This is an edited version of remarks that were originally delivered in Rochester on September 17th at the opening of the 2026 Women’s Convention. A full, unedited video of the introduction remarks can be viewed here. Fairer Disputations

Friends,

we gather together in truly difficult times. Trust in our political, economic, and cultural institutions—and the leaders of those institutions—has never been lower, at least in my lifetime.

We, in the West, are living in the midst of an increasingly fast-moving, destabilizing, now-decades-long technological revolution, accompanied by a massive, destabilizing, now-decades-long cultural revolution. It is no wonder that so many are experiencing a sense of economic precarity, cultural dislocation, political unrest, and individual anxiety.

In many ways, our time is not terribly dissimilar from the era in which the mid-nineteenth century women’s advocates found themselves. They too were living through the economic and cultural dislocation of a massive technological (industrial) revolution, alongside the prolonged horror of chattel slavery. These reformers saw the myriad ways in which men, women, children, the enslaved, the worker, and the migrant were all distinctively impacted by a kind of large-scale de-humanization. And though none were perfect—just as, I assure you, none are perfect here—they came together, each bringing her own concerns, perspective, and talents, to speak out against dehumanization where they saw it, in an effort to make the world around them—unstable, unjust, and ugly as it was—a better fit for the noble creatures that we human beings are, that these women recognized us to be.

In our time, we see dehumanization in both new and old forms. We’ve made an effort in the Declaration – of interdependance for the 250 years of the US- to name how these forms impact women particularly, and we will be discussing these realities throughout the convention.

As this is a women’s convention, I want to turn for a few brief moments to consider an underlying reason that, I think, women have come increasingly to dehumanize themselves.

Consider one of the resolutions adopted at that first Rochester convention in 1848:

“the universal doctrine of the inferiority of woman has ever caused her to distrust her own powers, and paralyzed her energies, and placed her in that degraded position from which the most strenuous and unremitting effort can alone redeem her.” Indeed, we see a consistent concern among these women reformers that women at this time were, in the words of Lucretia Mott, at risk of “degenerating”: of not cultivating their rational powers so they might become the truly dignified human beings they were meant to be.

It may seem odd for me to claim a kind of echo in our time, with all that modern women have achieved educationally and professionally. After all, the 1848 convention in Rochester created a bit of a scandal by having a woman, rather than a man, preside over the proceedings. Still, today, I do see in many women—even women with much worldly success—this same distrust of one’s own powers and paralysis of one’s own energies. And, dare I say, I think it hails from similar quarters: a cultural sense of the inferiority of woman qua woman.

But after decades of “feminism”, how could this be?

Well, as many of us here have noticed, the regnant form of feminism, now hegemonic for decades in the West, assumes a series of technological incursions into the body of a young woman such that she can become the equal of a man. A lifetime on the contraceptive pill, abortion at the ready, the availability of egg freezing and other reproductive technologies: all to ensure that she can engage in the bedroom and in the marketplace along the normative patterns of a man.

The rise and triumph of this form of feminism—which departs gravely from what came before—has made women distrust their own powers, their own body’s powers, their own reproductive powers, those powers that make a woman distinctively female. Early advocates saw women’s capacity for motherhood as a superpower, and they agitated for their rights so that they might responsibly carry out their duties of care. Today, by contrast, many women have come to fear, to dread, even to despise the distinctively feminine power of becoming a mother.

But now there is more.

A rising masculinist backlash assumes—as have so many notable figures throughout the centuries—that women really are the inferior sex, and so ought to distrust their powers… their powers of reason, of will, of judgment, in a word, of moral agency. It is in women’s best interest, we hear on that dark corner of the internet (a corner that grows larger by the minute), that women always and everywhere need to be ruled by men. And some women, despairing of the fairer sex’s rational powers, now seem to agree.

So, on one side, we are told to distrust our female bodies; on the other, to distrust our common human capacity to become responsible agents of our own lives.

We gather these days to forge a better way forward for women: one that will avoid both of these grave errors about who women are and what we are called to be. Our speakers will help us to wrestle with ways to encourage, to guide, and to support women as they seek to better cultivate their powers of body, mind, and soul—and to find ways to help the world become more hospitable to women as we actually are.

Now, in many ways, there is no question that it’s gotten much easier to live a dignified life as a woman today. The gratitude I have, I’m sure that we all have, for those who have made ordinary life more hospitable for us all is immeasurable. But just as in the West we’ve made so much material progress, and progress for women in education and in the professions, we have simultaneously forgotten, as a civilization, how to cultivate the interior dispositions each of us need to respond with confidence and responsible care to the adverse moments of our lives. And these are adverse times.

Both ends of our rather awful political spectrum, and some in between, seem to have forgotten that human beings do not spring forth from our mothers’ wombs with these sorts of mature human dispositions. Nor do we, especially in adolescence, instinctively feel affection for the bodies that we are. Rather, each girl and boy is born into a family for a reason. We are meant to rely on our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and teachers and mentors and myriad others to care for and guide us and form us so that we might become the kinds of people capable, one day, of doing the same for our own.

Women have always been at the center of this culturally essential formative work. But as women’s own recognition of the fullness of their dignity recedes from a culture that has forgotten it, we see fewer women with the confidence to guide, shape, and form others, because they haven’t ever been given the gift of that guidance, that formation, that humanizing process themselves.

To become just and wise and temperate and courageous agents of our own lives—capable of doing right by others in every sphere of life—we need to know who we are and what we’re made for. And let’s just say here at the outset that we are not made for the machine, for the market, or for men’s desires. As many of the leaders of the early women’s movement pointed out, women aren’t made primarily for any of those. Why? Because, I say on this Feast of the great mystic, composer, and philosopher, Hildegard of Bingen, because we are transcendent beings made ultimately for union with God.

Now, many have asked me how this nascent movement will scale. And of course I have ideas—ideas which need time, talent, and treasure… lots of treasure. But it seems to me that our era is really stuck, and this is a real challenge for us, in a distinctively modern account of politics-as-all-out-war, where political tribalism grows at a pace: where you must always know whose side you are on. Many seem to have lost entirely the ability to think in frameworks different from and prior to power politics. We must do much of that kind of thinking here.

We have lost, I think, a more ancient understanding of politics, one which found its way into American practice too, in which particular people, women and men, from different backgrounds and religious commitments came together to solve concrete problems. Even if many of us here may despair of recovering this form of small-p politics on a broader scale any time soon, at the very least, on this Constitution Day and in the days that come, let us rehabilitate and practice small-p politics together.

For though most of us can happily sign onto the principles laid out in our Declaration, and there is plenty there to build strong coalitions upon, there is also plenty upon which the women and men in this room disagree, plenty about which the speakers and panelists disagree. Do not hesitate to let those disagreements respectfully surface. Making room for disagreement and debate will not weaken but will, rather, only strengthen our nascent movement from the outset.

So as we go forward, I ask this of you all: put aside for these next few days (at the very least) the outrage machine that is social media, the who said what from left or right that pulls our very beings into a state of reactivity. This, as we all know, simply does not allow for the best of thinking. And we want the best of thinking here!

During our time together, let us really practice here and now being an antidote to all that: being present and attentive, fair-minded and considerate, thoughtful and curious. Because, friends, the world really needs us. The world needs a new movement of well-formed women to dig deep, to think well, to love intently, to lead a revolution of the heart, and, in many places, a revolution in thinking as well.

Starting in a few moments, you’re going to hear from many incredible speakers, women of real professional and personal excellence. We’ve brought these particular women together — with all of you — because of the deep concern each of us has for women, for children, and for the men, young and aged, who we truly need.

This is all to say that we aren’t here to sling arrows at this enemy or that. We are here to fortify each other, to build friendships, and to forge a better way forward for women.

Thank you all for being here. It means the world to me.