It is my conviction that gender roles are renegotiated every generation relative to social, economic, and technological factors. This is not to say that faith or tradition play no role in defining gender relations. They most certainly do — but in an abstract sense that must be adapted to broad historical contexts and narrow individual circumstances.

Furthermore, High Tradition and Habitual Traditions must be disentangled. While the Christian faith requires that women adopt a quiet role during service and look up to their man as the leader of their household, the Bible itself demonstrates women taking leadership roles in matters of faith. Modern life requires a dynamic nearer to a partnership of trust than a patriarchal tyranny.

One may regard one’s wife as a limited partner if one prefers, but relegating her to the status of employee within the family enterprise weakens the family, denies the family the full expression of her talents, and needlessly humiliates and degrades her invaluable and irreplaceable role.

After reconciling one’s faith and first principles, and how they inform gender relations, one must consider how social, economic, and technological change has transformed gender relations. All too often, the dissident right incorrectly interprets this exclusively through the lens of degeneration and subversion.

There’s more talk about how women must embrace their traditional role than talk about what that traditional role looks like relative to the sweeping changes of the past few centuries. Many of the household duties have been automated or outright eliminated. The broader community context that was an entire realm of human endeavor that women dominated has been alienated and isolated, often leaving stay at home moms feeling isolated, useless, unappreciated, and alone in a way that wasn’t the case a century ago.

It’s my conviction that the first waves of “feminism,” often bundled together as “first wave feminism” were healthy and necessary adaptations to a changing world where women could, should, and would have greater autonomy, civic engagement, and civil liberties than made sense in previous eras. These early movements were actually more religious, more patriotic, and more tribalist in nature than the men they were up against.

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