grown myself, or one of the delicious blends from Farm House Teas (for whom I do have a link as they are aother lovely, small, family-owned business that shares your values, yay)!

Love your own skin

Your body was designed to drink in sunshine, be nourished with the produce of the earth, move happily, and take care of itself. My beauty routine prioritizes sunshine and nourishment over products, although I do love using a gua sha roller and I absolutely swear by tallow balm.

There are many products on the market but I’m committed to and work with PapaBear Naturals, who openly share your traditional family values, are Christian, owned and operate by a homeschool family, and make truly amazing products my family literally uses every single day.

My skincare routine is to wash with water and apply tallow balm – that’s it. I sometimes use PapaBear’s Vitamin C serum and tansy mask, but I could use their whipped tallow balm for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy. At 40, my skin has never been clearer or looked more nourished, and always feels very soft and smooth. Save 10% with my link!

For makeup, I’ve used Araza makeup for years (their coconut crème foundation, powder, eyebrow pencil/eyeliner, and lip color), and they make me feel more beautiful and comfortable in my own skin than drugstore makeup ever has. You can save 15% on their products with the code Isa15.

Stand by your man

Women were made for relationship, and much can be said about the impact of our relationships on our wellness. Women feel happiest and safest in the container of a loving family, which is created by a man who is devoted to his masculine duty.

Sexual and emotional intimacy are extremely healthy for women – but this doesn’t mean that your health will be inhibited if these are painful topics. In fact, quite the opposite – it’s a beautiful and nourishing practice to work on your emotional and relational health and take radical responsibility for your own peace and happiness.

As women, our priority is to our own “territory” or body, which means we need to know how to maturely tend to our health and maintain our own mental peace, placing trust in God and the men we have devoted ourselves to. This is a lifelong work, and much easier said than done, which is why I work with women in group coaching and 1:1.

I also highly recommend my friend Brendan’s Masculine Revival group coaching for men, which provide husbands and fathers with necessary brotherhood and accountability for growth and personal development. (Please tell him Isa sent you if you sign up!)

This point applies even if you’re not married, by the way; women are uniquely designed for community and relationships and it is good for us to pour into connection with others, and good for them, too!

Which brings me to…

Just be

I believe this is the apex of the beauty in being a woman. We are so much more than “just a girl,” but there is a special kind of joy in simply embracing being a woman.

This includes enjoying time with our girlfriends, our mothers, our sisters, all the other women in our life who make us glad to be women, and glad to be women with them.

Fellowship, friendship, and sisterhood are just as important to women as marriage and motherhood, and just as valid to embrace and find identity in.

Because, truly, that is real traditional womanhood, despite the propaganda you’ll here on either side about the purpose of a woman’s life.

A woman’s highest calling is to be a woman of God, and to reflect His image in her womanhood.

If this is your ultimate “wellness” goal, anything else you do will be mere devotional exercise.

Embrace this as your health and wellness routine, and you’ll be well on your way to being a truly traditional woman.

There is probably nothing more destructive to female society than to convince women that men are inherently unsafe.

Women need to be able to rely on men.

And teaching women that men are not reliable, and that instead, women can rely on themselves alone is not only anti-man, but also fundamentally anti-woman and anti-human.

When we discuss the ways that feminism turned men and women against each other, it is not simply to highlight that we’re meant to get along.

We are meant to get along because we are necessary to one another.

Women are necessary to men, because without women, there would be no human race.

Men are necessary to women because, speaking in terms of Christian theology and the creation account, men are the head (“source”) of women, something which takes on profoundly spiritual terms in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 11) but remains a simple, earthy, human truth:

Men are like the dirt that our species were made from, they are the soil in which our seeds need to grow.

We need a sturdy, firm, reliable society – marriage, community, country, society – to thrive biologically as women.

Maybe this sounds far-fetched, but I am not using woowoo concepts. I am speaking of plain, basic, observable biological realities: women are healthiest when they feel safest.

Now, whether or not a woman feels safe is subject to her perception of herself, what safety is, and who she inherently expects to provide that for her.

Consider the all-too-common scenario of modern women who are raised in human bodies that instinctively expect protection from their male and female parents, and often do not receive it from the male parent, or are conditioned to look upon overt male provision (“the patriarchy” of traditional marriage, male leadership, chivalry) with skepticism and even contempt, while largely unaware of all the male provision that remains (financial provision, male-dominated fields that maintain the labor grid, the men who keep women in the modern world safe and living in a free society).

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A woman with this angry, inherently cynical view of men will always view men in her life as a threat, which means she will view her own basic needs for safety as weakness.

How can we quantify the psychological and physiological ramifications of spending your whole life believing that depending on a man is a threat to your dignity as a woman, when in reality, it is because of your dignity as a woman that you should be able to depend on a man?

There is no shame in having feminine needs, and no woman should ever be expected to go through the “work” of maintaining a female body, being emotionally and physically present in the lives of her loved ones, andmentally and practically maintain her own safety. It certainly happens, and some women will choose it for themselves, but I don’t believe any human being is designed for isolation or complete self-dependence.

We were built for community, and women create community, and community thrives within the safe confines of civilization.

And the safe confines of civilization are typically provided by men.

Do men enjoy the benefits of women who keep homes for them while they keep us all safe?

Absolutely.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The only reason we now angrily compare the worth and weight of the labor each sex may more commonly do on behalf of the other as contrasted to the ideal of feminism is because of the materialist, Marxist social distribution of wealth the radicals have attempted to inflict on the formerly great civilization in which we now live.

It is intellectual warfare and, frankly, a full-blown psyop — after all, what better way to tear apart the fabric of society than to weaponize the entire concept of a home?

The family is the base unit of society, and a family is created and perpetuated by marriage.

There is only one real, authentic way to create a new human being, and that is through the act of human reproduction, which requires exactly one male, and exactly one female.

The institution of marriage has been raised to its appropriate place in the context of the Christian religion, which reveals in Christ the true purpose of lifelong, monogamous marriage.

To put it pathetically simply, that point is this: that marriage is about much more than just us.

A man and a woman, together, are so much more than the sum of our parts (or estimated monetary figure of our labor in society).

Men are not your enemy. You were created from man, and for man. Even if no good men exist (as so many complain today), the ultimate Man, Jesus Christ, is alive and ready to be betrothed to you; He is the only truly worthy Recipient of your affection and the apex and epitome of good in mankind.

That is the safety and security that Christianity offers women. That is the safety and security that Christian men ought to thrive to offer women. When they fail, they prove the need for this masculine haven all the more.

Women who have been hurt by men and are afraid of them show us just how wicked it is for women to hurt men. They do not show us that all men are wicked, quite the opposite. Like a lock that has been forced open rather than unlocked with a key, the damage that’s done proves that the lock was misused and designed to be opened in a very different way.

You were not made to live in fear, or to survive on your own without help from anyone.

You were made for love, and for community, and for union.

If it is not to happen for you in this life, let it happen for you in eternity: let Christ be the Man you’ve never had, but were designed to need.

And let Him slay the real enemy in your life: the lies that keep you trapped in fear.

Do you struggle in your relationship with men as a Christian woman? I work privately with women in a small group behind the Created Female paywall, as well as 1:1. Send me a message or reach out to me on Instagram to learn more about how to work with me.

There was a time I used to start all my awkward newsletters like that one, unused as I was to the then-novel platform of Substack.

Although I probably shouldn’t claim to have outgrown any awkwardness!

I’m sitting here in a quiet house listening to rain fall from a spring storm and enjoying a little bit of peace after weeks of chaotic busyness.

I shared earlier this year that my boys and I tried our hands at raising meat chickens for the first time and three weeks ago, we slaughtered our first batch!

It’s been a lot of work for a lot of reward; my outstanding takeaway from meat chickens vs. goats or pigs is that goes by very quickly and yields a lot of meat for generally lighter, but equally time-consuming work. We got about 28 broiler chickens weighing about 5-6 lbs each in seven weeks, and according to my husband’s calculations, spent roughly what we would have on the cheapest factory-farmed chicken you could find at the grocery store. Not bad!

I am reminded almost daily in my life here with my husband and children just how absurd it is to frame the role of a “traditional” woman as one of inactivity or social limitations.

It’s very difficult to say which family member benefits or does the most around here, while obviously my husband and I work a lot harder than our children, we couldn’t possibly homestead the way we do without their help, at this point.

While moderns often see life as separated into parts, work, school, home, social life, hobbies, etc., throughout history, most people had a social position and a vocation and this took up the whole of their time and energy.

I often wonder if this is one of the reasons why we feel so fragmented in today’s world. While the life of your typical European peasant or artisan was likely a lot less materially comfortable than ours in many ways, it was likely a lot less difficult to find a “work-life” balance when life more or less was work, with rhythmic times for rest and recreation in the same community and space.

I think we could chalk a lot of today’s social chaos up to the fact that life looks so very different now than it did before the Industrial Revolution, and human beings are often completely overwhelmed by the precariousness of their own existence rather than happily (or even not-so-happily) resolved to accept whatever station the good Lord saw fit to give them in life.

For me, finding work-life balance when my life revolves around my home and my work involves writing about life that revolves around the home and is also done using some of the most overwhelming and distracting technology ever invented can be a little…chaotic.

First of all, if I do not get a chance to sit down at my desk during the day, my work simply does not happen. I used to “incorporate” content creation into my daily life much more, but this often looked like procrastination and an inability to stick to basic structured routine.

I’ve been working on changing that this year, and cultivating a sacred space in my day to mindfully use the internet and to plan and execute the work that means so much to me.

I’ve also been working very hard this year on creating healthier habits to reduce the amount of information I’m taking in via social media, as well as unpleasant interactions with strangers on these platforms.

It’s a process of daily refinement that exposes my own misplaced desires and inflated sense of my own importance, so, pray for me.

Anyway, in light of my most recent essay, I wanted to revisit the reasons why I write this manifesto. It is not popular to challenge or push back against feminist narratives; this is because it has gotten so deeply embedded into our cultural zeitgeist that it is regarded by default as a kind of progressive, modern orthodoxy we’re all required to adhere to.

I do not believe we are, however, and I believe that the ideas that feminism sought to overturn were, in many (but not all) ways, a much healthier way of honoring feminine dignity.

(Side note: I frequently get asked about my favorite books highlighting the history of feminism, all of which you can find here along with other titles I highly recommend to get an idea of the “big picture” context in which feminism took place.)

The Manifesto my expression of why I believe feminism is flawed and traditional values regarding men and women, women and children, etc. are more biological and moral.

It must also be stated that, at the same time, I also reject a reactionary, nuance-free or legalistic view of women as well as a the cartoonish/extreme examples of sinful men that feminists use to characterize patriarchy.

Instead, I embrace the classical Christian standard to which both men and women have been held throughout the history of Christendom of chivalry, dignity, and respect for sex differences.

My focal point of attack are the ideas that came to fruition from the 19^th to the 20^th centuries that challenged the historical Christian worldview and turned morality and man’s relationship to his fellow man on its head.

I was instilled with the values of postmodernism, secularism, and progressivism growing up. I only learned as an adult the origin of these concepts and how deeply embedded these modern ideas have become within the western ethos – particularly among nominal Christians who often don’t hold a consistent worldview.

We live in a culture that has been defined by morally relativistic values, in which it is considered taboo to affirm basic sex differences between men and women. There is a reason for this, and it is based in the fundamental beliefs modern westerners hold about morality and truth.

How we view men and women, child-bearing, and homemaking has had tremendous repercussions on contemporary generations, and this is neither a coincidence or an accident. It is the fruit of feminism, and no matter how many misconceptions there are floating around out there, it always has been the natural conclusion of the basic aims of feminism.

I could go on and on about this, of course — and that’s why we’re all here.

Here are some of my favorite posts dismantling feminism and discussing womanhood (and manhood) with a clearer lens:

These are just a few of my favorite posts, you can access these and many more with an upgraded subscription!

This page is supported by readers like you (*cue PBS music*)

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I am not a feminist; I’m sure that much is clear to you if you have followed me thus far.

I am also pretty decidedly opposed to feminism. So, naturally, I’ve long identified as an “anti-feminist.”

This is, perhaps, quite logically and semantically true.

Yet, by placing my opposition to feminism at the center of my messaging, I believe I’ve made the mistake of not practicing what I myself preach about how we ought to position ourselves in the world as Christians — particularly when it comes to the best interests and inherent dignity of divinely designed biological femininity.

It’s taken me a really long time to admit to myself, but positioning myself directly opposed to feminism, rather than simply not a feminist, betrays my belief that we ought not define ourselves by what we’re not, but rather by what we are.

The way I classify my views may not fit neatly into the polarized mainstream zeitgeist’s means of categorizing the “us” and “them” of the “us vs. them” paradigm, but it is nonetheless simply not easily classified as “anti-feminist.”

For one, as my critics often like to point out, the Taliban is also anti-feminist, and so are the misogynistic hyper-patriarchalists and the “red pill” voices I very much want nothing to do with and no association with.

Simply opposing an idea does not mean that the idea you propose in its place is a good one.

In fact, this is exactly why I oppose feminism.

Feminists claim to want the best interests of women, but this is built on a presumption that intentionally designed (i.e., forced) civic, economic, and social equality between the sexes is in the best interest of women.

I argue that, considering men and women are different and complementary, any idea of equality that is based on erasing the distinctions between the sexes is not, in fact, in the best interest of women.

In the same way, identifying feminism as harmful to women along these lines, as I so often do, is not the same thing as demonstrating that my values are, in fact, better for women.

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A Homemaker’s Manifesto is my attempt at arguing that the traditional Christian household model and the Christian worldview of men, women, and children are better for women than modern feminism because they are based on how God designed us. (Created Female is my sister publication and private women’s group based on the same concept, but it offers personal insight, sisterly fellowship, and a deeper understanding of our bodies and feminine psyches.)

Secondly — and this one is much harder on my ego — I do not believe it is fruitful, consistent, or Christian of me to polarize myself so much from feminists.

(Ouch, this is hard to write, knowing I’ll probably still be tempted to do it again and again, and maybe sometimes even deliberately when I’m piqued, so pray for me.)

You see, I believe in attacking arguments, not people. I hope I have conveyed that and accomplished it as well on this page, but I’m always painfully aware that my content is extremely provocative and often upsetting to feminists.

I will be honest that I’m not sure how much my tone or tenor will change (so don’t worry, if that’s what you’re here for), but I certainly hope to become more aware of the suffering, fear, and pain that cause so many women to find a haven of perceived justice and safety in the philosophy of feminism.

Because, well, that’s the thing: I love women, I care about women, and I believe strongly that no civil society can exist that does not protect the inherent dignity and worth of women, who are created female in God’s image.

I regret how often I have neglected to acknowledge the suffering of women and the understandable outrage they have at perceived abuses of women, even if I may not perceive the same thing as injustice.

For example, I do not believe that voting rights are necessary for women and possibly not even a very good idea, but I still ought to be perfectly capable of acknowledging how degrading it feels to modern women to hear someone say that their voting rights should be taken away.

I believe that men have been broadly dehumanized by our culture as a whole, but also that domestic abuse and the misuse of women are probably far more rampant than they ever were before feminism, so I even hurt my own cause by neglecting to acknowledge the very real experiences that women have had.

I no longer desire to be pushed into a polarized box where I can’t hold space for a woman who may be going through divorce, who may have been served objectively well by the modern family court system, who works with survivors of domestic abuse, or who has found a haven in modern Western values surrounding womanhood after growing up in an oppressive, non-Western system where she was seen as little more than a useful domestic servant.

Even writing that, my pride screams, “No, that sounds like the other side! You’ll let your critics win!” and that is exactly why I’m writing this piece.

It’s not right for me to save face and feel like I “win” if I am also ignoring the very realities that my deeply held beliefs about the protections that traditional Christian values offer women actually address.

I do not want to live in a society where blind eyes are turned to abuse in the name of “owning the feminists.” I do not want followers who tell me I shouldn’t elevate voices that criticize the “trad” movement because “feminists would love to hear that.” I do not want to cater to voices who seek to elevate fragile male egos and belittle wounded female souls.

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Again, this is exactly why I oppose feminism, and why I’ve always felt so compelled to write about it.

To prove that the alternative to feminism does not have to be its opposite extreme, or its distorted fantasy of what traditional values actually look like.

Before feminism ever came along, Western society elevated, valued, and protected women in a way we’ve completely lost sight of in our contemporary culture.

We see this in the darker side of the trad space, where the time-honored institution of the family household is sometimes reduced to cartoonish “cosplay” renditions of the organic, natural structure of a Christian household. (Although I still stand by every word of this piece defending the “trad” world against accusations of “cosplay” — do all these quotation marks make me sound old? Probably. IDC.)

At any rate, I’m taking the plunge and risking being misunderstood, knowing full well a lot of committed fans may balk at the very idea of simply not identifying as anti-feminist.

My beliefs haven’t changed, only my capacity to see myself a little more clearly and a new desire to be more consistent in my message, even if it seems like I’m not.

Here’s hoping this makes sense to anyone other than just me — let me know your thoughts.

Do you want to learn more about the topics I write about? Check out my list of recommended reading to dive deeper into the history of feminism, postmodernism, and the Christian view of womanhood.