The Return of the Woman: From Mary to Meloni and the Reawakening of the Feminine

“The glory of woman is not rebellion against her nature, but radiance within it.”

There was a time, not long ago, when the Western feminist vanguard celebrated the very forces that would ultimately degrade womanhood. Writers like Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, once icons of sexual liberation, championed a vision of freedom that unmoored women from reverence — from motherhood, from marriage, from the mysterious power of restraint and self-possession. In the name of empowerment, they helped sexualize the feminine, turning woman from a source of inspiration into an object of consumption.

We need not get into how this happened for purposes of this essay. But time, and conscience, are patient teachers. Both women have now repented of what they helped unleash. They have spoken openly of their disillusionment — the realization that the ‘sexual revolution’ did not elevate women but unveiled them, leaving them spiritually naked in a culture that knows the price of a body but not the value of a soul. They sought emancipation from men and found enslavement to appetite and became unmoored from themselves.

The damage, however, has been done. Generations of women were taught that motherhood was servitude, that modesty was weakness, that the admiration of men was oppression. They were told not to inspire men but to compete with them — to become, in essence, mini-men: efficient, ambitious, hardened, yet increasingly unhappy.

The social toll has been devastating. Women increasingly find themselves alone, childless, and miserable. You would not know this from reading the usual propaganda, but the dwindling true believers protest too much. As old age creeps in millions of women find themselves alone, bitter and regretful. The children they were supposed to have, the children who would have looked at them with adoring eyes were victims of a misguided and false ideology. They have exchanged family for a false doctrine, and a loyal husband and family for one-night stands on Tinder.

Naomi Wolf is now happily remarried and has recast herself as a pro-family and conservative, but not all former feminists have been as brutally honest with themselves as Ms. Wolf. Camile Paglia, who once lauded the sexual liberation of Madonna now finds herself repulsed by the shoddy way today’s women walk around in revealing yoga outfits, advertising themselves as the sex objects they once claimed to abhor. The elegance of Audrey Hepburn has been replaced with the tackiness of Kim Khardasian. It looks cheap and tawdry, because it is.

Yet now, at last, the pendulum swings back. Across the world, a new kind of woman is emerging — neither submissive nor masculinized — who rejects the nihilism of the last century and restores dignity to difference. These are the women of the modern conservative movement: proud, radiant, and reconciled with their nature. There are millions who are coming to the conclusion that Marxist feminism, invented by cynical misogynist men who had no real love of understanding of true womanhood, has been degrading. True womanhood has been degraded and women were persuaded to join the Orwellian vision that objectified women and sought to turn humanity into robots.

But now we are seeing the return of the heroine in a manner that would make Joseph Campbell smile. Among these heroines is Erika Kirk, whose quiet influence has become emblematic of this restoration. Bold, articulate, fiercely loyal to her husband and family, she represents something Western civilization has nearly forgotten — that goodness itself can be powerful, that love can be fierce, and that a woman’s highest calling is not domination, but transformation. These are the women that men glorify and have even worshipped, the women that inspired men to risk their lives to fight fascism, because they knew that there was a strong, fiercely loyal, fiercely feminine and powerful woman waiting for them should they survive.

Historians can be selective creatures, and certainly they have been of late when it comes the history of the world’s greatest partnership, men and women. It is routinely ignored in today’s propaganda factories that for centuries, men have been inspired by women. From the troubadours who sang of chaste devotion, to the poets who carried their beloveds’ names into battle, to the artists who painted the Virgin Mary as the radiant intercessor between heaven and earth — men have always found in woman the mirror of what is most noble in themselves. Even in the pre-Christian world, Greece and Rome venerated goddesses — Athena, symbol of reason and justice; Aphrodite, embodiment of beauty and love. Christianity did not abolish these ideals; it sanctified them in Mary, who joined intellect with grace, courage with compassion. For men, strong women have been sacred, not as a silly caricature of men, but as a divine feminine strength in its own right.

It is from this ancient lineage that today’s conservative women descend. They are heirs to the eternal feminine — the principle that civilizes men, ennobles nations, and heals disorder through beauty. And now, from Rome’s Giorgia Meloni to Athens’ Afroditi Latinopoulou, from Erika Kirk to Nancy Mace and Anna Paulina Luna, we are witnessing the return of women who no longer apologize for their femininity. They have remembered what the modern world forgot — that the true feminine is not weakness, but wisdom clothed in grace.

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni embodies the rebirth of the classical feminine in politics. When she declared, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” progressive Europe gasped — as if stating biological and moral identity were a provocation. Yet that simple affirmation was revolutionary precisely because it was so real.

Meloni’s power lies not in her aggression but in her centeredness. She represents the materfamilias of a wounded civilization: protective, rational, ordered. Her femininity is not weakness but an organizing principle — the Marian archetype transposed into politics. She is not Aphrodite in her seduction, nor Athena in her distance, but a union of both: the intellect that governs and the beauty that inspires. At a recent gathering, a male colleague of mine confided in me that he was in love with Giorgia Meloni. I smiled and told him to get in line. Such is the lie perpetrated by the left that men do not love strong women.

In Meloni, Italians sense something ancient — a resurrection of those women who once shaped nations by shaping men, who ruled not through decrees but through character. Meloni’s Italy, for all its modernity, still remembers the Madonna watching from every street corner and the mother at every table. Her leadership feels like a restoration of that old order: faith, family, nation, beauty. Meloni is the embodiment of the civilizing principle that has turned men from monsters into respectful citizens.

Afroditi Latinopoulou and the Greek Reawakening

In Greece, Afroditi Latinopoulou offers another expression of this resurgence — fiery, youthful, unapologetically national. Her very name evokes the goddess of love, yet her politics echo Athena’s guarded wisdom: the defense of cultural boundaries, the preservation of moral order. She speaks in the tones of an older civilization that remembers woman as guardian of the hearth and soul, not a competitor for masculine dominance.

To her admirers, she is a modern embodiment of philotimo — that distinctly Greek mixture of honor, grace, and courage. To her critics, she is too blunt, too fierce. Yet that fierceness is exactly what the age demands. She defends Greece like a heroic mother defending her children. In a Europe bent on self-negation, she dares to say that identity is sacred, motherhood is holy, and civilization depends on female virtue as much as male strength. Her vision, though political, is metaphysical: a defense of boundaries, form, and beauty — the eternal qualities of womanhood.

Across the Atlantic: Mace, Luna, and the American Revival

In America, this same spirit is rising in unexpected places. Nancy Mace, Anna Paulina Luna, and other emerging conservative women do not apologize for their femininity; they inhabit it. Mace speaks with clarity and irony, navigating Washington with the ease of someone who knows exactly who she is. She is courageous, unafraid and startlingly feminine. Luna brings a mixture of glamour and substance — the poise of a woman who believes beauty is not vanity but harmony made visible.

These women refuse the false choice between power and grace. They are comfortable in their bodies, in their voices, and in their moral convictions. They see that the true crisis of the modern woman is not inequality but disorientation — the loss of a stable idea of what a woman is. In fact, the opposition party cannot even define what a woman is. But one look at these women and we know. In them we glimpse a cultural correction, not of oppression, but of purpose.

The Feminine Principle Restored

What unites Meloni, Latinopoulou, Mace, Luna, and Kirk is not ideology but divine synthesis. They are whole. Their strength is maternal rather than mechanical, moral rather than managerial. They do not imitate men; they embody what men were once meant to honor.

They remind us that the health of a civilization can be read in its women — not their freedoms alone, but their form, their speech, their sense of sacred measure. When women lose that sense, men become crude and culture collapses. When they recover it, even empires can heal. If the West is going to recover, it will mean that women have recovered their feminine calling and men have once again been inspired to greatness by it.

In Greek myth, Athena and Aphrodite were rivals — wisdom versus beauty. Christianity resolved that tension in Mary, who was both wise and beautiful because she was pure. In Meloni, in Afroditi, in these modern leaders, that reconciliation stirs again: reason joined to radiance, conviction joined to compassion.

We live in an age of vulgar women — not in dress, but in spirit: loud, envious, perpetually aggrieved. The conservative women rising today are their antidote. They speak calmly, dress elegantly, and bear themselves with dignity. They are not desperate for validation; they radiate composure, the lost art of self-command.

They restore what feminism destroyed: the idea that beauty and virtue are allied, not enemies. That woman’s greatest power is not mimicry of masculine aggression but mastery of her own moral and aesthetic domain. They are reminders that class is not money or education — it is restraint, harmony, presence. And it is divine.

The Woman as Healer of Civilization

Civilization begins with the woman because she is the first mirror of order. From Mary’s acceptance of divine will came the rebirth of mankind. From the matronly strength of Roman and Greek households came the laws and manners of Europe. It was my father who showed me what duty meant, but it was my mother who civilized me.

Today, these modern women — in politics, media, and public life — are performing that ancient work again: healing the social body through example. They are restoring beauty in a brutal world, faith in a cynical one, and direction in a time of chaos. They are not the revolutionaries of feminism’s second wave, who sought to overthrow men. They are the restorers — women who stand side by side with men, not in imitation but in complementarity. They are saying, in word and deed: we do not need to be men to be powerful. But in doing so, they are renewing the partnership that men and women have had for thousands of years—and a partnership in the west that has produced a civilization worthy of preserving.

In Italy, the Madonna still looks out from frescoes, holding the child who redeems the world. In Greece, icons of the Panagia still glow in candlelight beside Athena’s old marble temples. Both speak of a truth the modern West forgot: that civilization depends on the union of wisdom, beauty, and love — the essence of the feminine.

Spyridon Andrews is a Greek American lawyer, writer, and musician who divides his time between Los Angeles and Lucca, Italy. He is the author of Manuel and Me: Looking for the Soul of America in the Heart of Italy, and his forthcoming book The Broken Hellene explores Greek identity and civilization through history and faith.