Building the Super-Woman

The difference between a good teacher and a bad one often lies in the nature of the challenge the teacher is willing to take on. A good teacher understands that, in the moment, students rarely appreciate the lengths to which a mentor will go to carve wisdom into their stubborn minds. The mark of a good student, then, is the one who—if fortune allows—comes to understand this before the end of life, and perhaps even apologizes for all the foolishness of youth. More often, the teacher is long gone, and the only thanks the student can offer is to pour grace, discipline, and gratitude into the next generation.

Sometimes this awakening produces revolutions. My late father‑in‑law, the theologian Ronald Goetz—of whom I owe more apologies than I can count—used to say something both humorous and devastating: “It’s pretty clear the apostles never understood a damn thing Jesus was trying to tell them, and when they did, they didn’t like it.” Only later, after His death, did they write down what they finally grasped. What they recorded triggered a civilizational upheaval: a true moral revolution. Those with low societal status—slaves and women—were declared equal in the sight of God. As my old teacher George MacCrae of Harvard once said, “The words, ‘In Christ Jesus there is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Gentile,’ remain the most revolutionary words ever uttered.”

For two millennia this vision worked its slow, painstaking transformation on the West. During this transformation, women rose gradually from the vulnerability of premodern life toward social equality. The past sixty years have accelerated this rise at a pace unmatched in history—thanks largely to technology. Electricity, police, medicine, and urbanization have ended the physical dangers that once required male strength for defense. The family no longer relies on large numbers of children for survival. But these same developments have given some feminists the illusion that human history was an extended fraternity party from which women were barred. This fantasy betrays a deep ignorance of the brutal reality of the past: short lives, harsh winters, near-universal poverty, and the constant struggle for survival faced equally by men and women.

Most of human history was not patriarchy as a conspiracy—it was poverty as a prison. Men worked the fields, built the roads, and faced the dangers; women produced and preserved the food that sustained families through the long, unrelenting winters. Physical strength determined labor division not because of oppression but because nature allowed no alternative. Even today, nature still quietly dictates its limits: women overwhelmingly prefer tall men; men prefer signs of fertility. Feminists may wish this away, but human instincts are stronger and older than ideology.

And despite the promises of the 1960s, men still overwhelmingly perform the dangerous and dirty work that makes civilization function. They build our infrastructure, maintain our grids, work oil rigs, fight fires, and dominate mathematics, physics, and engineering—not because women lack intellect, but because these fields still demand a degree of obsessive focus and physical risk that fewer women desire or choose.

Technology has shielded us from nearly all the hardships that once shaped humanity. Domestic pets today live better than most humans did a century ago. And worse still, technology has also inflated our sense of entitlement. We now become irritated when satellites take an extra few seconds to deliver entertainment—forgetting that our phones hold more knowledge than ancient or medieval libraries, without the perilous journeys once required to reach them.

Technology is not the answer to our problems, but an opportunity to address them.  History teaches us that every major technological breakthrough in history has been quickly repurposed for violence. While Marxists predicted a workers’ utopia, the 20th century instead produced unprecedented bloodshed, the slaughter of millions.   And now, in the 21st century, we use technology not to cultivate virtue but to amplify chaos though social media.  Crime rises amid the enormous wealth; homelessness spreads in cities of abundance; men who once built cathedrals and canals now seek validation in self‑parody; women who once sustained families now terminate pregnancies at staggering rates. We have abandoned the ancient and Christian understanding that there is something wrong in human nature that must be healed. Instead, we have replaced moral language with pseudo-therapeutic excuses.

Yet technology also offers an extraordinary possibility: the chance to refine and improve  our natures. Feminists are correct in one sense—men could indeed show more empathy. Scarcity no longer forces the harshness that once governed life. Humanity has never had fewer excuses to ignore Christ’s call  to love one another.

Men share this failure with their longtime partner.  Many women have not risen to this moral opportunity. Instead of cultivating the strengths with which nature endowed them—empathy, intuition, relational intelligence—too many have embraced the worst traits of modernity: vanity, resentment, and irrationalism. Universities, instead of elevating women, have often indulged their weaknesses: emotionalism over logic, grievance over humility, performative activism over intellectual growth. Anti‑rationalist academics like Foucault and Marcuse persuaded generations of students that Reason—the very foundation of modern civilization—is oppressive. Women who once encouraged men to rise above their primitive impulses now often join in amplifying them.

Still,  women possess inherent gifts that are indispensable to civilization. Empathy was not a flaw of nature—it was a survival tool. Intuition protected children, guided households, and complemented male strength. Humanity is only a few generations removed from the dangers that shaped these instincts. These roles were not prisons; they were the architecture of survival.

Now, freed from the old constraints, women have the chance not to abandon rationality but to master it. They can learn mathematics, logic, and philosophy—not as rejections of femininity but as refinements of it. They can recognize the contributions of the millions of men whose anonymous labor has lifted billions out of misery. And they can rediscover the partnership that has sustained humanity from the beginning.

It is not irrational fury that built the modern world, but cooperation. Not tribalism, but humility. Not chaos, but discipline. Our ancestors would rejoice to see a world where men could choose peaceful vocations and spend more time with their families; where women could study art, science, and literature without fear. But they would be bewildered to learn that their sacrifices led to a society where men dress like cartoon birds and behave like fools and women mistake hostility and choreographed outrage for liberation.

This moment—this technological age—offers a profound opportunity: to refine both male and female nature, to recognize each other’s contributions, to rebuild the partnership that sustained civilization, and to create a future in which both sexes rise to their best selves.

To build the super‑woman is not to erase femininity; it is to elevate it—combining nature’s gifts with the discipline of reason, the humility of tradition, and the courage to rise above grievance toward greatness.