A Conservative Magazine Returns to Harvard

Extending the Marxist analogy, I foretold that this movement would harm America more than Bolshevism had damaged Russia. None of my pronouncements have earned me as much derision as that one did, but I never considered modifying the prediction. I knew that had I been born in 1946 instead of 1936, I too might have been susceptible to the idea that there was something better than getting married and raising a family. But by then in my 50s, I felt pity and sorrow for the young women who fell for ideas about liberation that would release them from what I knew were the supreme privileges of womanhood. I hoped and waited for the culture to turn.

Imagine my delight last month on receiving the latest issue of the Harvard Salient, Harvard’s conservative undergraduate journal. The Issue was devoted to “Matriarchy: Motherhood, Feminism, and Family in a Post-Woman World.” The editors use “feminism” in its original sense: equality in citizenship, “the equal dignity of men and women, offering fair opportunities, and ensuring just treatment for all.” “Post-woman” they define as the call for equity, a unisex concept of equal outcomes predicated on a denial of biological categories that makes womanhood obsolete.

The Salient, founded in 1981 had been a Harvard student magazine until 2014, coincidentally the year I retired from the university. Having served as one of its faculty advisers along with

Harvey Mansfield,

I was keenly interested in the magazine’s resurrection in 2021. While it has remained conservative in outlook, this new iteration distinguishes itself as “an alternative platform . . . for political, ethical, metaphysical, theological, and aesthetic discussion.” Its touchstone is clear: rational argument, rather than conservative politics narrowly defined and aggressively pursued. Salient editors prefer to write pseudonymously in the tradition of the Federalist Papers, subordinating authorial ego to serve the public good.

With no direct reference to leftism, they lead off the new issue with the argument that a unisex world naturally favors males. When women seek identical outcomes to men, they try to be like them. “Gender equity” signals to girls that they are less fit versions of men. While one article also addresses the harm of treating maleness as a problem, most of the issue describes the movement’s ill effects on women. Today’s third-wave gender-equity feminists are misogynists who disparage women’s unique contribution to the species, of which procreation is the most essential.

At the beating heart of this little magazine is an abhorrence of abortion and the culture that enthusiastically endorses it. An author with the pseudonym Publius writes that government shouldn’t pay for abortions, “so that women can regularly terminate their biological offspring in order to allow men to pursue desire without consequence.”

Meanwhile, Quinta thinks the state would like nothing more than to be our mother, fearful of the independent powers of women in the domestic sphere. Zeno emphasizes that parents mold the child and must not relegate that privileged task to specialists. Cephalus, concerned for the health of the nation, reminds us that only a woman can create a new citizen, and

Mildred Fay Johnson

argues for honoring the living organism at its inception, on the grounds that “every one of us here at Harvard was once a member of the human race undergoing that very same stage of development.”

Had I been writing on this subject, I might have singled out the spectacle of a Catholic president who makes abortion the basis of his domestic political campaign. When people talk about socialism overtaking America, they forget that socialism is essentially reductionist, rejecting religion among many other exalting facets of civilization. The more the Democratic Party embraces socialism, the less it tolerates religion, whether the Catholic view of procreation or Jewish Torah education. What is American freedom if a Catholic politician feels obligated not only to ignore but to campaign against the consequences of his faith?

Yet the editors, some of whom are Catholic, have come together on a different basis, using what feels like the civic-philosophical language of the Founders rather than contemporary partisan political rhetoric. Their writing is reflective, their spirit affirmative, and their intellectual independence confident. They must do it their way.

Because “conservative revolution” is a contradiction in terms, the recovery of the academy and the nation cannot happen through student takeovers like those of the 1960s. It will come about like this, through the steady nerve of patient warriors, joined by every student who shares these values or believes in the right to live by them.

Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”