Helen Andrews has a point about wokeness and women. Together, they have done a lot of damage to American institutions.
As many of her critics have pointed out, males as well as females are culpable for mistakes of the 2010s, when performative racial grievance elevated a new multiracial elite at the expense of everyone else, including and especially non-white non-elites. Yet, unlike many of Andrews’ other critics, I do concede that college-educated women deserve a disproportionate share of the blame.
However, contra Andrews, I contend that this is not the result of elevating women. It’s the result of elevating the wrong women: the kinds of women who organize marches with no discernible objectives, yet claim to embody female empowerment. The kinds of women who cry and scream because professors do not forbid other young adults from wearing Halloween costumes they find offensive, yet claim to be “tolerant” above all. The kinds of women who cannot define the word “woman,” yet insist that the world is rife with misogyny.
In other words, we have elevated the kinds of women (and, it bears mentioning, the kinds of men, too) who are chronological adults yet think and behave like toddlers: profoundly unreasonable, proudly irrational, and occasionally hysterical.
The problem Andrews identifies, then, is not feminization. It is infantilization.
America the Infantile
For over a decade now, clickbait sound bites and one-sided narratives have both created and reflected all sides of our polarized politics and culture. True believers on the left have various litmus tests of illogical allegiance for friends, family members, and politicians alike: trans women are women, equity is true equality, and masculinity is toxic. Their counterparts on the right likewise have nonsensical premises that bond them to like-minded others: America is a Christian nation, America first means America alone, and women ruin workplaces.
No right-thinking adult could take these views seriously, let alone hold them. They have been elevated because there are now far too many overgrown children, both male and female, in positions of political and cultural power. This immaturity is affecting and infecting nearly all of our political and cultural institutions, rendering Andrews’ fear of a future in which rationality is superseded by irrationality entirely legitimate—and not by the left’s hand alone.
People with adult qualities of mind and character uniformly accept the reality principle that economist Thomas Sowell has termed “the constrained vision.” They recognize that trade-offs between competing goods and values are an irreducible aspect of personal and political life, and that eradicating these trade-offs is not possible. Grown-ups also recognize that, given the constant reality of competing goods and values, not all moral people will prioritize those goods and values in the exact same way. Among adults who actually merit the designation, Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism reigns: it is entirely possible for two perfectly reasonable people to disagree without one of them necessarily being evil.
The leftist excesses that rightly worry Andrews are borne of a widespread rejection of these basic tenets of political and cultural maturity. There is also an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own failures and successes. When everything is “systemic,” nothing is really up to anyone. There is no authority. So it should come as no surprise that performative helplessness, the defining characteristic of toddlerhood, is arguably today’s most potent political and cultural currency, on left and right alike.
In the remainder of this essay, I will make two arguments. First, I will illustrate why Andrews’ feminization thesis is such a seductive red herring—but a red herring all the same—for the real problem of endemic, unisex American immaturity. Second, I will make the case for recognizing anew, and actively elevating, the incomparable societal value of grown-up women.
Not All Women
In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed, Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility, topped the bestseller lists. DiAngelo’s thesis is that white people should treat Black people not as fellow human beings and presumptive equals but as endemic “others” meriting sycophantic devotion. She can be fairly considered the founding mother of what New York Times columnist and Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter calls “woke racism,” or the creepy condescension of the racial equity initiatives that dominated mainstream academic and corporate spaces from 2020 to 2022: The Smithsonian calling “being on time” a tenet of “white supremacy”; discussion circles in schools and elsewhere segregating participants by race; and politicians allowing crime to spike, watching while schools instituted so-called “restorative justice,” and echoing activists’ calls to “defund the police.”
These patronizing affronts against the dignity of Black Americans (which managed at the same time to introduce various kinds of discrimination against white males ) were not perpetuated equally by Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. Indeed, as I wrote in 2020, progressive, college-educated white women bear a disproportionate share of the blame for the mainstreaming and institutionalizing of the worst “woke” excesses of 2020 and beyond. Without thousands of shrill “mini-mes” embedded everywhere across the nation, DiAngelo would easily have been dismissed as an incoherent, self-aggrandizing fool.
Adults are supposed to embody authority and women are supposed to be adults. We may need men more than fish need bicycles, but we should not need them in any given moment to make boys or girls behave.
For Andrews, this reality of women’s unequal blame in the various leftist excesses of recent years amounts to “feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” In other words, wokeness is a direct consequence of the increasing number of women. That alone made wokeness inevitable.
Andrews fails to notice how our institutions’ elevation of anti-meritocratic performative empathy over reason, and of anti-pluralistic intolerance in the name of tolerance, happened concordantly with their inclusion of women. Unless Andrews is arguing that the removal of barriers to female advancement is, in itself, an outgrowth of leftist excess (which, to be fair, she is not), then correlation and causation remain distinct things.
So, the problem is not that we began including women, but that we began paying obeisance to infantile nitwittery at the same time that we began including women. As a result, we have included too many infantile nitwits who happen to be women (along with, it bears mentioning, plenty of infantile nitwits who happen to be men).
There is a complicated history behind this. As Erika Bachiochi has documented in The Rights of Women (2021), the earliest iterations of proto-feminism concerned themselves with women’s spiritual and legal equality within a framework of Christian virtue that applied to women and men alike. While males and females might be expected to demonstrate qualities like strength, bravery, and honor in distinct ways, owing to their inherent biological differences, these virtues themselves were expected from and prized in both sexes.
Unfortunately, the history of mainstream feminism amounts to a series of moves away from this concept of women’s equal dignity and morality. Beginning in the nineteenth century with the equation of elite white women to “angels” whose feelings could stand in for moral argument—and extending to arguments for suffrage predicated not on women’s equal humanity but on their superior emotive morality—feminism and the corresponding progressivism lionized leftist women’s feelings. That’s where what Allie Beth Stuckey has termed “toxic empathy” (or, many progressives’ endemic elevation of feelings over reason) comes from.
One can acknowledge that women are, on average, more agreeable and by extension more empathetic than men, and thus the likeliest and ablest promoters of toxic empathy, without accepting Andrews’ thesis. Likewise, to acknowledge that men are on average less agreeable and by extension more aggressive than women, and thus the likeliest and ablest perpetrators of violence, sexual and otherwise, is not to accept the theses of mainstream feminism.
Empathy and aggression are morally neutral traits. But the indulgence of either, contrary to reason and civilization, should be expected and accepted only from toddlers.
Our institutions have long been designed to resist, marginalize, and punish undue aggression, which can be properly understood as infantile masculinity, and to select for males mature enough not to indulge it. They were not designed to resist undue empathy. Indeed, many were long ago hijacked by a progressivism that equates unreasoned empathy with virtue. Hence, they resoundingly failed to resist, marginalize, or punish infantile femininity or to select for females mature enough to resist it.
So, what Andrews positions as a simple chain of events (in came the women, and out went the objective truth!) fails to account for the character and quality—the maturity—of the women in question. In other words, we used to value objective truth and exclude women; now, we value infantile untruth and include women.
What have we never yet tried? Valuing truth and including women.
If we attempt that, I suspect we shall find that America is in fact home to large numbers of actual adults who happen to be female. Indeed, I am fairly certain that we could fill every relevant institution many times over with such women, while avoiding all the perils of what Andrews misleadingly calls “feminization.”
My primary worry for America’s future, though, is not that there are too many infantile, weak-minded women in historically male spaces, but that there are not enough mature, strong-minded women in historically female ones.
American Girl Power
Andrews is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” The predictive value of this statement depends entirely upon the maturity of the females in question. My own worry is that the nation itself will not survive if our mass infantilization continues.
If we want to grow and institutionalize renewed American maturity, we need adult women to lead the way—not only in our board rooms and courtrooms, but first and foremost in our homes and schools.
Historically female spaces, as well as historically male ones, merit and require the triumph of reason and discipline over impulse and indulgence. This is necessary for the country to persist.
After all, it is teachers and mothers lacking in adult reason and authority who produce girls too weak and sentimental to resist misguided empathy (take a look, once again, at today’s young female left) and boys too weak and petulant to resist revolutionary destruction (take a look, if you can bear it, at today’s young male right).
Those who advocate for more stay-at-home dads and more male teachers, as Richard Reeves does in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, do so in large part to diversify role models for male success. I have no objection to that. But another tacit assumption is also at work here: we need more male teachers to facilitate better school experiences for boys. Men will allow for more male competition and bodily movement, yet tolerate less bad behavior.
Aside from realizing that the kinds of men who tend to go into education are not particularly likely to resist the antimeritocratic, undisciplined tenets of today’s educational institutions and that men are not going to become stay-at-home dads or teachers en masse (unless we socially engineer that outcome, psychological and personality differences between men and women being what they are), we must resoundingly reject the notion that women must be flanked by men in order to exact compliance from children.
American women should be universally more than equal to the task of establishing sufficient structure and authority to facilitate children’s education and formation, whether there are more men in our homes and schools or not.
I defy anyone to find me any child or group of children hailing from law-abiding, two-parent homes, from toddlerhood through grade school, who I cannot deftly keep in line. This is not a boast; it is a baseline and a given, and one that should be shared with every other normal woman in America. Adults are supposed to embody authority, and women are supposed to be adults. We may need men more than fish need bicycles, but we should not need them in any given moment to make boys or girls behave.
To put it another way: returning the right’s “soft girl” moms and the left’s gentle “parenting” moms from the courtroom to the classroom and the home would not serve anyone’s interests. Weakness disguised as virtue destroys everything it touches, and schools and homes are upstream of laws and research.
Thus, we are no better off with today’s overgrown little girls failing to do the work of yesterday’s grown women than we are with their failing to do the work of yesterday’s grown men. Indeed, the former might be more destructive.
The key to reversing our national infantilization, then, is not to have fewer female attorneys. Rather, we need more Tocquevillian matriarchs—as lawyers and nurses and engineers, yes—but most importantly, as mothers.
We need, in short, the hands of more grown women like Helen Andrews, rocking more cradles to rule an imperiled world.