The Heritage Foundation has had a tough month. President Kevin Roberts’s decision to vigorously defend Tucker Carlson’s platforming of the noted anti-Semite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes has pushed the conservative think tank into a tailspin. One board member, the Princeton professor Robert George, resigned; a number of staff departed; and a task force to combat anti-Semitism severed its ties.
Yet Heritage’s problems are hardly limited to its handling of Fuentes. The think tank’s recent decision to hire Scott Yenor, a family-policy scholar, to lead the Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.
Yenor’s views are, to say the least, controversial. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He has echoed the online right’s use of the term AWFLs (for “affluent white female liberals”) in his writing, and had to step down from an appointment as the chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when it became clear that the Republican-controlled state Senate would not confirm him.
Yenor has also criticized prominent figures on the right, such as Megyn Kelly, the former Fox personality who now hosts a popular podcast. She argued that it was wrong for conservative men, when looking for a spouse, to prefer women who don’t work full-time. Yenor responded that that’s precisely what conservative men should do, contending that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.”
[Jonathan Chait: The conservative movement’s intellectual collapse]
His rhetorical pugnacity, though, is merely a symptom of the challenge that he presents to the beleaguered Heritage Foundation. It’s his ideas, not just his words, that are the problem.
Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
Those ideas put him at odds with today’s Republican Party. The GOP has spotlighted high-ranking women—including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Senator Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama—in its bid to attract more female voters. One doubts it would welcome the idea that powerful men should be allowed to punish or prevent their rise solely because they are women.
Even Heritage’s leadership might balk at that concept. Its board of trustees has four female members, including its chair. Does Yenor believe that their parents should have guarded their daughters from taking higher education too seriously? “The Mrs. Degree,” he’s written, “with additional credentialing for work, is all you want by graduation day.”
Many social conservatives will disagree. Take Kris Ullman, who is both a mother of three and the president of the Eagle Forum, a powerful social-conservative lobbying group. It rose to prominence in the 1970s under the leadership of Phyllis Schlafly, who herself combined motherhood with a career to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment nearly single-handedly.
Ullman believes that motherhood has been devalued in the culture and that full-time paid child care should be resisted because “the emotional security and love provided by the mother is second to none, especially from birth to age 3.” But she parts ways with Yenor on the question of discrimination, giving a simple answer when I asked whether she agreed that employers should discriminate against women in the workplace: “No.”
Yenor’s ideas on employment discrimination are decisively outside the American and conservative mainstreams. But his most extreme views on gender are so radical that he tends to articulate them only elliptically.
Marriage, Yenor argues, should be the formation of a natural community that can “reconcile what men and what women want.” In his view, the two sexes are formed by nature to be fully complementary. Women bear children, are more tender and attached to their offspring, and prefer to focus on the home. Men father children, are more attached to achievement and competition, and prefer to focus on matters outside the home. Traditional marriage brings these two worldviews together by making men responsible for supporting and protecting women as they achieve their goals, and by making women the primary support for men as they achieve theirs.
This, in Yenor’s view, resulted in the English common-law concept of “coverture marriage,” the prevailing form of marriage at the time of America’s founding. Under the legal doctrine of coverture, the man “covered” the woman by taking all responsibility—and holding all power—in public life. The husband voted, was solely eligible to practice professions and hold public office, and held title to all the family’s property. Divorce was either illegal or restricted to extreme circumstances, such as abandonment and adultery. In return, the husband provided for and protected his wife and children to the best of his ability.
This arrangement understandably rankled many, Yenor argues, leading to the first wave of feminism. In that movement, typified by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, suffragettes campaigned to end this repressive system. They succeeded, drawing on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Yenor notes that the goal of these activists was to create an “independent woman” who could stand apart legally from her husband, and he contends that the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote nationwide, was their crowning achievement.
The triumph of the suffrage movement is widely considered proof that our founding ideals can slowly work their way into public consciousness and extend the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all. But that’s not how Yenor sees it.
He recently called this noble effort “a feat of social engineering,” and said in a 2024 debate that “what we’ve really learned in both the last 60 years, and maybe even in the last 220 years,” is that there’s nothing automatic about “the engines that seem to drive men and women toward marriage.” Those engines are “part of a large social project” that needs legal support, and the legal changes wrought since first-wave feminism appear to Yenor to have weakened “the scaffolding of that project.”
In an interview last month, I asked Yenor what he considered the relationship between first-wave feminism and marriage to be. He replied that it raises the question of whether you can “maintain a marital community while recognizing as a state each of the individuals separate from that community.”
Yenor is convinced that, in practice, the answer is no. “The principles in law and the goals of independent recognition from the state over generations have a wearing-down effect on the traditional family,” he told me. “I don’t know of any place that has maintained a healthy marriage culture after three generations of even first-wave feminism.”
So Heritage now faces an uncomfortable question: Does it agree with its new director of American studies?
What makes the question particularly pressing is Heritage’s “one voice” policy. “While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view,” the institution explains, “Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.” If this is Yenor’s view, and he’s now a Heritage director, does that make it Heritage’s official view?
Yenor told me that he’s heard many directors say that Heritage “does not have a one-voice policy on feminism.” But for the foundation to allow Yenor to make these arguments now that he’s on its payroll is still a choice, a declaration that it considers them to be reasonable. That’s political poison. (“Heritage does not, and does not believe employers should, discriminate on the basis of sex in matters of employment and remuneration,” Vice President of Domestic Policy Roger Severino told me.)
[Peter Wehner: The intellectual and moral decline of the American right]
Heritage doesn’t have to fire Yenor to solve its problem. He advocates for a number of conventional conservative policy goals, such as barring access to online pornography. But Heritage ought to make clear that it supports women’s legal equality and their attendant political and economic gains, establishing a one-voice policy in favor of the legal status quo. Yenor can then apply his talents to the admittedly arduous task of moving that consensus toward a more family-friendly view that elevates the social status of mothers who choose not to work full-time.
Yenor might balk at that. After all, he has gained his notoriety precisely from his provocative ideas. But one must often trade provocation for power in politics. Bomb throwers have their place in political discourse; they can move public opinion with their advocacy for unpopular views. But they cannot operate within a system whose premises they undermine.
Heritage and Yenor face a choice. Do they stand within the conservative consensus, seeking to extend its principles into the public consciousness and enact them into law? Or do they stand outside the Trumpian coalition because that coalition’s premises are inadequate to meet our challenges?
The first path means rejecting Yenor’s provocative views in favor of a policy agenda that can support women of all professions, full-time mothers, and conservative girlbosses. The second will, regretfully for those who have long looked to Heritage for conservative leadership, be a self-inflicted wound, ultimately pushing Heritage out of the conventional discourse and into irrelevance.
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