I’ve printed stickers and magnets (as below) for you to give alongside the book (or keep as a bonus for yourself).

You can claim a sticker or magnet if you buy The Dignity of Dependence or any of my previous books. Both are about two inches square. Magnets are first come, first serve, because I have fewer of them.

You can sign right up here to send me your receipt and your address.

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A quick reminder of what’s on offer below:

The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto

The book that grew out of this substack! My book lies at the intersection of these two claims:

• Women’s equality with men is not premised on our interchangeability with men.

• Dependence on others is not a temporary embarrassment at the beginning (and end) (and much of the middle) of our lives but the pattern for how we live together.

Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name

A practical guide to creating thicker Christian community where you are now, over the next two weeks to two months. I’ve loved hearing from readers about what they tried out. One reviewer: “I particularly enjoyed Libresco's suggestion to take things you would typically do alone, and do them as a group. It inspired me to send a text out to my son's class' mom group and plans for acts of mercy are in the works for next week.”

Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers Even I Can Offer

This was my first book, and it tells the story of my conversion from atheist to Catholic, and how I learned to pray. As one reviewer wrote: “This book is really a practice manual, a helpful guide to expanding and growing that most important but most difficult of modern disciplines : a regular and disciplined prayer life.”

And, as a special bonus…

Back Again from the Broken Land

This is a tabletop RPG I wrote together with my husband. It’s inspired by “The Scouring of the Shire” at the end of The Lord of the Rings. You play small people who played a pivotal role in the defeat of the Doomslord, who now need to make the long walk home.

You can get the pdf at this link, and you can get a black and white print edition directly from me for $25 (including shipping).

To claim your bonus, fill out the form here. You’ll need your receipt, or, if you’re buying direct from me, a screenshot of your venmo or paypal payment to me.

And please tell me whom you’re getting a book for, and why!

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Check your local listings! It’s excellent. And you want to go with a friend to kibitz after.

Some time ago, I had a post here titled “Against Fractional Complementarity,” which sparked a lively conversation. I drew on several women writers I admire, particularly Abigail Favale, as below:

Fractional complementarity, then, sees the sexes as complementing one another because they each reflect partial or fractional aspects of a whole human being. Fractional complementarity tends to divvy up various human traits and virtues into pink and blue lists: men are more rational, let’s say, and women are more emotional, so together they make up for one another’s deficiencies—together, we account for a well-rounded human being.

Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes. Our complementarity, then, is synergistic—it does not complete a lack but enhances a whole, resulting in a fruitful collaboration that is more than the sum of its parts.

Men and women overlap significantly, and there are some strong statistical differences between men and women when our traits as a group (height, appetite for risk, etc) look like two overlapping, slightly offset bell curves. These are what Favale calls “second order” sex differences.

The “first order” ones are not like overlapping bell curves at all, but a fairly sharp binary: women are ordered toward the production of large gametes, men toward small gametes. (“Ordered toward” takes not that you do not cease to be a woman when your reproductive system functions poorly. I did not cease to be a woman when miscarrying—I experienced a distinctively and exclusively female form of loss).

I asked you readers a couple of questions, among them:

Do you agree with Favale’s distinction between “first order” and “second order” sex differences?

Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?

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Tessa wrote:

This is a great question. When we feel uprooted and adrift, it’s easy to fall into a regimented, lifeless, or fractional system, because we’re looking for something solid to hold on to.

My thought on why it is that we struggle with being non-reductionistic in our conception of what it means to be masculine and feminine is that it seems rooted in at least two things: (1) our increasing distance from ordinary community and from the ordinary cycles of life and death, around which a community would have specific rituals and traditions (one example is cooking: cooking within a particular food tradition rather than according to whatever a placeless expert says is both more grounding and freeing, and most likely healthier too), and (2) our lack of a symbolic/poetic imagination. We have a really hard time with metaphor and symbol nowadays, such that when we see something amiss—such as the erasure of traditions and differences of any kind—when we try to rectify it, it’s easy to replace the lost thing with a kind of hardened and actually imprecise understanding, which can lead to absurd notions, such as fortitude only being a masculine virtue.

There was a little discussion of the Greek tradition, which is pretty well glossed by this number from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Dissent made a pitch for stronger gender norms and divisions, saying they can be arbitrary and important at the same time:

In society at large, we need more same-sex spaces, not fewer. It may be arbitrary who does the plowing of the field or the threshing of the grain, but in a particular community it is not arbitrary. The more comprehensive the divisions between the sexes the more flexible the whole thing becomes in times of necessity. (Women always take over male responsibilities in times of war, when men are off at war.) When men in a marriage know what their normal duties are they can work to get it done---and in times of necessity pick up the slack without worries. It might be your wife’s work to change diapers when you aren’t around, and you aren’t around often, but if you have that sense then, in your wife’s absence, you can do the Daddy diaper change without having that murky sense you are a traitor to your sex. That duty *is* arbitrarily female, but *because* it is firmly normative it *can* be assigned to the male in times of necessity, like when the wife is sleeping, working, showering, cooking, milling grain, or all the rest.

Unity (and equality) is only borne out when there is radical habitual division between men and women. Recognizing the call of necessity and the ability of the sexes to be interchangeable in any isolated task is only possible when it is an exception. When it is a norm, the identities of both men and women are lost.

I read this as partially saying it’s easier on everyone if you feel like your (and everyone else’s) understanding of you as a man/woman is strongly established. You’re not proving it day by day or frequently on the margin of “obviously” male or female.

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To that last point, I also asked you to reflect on some of Sr. Prudence Allen and Sr. Carino Hodder’s ideas that our embodied nature makes the same act “feminine” or “masculine” because of who’s doing it. The paradigmatic example is that a mother or father comforting a sleepy baby may both be shushing and rocking, but it’s true to say it’s maternal in one and paternal in the other.

Michael weighed in:

The idea that an act becomes masculine or feminine based on who's carrying out the act rings true to me as a stay at home dad. As my wife notes, there is something masculine about how I care for our kids and take care of our house, just like there's something feminine in how she does her work. It's hard to tease out all the differences, and how the work I do looks different by virtue of me being a father and a husband, but there is a difference there, certainly.

But Gemma didn’t find that Hodder/Allen’s framework resonated for her:

I don’t think that all of my acts are feminine acts by virtue of being done by a woman. There is no necessity that virtues have to play out “in a different key” in response to the body of the person doing it. We should be wary of going from a descriptive “men and women sometimes tend to enact virtues in observably different ways” to a totalising “virtues always become different when enacted by a man or a woman.” Sometimes what we are embodying is not “man” or “woman” but simply “neighbour” or “friend” or indeed “parent.” I’m all for recognising the importance of the specific relationship between a woman and the child she has birthed, but even then there are parental acts that need not take on a sexed character.

I think Sr Hodder has inadvertently implied that something has gone wrong if a woman is, at any given moment, not enacting the feminine in some sense. No doubt it is comforting, given that assumption, to hold that this has always already been achieved, but it actually needn’t always be necessary in the first place.

A user going by Beloved framed the question through Jesus and Mary:

“The act becomes fem/masc by nature of the actor” sounds appealing but not quite rich enough to me. The place I have pondered about masc/fem recently relates to our invitation to participate in giving of ourselves. Jesus sacrificed his body through death (and resurrection and ascension); Mary, through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing. But they both lived and died. The red martyrdom vs the white martyrdom - dying for Christ vs living for Christ - the difference to me today is which moment is more /obviously/ heroic. Continual renewal of purity of heart is painful, but usually invisible. Your literal heart ceasing to beat cannot be hidden. But rarely does one dare to die for Christ if one has not already lived for Christ; or, rather, to die in the body if not already in the will. Jesus lived, doing the Father’s will and not his own, his whole life, not just during his passion and death. If he hadn’t had that last bit, he would have died a white martyr; and plenty of women saints have died a red martyrdom (or died in childbirth). No definitive conclusions, more musings.

I enjoyed the discussion and there’s more in the original comments!

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A lot of people gave $20 each, and at least one person gave more than ten times that. I’m very grateful to have a mix of both—it’s what we’ve relied on to sustain K as she builds her new life. The group of women who have been the primary supports so far have a lot of variation in what we can give financially. I’ve been the bundler so that we can help without revealing who gave how much.

It takes a village.

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Relatedly, I really enjoyed this Plough essay from Matthew Burdette: “Everyone Is Eventually a Burden.”

Igot to know the theologian Robert W. Jenson during the final years of his life. Like many people, I first met him on the page, starting with his Systematic Theology. But I soon discovered that he and I worshiped at the same church and, not only that, we liked to sit in the same south transept. One Sunday, I leaned over the pew in front of me to where he was seated in a wheelchair and asked, “Are you Robert Jenson?” He looked at me perplexedly and, after a long pause, finally said, “Well, that’s my name.” Soon thereafter, I was invited to call him “Jens,” and before long I was visiting him at his home about twice each week. As our friendship grew, I would sometimes keep him company while his wife, Blanche, left the house so that he wouldn’t be alone. By this time, he was unable to get himself a drink or something to eat or walk unassisted to the bathroom.

On one occasion, after assisting him to and from the bathroom, Jens frustratedly muttered something about being a burden. I insisted, “You’re not a burden.” At this, he looked at me and said very clearly, “Yes, I am. Everyone is eventually a burden.”

His surprise at my pastorally inept response, and my surprise at his candor, centered around the same problem: my politeness.

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This is, of course, one of the major themes of The Dignity of Dependence. We all start out as a burden as a baby, even if it’s as a welcome, longed-for one. Almost all of us will have a period of burden-hood as we prepare to die. And those who don’t are not usually those we regard as lucky—those killed suddenly and unexpectedly in the prime of life through e.g. a car accident or a heart attack.

One of the small shifts I suggest in talks is answering “Thank you,” with a firm “You’re welcome,” rather than a “It’s nothing.” Through many little choices, we use politeness to screen out acknowledging asymmetries of need and debt.

And then? Well, as Burdette puts it:

The question that generally goes unasked and therefore unanswered is: what happens to people who are a burden once they have been totally buffered from the acknowledgment of this fact?

I suggest that such people will often do everything in their power to turn the polite denial into the truth: they will try not to be a burden. Politely denying that someone is burdensome in fact denies that person the freedom to be a burden, even when burdensomeness is involuntary, so that the person is weighed down by his or her own dependence. To be clear, this dynamic is not present in every experience of being burdened: for example, I love my children, and it really doesn’t bother me when my daughter or son wakes me up at night. Love has a way of blinding us to the cost of bearing other people. At the same time, neither my children nor my love for them would be served were I to pretend that I’m not exhausted after a series of nighttime interruptions. Love may relieve the feeling of being burdened, and it energizes us to give of ourselves, but it does not alter the basic fact we must carry one another and that we get worn down. When we pretend that we are not exhausted by the demands put on us, the very love that binds us to ones whose burdens we carry is malformed into a force that keeps us apart and isolates us and those who depend on us.

How have you seen burden-hood and asymmetry of need deflected?

What’s one of the best ways you’ve seen it acknowledged openly?

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First up, I have a spot where I could use some help, and I figure Other Feminisms readers might be the ones to ask. I’ve been helping to support a woman who fled domestic violence with her son for the past two years (in concert with a group of ~30 women). That’s let us split the costs of lawyer retainers, housing security, etc as she rebuilds her life.

She’s got a legal fight coming to a conclusion in the next few months [details redacted, about child support and taxes], and covering the fight plus some of the rebuilding is a little hard for our group to handle. We have a gap of about $1200 total over four months.

If you’re an Other Feminisms reader, and you’d like to chip in, you can email me with any questions, and my venmo is @leah-libresco. We’ve also gotten help from the Order of Judith, to whom I’m very grateful.

On average, women fleeing abuse return to their partners many times before they successfully escape. Being able to remove some of the financial pressure has made it easier for K to build a new, safe life.

Last month, I flew to California to sit down with Lila Rose of LiveAction. We had a broad ranging conversation—definitely a lot in here about The Dignity of Dependence—but also a little more about my conversion story and my family’s history of losing children through miscarriage. Plus, my take on rising misogyny on the Right (everything from saying women should be excluded from student loans to half-joking cries to repeal the 19th Amendment).

The video link is below (they went through several SEO driven titles, and very obviously I didn’t pick this one!) and you can also listen on Spotify and other podcast providers.

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I’ve really enjoyed being tagged in some people’s notes when they’re reading The Dignity of Dependence post-partum, and it was a delight on one book tour shop to have a mom show me her son’s inscription in the copy of The Dignity of Dependence that he bought for her.

So, as Mother’s Day approaches, I’d like to offer readers a little something extra if you’re thinking of getting a book for a friend or family member in April or May. This is NOT limited to moms—the book’s discussion of how our bodily frailty connects us to others certainly is not.

I’m planning to get the design below printed as either stickers or magnets, which I’d put in the mail to anyone who sends me a receipt for The Dignity of Dependence (or my other two books, Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option) in April or May. I’ll have a copy to buy directly from me, if you’d like one signed.

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So, first off, would you prefer to see this printed as a sticker or a magnet?

I’ve got some magnet proofs on their way to my house, because I want a magnet, but stickers are a little more cost effective. Hold onto your receipts if you have them, and I’ll have a sign up form soon!

Who in your life have you lent your book to already?

What’s the best book someone recommended to you during a time of extended recovery?

I definitely nominate Piranesi for that second category.

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Second, at The Dispatch, I got to dig into a question that I’ve wondered about for a long time: What kind of death threats count as crimes? I interviewed both a first amendment lawyer from FIRE and a journalist who has had to triage the many threats he receives.

Finally, Ave Maria Press is having a spring sale, which means my conversion story, Arriving at Amen, is available for $8. A teaser from the opening page: “[When I saw Les Miserables] I didn’t fall in love with tragic Éponine or fearless Enjolras or noble Jean Valjean, but with Javert, the story’s antagonist.”

I was delighted to sit down with to talk about The Dignity of Dependence and her work improving primary care.

Hard Medicine

Can Medicine Make Peace With Dependence?

What is dependence, and is medicine built to handle it? That’s the question at the center of this conversation between Dr. Yurkiewicz and Leah Libresco Sargeant, a writer and thinker. Sargeant’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, argues that society treats autonomy as the default, when in reality our lives are shaped by need. Does healthcare, of al…

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a month ago · 2 likes · Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (I’ve edited the transcript a little for brevity).

Ilana Yurkiewicz:

I want to talk about the economics in the workplace as well. You write a lot about that. Many workplaces can be openly hostile to illness or disability. As a physician, I have learned that my signature can be one of the most powerful tools I have to give chronically ill patients protected time to step away from work that otherwise treats them like widgets.

They can step away to inject insulin, they can attend appointments, they can take their medications. I often write for intermittent FMLA for people to be able to do this. Yet often I and my patients face employer pushback anyway, because modern workplaces are built largely to squeeze maximum productivity from able-bodied workers.

I believe that squeeze leaves zero room for dependence or illness. How do we create workplaces that treat workers like real human beings with real needs and not widgets?

Leah Sargeant:

I’m not sure exactly how we get there, but I can talk about an example of somewhere that does this differently and how they got there. There’s a group called the Bruderhof, who are an Anabaptist community. They built a factory as part of the way they were supporting their community.

Now, they hold all their goods in common. So the point of the factory isn’t to enrich the owner of the factory. It’s for the community together to make something that is viewed as valuable by the world that the world will pay them for. In the same way that monasteries might make beeswax candles or have some other industry that helps support their work.

So when the Bruderhof were designing their factory, they said, well, this is a factory that’s meant to employ our community. So we’re not going to start from the assumption of we get to pick whoever we want to work here. We can’t say we’re only hiring 20 to 30 somethings who don’t have kids. We’re employing almost anyone in our community, including the elderly.

So they designed their factory with the assumption of this factory needs workstations that accommodate people as they are. And the Bruderhof had the sense of stewardship of their community. They had to design the job so it could employ the people nearby. And I think that’s just not a way that most workplaces think through this.

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I’m a big fan of Ilana’s work and I got to review her book Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care for National Review. Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

The range of treatments that doctors can offer has gotten more and more advanced. Robotic suturing tools allow surgeons to conduct delicate surgery through minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures. CAR T-cell immunotherapy can be precisely tuned for individual cancers, teaching patients’ immune systems to kill their tumors. But when it comes to medical record-keeping and continuity of care, many doctors like Yurkiewicz find they’re operating in an era of oral history or as archaeologists.

In her practice, Yurkiewicz reconstructs a patient’s medical history as though she were piecing together potsherds at a dig site. She asks other doctors to mail her CD-ROMs of medical images (and then borrows a disc drive to be able to view them). She pores over pages of blurry, out-of-order faxed records. And often, she turns to the patient as her co-investigator, asking questions such as, “What did the testing show? Was it a loud machine where you lie flat, or did someone use a probe coated with cold gel?”

…Michael’s doctors have medical expertise, but it’s his wife who’s an expert on Michael. It’s she who is the first to realize that his new provider didn’t follow his discharge treatment protocol and that neglecting to properly administer his sodium infusions is killing him. But it’s hard for her to be heard — when she brings up her concerns, she’s initially told, “This is just the progression of his illness. He’s a sick person, you know.”

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In Christianity Today, Matthew Loftus has a piece that complements Ilana’s work. He’s focused on what Surgeon General nominee Casey Means is missing, that she might have learned if she’d spent time working in primary care.

Changing health behaviors is critical to getting control over chronic diseases. Means complains in her book that doctors are too quick to prescribe pills when “an ultra-aggressive stance on diet and behavior would do far more for the patient in front of them.” Means, who didn’t finish her ear, nose, and throat residency and doesn’t hold an active license to practice medicine, makes a good point. But has she ever sat with recalcitrant patients and tried an “ultra-aggressive stance on diet and behavior” with them?

Anyone who has practiced primary care medicine, as I have for over a decade, will tell you it’s not as simple as that. In fact, most patients will avoid coming back to your office if you try to be “ultra-aggressive” about any behavior in their lives. Means and RFK Jr. overestimate the power that individual lectures from doctors have on their patients’ choices and habits, which is not surprising considering that neither of them has ever treated chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes over the long run…

I train medical students, interns, and residents nearly every day as part of my work as a family doctor. These trainees, because they have more classroom experience than clinical time treating patients, often come up with diagnoses and prescriptions that sound good on paper but won’t work because they don’t have the wisdom that comes after seeing and treating many patients. They don’t know what they don’t know, and when they’re not carefully supervised, they can do more harm than good.

The Bruderhof with their factory, and Drs. Yurkiewicz and Loftus with their patients are deeply concerned with the reality of the person they aim to serve. If they engage with an imaginary, idealized version of the community or patient before them, they will design systems that don’t work.

And, often, the blame will be placed on the aberrant or disobedient subject, not the practitioner.

Where have you encountered a professional (at work or in medicine) who kept rejecting the actual people in front of them in favor of an imagined ideal?

Where have you redesigned a system or replanned an event in order to accommodate people as they actually are?

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Today, on Good Friday, I wanted to share an excerpt from Pope Leo’s homily during the Chrism Mass in Rome, which seemed Other Feminisms-relevant:

Dear friends, we follow Jesus who “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself” (Phil 2:6-7). Every mission begins with that kind of self-emptying in which everything is reborn. Our dignity as sons and daughters of God cannot be taken from us, nor can it be lost, but neither can the affections, places, and experiences at the start of our lives be erased. We are heirs to so much good and, at the same time, to the limitations of a history into which the Gospel must bring light and salvation, forgiveness and healing. Thus, there is no mission without reconciliation with our past, with the gifts and limitations of the upbringing we have received; but, at the same time, there is no peace without setting out, no awareness without detachment, no joy without risk. We are the Body of Christ if we move forward, coming to terms with the past without being imprisoned by it: everything is restored and multiplied if it is first let go, without fear. This is a fundamental secret of mission. It is not something that is experienced just once, but in every new beginning, in every new sending forth.

Jesus’ journey reveals to us that the willingness to lose oneself, to empty oneself, is not an end in itself, but a condition for encounter and intimacy. Love is true only when it is unguarded; it requires little fuss, no ostentation, and gently cherishes weakness and vulnerability. We struggle to commit ourselves to a mission that exposes us in this way, and yet there is no “good news to the poor” (cf. Lk 4:18) if we go to them bearing the signs of power.

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I also appreciate this homily in the context of America’s 250th anniversary this year, to which this quote seems apropos:

We are heirs to so much good and, at the same time, to the limitations of a history into which the Gospel must bring light and salvation, forgiveness and healing.

Later this summer, I’ll show my kids the musical 1776 for the first time, as we celebrate July 4th.

At the beginning of September, I’ll invite over grown up friends to watch Come From Away. It’s a musical about the real story of travellers from all around the world who were stranded in the tiny Canadian community of Gander when American airspace closed on 9/11.

Neither musical asks us to found our hope in a denial that we live in a world wounded by sin. We receive our history as a gift, both the good (which we hope to preserve) and the bad (which we ask to be trusted to mend, as best we can).

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The other quote on my mind is from Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon. This Good Friday, I have two vigils to keep—one on the Way of the Cross in DC, and the other in a hospital room across town, with a college friend who is not expected to recover.

In Death on a Friday Afternoon, Neuhaus offers meditations on each of Christ’s utterances from the Cross. This comes from the chapter on “It is finished.”

In what we think of as the piety of a simpler time, Christians undergoing trial or affliction were urged to “offer it up.” I recall being deeply impressed as a young man by the death of Pope John XXIII. It was slow in coming, and over the days there were regular news bulletins reporting that he was offering up one day’s suffering for those with cancer, another day’s suffering for homeless refugees, another for mothers with difficult pregnancies and so forth. He seemed to be going about his dying with such purpose, with almost workmanlike efficiency, wasting none of it.

I’ve found this passage very helpful as a door into hope in my own life.

And in my book touring for The Dignity of Dependence, I think one theme that has come out with stronger emphasis in response to discussion and questions has been the idea of stewardship. I cite Lewis Hyde’s The Gift in the book, but I probably could have cited it more!

How do you receive your body, in both its faculties and frailties, as a gift?

How can you approach your overspilling strength and your pressing needs as something given to you for the sake of others, so that you can look around with curiosity, wondering who it is meant to be shared with?

Where have you felt you were one of the “heirs to so much good and, at the same time, to the limitations of a history into which the Gospel must bring light and salvation, forgiveness and healing”?

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I’ll be speaking about my book, The Dignity of Dependence, and the future of the pro-life movement on March 14 on Long Island.

I really appreciated a recent post by that was sparked by Carrie Gress’s critique of feminism in Something Wicked. (My review of Something Wicked is here, and for this post, I’m just engaging with Luciano’s ideas, not relitigating the review).

First off, I appreciated (and fully agree with) Luciano here on how incoherent it is to treat feminism as a single ideology (especially across multiple waves). There’s a reason (well, several) that this substack is called Other Feminisms. As Luciano puts it, to argue that there has just been one feminism, leaves you stuck with this:

Feminism is not treated as a tangled web of historical movements, internal disputes, theological tensions, and philosophical mutations. Instead, it is presented as a single, unified Movement, complete with a stable philosophical essence and a shared core, intact across centuries and immune to qualitative change. Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and contemporary radical feminists are not divided by incompatible frameworks; they participate in the same underlying philosophy, even when they speak in different idioms.

When I give talks on my book, I try to give a clear definition of what I mean by “feminism” early on. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my definition, but I don’t want them to be distracted by attributing what they think a feminist must be to me (and being mad when I don’t fit). What I say usually goes something like this:

Feminism is more of a braid of multiple factions than a single, unified movements. And there are plenty of feminists who think I shouldn’t call myself one. So, to give my own definition, I think feminism is, at its heart, a collection of people deeply concerned with what it means to be just to women, as women, not as defective men or generic, unsexed human persons. I certainly disagree with some other feminists on what justice consists of here, but I think we’re all concerned with fundamental asymmetries of sex and how to respond to them.

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Luciano concludes her post by identifying what she sees as the root of feminism. We agree that it’s about a response to embodiment and assymetry, but she defines it as being a very particular response:

Feminism does not exist merely as a loose aggregation of political demands. It does function, in many of its historical forms, as a movement — with a capital M — possessing a certain internal unity and a shared metaphysical core.

At its center lies a metaphysics of revolt: a gnostic refusal of feminine suffering, of incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself. From this perspective, feminism does not merely contest social arrangements or moral norms; it claims a REVOLUTION. In this sense, it is structurally incompatible with Catholicism and with those forms of Protestantism that preserve the Christological grammar of incarnation and mediation, including the affirmation of the Theotokos, Mary as Mother of God.

Luciano and I are in agreement insofar as this is definitely one of the strands in the braid of feminism. How do you respond in justice to the asymmetries of embodiment? One possible answer had always been by attempting to correct the asymmetries and transcend the body.

This is why, in “Designing Women,” (an essay I wrote at Comment), I was focused on how three groups (transhumanists, people with disabilities, and women) respond to assistive devices and other tools to extend or fix the body:

The most audacious body augmentations are pioneered by two groups: hobbyist enthusiasts and people navigating disabilities. The enthusiasts often want to expand the range of what we see as human. People navigating disabilities, however, feel that they are forced to become inventors to navigate a world that is hostile to their body and prefers they reshape it into a more expected form. The disabled inventors are making a case that our idea of what is human doesn’t include everyone who is human…

Most of the famous transhumanists are male, but most of the practicing transhumanists are women. When the world makes demands of women that are impossible to fulfill, we are offered ways to “fix” our bodies. Unaugmented, many women find that female bodies and female fertility are expected to be standardized and made “safe” to be welcome in the world.

For the most part, I’m more interested in explaining what I mean by feminist than in persuading people that mine is the central definition. (If it were, I wouldn’t need to call this substack “Other Feminisms.”) I do think that rejection of embodiment isn’t the only reaction to sex-based asymmetries—I think it’s one strand in the braid.

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Ultimately, I think most movements and ideologies have some degree of pull toward “a metaphysics of revolt: a gnostic refusal of feminine suffering, of incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself,” because the body is both gift and cross. Cross is the idea everyone can agree on, religious or not. Gift depends on believing in a giver that has ordered Creation (even the hard parts) out of love.

It’s easy to fall back into thinking of your body as a (slightly faulty) tool. I fall into these patterns of thoughts, even after writing a whole book to talk myself out of it. And I really appreciated a feature in The New York Times Magazine this weekend on ACL injuries in girls’ soccer which seems apropos to this whole discussion:

In July 2022, a few months after her second injury, I watched trainers hoist another of my daughter’s friends onto a cart — another torn A.C.L. The next summer, that girl, too, ripped the ligament in her other knee. In the fall of 2023, three girls on my daughter’s high school team also ruptured their A.C.L.s. Soon the tally of torn A.C.L.s among my daughter’s current and former teammates would reach an astonishing number: 19.

Craig Welch, investigating why his daughter and her friends are suffering disabling injuries in their sport, lands on what I would call typically feminist (positive connotation) concerns. Girls are 3-6x more likely than boys to tear their ACLs in youth sports. Girls committed to year-round soccer schedules have a 1 in 6 chance of tearing their ACL before getting their high school diploma.

Partly, Welch finds, this is a matter of bodily asymmetries:

Athletic women, particularly in adolescence, also battle their anatomy. The notch in the femur through which the A.C.L. passes is smaller in women than in men. The combination of wider hips and shorter thighs can put more strain on their knees. Hormones released during menstruation can make ligaments looser and possibly increase the risk of injury.

Gender contributes in less obvious ways, too. Despite skyrocketing participation in girls’ sports, girls’ cleats are often just boys’ shoes with different stylings. (“Shrink it and pink it,” in the argot of the apparel world.) But the female foot tends to be shaped differently than its male counterpart, and it absorbs forces differently.

So far, so feminist by my definition. But Luciano’s definition haunts the piece, too. As Welch describes, there’s a pattern of stretches girls can do for about twenty minutes, which, if done consistently, significantly reduce the chance of ACL tears. But most girls (including his daughter, who suffers two tears) don’t do them. Many don’t know the option exists (few coaches incorporate them), but even for Welch, it’s hard to commit to what the body demands.

He knows he should have pushed his daughter to follow the protocols he was writing about but, “After a year of injury and grief, I was also tired of hounding my teenager. Edie was tired of being hounded.”

I don’t think this is an ideological refusal of the incarnation or a hatred of the feminine. But I do see something of a gnostic rejection of the frailty of the body. Surely, we all sometimes hope, frailty is just a brief interruption of strength. It can be frustrating to graduate from physical therapy and still need to set aside time to care for your body. Didn’t you just fix it?

Luciano and I end up with different definitions of what’s core to “feminism” but we agree that many feminists (and, by my lights, many people, male or female) have a complicated relationship with their own embodiment and limits. Are we ultimately trying to see a purpose to our frailty, or are we working to fix the janky meat suit that carries us around?

Where do you find it hardest to see the body as cross and gift?

Where do you spot temptations toward “a gnostic refusal of… suffering, of incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself” outside the domain of sexed asymmetries?

Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?

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My kids and I enjoyed the Olympics at the normal level (watching figure skating, primarily; going “why would you do that?” at ski jumping), and I enjoyed the Olympics at a special, Other Feminisms level when I read articles like this in the Athletic: “At the Winter Olympics, full gender equality remains a work in progress.”

Most Olympic sports are pretty tightly mirrored across genders (the hundred meter dash is exactly the same race) though some are more differentiated (male gymnasts have pommel horse; women have the uneven bars). The Athletic piece linked above is interested in gender differentiation in ski biathalon, where competitors need to both race on skis and shoot accurately at targets.

In the relay ski biathalon, men and women have different distances to cover in their cross-country skiing relay legs in their respective divisions (7.5km for men, 6km for women, 6km for everyone in the mixed relay). The Athletic author, Matthew Futterman, is concerned that this difference means “an explicit message of women as weaker remains.”

But Futterman’s interviews surface another explanation: Max Cobb, the general secretary of the International Biathlon Union, says:

He said the shorter distances are meant to have women racing for a similar amount of time as the men. That maintains a consistent ratio between the time biathletes spend shooting and the time they spend skiing. If women ski as long as the men do and don’t do it as quickly, that ratio gets out of whack and overemphasizes skiing for the women and not for the men.

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I don’t know biathalon well enough to assess this (obviously!) but I do find it an interesting example of where equal may not be equitable. Futterman pretty clearly hopes that, as women train harder and ski faster, the equal and equitable might converge, avoiding a tradeoff. I doubt the asymmetry will ever totally dissolve.

The first chapter of The Dignity of Dependence has a lot more about basketball than I imagined in my original outline, because sports offer vivid examples of how contentious “fairness” is when it comes to the asymmetry between the sexes.

University of Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma came out swinging against the [NCAA decision to have two different three-point-lines for men and women]. He told ESPN that the two visible lines on the court hurt women’s standing on campus, saying, “Please. Like another indication that, what, we’re not capable?” It was an expansive “we,” since at six foot one he stood taller than many of the women he coached.

In 2021, the NCAA brought the college women’s line back to the same distance as the men’s. The women’s three-point shooting percentage dipped, but analysts expect it will eventually stabilize with practice. And even if it didn’t, a little sag in the number of perfect swishes is a lot less obvious than the sweep of two separate lines on the floor.

Not every woman can land a shot from the three-point line. But every woman faces the same question the WNBA and college women’s players did — When is it worth it to us to call attention to our embodied difference?

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And, on the topic of asymmetry, I really enjoyed Elizabeth Oldfield’s essay at Capita, “Towards a Feminism of Interdependence: Why the Common Good Requires a New Feminist Politics.” (I’ll be on her podcast soon). She writes:

I came fully into a feminist identity during my first pregnancy, when the stark chasm between my experience and my husband’s, mine and my male colleagues’, could be felt in my bladder, my dislocating pelvis, my foggy brain. I was leading an organization and was roundly patronized by older men who made no secret that they saw leadership and motherhood as incompatible. One funder threatened to pull their support because they “didn’t want to fund [my] maternity pay.”

She and I are in agreement that no one can pretend to be autonomous forever, but that women tend to get caught first as failing to live up to this impossible standard:

At least half the population cannot cosplay the autonomous, independent, male-coded model of a desirable human life as well as the other half. It is a charade for both, a trap for men too, but their own reliance on and calling to care is easier to hide and more socially permissible to avoid.

And I really love both the specific way she chooses to live out interdependence, and her broader invitation to readers:

We are soon to be eight people living together—my husband and two children, another couple who are pregnant, a single person (and a cat). It was a long, difficult road to get here. […]

My vision of the common good, a vision we are trying, deeply imperfectly, to step closer to in our house, is one where we stop pretending to be imaginary autonomous individuals and live more fully into our irreconcilable interdependence. In practice, that looks like a cascade of care. Care flowing through a set of concentric circles we all participate in, which overlap and through which we dance between giver and receiver, more intense and less intense seasons. In this vision (which does not require a radical household like ours) we recognize our collective need for care and are invited to contribute according to our gifts.

I’m looking forward to visiting friends living in a large group house (two couples, three babies, assorted other housemates I’ll have to tally when I get there). It will never be the most common way of living in an interdependent way (the housing stock you need is rarer than single family homes) but I love the lively village-ness of it all. Not to mention, no one needs to book a babysitter for rpg nights after the kids’ bedtimes!

Where have you participated in a “cascade of care”?

Where, if ever, have you had structures that sustained a “cascade of care” in ordinary times, versus as a surge in a crisis?

Where should the women’s three-point line be?

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At the Institute for Family Studies, I have a pitch that colleges should open a Marriage Office to complement their Career Offices. It’s not about creating two tracks, but being realistic that both career and family require deliberate planning and choices. Especially as life scripts that worked in the past will leave you adrift today:

A college Marriage Prep Office would work in parallel to the career office. Such an office would host new and long-time married couples for informational talks, the same way that they bring in recruiters and alumni. Couples could talk about how they approached dating and deciding to marry. Older alums with kids might discuss how they budgeted for child care, whether they chose to step down or do part-time work, and how they navigated a later return to a full-time career.

The Marriage Office could co-sponsor a lecture with the economics department, and bring in Nobelist Claudia Goldin to discuss her theory of “greedy jobs.” These are the jobs where pay per hour rises substantially with hours worked, so that the wage for working 50 hours a week much more than doubles the price for working 25 hours a week. Prospective parents that go into these fields may feel they have golden handcuffs that prevent them from tapering back work when their children are young. The Career Office might step back in with job advice for thirty-something alums looking to return to work after a pause.

You can read the whole thing at IFS, and I enjoyed compiling some of the college classes that require students go on a date, and which are very popular as a commitment mechanism (pun intended).

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Elsewhere, at Word on Fire, I have a review of Carrie Gress’s Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. Given that my book’s full title is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, it’s not a shock we disagree.

I don’t care very much about converting people to define themselves as feminist or not. It’s always been a contested term and a rowdy, internally-contentious movement. I’m upfront about how I define feminism:

A concern for justice to women as women, not as defective men or generic, unsexed individuals.

But part of why this substack is called “Other Feminisms” with an emphasis on that ‘s’ is because even if you’re attracted to that definition, there’s a lot of disagreement about what justice demands. And I’m up to have conversations with a pretty broad range of people of good will.

My problem with Something Wicked is that I think it leaves the reader who is skeptical of feminism less prepared to talk to her neighbor than she was before she picked up the book. As I wrote for Word on Fire, it reminded me of the way that reading the New Atheists left me poorly prepared to debate Christians in college:

Harris and Dawkins were always looking for the worst examples of religion to use to discredit all strains of Christianity. The New Atheists would point toward Levitical laws to cast all Christians as hypocrites, as though Paul had never talked through these questions in Acts. Dawkins dwelt on some Christians’ rejection of evolution, without a care for the work of religious brother Gregor Mendel in figuring out the rules of genetic inheritance. Even when our enemies are wrong, they are more diverse (intellectually and morally) than any broad-brush condemnation can reflect…

Like the New Atheists, Gress is deliberately not engaging with the strongest arguments of her opponents. Her evidence that early feminist and advocate for women’s education Mary Wollstonecraft hated men is a single quote in which Wollstonecraft objects to men holding doors for women. She goes further, saying that Wollstonecraft should be judged not just by her writing but by the “bad fruit” her work bore in her disreputable daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, who ran away with a married man. Gress neglects to mention that Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after her daughter’s birth from complications of pregnancy. The book tempts readers to believe they can skip past deep examination of Wollstonecraft’s work, since Gress’s just-so story of “bad mother, bad daughter” gives permission to move on. In fact, they are exposed as evangelists without the armor of scholarship or charity. Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?

I recognize these traps, because I fell into them as a New Atheist. These curt dismissals cut off curiosity, and without a real interest in your opponent, it is impossible to win her trust. Gress’s work, like that of the New Atheists, does not form readers for fruitful dialogue: It gives them excuses to disengage. When I read caricatures of Christians, then attempted to talk to real people, the jarring discrepancy pulled me up short. Had the New Atheists misrepresented what they claimed to specialize in? Or were my interlocutors lying? It would be easy for a reader of Something Wicked to walk away from the possibility of conversation (and conversion) the moment her feminist friend says, “But I don’t practice the occult! What are you talking about?” If she places deep faith in Gress, she will conclude her friend is operating in bad faith, making dialogue impossible.

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If folks want a great history book that doesn’t oversimplify the past in order to score points in present conflict, I loved ’s Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. The book doesn’t “prove” anything about whether you can be a pro-life feminist or not, but it does a great job tracing how little previous divides over abortion mirrored present ones. It felt like finding a branch of the family that had been erased from the tree.

And speaking of pro-life feminism, I’m one of a coalition of pro-life writers and activists who signed this open letter, asking ICE to return to its prior policy that, “absent narrow exceptions, ICE should not arrest or detain individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing.”

So, as I turn it over to all y’all in the comments:

What programming would you schedule at a Marriage Office at your alma mater?

What history book did you love for showing how much more complex and contested a movement is as it unfolds, versus as it’s distilled into a paragraph in a history textbook?

What book has helped you the most in having conversations across a divide (on any issue)?

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• On February 11th, I’ll be at St. Thomas More College in New Hampshire to talk about The Dignity of Dependence.

• On February 19, I’ll be at Middlebury College in Vermont, also on the book, for their Alexander Hamilton Forum.

• (And DC peeps, I’m doing a non-book talk this month for the SJI Institute on how to have better fights on February 26th).

My spring schedule is extremely closed, but I am taking bookings for the fall.

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When my husband I write our goals for the year, one thing stays the same for me: “Write for a new magazine.”

I want to keep expanding my list of places to pitch, and I benefit a lot from getting feedback from diverse editors and thinking about how to reach different audiences. Last year, I was delighted to add Asterisk Magazine to my list.

My piece “Rethinking High School Science Fairs” has just come out. It’s about how professionalism has eclipsed pedagogy in competitive science fairs.

Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer. I remember in my high school physics class we were first taught the value of Earth’s gravitational constant g, and then asked to perform an experiment that should reveal it.

Of course, working with cruder tools, limited patience, and air resistance, many of us didn’t wind up squarely on 9.8 m/s². One of my partners was quick to scribble out our actual observation, and she and I had a brief struggle over control of the pencil as she attempted to put in the “correct” answer. She had a better sense of the teacher’s intentions than I did. The tables that honestly reported a “wrong” result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that “worked.” We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown.

Students in science fairs and adults in professional labs know the answer they’re supposed to get. A result has to be statistically significant to “count” and, just like in my physics class, students can be tempted to keep reworking their results until they get the right answer. There was no p-hacking at my research internship, but part of the education I received in a professional lab was how much the scientific process was dominated by anxiety, not curiosity.

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What I carried out of the lab and what enriched my life didn’t have much to do with the scientific method of “explore, wonder, hypothesize, test, repeat.” Instead, the most valuable things I learned were the virtues of reproducibility and legibility. I had very limited ability to contribute intellectually to the work I was carrying out, but I had almost unlimited potential to wreck it by mislabeling the petri dishes, forgetting to change out a pipette tip, sloppily loading the gels … or even just being lax about recording the work I did in the lab notebook that was the authoritative source of truth for the protocol.

My internship made it clear how much work it took to do something completely consistently across many partners. Even though I wasn’t knit into the culture of the lab, I still was a little awed by the trust I was given. Long after I’d left the bench behind, I remembered how important it was not just to do something right but to do it legibly right. I haven’t smelled agar plates for almost 20 years, but I still draw on old skills every time I annotate a draft for an eventual factchecker.

Ideally, students studying science should get to do some of the shadowing I did, to see how much slow, faithful, unpublishable work it takes to seek the truth. I was glad I did my internship; I just didn’t think it made much sense for me to take the results into competitions. At a science fair, I’d rather see students tackling their own questions, even if an adult could answer them better. A science fair should be more about giving intellectual and moral formation to the student than about pushing out the boundaries of what is known.

At the end of the piece, I got to suggest new, better prizes for high school students, and, to my delight, Asterisk commissioned illustrations of the trophies.

Null Results Division

Students submit papers and experiments that turned up no significant results. The hypotheses being tested should be plausible, and the student should be able to explain why their experiment was sufficiently powered to detect a relevant effect size.

Best in Class Trophy: The “Blind Alley Closure” award, a gilded figure holding a WRONG WAY sign.

I’m hoping to make an debut later this year, but in the meantime, I was glad to weigh in on Kelsey Piper’s “In the shadow of the omnicause.”

Leah Sargeant described it to me as “the ‘bearing witness’ (by posting) model of activism” — in contrast to models of activism that focus on persuasion or finding leverage points to achieve policy change.

I saw a great post about how to decompose a “do something!” demand into “which something” as part of ’s hourly comics this year:

Much better than my approach of saying “Should we slide up or down the ladder of abstraction?”

I’m about to board my New Hampshire flight (I’m running?), so here are my questions for you:

What experience(s) gave your your best formation in thinking scientifically (both in and out of a classroom)?

When have you found it helpful to differentiate between values/strategies/tactics when deciding how to act? Are there other tools you’ve found helpful?

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First, and most centrally Other Feminisms-y, is the news that the United States will finally (in ~2027) begin requiring car manufacturers to use a female crash test dummy as part of their safety tests. I was heavily indebted to Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men when I wrote about this lacuna in The Dignity of Dependence.

Relying on a tiny (5th percentile) male figure to stand in for women in crash tests is one of the more obviously dangerous ways we treat women as defective men. As I wrote:

When interviewed about these disparities by AutoExpress in 2020, Richard Schram, the Euro New Car Assessment Program’s technical director, acted as though the problem was with women, not car manufacturers. “Biologically, females are slightly weaker, and women sitting closer to the steering wheel can be an issue,” he said. “There is a difference between men and women; I acknowledge that, and I acknowledge this may be hard for women to accept.”

Schram spoke as though women sat closer to the steering wheel on a whim. But this “choice” is determined by design. In order to reach pedals that are calibrated to men’s longer legs, women slide their seats forward and place themselves much closer to the explosive force of the airbag. The airbag’s expansion is tailored to a “standard” (implicitly male) driver. The shorter a women is, the more danger she is in. During the 1990s, women petitioned to have a switch that would let a woman disable or re-arm the airbag, depending on whether she or her husband was in the driver’s seat. Car manufacturers opposed the proposed regulation. […]

The NHTSA emphasized that the danger shouldn’t be analyzed by structural differences between sexes; it was, as they framed it, a matter of personal error. “The one fact that is common to all who died is NOT their height, weight, sex, or age,” the brochure stated. “Rather, it is the fact that they were too close to the air bag when it started to deploy.” The NHTSA didn’t address how petite women could avoid this “mistake” except by electing not to drive.

I’m glad to see some real (albeit overdue) progress being made!

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I’ve had this one saved in tab for more than a year (eek!) and I still love it:

On a Thursday afternoon in late summer Frances McDormand, the actor, and Suzanne Bocanegra, a conceptual artist, were testing out a Shaker cradle for adults. The exhibit of these little-known furniture items that they put together for the Shaker Museum’s pop-up gallery was days from opening in the Kinderhook Knitting Mill — a converted historic space in Columbia County, N.Y.

McDormand climbed into the handsome, coffin-size lidless wooden box — one of several, along with a baby cradle and rocking chairs on display. She was lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Her position was moribund, her mind alert.

As the article discusses, the Shakers, being celibate, had no need for baby cradles. Instead, they had to think about how to care for the elderly and the dying. (Just as a religious order does). They concluded the end might resemble the beginning:

When [McDormand] first saw a Shaker cradle in a book of photographs, something clicked. “They put so much energy into the beautiful things they made, and they were ready to comfort their people when the time came,” she said. She thought about being able to grow old in a caring community and about the regrets she had for not being around for her adoptive parents when they died. She also thought about the time she spent at the bedside of a dying friend.

“I helped with changing her diapers and feeding her and keeping her from choking,” she said. “We all need that kind of care and the Shakers seemed to really know how to prepare for it.”

Very little about our homes or furniture is designed in anticipation of aging and dying. Thinking about our parents’ coming years made my husband and me pick a house on the lower side of our street’s hill (so there’s no long set of steps to our door). But we don’t have a bathroom on the first floor, and we’ll have to fix that or move at some point if we want our home to stay hospitable.

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Finally, and just for fun, I’ve always enjoyed the wild designs of Iris van Herpen, and last summer she made a dress that incorporated living algae for their bioluminescent properties.

You’ll want to check out the full feature (and videos!) at Nautilus, but this was a highlight:

Keeping the algae alive inside the gel is tricky. The cells thrive within a narrow temperature range and need nutrients and a saline solution to stay alive. The gel has to breathe, but too much exposure to the air can bring in contaminants, like bacteria or fungi, which can overgrow the algae inside. The hardest part was getting the consistency right, something “firmer than your granny’s jelly pudding,” said Bellamy, but that could still be squeezed through a syringe, molded and stitched into fabric.

The dress made its debut on the runway on July 7 in Paris, during Haute Couture Week. For Bellamy, the most interesting part of the project was observing the relationship that developed between Iris’s atelier and the material. “The material has a bedtime, the material has a wake-up time, the material gets jet lagged,” he said. “It’s that fragility that makes livingness so beautiful.”

Where have you seen elements of the built environment anticipate and accommodate the “fragility that makes livingness so beautiful”?

What in your home have you already changed / anticipate changing to be able to welcome friends and family as they age?

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I was glad to be invited by the WSJ to respond to William A. Galston’s “America Needs More Husband Material.” I’ve excerpted the key grafs of my letter to the editor below, and you can use the gift link to find out what made my husband so marriagable so early.

In 10 years of surveying high-school seniors, the Monitoring the Future project has found that fewer and fewer young men and women expect they will be “very good” as a spouse. It’s little wonder the share who expect to get married has plummeted in parallel.

Holding a stable job and being able to provide for one’s family is part of what it means to be a good spouse, but it flows out of bigger questions of character and how one handles responsibility. If we want to see marriages rebound, it isn’t enough to focus on expanding blue-collar work. High-school seniors need to have more faith they can handle the duties of marriage and child-rearing. Giving them more lectures on how important marriage is won’t do it—they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it. Kids need more time away from adult supervision, pursuing projects of their own design, with the freedom to fail and to learn.

I’ve also seen friends argue that if you’d like people to match and marry earlier, you need different signals of potential/responsibility/etc than pulling in big wages, since your potential spouse will be earlier in his career.

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Back in November, I got to speak at the de Nicola Center Fall Conference. It’s always a highlight of the year when I get to go. This time, the theme was “‘That which I Also Received’: Living Tradition” and my talk was titled: Known by Our Need: Images of Maternity as a Guide to God’s Love.

If you’re one of the people who wished that The Dignity of Dependence was more explicitly Christian, instead of being part of Notre Dame’s series on “Catholic Ideas for a Secular World,” then this is the missing chapter of the book.

My talk starts at 20:16, and the other two talks include Kelly Anderson explaining why Jael is a type of the Ark of the Covenant and Abigail Jorgensen on “woundability.”

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I’ve got a sick preschooler at home today, so I’ll cut right to reader questions:

What are strong signals of marriageability?

What can someone (male or female) do in high school or college to make them more marriageable in their mid to late 20s?

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Every year, I make a reading list drawn from books I already own as of January 1st. My list is a way I give myself permission to prioritize these books over other reading that feels more urgent but less important (e.g. finishing the newspaper, getting to my library holds, etc.). The list takes the books from ones I could finish at any time to ones that deserve my attention right now.

Last year, I finished all twelve books on my 2025 list (the last one at 11:20p on December 31st). It helped a lot being on book tour (sans kids) for The Dignity of Dependence in the back half of the year. This spring won’t be as busy (probably about six book trips away from home) but I’ve gone mad with hubris and put fourteen books on my 2026 list.

• Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic by Jeanne Boydston

• Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean

• Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds by Mary Dunn

• School of Shards by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

• Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order by David Dyzenhaus

• Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery by Douglas Hofstadter

• Something for Nothing?: An Explanation and Defence of the Scholastic Position on Usury by David Hunt

• The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones

• Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine

• Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi

• Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts

• Song of the Lamb: Sacred Music and the Heavenly Liturgy by Robert Cardinal Sarah and Peter Carter

• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman

• Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson

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As you can see, there’s something of a post-book publication pause on my beat. Only two books, Home and Work and Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See, are clearly Other Feminisms-coded.

But I started Let the Record Show last year (and stuck it on the list anyway, because I still have a lot to go) and I think this note from Schulman on why ACT UP succeeded in its confrontational activism is of interest to anyone who wants to change the world:

1. Experience-Based Agenda: Identify your issues based on the lived experiences of people with AIDS.

2. Education: Become the expert on your subject.

3. Design the Solution: Instead of acting in an infantilized relationship to those in power, begging them to solve problems, ACT UP used their acquired and innate expertise to design reasonable, doable, and winnable solutions.

4. Present This Solution to the Powers That Be: And when they refuse to listen …

5. ACT UP’s process of “self-purification” was a combination of nonviolent civil disobedience training, emotional and political bonding through the creation of affinity groups, and the putting in place of highly organized support systems of marshals and volunteer lawyers to ensure that no one would get lost in the system. Teach-ins created a highly informed rank and file, all of whom were encouraged to be spokespeople because “people with AIDS are the experts.” Sophisticated media workers combined grassroots video activism and high-level media contacts to present ACT UP’s demands.

6. Then ACT UP would perform nonviolent direct action to, as facilitator Ann Northrop would say, “Speak through the media, not to the media.”

7. Thereby, ACT UP created public pressure on the powers that be to move toward ACT UP’s reasonable, doable, already designed solution.

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I picked up the book because I’m interested in the period and in what it can illuminate about why confrontational activism does or doesn’t work today. (This is part of why I followed Red Rose Rescue members on an attempted abortion clinic sit-in for a reported piece, and interviewed one of their leaders before she was incarcerated).

Two things that stand out so far is that activist groups (of all stripes) seldom have the precise, actionable demands that ACT UP deployed. More groups do take the “infantilized relationship to those in power, begging them to solve problems” that Schulman describes, which makes it hard to be given a simple, immediate win.

ACT UP also operated in a very different media environment, when activists could expect that when they “spoke through the media, not to the media” they would be seen by ordinary people. Our fragmented media landscape is very different.

Many of ACT UP’s actions were more novel and shocking at the time than they would be when repeated now. A mass protest outside the FDA is unlikely to make the nightly news. Even their most provocative stunts, like disrupting Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, are not shocking now. (Back then, there was substantial internal division about whether it was a good idea / whether all demonstrators should be careful to only disrupt the homily, not the prayers).

I’m looking forward to finishing the book and to the rest of the list!

What are you prioritizing for your reading in 2026?

What historical strands of activism do you wish would cross-pollinate today’s struggles for justice?

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Frequent commenter and I agree on a lot about building up networks of mutual aid (and the public policy to support it). But we disagree strongly on the ethics abortion, so I’m particularly grateful she’s stuck around for years, helping to put the “s” in Other Feminisms.

We don’t just disagree on whether abortion bans are aimed at a real good, we also disagree on whether they have robust protections for women and doctors in the case of medical emergency. (I think they could be improved specifically with respect to PPROM, premature rupture of membranes, but are otherwise pretty good). I’ve covered why I don’t think bans are to blame for substandard care (which happens in pro-choice states too) and why I think hospitals are derelict in offering the guidance doctors need.

A big question is: when (if ever) should doctors feel they can accept the laws and exemptions at face value versus seeing them as a trap waiting to spring. As time passes, and doctors (clearly) do intervene in emergencies without charges, I think they should become more confident pro-life states are giving them a yes for an answer.

Martha expects the future to play out differently:

I do believe that dozens+ of doctors who have performed medically necessary abortions and who have been public about their anti-abortion-restriction beliefs will be charged in the next five years.

So, we’ve formalized our disagreement into a bet. Martha and I are on opposite sides of this question, which she’s willing to bet at 70% odds. (We’re just staking $50 each).

By the end of 2030, more than 30 doctors will be charged for violating a criminal statute related to providing abortion-related care. These charges count for our bet specifically if the doctor (or hospital) claims the sanctioned care was necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

Martha adds that she anticipates the doctors will be charged “after an accusation from a family member / the patient themselves” but she’s not on the hook for that element.

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I like formalizing disagreement into bets because in order to make something specific enough to resolve, you both need to clarify how you disagree. And (as is the case here) it makes it clear we disagree strongly about the morality of a law because we have very different expectations about what it will look like applied.

I’m curious which side of the bet Other Feminisms readers would take, so I’ve got a poll just below, and I’m asking you to sort by “pro-life” / “pro-choice.” (Yes, I know that may not be the language you always use as a self-descriptor, but please whichever one you’re closer to.

If you’re a user, I’ve also made a market for this question (where you can bet with play money).

Now that you’ve had the chance to vote or bet, I’ll expand a little on why I’m on my side of the prediction.

First, I know a lot of politically active pro-lifers and they’re not aiming to prosecute doctors who make a good faith attempt to save a mother’s life. And then there are a bunch of politicians who don’t care much about the pro-life cause but really really don’t want to be on the hook for these consequences.

But beyond the question of people’s intentions or good faith, I think we should expect the bans to keep playing out as they have so far… with few to no prosecutions.

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Shortly after Texas passed SB8 in 2021, which established a private right of action to sue doctors who provide abortions, Dr. Alan Braid wrote a WaPo op-ed titled: “Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban.” Braid was explicit that he violated the law as a matter of civil disobedience:

On the morning of Sept. 6, I provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit. I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.

I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.

What happened next? A few activists attempted to sue him and claim SB8’s bounty, but their cases were thrown out for lack of standing because they were not “directly impacted by the abortion services provided.” SB8 was a weird law (and I think a bad idea), which was an attempt to do an end run around Roe before Dobbs.

Post-Dobbs, in 2025, a Texas midwife was the first person to be charged with a felony under Texas’s ban. She allegedly provided illegal abortions and also was charged with practicing medicine without a license. The case is ongoing. Here’s what one patient alleged in an affidavit:

In interviews with investigators, E.G. said Rojas’ employees portrayed her as a doctor, so when Rojas told E.G. that her pregnancy was likely non-viable, she agreed to take the abortion pills Rojas offered.

The woman told investigators that she would have continued the pregnancy, but “since the gynecologist informed her of medical complications that would arise should she continue with the pregnancy, she relied on that medical advice.”

Texas has also brought a civil case against a New York doctor who sent abortion pills to a patient in Texas using a telemedicine service. Louisiana filed criminal charges against the same doctor for the same reason. Relying on New York shield’s law, the doctor has not paid fines or appeared in court in either state.

None of these cases would meet the criteria that Martha and I have agreed on. I anticipate future investigations and/or charges will focus on telehealth (which will not be emergency care) or cases where things are allegedly going egregiously wrong (as with Rojas’s case).

Time will tell.

Why did you take one of our side’s of the bet?

Is there any relevant context you think we’re leaving out of the question?

Have you ever been able to improve a disagreement by getting concrete about what predictions flow out of your beliefs?

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I’ve been pitching various outlets on a piece I was calling “The Last Mile of Abortion Law” since shortly after Dobbs. I wanted to know how various hospitals were translating state bans into guidelines for practice in cases of emergency. Who decided where to draw the line, and how much was was spelled out explicitly versus devolved onto the individual doctor’s judgement?

The trouble is, I couldn’t get hospitals to talk to me on the record.

In the new issue of The New Atlantis, I’ve finally gotten to write a version of that piece:

“Who Decides on Emergency Abortions After Roe?”

I’m indebted to pro-choice Senator Ron Wyden, who got me (and everyone else) some of the answers we needed by subpoenaing hospitals and conducting roundtables of OB-GYNs. As I explain, drawing on his data and some sources of my own, some hospitals are choosing not to interpret the law, to the detriment of doctors and patients.

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Here’s an excerpt:

A recurring theme in Wyden’s report, titled “Practicing Amid ‘a Minefield,’” is that many hospitals had not updated their guidance on how to comply with EMTALA since the Dobbs decision in 2022 and the new state-level abortion restrictions that followed. Some hospitals told doctors to direct their questions to the hospital legal team but didn’t actually provide guidance when asked.

The doctors convened in Wyden’s roundtables expressed open frustration with their hospital systems. One Tennessee obstetrician said that, at their hospital, “when all of this became very confusing, they just disbanded the [hospital] committee” that had been tasked with analyzing the abortion ban and refused to provide guidance to doctors. An ER doctor in Texas faulted their hospital for being reactive in guidance, not proactive. The hospital only offered “education about EMTALA when the hospital … was cited for an EMTALA violation.”

One Louisiana obstetrician said their hospital shared protocols on a “need to know basis,” creating confusion about what the protocols were and putting patients at risk of getting misinformed by physicians who hadn’t been specifically briefed. An Idaho provider had experienced similar problems where nurses were left out of the loop, and as a result “nurses have been anxious to work with physicians when physicians tell them it is okay to treat a patient. This disrupts care.” A Texas obstetrician expressed blunt frustration with other doctors who interpreted the law on their own: “doctors [are] telling patients they can’t treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is not true.”

When hospitals refuse to interpret the law by offering clear protocols, doctors rely on legal consults, which may not be timely. The emergency room is always open, but the hospital’s lawyers may not be pageable round the clock. Multiple doctors told Wyden’s roundtable that they had been ghosted by their hospital’s legal team when they sought guidance. A doctor from Missouri said that the legal team’s responsiveness to questions about abortion was lacking compared to other inquiries. An obstetrician in Idaho reported being stonewalled for two months when requesting a meeting.

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If you’re wondering what kind of guidance states are providing, I think it’s worth checking out this video guidance South Dakota produced, at the direction of the state legislature:

For people with good faith concerns about abortion bans offer adequate room for intervention in case of emergency, I’d be very curious whether that video hits the mark, or what you think it lacks.

Pro-choice groups have never identified a law they think offers adequate protections, nor identified model language that would be sufficient. In some cases, major abortion groups have a policy against endorsing any improvement in a law that does not return to the protections of Roe. Some abortion access advocates state explicitly that advocating for clearer life of the mother exemptions undermines the movement as a whole—since it “creates a false hierarchy of who is deserving” of an abortion.

At least one pro-choice MFM has spoken out publicly about her frustration that her allies won’t join her in improving or clarifying the laws they hope they can one day repeal. I think there are plenty of pro-choicers who disagree profoundly with me on bans, but also want exemptions to exist in ban states and to be interpreted clearly and fairly by hospital systems.

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If you could speak frankly with a hospital administrator, what would you hope to hear about how they help their doctors interpret abortion laws?

What do you think of South Dakota’s video explaining physician safe harbors? Do you think it should leave a doctor comfortable caring for a patient in crisis? Why or why not?

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Baby Bonds

• Money parked in index funds till a child is ~18.

• Put in a small amount at birth, multiply through compound interest.

• Aimed at helping launch kids into adulthood.

Baby Bonus

• Money given to parents immediately after birth.

• Multiplier effect comes from helping parents when marginal dollar is more valuable, not through compound interest

• Aimed at helping parents weather the income shock of welcoming a new baby.

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In my day job, I work on improving family economic security, and one big focus is baby bonuses. I have a worked out proposal for a $2000 baby bonus here.

You can think of a baby bonus as analogous to unemployment insurance—it cushions the income shock that comes with having a baby. Neither completely closes the gap, but it helps protect families from bad short term choices driven by scarcity.

A baby bonus cushions the opportunity cost of saying yes to a child.

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Autonomy-based feminist theories don’t just misunderstand women; they reflect deep misunderstandings of the human being, per se. Perhaps the strangest and best thing about this particular feminist manifesto is that it isn’t really about women (or inadvertently about men). It’s about human beings. As the author puts it: “the fundamental question is whether our view of persons is large enough.”

And second, I’m delighted to announce that The Dignity of Dependence was Christianity Today’s pick for best book of the year in Politics and Public Life. The best price right now for The Dignity of Dependence is directly from Notre Dame Press, because it’s 40% off with “14HOLIDAY.”

Sr. Carino Hodder has an excellent piece about same-sex societies and the masculine vs feminine virtues in The Lamp. (She’s also the author of The Dignity of Women in the Modern World). As a consecrated religious, she’s interested in the ways that two same-sex communities of friars and sister live out the same rule in their gendered communities:

The differences between male and female religious communities are particularly intriguing—and, I think, particularly edifying—when we compare communities within the same spiritual family, such as my own Dominican family. These are communities bound to the same Rule of life, exercising the same institutional charism, formed in the same history and spirituality and ordering their common life by the same structure of internal governance—and yet, nevertheless, not reduced to a bland interchangeability by this shared structure.

When a Rule and a charism are embodied in a living community, the divinely given contours of that feminine or masculine embodiment become clear, made manifest exactly where they are meant to be: in human relationships marked by charity and mutual help. A Dominican friar is not a sister without a veil; a Dominican sister is not a friar who chants in a higher pitch. The commitment to living by a Rule calls us to find dignity, not danger, within our sexual differences, and to acknowledge sexual diversity without giving in to the temptation to invent a corresponding sexual hierarchy.

Sr. Carino Hodder and I are in agreement that there are some broad tendencies you can observe across same-sex groups. She notes that convents often have little notes and labels on everything, while the friars have barer walls. I’m happy to concede if my husband tells me there was rough-housing during one of his high school’s single sex refectum periods, I can guess pretty accurately which one.

But this doesn’t lead Sr. Hodder to see men and women (whether in vows or not) as dividing up human virtues and habits. She writes:

All of this might suggest that my experience of religious life will have made me sympathetic to our current discourse on femininity and masculinity. It absolutely hasn’t. For me, our current obsession with arriving at an ever-more-structured definition of the differences between men and women, our drive to define even more tightly masculine and feminine virtues, vices, roles, and responsibilities, simply doesn’t map on to the reality of life in a single-sex system like a convent. What is a woman’s job? What is a man’s job? I have no idea, because in the convent there are simply jobs, and unless I or one of the women I live with find it within themselves to (for instance) take out the trash, put up a shelf, have a necessary confrontation or make a tough decision regardless of the emotional tension it might cause, then these things are simply not going to get done. We have neither the time nor the inclination to wonder if this might actually be a job for a man when it is, quite simply, a job for this present moment in this particular religious house. It becomes a feminine act by virtue of being carried out by a human being embodied female. It is, if you like, a human act played in a feminine key.

Here, she’s drawing directly on the work of Sr. Prudence Allen, who describes and rejects what she calls “fractional complementarity” in her magisterial The Concept of Woman.

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Abigail Favale, author of The Genesis of Gender, has an excellent gloss on Sr. Prudence Allen’s work (for those not able to commit to her 500p tome) at Church Life Journal. Favale writes:

There are three basic theories at play: unity, polarity, and complementarity. What differentiates these theories is how they hold to or depart from the twofold principle of equality and difference. Unity theories, which we can trace as far back as Plato, emphasize equality while downplaying difference. Polarity theories, which can be seen in many ancient traditions, including Aristotelian philosophy, emphasize difference at the expense of equality, thus affirming a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority between the sexes. Complementarity theories attempt to hold both equality and difference in a fruitful tension…

Fractional complementarity, then, sees the sexes as complementing one another because they each reflect partial or fractional aspects of a whole human being. Fractional complementarity tends to divvy up various human traits and virtues into pink and blue lists: men are more rational, let’s say, and women are more emotional, so together they make up for one another’s deficiencies—together, we account for a well-rounded human being.

Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes. Our complementarity, then, is synergistic—it does not complete a lack but enhances a whole, resulting in a fruitful collaboration that is more than the sum of its parts.

Favale notes there are some stark, first order differences between the sexes (fertility being the most obvious) but that the empirical data shows that second order differences of personality traits don’t divide men and women neatly. Overlapping bell curves… overlap, even as there is a general drift or tendency. I’ll highlight one of several graphs she explores in detail:

Men and women do differ in their average scores on risk taking, and the differences are more pronounced at the extremes. When you look at the tails of the bell curve, you’ll see bigger gender skews, but in the most common ranges, men and women are strongly mixed. As Favale sums it up:

To put it another way—this means that sex stereotypes are often based on atypical males and females, those who exhibit a more pronounced extreme of a sex-associated personality trait. The female who is closer to the male average (and vice versa) is often presented as the outlier, the exception, when in fact she is closer to the norm.

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And now here comes the strongly Catholic part. Favale blends Sr. Prudence Allen and St. John Paul II to discuss what our embodiment means for the virtues:

A man exhibiting compassion is not reducible to a woman exhibiting compassion—not because the trait per se is different, but because that trait is being embodied by a male, and thus takes on a paternal, rather than maternal, character.

Picture, in your mind, an icon of Joseph holding the Christ child. Now picture an icon of Mary holding the Christ child. If we were to describe these two images in terms of abstract traits, we would likely have a lot of overlap—tenderness, love, protection—and yet these images are not interchangeable. They are meaningfully different, irreducible to one another. The difference arises from embodiment. In his Letter to Women, John Paul II refers to this as “iconic complementarity”—our bodies carry an “iconic” meaning, a “powerfully evocative symbolism” that reflects some of the most sacred metaphors in divine revelation. A man can reflect, in a distant but important way, the iconic character of God as Father and Christ as Bridegroom, just as a woman reflects the iconic character of the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, and the Church as Bride.

I find this pretty compelling… but then, before I was a Christian, I was an atheist with strong Platonist leanings. The idea of imperfectly participating in a Form is part of my ethical vernacular. But I don’t assume this image rings true to all Other Feminist readers, not even the Christian ones.

So here’s what I’m wondering:

Does Sr. Carino Hodder’s claim “[An act] becomes a feminine act by virtue of being carried out by a human being embodied female. It is, if you like, a human act played in a feminine key.” ring true to you?

How would you restate it in your own words?

Do you agree with Favale’s distinction between “first order” and “second order” sex differences?

Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?

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Meanwhile, it’s time for my own best books of the years list!

These are the best books I read this year; they don’t have to have been published in 2025. I bend the rules of “year” a little, so I can go from December to December (and publish the list early enough for you to find a Christmas present for a friend).

I have a writeup over here, and I’ll pull out two particularly Other Feminisms titles for a little more discussion here. But first, a teaser of the whole list.

My favorite books of 2025 were about:

1. Jimmy Carter

2. the Iranian revolution

3. the Panama Canal

4. the Edmund Fitzgerald

5. poetry instruction

6. sanctions

7. a translator’s philosophy

8. Indonesian independence

9. Texan Zionism

10. lighthouses

11. Augustine

12. Irish lament

13. paint drying

Now for the two that feel most relevant to this substack…

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A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Ghost in the Throat is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s mixed memoir of her maternity and her work as a translator. She pumps milk (first for vulnerable local babies, then for her own) and is researching a lament by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

As you might expect, a good poet’s prose is also lovely.

Here’s one passage I dogeared:

For years, my sleep is broken by milk. Occasionally, as I’m tugged awake, I take comfort in imagining how often this precise moment has been enacted not only by my own body, but by other mothers, again and again and again, each a mirroring of the same elements — the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the milk, the milk — and in such moments, I am excruciatingly tired, yes, and yet, contentment hovers here too, shimmering in the peripheries, regardless of how tired I am. I am excruciatingly tired, yes, so tired that I frequently repeat myself, so very, very tired — and yet, I still procrastinate over whether to wean. To lure this child away from my body and train her hungers elsewhere would be to pull myself from my comfortable burrow of service. I can’t do it, the ritual of giving of myself to another is so exquisite. I have made an invisibility of myself, neatly concealed in rooms made by female labour and repetition and milk.

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Intimacy and Intelligibility: Word and Life in Augustine’s “De magistro”

by Erika Kidd

Intimacy and Intelligibility is a slim, lovely book exploring St. Augustine’s De Magistro (On the Teacher). De Magistro is a dialoge between St. Augustine and his son, Adeodatus, as they wrestle with the question of whether is is possible to teach anyone anything.

Many parents, perhaps, have wondered this in a moment of frustration. But Augustine and Adeodatus (and Kidd) are deeply interested how an idea can be communicated from person to person, and how conversation knits us together.

Here’s a particularly Other Feminisms-y passage:

We return now to Augustine’s metaphor of parturition that occurs midway through the dialogue. Augustine suggests Adeodatus may be wondering whether their discussion is bringing forth (parturire) something great or worthy. The metaphor rewards careful attention: parturire means to be in labor or to be pregnant with, as in the English word parturition. Augustine tells Adeodatus that they, father and son, are involved in a kind of birth… Augustine’s words evoke the moment of a newborn’s first gasps. This is the language of birth, of deliverance. Augustine hopes he and his son will not merely get a squinting glimpse of that dazzling realm, but will learn to love what gives light to the blessed life. It is a poignant image, but a strange one too…

The metaphor of birth is the heart of the dialogue’s logic. Something or someone is being born. But what? On the one hand, the conversation gives birth to deeper insight about why they talk with one another. Father and son’s developing view of language that is, we speak primarily to inform--will soon show its deficiencies, when they come to agree that Christ is the teacher of all. On the other hand, and much more fundamentally, the conversation gives birth to them, father and son. Recently baptized, they know their pilgrim lives are not their true end, and they look forward to the life of the blessed in heaven. They are not yet fully born into the life of Christ that they share. They are still being formed, not yet ready to withstand the heat and light of that most blessed realm. Yet they are moving toward the blessed life, from darkness to light, as they speak together about speaking. Augustine’s metaphor of parturition implies that the conversation in De magistro is not merely instrumental and informative, but generative. Augustine’s speaking does not serve a narrowly instrumental purpose of informing Adeodatus about the nature of the beata vita. No human being could give a comprehensive account of that life. More importantly, no one reaches the beata vita through simply being informed about it. Augustines own biography makes this painfully clear. Like every other form of human life, the beata vita is reached only through birth, which is hardly a process one can engineer or manage for oneself. What do we want in speaking together? Augustine’s metaphor hints at an answer: We want to birth each other into the beata vita.

What’s on your personal list of the best books you read in 2025?

What do you think about the metaphor of midwifery for teaching?

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For everyone, Xan DeSanctis Marr reviewed The Dignity of Dependence in the January issue of National Review: “The world is the wrong shape for everyone. Sargeant considers how dependence and vulnerability mark the lives of men in ways less noticeable but no less real.”

Your best bet for the book is still direct from Notre Dame University Press, where it’s half price with the code “14GIVEBKS.” If you’re getting it for someone for Christmas, I’d love to know :)

The Free Press ran a recent symposium on “The Great Feminization” and asked me to contribute. Since the podcast Helen and I did let me lay out a lot of my objections to her thesis, I wanted to focus more of my comment on a positive alternative.

I care a lot about whether institutions have habits of truthseeking (not for nothing were two of my previous jobs at a group teaching “defensive driving for your brain” and another one running debates on college campuses). So, I don’t think the problem isn’t women, what is making it hard for us to love the truth more than our pride, and how could we grow in this strength?

Helen Andrews’ “Great Feminization” hypothesis would benefit from a little more of the concrete, data-driven analysis that she thinks working women neglect. If she is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” why have industries already dominated by women (pharmacy, veterinary medicine) not collapsed? I choose those industries specifically because their failures should be noisy, producing a visible body count. If women persistently, and perniciously, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” I’d expect to see visible harms in less politically contentious arenas.

Like Andrews, I’m concerned by institutions becoming “oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth,” but I’d like to propose an intervention that doesn’t depend on the office gender ratio. Our education system and helicopter style of parenting are too risk-averse, harming boys and girls alike. Children need room to take ownership of projects, with no adult safety net, and the freedom to fail. The habit of truth-seeking is built up by encounters with the consequences of falling short of what Matthew Crawford calls “the infallible judgment of reality.”

In college, I got part of my education from my classes, but some of my most critical formation in character came from shop class, where miscalibrating a computer numerical control meant my steam engine parts didn’t interlock, and from costume crew, where lazy construction could leave a dancer naked. Everyone, male or female, needs the experience of failing unambiguously to understand why rigor is required.

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Having written that in early November, imagine my delight when I found similar themes in St. Edith Stein’s Essays on Women. (Finishing the collection this week means I’m currently 10 for 12 on my 2025 reading list).

She picks up this theme several times across the essays, and this is from “The Significance of Women’s Intrinsic Value in National Life” (emphasis mine)

How is it then possible to extricate the purified valuable feminine character from the raw material of feminine singularity with all its faults and weaknesses, of which, as daughters of Eve, we all have a share?

In the first instance, a good natural method for this is thoroughly objective work. Every such work, no matter of what kind, whether housework, a trade, science or anything else, necessitates submitting to the laws of the matter concerned; the whole person, thoughts just as all moods and dispositions, must be made subordinate to the work. And whoever has learned this, has become objective, has lost something of the hyper-individuality and has attained a definite freedom of self; at the same time she has attained an inner depth—she has attained a basis of self-control. Indeed, every young girl should receive a basic vocational formation for the sake of these great personal gains, quite aside from any economic compulsion; and after this formation, she should hold a position which completely fulfills her.

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You can talk about seeking out objective work in more masculine- or feminine coded ways.

Are you in the arena, wrestling the material world?

Are you becoming docile to reality?

It’s both, obviously. And open to both sexes in either (and preferably both) of these spirits. Doing objective, physical work, whether it’s mending, cooking, or building always prompts me to consider myself in relation to the world. I neither author reality, nor do I passively observe. I am a steward of what I’ve been gifted.

In an ordinary day, what do you do that feel like objective work, with the possibility of unambiguous failure?

In intellectual or social domains, where it’s easier to self-deceive, how do you maintain a habit of preferring truth to comfort?

If not more physical work with unambiguous failures, how would you try to strengthen an orientation toward truth-seeking in a community?

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If you’d like to get the book, you should probably do it through Notre Dame Press directly, since they’re running a half price winter sale with the code “14GIVEBKS.”

“Dependent in the First Place” by Agnes Howard (author of Showing: What Pregnancy Teaches Us About Being Human)

An infant cries and wants not just anybody but the voice and the scent and the resonant shelter of the one from whose body he came. The giver gives. The recipient receives, then forgets. Dependence is our original and occasional condition. But humans, at least contemporary Americans, may prefer to think of dependence as a preparatory step we take before we turn into what we really are—autonomous self-makers. Sargeant skewers this folly. She argues that humans are frustrated to live in a society that presupposes independence and thereby makes need seem shameful and exceptional. Bodily circumstances make unjust the social expectations for women to shrink themselves to fit into a world shaped for a “model man.” Yet all humans do need help: “We depend on the echoes of other people’s need to know how we began.” That is, we are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent. Forgetfulness of what we really are figures among the reasons communities and policymakers sometimes make it even harder to help others in dependency.

A woman who bears, births, or cares for a child might find the process like an immersive intro course that equips her thereafter to meet the needs of others. Simultaneously, it teaches her how to request and receive what she needs herself. Sargeant doesn’t deny that serving others can be physically demanding. But the physical expansion of a woman late in pregnancy illustrates another important kind of growth. With the maternal body as exemplar, Sargeant shows how other occasions of dependence can bring transformation too. Being called to serve the need of another pulls me to grow in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Confronted with a need that a beloved or a suffering person puts in my path, I recognize my own inadequacy to give what is required. To do what needs doing, I become larger. I also may have to depend on someone else to serve the one who depends on me, and then we become larger together.

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“The Presence of Christ in Our Dependence” by Rachel Roth Aldhizer (who recently wrote a great op-ed about how Medicaid cuts put her disabled son’s care at risk)

Today, as I was picking my son up from class, this boy’s trach tube popped out. Without a constant watchful presence, a dislodged trach tube is a death sentence for the ventilator-dependent. His nurse calmly reinserted the tubing back into the opening at his throat, so his breathing could resume. The tube that the nurse’s hands reconnected to the machine, and the machine that pumps air into his lungs, and the little mittens, and the chair all talk very loudly, although the boy himself can’t speak. They say: “Help me. I need you.”

I know, because my son has some of those things too, and they speak to me. My son hasn’t spoken to me, and I don’t think he will, but every time I help him breathe or eat or walk or change his diaper, I am talking back to him in a language of our own making, a language without words. His needs call out to me, and I answer back. I talk to his birth defects, his blindness, his brain abnormalities when I touch him and care for him. My touch says “I’m here. You are not alone.”

…“The world is the wrong shape for women,” Sargeant argues in her opening chapter. But the deeper truth is that the world is shaped wrong for us all. The space David’s body is groaning for doesn’t exist this side of heaven. The type of community that could truly meet all of his needs—or all of my needs—simply isn’t there. It’s dependence on a teleological level that reveals our humanness, not just needs in relation to the material. Our need for God is what makes us human, more than our need for others.

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“What Has War to Do with Motherhood?” by Nadya Williams (author of Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic)

One of the most haunting scenes in Greek tragedy reflects on the two defining experiences of men’s and women’s lives in much of human history: war and motherhood. The protagonist of Euripides’ Medea is a foreigner and a sorceress, who sacrifices her barbarian family of birth to move to the Greek world with her common-law husband, the hero Jason. Except Jason turns out to be a faithless opportunist. Offered the chance to marry a Greek princess, he gives Medea her proverbial walking papers, although he graciously offers to retain custody of their two children. Medea’s gut-wrenching monologue in response concludes with this: “Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”

Medea’s comparison is apt, as many have recognized in the 2,400 years since this comment was first uttered to an all-male audience on the Athenian stage. Just as the most life-threatening activity in which men traditionally engage is war, so is childbirth the most life-threatening experience for women even today, Leah Libresco Sargeant reflects in her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. But while war has historically offered men a way to exercise their strength to protect their state, childbirth for women is a time of profound vulnerability. It requires a dependence on others that will continue and even intensify after the baby’s arrival.

I’m profoundly grateful that in a time when many publications are decreasing the number of book reviews that they run, opted for a polyphony in response to my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of symposium Nadya convenes next over there.

She invited me to reply to the three reviewers, which I did here:

…I make parallel arguments in my public policy work, when I advocate for expanded family benefits, especially a baby bonus paid out to families after a birth. This isn’t a matter of squeezing childless adults to subsidize families. Everyone, including people who grow up and do not have children, begins as a baby. A benefit for babies is the most universal social support we can offer. Everyone has an infancy, even if not everyone lives long enough to collect social security.

Our own origins can feel irrelevant to or alienated from our sense of self, because we do not remember our time in the womb, our long lazy afternoons at our mothers’ breast, or the unstable steps that marked a new independence. That means that to know ourselves, we must be around young children, the disabled, the elderly, etc. Their visible need and others’ love in response to need shows us what we once wordlessly demanded and hopefully received.

Where has someone else’s obvious dependence drawn your attention to your hidden or forgotten dependence?

How (if you are religious) does your horizontal dependence on others change how you think about your vertical dependence on God?

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