When Women Ruled and Gentlemen Complied

“Tú sola comprendiste que el hombre y el tigre se diferencian únicamente por el corazón.”
—Horacio Quiroga, Juan Darién (1920)

At an event at Stanford Law School last year, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach shut down Federal Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech because his ideas hurt people’s feelings. More recently, officials in the United Kingdom have indicated they’re prepared to ask officials in the United States to extradite American citizens to face trial for offensive online speech. Does anyone believe that a future President Kamala Harris would not jump at the chance to have Elon Musk serve a prison sentence in England?

It would be naïve to ignore how the decaying dynamics of gender relations are undermining the core values of liberal society. It’s no longer subtle and hasn’t been for some time.

Indeed, one of the more notable aspects of the current social malaise in the West is a general contempt for men. The tendency to reduce the importance and purpose of masculinity relates to cultural and intellectual decadence. More worrisome, however, is the global reach of this decadence. In the past, sexual bewilderment was unleashed in a specific metropolis or nation: Athens towards the end of the fifth century BC, Rome beginning in the fourth century, Beijing in the mid-17th century, Paris at the end of the 19th century, and Berlin during the Weimar Republic of the early 20th century. Today, however, corruption and self-absorption have taken hold across most of Europe, the U.S., and Latin America, leaving the transatlantic social order effeminate and defenseless.

This observation is not a call to pity men. A society results from common efforts, and men bear at least half the responsibility for the new status quo. But to restrain the excessive submission and charity leading us astray, we need more women to demand that men be men again. Readers who subscribe to the prevailing passivity will find it concessive and paradoxical that I should say that strong women are the solution. But that’s simplistic. The strong woman I have in mind is not an academic revolutionary but an ancestral ideal. The question is how to recognize her.

In the imagination of many classical liberals, if women didn’t become major leaders or more violent figures of inspiration, it’s likely because the liberal order and values ​​that informed it were still on the rise.

There are epic women—that’s how I’ll describe them—who appear as if by divine providence to remind us that we were born to be men. When we’re no longer men, they manifest the harsh courage that we lack. This is what the phenomenon of the militant woman tells us in both literature and history. It also tells us that the phenomenon results from comfort and wealth. The true paradox and tragedy of our fading masculinity is that the perilous success of civilization is what turns us into fools and cowards. Thus, majestic women like Thatcher or Joan of Arc signal an ominous moment. We must pay attention to them; if not, something sinister will defeat us.

Today, two currents of feminism confront each other. One is new and radical; the other is traditional and judicious.

The new feminism advances a complete substitution. Women consider themselves equal or even superior to men in every aspect of life. The consequent social virtue is to remove men from the public square and reduce their authority in families, businesses, governments, and even the military forces. This kind of feminism appears in those television commercials where men are idiots and clowns while women always know better. The new feminism insists that 50 percent of the directors of multinationals must be women. The new feminism produces political campaigns in which a candidate’s superior management ability is attributed to nothing more than the fact that she’s female. The new feminism wants military recruiters to emphasize sexual diversity over the elemental need to kill the enemies of the homeland.

Leading figures of the new feminism include Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris, Michelle Bachelet, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Yolanda Díaz. They are the socialist wing of modern feminism, manifesting and amplifying the decadence of Western Civilization.

But there’s another kind of feminism that seeks mutual respect and advances the dignity of both sexes without repressing the natural differences that sometimes assign us different roles in life. This feminism resists decadence; it restores common sense and social order.

In the greatest work of classical-liberal political philosophy, Democracy in America (1835/40), Alexis de Tocqueville noted a false respect for women on the part of European men, who, despite their interest in improving the material lives of their women, ultimately considered them inferior and didn’t delegate any real authority to them. But in America, the French sociologist observed a rational division of labor between the sexes along with a trust that men had in their female partners. American men consulted their women about the important decisions in life. Tocqueville went so far as to imagine that American women made for a kind of political check to that male frenzy which, though necessary for frontier life, sometimes bordered on barbarism.

Five years after Tocqueville’s great study, Frederick Douglass included in his autobiographical novel, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), striking passages in which he alluded to the 19th-century alliance between women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements. For Douglass, the few memories of his mother and the teachings and help of several women, even those from slave-owning families, marked the path of his liberation (cf. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab [1841] and Fernán Caballero’s “La hija del sol” [1849]).

Anticipating Tocqueville and Douglass, the American founder and fellow abolitionist Alexander Hamilton addressed the question of how to consider women’s property in the Federalist Papers in the context of his discussion of the function, structure, and power of the courts in the new republic. In other words, as early as 1788, Hamilton understood that women’s rights and the abolition of slavery implied each other like the ambo and the lectern of a temple.

These three classical liberal writers consolidated the general struggle to improve life around the traditional sexual relationship. They understood women as colleagues in our earthly projects. They stressed the importance of respect for women’s decisions, not the sacrifice of the other sex, as if his misfortune were somehow the proper price of progress. In the imagination of many classical liberals, if women didn’t become major leaders or more violent figures of inspiration, it’s likely because the liberal order and values ​​that informed it were still on the rise.

That confident phase of expansion shared little with the alienation and crisis of our present day.

***

Composed more than six centuries before the peak of modern liberalism, El poema de mio Cid (c.1230)—the greatest of Europe’s national epics—contains one of the longest and most complex prayers by a female character in all of medieval literature. Before the Cid’s departure, the poet Per Abbat has Ximena guide the hero toward the altar of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña outside Burgos, where she then implores God to protect her husband during his exile in Moorish territory. Ximena cites a series of miracles from both the Old Testament and the Gospel, which serve as context for her request that God’s next miraculous act be to protect the Cid.

It’s easy to miss how this magnificent public harangue voices an intimate challenge to the deity. Towards the middle of her prayer, Ximena attributes to Christ the transformation of a stone into bread. Other literary critics remain perplexed by this miracle, which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Not wanting to suggest that Ximena is ignorant, a few critics have even speculated that the phrase alludes to some local legend about San Pedro de Cardeña. After all, they reason that Christ called Saint Peter his rock (see Matthew 16.18 and John 1.42).

No, this is neither textual error, female ignorance, nor local legend.

We’re dealing with something far more specific and recognizable to Per Abbat’s audience. Ximena is preparing her husband for his military campaign against the Moorish enemy. Ergo, she alludes to Luke 4.3–4. When Satan tells Christ to turn a stone into bread, Christ replies that “man shall not live by bread alone.” By contrast, in the epic poem, the heroine says Christ performed the miracle. Why? Obvious. This is not the time for moral hesitancy; this is the time to surrender to the diabolical temptation to seize power and apply force.

Ximena doesn’t want the Cid to be overly Christian during his journey. On the contrary, she wants him to separate his political and military life from his faith. Sacrifices, penitence, and acts of purification can be performed later to reincorporate the Cid into the Christian social order. For now, Iberian-style “decisionism” is required. The Visigoth heresy, “Arianism,” implied Christ’s relative imperfection. Ximena doesn’t want perfection. She wants victory and life, and moral costs be damned.

My students in Guatemala showed me this. I suspect it was not only because they know their Bible but because they can still recall their own civil war. There are decisive moments in life when refusing to fight is suicide. Morally superior suicide, but still suicide. Let’s remember that the foundation on which Christ built his church was St. Peter, the apostle who drew his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane. From a more militant perspective, Christ sacrificed himself so that we don’t have to. Civilization needs Christian soldiers. And the utility of martyrdom is limited.

There is assuredly something painful and tragic about Ximena. She pays a heavy price for her Arian assertiveness; she later concedes to the sacrifice of her two daughters. But she does so to ensure the reunified future of the Kingdom of Castile and Leon, and she does so because the man whom the Cid recognizes as his king, Alfonso VI, demands it of her. That is, the reestablished sociopolitical order in places like Burgos, Valencia, and Toledo also required unchristian acts.

It’s critical to recognize that the domestic sociopolitical context of Ximena’s prayer is far more important than the campaign against the Moors. Rather, the epic poet is concerned about the plague of decadence that has weakened the newly rich and powerful Christian kingdoms. First, incoherent and impure alliances between Muslims and Christians had arisen. After the Battle of Tévar, the Cid must recall the symbolism of the Eucharist for the Count of Barcelona.

Worse, there were fratricidal tendencies within the Christian ranks. The civil war between Alfonso VI (León) and Sancho II (Castile) ended after the treacherous murder of the latter during the siege of Zamora. The exile of Sancho’s surviving lieutenant, the now potentially vengeful and dangerous Cid, was simply the price to be paid to reunify the kingdoms. Thus, the Cid bids farewell to a mysterious abbot named Sancho, who promises to protect his wife and daughters at San Pedro de Cardeña. The name Sancho does not accord with the historical record. That’s because he’s a ghost of the betrayed leader murdered at Zamora.

When corruption and decadence reach levels that distort traditional morality, we need to renew our commitment to civilization.

Finally, there were also suspicions that carnal indiscretions motivated the aforementioned civil war. Rumors ran wild about an incestuous sexual relationship between Urraca and Alfonso, who then conspired to kill their brother. Alluding to this love triangle, Ximena cites the two lascivious old men in the book of Daniel who threaten Susana.

In sum, according to Per Abbat, a corrupt combination of religious contamination, internal political betrayal, and uncontrolled sexuality was the true motivation for the Cid’s exile.

Why is it difficult for 20^th and 21^st-century critics to understand Ximena’s biblical distortion? Why can’t they grasp the overtly militant essence of her prayer? Simple. The moral advantage of Spanish civilization—its religious passion—is also sometimes its major disadvantage, its blind spot. The Catholic mind instinctively resists the idea that a warrior hero’s wife might want him to separate his political and military actions from his faith. An inverted version of this is seen in the many Jesuits who become left-wing political activists. This Jesuit “social justice” mantra is a recalcitrant form of excessive charity that still stalks the Western world.

By contrast, Ximena’s feminism—let’s call it forceful feminism—obliges us to be serious. She asks us to be citizens rather than deluded utopians who want to sacrifice our communities for the sake of those who would do us harm. Theologically and socio-politically, evil exists to clarify for us what is good. The morality that civilizes human beings can be a matter of peaceful codes and reforms at the center, but it cannot avoid applying destructive domination at the margin. Social order brings peace and docility to the daily lives of most citizens, but in our confrontation with barbarism, that same order requires us to apply force. Where? At the border of a civilized nation or within those urban areas where barbarism threatens the most defenseless among us. Perhaps our greatest dilemma lately is that even when we recognize what is good, we seem unable to recall how to defend it. When corruption and decadence reach levels that distort traditional morality, we need to renew our commitment to civilization.

It’s not that history repeats itself, but there are waves and cycles in the long trajectories of civilizations. Four centuries after Per Abbat’s epic poem, around the middle of the 17^th century, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza—the bishop of Puebla, and briefly the archbishop and viceroy of New Spain—contemplated the decay of the Spanish Empire. His novel, the Conquest of China (c.1654), projects an oriental analogy for that European decay.

We should not be surprised to find that Palafox’s novel highlights a series of inversions of traditional gender roles. It begins with the suicide of the last Empress of the Ming Dynasty, and then it describes the invasion of the Tartars—the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty—whose women are just as independent, upright, and warlike as their men. Like his emphatically “legitimate wife,” except additionally (and ironically) distracted by his own harem, the last Ming Emperor realizes too late that China is plagued by mandarins, eunuchs, and men who no longer carry even a knife and who now fight each other with nothing but their fingernails. And because sexual decadence has resulted in effeminate men, those same men now feel compelled to keep their women trapped indoors, only allowing them to travel in heavily guarded cages.

Thus, confused sexuality in the Conquest of China is one of the ultimate indicators of the need for a sociological as well as political revolution.

It’s clear that Palafox has in mind a parallel between China and Spain: “the ignorance and carelessness of a Tartar woman who doesn’t know how to ride a horse would be as great as that of a Spanish woman who doesn’t know how to walk in chopines.” Moreover, his vision of moral renewal is not elitist; it’s revolutionary, demanding the participation of all ranks of society.

What’s most admired in these women is their skill at running and governing a horse, and many of them are excellent at it; and all of them more or less know generally how to run a horse better than the men in Spain; and they’re more practiced at it, since in Spain only aristocrats ride horses, whereas among the Tartar women it’s practiced by nobles as well as commoners.

For the beatified novelist from Navarre, the rebirth of courage and self-reliance requires and elicits a kind of democratic revolution, and it’s feminine and masculine at the same time: “The Tartars raise and want the Tartar women to be warlike, manly, and warrioresses according to their inclination; and they inherit that inclination from their parents and continue it at the pleasure of their husbands, and even according to their own appreciation of the education they’re given and the inclination they’ve inherited. And so, either they are blameless in this manly exercise, or else they have an excuse very much at hand.” Thus, the military talents of the Manchu women don’t threaten their men. Rather, they confirm the natural and cooperative order of a healthy society. No wonder the Manchu women express contempt for the degradation to which the Ming women have allowed themselves to be subjected.

Both Per Abbat’s 13^th-century perspective on the conquest of Valencia by the Cid and Palafox’s 17^th-century vision on the founding of the Qing dynasty are examples of the resurrection of justice in concert with a resurgence of traditionalist women. The reconquest of Iberia and the revolution in China have their modern analogs. During the first existential crisis of the tiny Republic of Israel, Golda Meier knew how to inspire heroic actions. When the socialist policies of the post-war period seemed destined to destroy her country, Margaret Thatcher liberalized its economy and salvaged the relationship between England and the U.S., leading to victory in the Cold War. The great American lady, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, overcame her shame regarding the soft policies of McGovern and Carter by becoming a staunch ally of Ronald Reagan. The title of her final book signaled her resolve: Making War to Keep Peace (2007).

Today, in Europe and Latin America, we see a similar phenomenon. Courageous women who encourage us to turn back the tyranny of corruption and overdetermined charity have emerged. Whatever you think about their specific policies, these women are telling us that the cultural suicide of the West must end. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo in Spain, María Corina Machado in Venezuela, and Marine Le Pen in France are resisting an existential crisis. But they cannot do this alone. The men in their nations must also wake up and realize that the defense of freedom requires self-esteem, mutual respect between the sexes, and the courage and responsibility of honest citizenship.

Photo by Ted McGrath — Mexico City – Lady Godiva with Butterflies — Flickr