The Feminist I Wasn’t: A Conservative’s Reckoning

When telling the story of my venture into activism, I often describe it as more of a faceplant than a calling. I was an abandoned wife raising two little kids while working a demanding full-time job when civic duty came pounding down my door.

At that point, I was what you might call a Republican dream voter. I identified as conservative, but I couldn’t tell you the name of my local representatives—or even the last time I’d bothered to vote in anything other than a Presidential election. My political views boiled down to a simple checklist: government should be small, abortion should be illegal, people should have the right to speak and worship freely, and they should have the right to own guns.

If the party could get me to the polls, they could count on me to vote red straight down the ticket without much further thought. That’s not exactly a badge of honor, but let’s be honest: both parties rely on loyal, unquestioning subjects like I once was.

Then came the day when it suddenly mattered. Some unelected bureaucrats had arbitrarily decided that laws guaranteeing sex-based protections in locker rooms and showers also applied to “gender identity.” Suddenly, the women’s locker room at my workplace was open to any man who claimed to identify as female—and I was powerless to stop it.

For the first time, I needed to understand how laws worked and what steps were required to change them. I feverishly registered for “politics for dummies” classes at my local Family Policy Institute. I began walking the halls of Olympia, meeting legislators, and learning the system. A then-17-year-old political savant personally guided me around the Capitol, introducing me to key people. At one point he leaned over and joked: “Just promise me you won’t become a feminist.”

I laughed. Not a chance.

As I navigated those halls, fighting to protect women’s privacy, I began to question why “feminism”—a term I’d dismissed as radical—was so closely tied to my fight for fairness. For most of my life, I’d disdained the caricature conservatives hold up as the norm: abortion, man-bashing, bitter women with blue hair and septum piercings. Even my early writing on gender issues reflected that antagonism.

Reflecting on my childhood, I realize how authority figures conditioned me to distrust women’s studies—treating them as a portal to rebellion, even witchcraft—without ever inviting me to question whether there was value in analyzing the history of women. Was this aversion designed to keep me small, compliant, and quiet? Or was it wisdom? An admonition to avoid feeding oppression narratives that would ultimately get me nowhere? Perhaps it was both.

But here’s the thing: the word feminist didn’t start out radical, even though some men have always recoiled against it.

In the 1830s, French philosopher Charles Fourier coined “féminisme” to describe the movement for women’s equality. While his broader worldview isn’t one I share, his term simply captured the fight for fair treatment. By that definition, much of my work has always aligned with feminism. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that feminism has become, for conservatives, a thought-terminating cliché—a verbal shortcut we use to dismiss discussions without engaging their substance. That’s foolish, and it’s costing us.

Feminism, like many other words—Republican, even Christian—has been diluted and contested. Yet whether we admit it or not, feminism arose as a response to very real wounds inflicted by patriarchy (another word we aren’t allowed to use without being labeled Marxists.) These weren’t imaginary. For centuries, women in the West couldn’t own property, enter contracts, or retain custody of their children after divorce. They were shut out of higher education and certain professions. Marital rape wasn’t recognized as a crime until the late 20th century. These are documented realities of systemic oppression.

If we refuse to reckon with those wounds, we only drive people further away. We confirm the caricature conservatives often lean on: cold, dismissive, and uninterested in justice.

The work Charlie Kirk and others did on college campuses—exposing how radical extremes have been normalized—was invaluable. Third-wave feminism is, in fact, a dumpster fire every bit as bad as people think it is. No one is wrong to call that out. But the work is not completed by pointing at rotten fruit. It can only be completed when we examine the roots of that fruit. As my best friend put it, “Patriarchy is feminism’s ungodly father.” So why can’t we talk about that? Why is this instantly dismissed as man bashing rather than accountability?

Sadly, none of the viral “own the libs” videos engage in the nuanced conversations we need—especially with people capable of articulating real arguments about the harms of rigid gender cages. As #repealthe19th rhetoric gains traction, the stakes are real. Romanticizing tradwifery, large families, and women devoted entirely to homemaking ignores the economic realities modern families face. Dual incomes aren’t a luxury—they’re a necessity. Encouraging young people to marry and procreate recklessly, without equipping them for financial, emotional, and societal realities, risks creating a generation ill-prepared for the responsibilities they are told to embrace.

It’s exhausting to hear pundits repeat debunked caricatures about the differences between the sexes as though they were God’s honest truth. Women are not inherently overly emotional; men are not naturally rational; girls aren’t automatically better nurturers. These stereotypes reduce complex human beings to convenient clichés, making it easier for men to dismiss women’s contributions in politics, workplaces, and homes. Framing women as illogical or fragile isn’t science—it’s a power-preserving shortcut that masks the social, cultural, and economic factors shaping behavior.

We need voices that encourage critical thinking over paint-by-numbers “solutions” to societal problems. Too often, these solutions cost women the most. The people raising these challenges—once called feminists—deserve to be heard, even if we don’t agree with every nuance of the modern movement.

None of this means I’ve abandoned my convictions. I remain unapologetically pro-life and rooted in my faith. I will never embrace the strand of feminism that treats abortion as liberation or views motherhood as oppression. But writing off feminism wholesale, as though every woman who claims the label is a shrill caricature, is short-sighted and lazy.

When we reduce feminist to an insult instead of recognizing it as a call for fairness, we miss the opportunity to contend with the wounds we ourselves may have caused. We fail to answer with compassion, and in doing so, we cede ground. The term may be messy, loaded, and contested—but the underlying concerns that gave birth to it are not going away.

Friends have pleaded with me to abandon the term entirely to cast a wider net. I cannot, in good conscience, do that. To do so would mean avoiding the difficult conversations that desperately need the light of day.

Conservatives who care about truth and justice should stop using feminist as a thought-terminating cliché. If anything, we should recover its truest meaning: the insistence that women, too, bear the image of God and deserve to be treated as such.

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