When Patriarchy isn't Fringe

The Third Way of Humanism

On August 7, 2025 Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson proclaimed on CNN his support for the repeal of the 19^th amendment. It sounds too niche to be worth attention. Surely only a crazy person would try to overturn women’s right to vote. People assume that the idea will never gain much traction.

However, the video segment was endorsed by the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has since then had to backtrack and publicly assert women’s right to vote. Hegseth attends Wilson’s church, and the Pentagon Press Secretary admitted, “The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” The tie between Hegseth and Wilson grows closer when you realize that Hegseth co-authored Battle for the American Mind with David Goodwin, the President of Association of Classical and Christian Schools, who inherited the baton from Douglas Wilson, the association founder.

The movement to repeal the 19^th amendment will not become a reality in a country where more than half of American women of voting age are single, but the crusade for a return to patriarchy is increasing its momentum every year in this country. The anomaly of Wilson is becoming uncomfortably permissible. In the 68^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women held by the United Nations in March 2024, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned, “Patriarchy is far from vanquished; it is regaining ground.”

With the recent national attention on these figures, I feel compelled to decry the current exaltation of patriarchy and the false dichotomy between patriarchy and feminism. Wilson accuses me of feminism. “The feminist tendency to argue like this is a bluestocking giveaway,” Wilson writes. “Put another way, her [meaning me] missing truth is feminism.” The reality is that these promoters of patriarchy juxtapose it with feminism as the only alternative. First, the antithesis of patriarchy is matriarchy, which should not be conflated with feminism. Second, supporting women as equal in dignity and capacity is the hallmark of “feminism,” despite the connections between the “ism” and its offshoots, of which these figures are fearful, i.e. transgender, LGBTQ, androgyny or matriarchy. Rather than contrast patriarchy with feminism, I would offer a third way that the tradition has called humanism. “Every woman is a human being,” Dorothy L. Sayers was compelled to say in 1938, “one cannot repeat that too often.”

Sidenote: Sayers herself is often touted as the progenitor of the classical education movement in America because of her 1941 talk “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which was republished in National Review in 1978 and led to the founding of the first three classical schools in America between 1980-1981, which included Douglas Wilson’s Logos School in Moscow, Idaho.

Despite Sayers’s popularity for the classical education movement, her talk “Are Women Human?” is less appreciated as essential reading for students. In that essay, Sayers shies away from claiming the label “feminist” because of its association with “aggressive feminism”—the kind that saw militant action in her country as women planted bombs in their attempts to fight for suffrage. Sayers wants to assert what she finds obvious about women but that has been overlooked—their humanity. From her perspective, women are the “neighboring sex” not the opposite one, and women are neither “the weaker vessel” nor “a divine creature,” for both the negative and positive assumptions have led to patriarchy. Rather, women are human beings who should be reckoned with as individuals with particular gifts, capabilities, weaknesses, preferences, and so on, just as men are.

Sayers explains the unfortunate tightrope that women are forced to walk which falls prey to fallacies on both sides. In one view, women are inferior, whereas the other uplifts women as superior, but neither are accurate. On the one hand, patriarchy assumes a hierarchy of potential between men and women based on physical difference and closes out women from some forms of education, jobs, leadership and so on. While the other side declines to admit any difference between women and men because they do not want to concede in ways that might lead to classification or limitation. Under patriarchy, women are often reduced to their ability to birth children; while extreme forms of feminism compel women to forego their maternal nature for their roles in the public square.

Women should not be reduced to either mothers or workers, Sayers contends. Just as men do not have to choose between being husbands and fathers or workers and citizens, so women should not be forced to choose between family or vocation. If we accept the premise of the patriarchy, Sayers asserts, that “women should stick to their own jobs—jobs they did so well in the good old days before they started talking about votes and women’s rights,” then you have a woman who bakes bread and spins yarn and hangs clothes on a line, returning to the cottage industry tasks that once occupied people before the Industrial Revolution.

Maude Royden was integral to the British suffrage movement. She was a Christian woman who fought for rights to own property, work, preach, as well as vote.

Sayers offers an alternative—that women are human beings with individual callings that include motherhood as well as other vocations. Myself as a case in point: I am a mom of four who has published almost a dozen books and loves teaching college students. I do not represent the ideal woman, nor do I uplift my choices as symbolic of the class of woman. We need to read from the mothers of our past in order to see the wide variety of ways of being woman, in a similar vein to reading a diversity of male authors shows us so many ways of being man. Sayers and I can only express our own reasoned arguments and opinions on womanhood, drawn from our experience, knowledge of the tradition, and ability to think.

“I prefer to think that women are human,” Sayers reminds us, “and differ in opinion like other human beings.” Because women differ in their opinions from one another, as well as from men, each person should have a say—a vote—in the ways that society function. The idea to repeal the 19^th amendment might sound reasonable when you don’t know the contributions that women have made and must continue making to society. This supposedly fringe movement matters because it seeks to hide or silence those from the past who have been muted for too long. Ultimately, any system that fails to recognize the humanness of both men and women diminishes all of us.