[Just ran across this post from September, 2016 in my archives. Except for the dated photo, it still works.]

THE ASCENT OF women to the top reaches of the political world means exactly the opposite of what most people say it means. It is not female empowerment. It is female disempowerment.

In order for a woman to be president, tens of thousands of women have to enter the lower ranks of political life and government. Most of them are relatively low-paid administrators; the top female candidate puts a pleasant spin on the hard reality. Does power for a few make drudgery for the many palatable? Does the thrill of cheering selfishly for your own sex make the years on the treadmill less unpleasant?

In order for a woman to be president, most women, even beyond these workers, have to be politicized.

But the strength of womanhood, as G.K. Chesterton said, is not to be found in her support for laws or rules or political platforms or abstractions. It is to be found in her defense of persons. Her natural kingdom is society itself.

A woman rules best by sympathy, prejudice and wisdom. She must compromise all of these things, so tied to her intuitive strengths and deepest desires, when she rules as politician — and she must turn the political into a socialist projection of her natural instincts. She also apparently has to surrender to ugly pantsuits. Imagine a priest giving up his vestments for a postal uniform. Such is the degradation and lowering of a woman who gives up her distinctive, quasi-ceremonial dress for an orange Nehru jacket and matching rayon pants. She is not just politicized. She is not just masculinized. She is proletarianized. She exudes chilly efficiency, and the dress becomes a relic of bygone aristocracy and leisure. Remember that? Leisure. The woman at the kitchen table, often there to listen, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing, was an aristocrat of time. She made persons feel like persons. How many people were saved by her prayers when she realized her own limitations? They must be numberless.

Chesterton’s “great amateur” is gone. The efficient Good Girl is in her place — and she’s intensely irritable, indeed nearly deranged and cruel with schizophrenic pressures, when she gets home. If she were not surrounded by non-stop propaganda, she would rebel. She has been disempowered. The heart, after all, is powerful. Only an intensely materialistic world would define her life as female advancement.

As Chesterton said, in What’s Wrong with the World,

“Most of the feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference.”

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