More Young Women Will Pursue Family Life If Good Men Step Up

For those concerned about the demographic cliff that is now before us, the growing cleavage between the sexes is not an encouraging trend. We often hear on the political right how gender polarization is manifesting itself: how young men are becoming more conservative, young women, more progressive; how young men are becoming more tradition-minded, young women, more career-focused; how young men are returning to traditional religion, young women to astrology and yoga; how young men want to get married, young women, not so much. 

Regardless of the perfect accuracy of these statements, they are characteristic of a widely shared conservative perspective. And so, conservatives—with a defining respect for tradition, religious piety, and monogamous life-giving marriage—can find it easy to side with the men. But to wrap our minds fully around this polarization, and to find an authentic path to bring the sexes back together, more traditional and religiously-minded folks should seek to understand the matter as it concerns young women. 

As a student of the history of political and legal thought with a focus on ideas about women, it seems clear to me that we in the West are living in a society that has generally imbibed the modernist myths of radical autonomy, materialism, and scientism, shorn of the truths and practice of Christianity that for a long time counteracted these heady myths. What I believe we are experiencing in real time is the post-Christian degeneration of the sexes. Worse still, these degenerations are being theoretically justified—on both left and right—by a flat, often evolutionary account of human nature that erroneously reads them as male and female nature, per se. 

From the political (feminist) left, then, we too often hear that masculinity is everywhere and always boorish and dominating. From the political (masculinist) right, we too often hear that femininity is everywhere and always emotional and manipulative. If you spend any time on social media, you may well find reason to believe that these descriptions of the sexes and their most salient features are altogether accurate. To my mind, they speak more to the nature of masculinity and femininity when they degenerate into the worst forms of themselves—when they become “toxic.” 

To wrap our minds fully around this polarization, and to find an authentic path to bring the sexes back together, more traditional and religiously-minded folks should seek to understand the matter as it concerns young women. 

Feminine degeneracy has always been a major concern of female writers. A literary scholar might refer to Jane Austen or George Eliot, a Church historian to the the writings of the female saints. Since I’m a legal scholar, I study those women who have made legal claims on behalf of women. And in sharp contrast to the central concerns of feminism today, the leaders of the early women’s movement in the United States, and those who inspired them, wished to see women thoroughly (or “liberally”) educated to ensure their cultivation—and to spare them from their characteristic degeneracies. They even spoke about these matters in exactly these terms. 

In a speech in Philadelphia in 1849, delivered again at the first national convention on Woman’s Rights, Duties and Relations in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850 (and republished widely), the beloved leader of the antebellum woman’s movement, Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, responded to the charge that women’s public opposition to slavery and other social ills was making them “unwomanly.” In her Discourse on Women, she wrote proudly of “all the difference, that our great and beneficent Creator has made, in relation of man and woman,” concluding, “we are satisfied with nature.” But, she argued, that women, like men, have a duty to develop their God-given powers and capacities for their own good and the good of those in their care. 

She worried, as so many female writers before and after her, that women’s want of a thorough education was leading some to “degenerate into a kind of effeminacy,” a sentimentality “in which she is satisfied to be the mere plaything or toy of society, content with her outward adornings” and other superficialities. To become a “true woman,” Mott argues, she must “understand her duties, physical, intellectual, and moral” and cultivate her powers as a moral and responsible being.

Likewise, the convention’s president, Paulina Davis, offered a speech “On the Education of Females” at the second convention in 1851. In it, she decries the widespread valorization of a kind of female weakness that masquerades as “woman’s nature” per se. Notice that Davis here is not speaking of women being enslaved by men, but by their own lack of integral development as women: 

Cultivated only for the delights of her affectional nature, the heart is disproportionately developed, and she is made a creature of pure feeling and passionate impulse. All aspiration, all heroism, all nobleness, all distinction, tolerated and encouraged in her, is in the direction of the passions and emotions only. Intellectual culture of any kind which might abate or stead, or balance feeling, is held unwomanly; and the [female] sex is enslaved by the disproportionate activity of its own distinguishing traits.¹

The Catholic philosopher Edith Stein writes similarly of this feminine degeneracy (using the same term) 75 years later: “[T]he one-sidedness, to which by nature [the woman] inclines, is particularly dangerous: unilateral emotional development.” She continues, “Where discipline of mind and will are lacking, emotional life becomes a compulsion without secure direction.”

This unilateral emotional development on the part of women is a chief target of the English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well. Regarding "the care of children in their infancy [to be] one of the grand duties annexed to the female character by nature,” Wollstonecraft worries mothers’ natural obligations to care for their young children will not overpower corrupt social conventions that tempt women to more superficial pleasures. To carry out the hard work of cultivating virtue in children, and fulfilling their other obligations as well, women must learn to be faithful, strong, and benevolent, fixated not on appearances or consumed with how to please. Rather, thought Wollstonecraft, they must learn how to prepare their children and themselves for the happiness of eternity. 

Rather than such aspirational accounts of female excellence, a generation of women has grown up with violent pornography on devices in their pockets, and an autonomy-oriented feminism that has defended porn as speech.

Wollstonecraft, Mott, Davis and Stein all want by education, robust responsibilities, and as Stein argued, “objective work,” to protect women from the characteristic vices to which they are tempted. They wish to call women to the full integration of themselves as human persons, as mature and fully cultivated women who freely dedicate their lives to the good of others. Imagine a women’s movement so dedicated! 

Rather than such aspirational accounts of female excellence, however, a generation of women has grown up with violent pornography on devices in their pockets, and an autonomy-oriented feminism that has defended porn as speech. I do not think enough of us appreciate just how frightening porn itself is to young women, or how frightening to women the men are who have been malformed by it. Or frankly, how frightening is the rhetoric of those extremely online right-wing male provocateurs who too often talk as though the proper relation between the sexes is one of domination and submission instead of reciprocity, collaboration, and care.

Frightening enough, it appears, for some girls and young women to attempt to flee womanhood altogether through trans-ing their bodies. Or others who—so broken from the sexualization and objectification they see—figure they’ll just monetize their sexualization on Only Fans instead. And then add the well-documented social-media-induced anxiety of Gen Z women as well as the real fear that many ordinary women have of pregnancy and childbearing (with 62% of American women reporting an “extreme” fear). 

Without robust guidance (and grace) from true religion and without the soul-ordering enterprise of liberal education (the lost jewel of the West), a woman with high levels of anxiety, especially about pregnancy, and too often only porn-addled partners to choose from makes an entirely reasonable decision not to pursue marriage with them. Rather, the ascendent norms of modern liberalism—workism, consumerism, and the pursuit of whatever makes you happy—seem like the obviously preferable route. So, yes: women are forgoing men, sex, and children for work, wages, and travel, instead. From an individual woman’s perspective, the trade-off seems entirely rational, even to their fathers. From a demographic perspective, it is completely suicidal. 

If men are leaders of families—which I think they have the responsibility to be—then men are going to have to lead here as well. Because women will continue to think it’s in their best interest—and, frankly, I think they are right—to decline becoming mothers with the profound vulnerability and dependency that entails—with men in whom they cannot put their trust. 

If a new and growing women’s movement can inspire young women to stop giving away their bodies to unworthy men, then men have got to become worthy of receiving them again. As mothers, women must do their part with their sons, teaching them how to govern their appetites and avoid the poison of porn. But as a cultural matter, it’s good men who must step up—to inspire young men to put down the porn and aspire to become gentlemen.

Erika Bachiochi is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Editor-in-Chief of Fairer Disputations, and author, most recently, of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. 

Editor’s Note: A version of this essay was delivered by the author on April 1, 2025, at the Family Formation and the Future conference at the Danube Institute in Budapest, Hungary. 

1. Paulina W. Davis, “On the Education of Females,” in Woman’s Rights Commensurate with Her Capacities and Obligations: A Series of Tracts (1853) p. 10