RIP Feminism: Reflections From TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Conference

I spent the past weekend in San Antonio at the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Conference. While I was on the older end of the bell curve, I was encouraged by what I heard and saw from a largely Gen Z and millennial crowd.

A host of speakers discussed a variety of topics appealing to the physical, mental, and spiritual development of women. From what it looks like to be a godly woman to what it looks like to be a healthy woman (which are not separate), attendees were given a road map of how to live a purposeful life. Throughout the weekend, one thing was made abundantly clear: Feminism is dead. RIP.

The video introducing the conference demonstrated the destruction feminism has wrought on American society. It opened by describing the bold, brave women who forged a new path preceding and during the founding of America, as well as the women of the frontier and those who were called to service to rebuild the country in the years after the Great War.

These women did not take up their mantle because of feminism. They were empowered to act because it was their duty to the Lord, the nation, and their families.

Feminists like to act as if women were helpless victims before their ideology came along to save them. That is simply not true.

Since the dawn of time, women have served as educators, healers, and—most importantly—mothers. As Erika Kirk said in the video, “Strength has never been defined by self-interest. It was found in sacrifice. In service to something higher than self.”

Feminism changed that. From its inception, it has fought to re-order God’s design and promote self-interest as a virtue. It encouraged women to take over roles, attitudes, and spaces designed for men. As Charlie Kirk once said, feminism was about wanting women to become men and, eventually, not to need men at all.

While many people define feminism differently, from its inception, the core of the ideology has been rooted not in service and obedience to God, but in power. It has always denied the fact that the most powerful tool a woman possesses is her biology—her ability to usher in new life—and the unique attributes that accompany that gift. When her biology is devalued, dismissed, or discarded, a woman may seek to fill that void through other avenues like career or activism.

Our current culture demonstrates what happens when women believe that freedom consists of rejecting the responsibilities that they once embraced with pride like homemaking and caretaking. Contemporary women are awash with resentment, anger, and bitterness. These sentiments were on full display not only in segments of the video, but outside the walls of the hotel amongst the loud and caustic women protesters who surrounded the entrances.

They threatened attendees and behaved in a way that has become a stereotype of modern liberal women: hysterical and unhinged. Or as my friend and colleague Scott Yenor likes to say, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”

These women were not unattractive because of their physical characteristics (although outside appearance often reflects inner states). They were unattractive because they are filled with hatred over God’s design for their lives, married or single, mothers or childless. And they were a far cry from the bright and uplifting young women I met at the conference.

The women inside the halls, elevators, and gathering spaces were well put together, with care for their appearance. They were not all models, but they were pretty because their hearts were seeking not mere human words of encouragement, but God’s wisdom and truth. That kind of love radiates from the inside out.

Luckily the number of women inside the building far outnumbered those outside. This is reflective of the culture at large, at least within the conservative movement. As feminism seems to be increasing on the political Left, it is sharply decreasing on the Right.

More young women are waking up to the failed promises of feminism and embracing a modern womanhood that, while it may look different from women in the past, seeks to first fulfill one of God’s principal commandments to mankind: to be fruitful and multiply.

Alex Clark, one of the leading voices in Turning Point as well as in the MAHA movement, spoke to how young women, even in what she called their “single season,” can heed the call of God. Clark said that women can’t be expected to just “sit under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.”

She encouraged women to live their lives. Travel, learn to cook, read good books, get healthy. In essence, become the woman a man would want to marry.

That is the difference between the path of feminism and the path of a woman seeking God. The means, like personal growth and development, may look similar. It is the intentions and ends that are different. One seeks to satisfy self. The other seeks to satisfy God.

So, the question is not what action a woman should take, but whom it serves.

Feminism is not dead because women no longer seek purpose—it is fading because it misidentified where that purpose comes from. It promised fulfillment through autonomy and self-elevation, but what it often produces is restlessness and dissatisfaction.

What I witnessed in San Antonio was not an absence of ambition, but its redirection—away from the self and toward something higher.

The future will not belong to the loudest voices demanding liberation from responsibility, but to those who willingly embrace it.