Tea at Trianon: Reviving Gender Roles

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, March 14, 2026

Reviving Gender Roles

From The Catholic Herald:

Unmoored from Christianity, however, the belief that women ought to obey husbands will not help heal our broken culture. Advocating strict gender roles in reaction to wider culture runs the risk of fetishising the recovery of traditional roles. When we prize submission rather than common-sense dynamics, gender roles become exaggerated and unbalanced.
Indeed, bereft for at least a generation, if not more, of couples embracing traditional gender roles, some young people turn to online influencers as their guide. While we might occasionally find a drop of wisdom in the sea of online content, it requires a discerning scroller to separate the wheat from the chaff.
An affinity for Andrew Tate-inspired chauvinism must not be mistaken for authentic chivalry. Tate reduces women to biological function, stripped of dignity and respect. His vision of gender roles fuels a war of the sexes and does away with proper tradition: he supports women’s subservience, yet warns men against marriage. Tate’s pernicious but popular views epitomise the harm that comes with believing in women’s obedience when detached from a Christian theology underpinning the dynamics between the sexes. (Read more.)

A thoughtful environmentalism. From Word on Fire:

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII promulgated Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that would become the foundational document of Catholic social teaching. Right away, Leo condemns socialism as denying the natural right to private property. In his argument, he emphasizes property’s role in upholding the family:

It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance.

Leo claims that, for the family to carry out its natural role, it requires not simply property but “productive property.” This statement critiques not only socialism but also modern capitalism. It implies that a family which lacks the ability to provide for itself through its own capital, whether that be a family business, a piece of land, or the tools and skills of craftsmanship, and must thereby rely solely on wage labor to support itself, will be hindered from fulfilling its natural responsibilities toward its children. (Read more.)