Many of the messages coming from the right today are not subtle: Empathy is toxic; competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work; corporate culture needs more masculine energy. In a recent viral essay, the conservative commentator Helen Andrews argues at length that sectors of society such as business and law are being undermined by the presence of too many women, or “the Great Feminization.”

In this atmosphere, it’s remarkable to hear an influential conservative voice calling for more, not less, feminization. In her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, the writer Leah Libresco Sargeant argues that women’s lives provide a blueprint for creating a more humane society—one that’s built not on toughness and self-determination but on dependence, need, and selflessness.

Sargeant tackles questions of gender, family, bioethics, and policy on her Substack, Other Feminisms, as well as in her prolific contributions to outlets such as First Things, The Dispatch, and Fairer Disputations, where her keen mind and humanistic approach to ethical and policy debates have won her a significant following. (The commentator Rod Dreher describes her as “one of the sharpest intellectual Catholics I know.”)

One of her central arguments is that through the experience of pregnancy, women are given a clear script for how to ask for and provide help in a moment of physical frailty and deep