In the past few years, something has increasingly troubled me regarding my fellow females. Many of them have never looked better—at least in the polish and perfection of today’s picture-perfect Instagram world. Indeed, female podcasters, politicians, and other public figures all race to capture the hair blowouts, lip fillers, and contoured faces that society tells us are the measure of a beautiful woman.
But even while these women exhibit unblemished external beauty, their nature exhibits something completely different. A brash boldness seems to consume many of them, exhibited not only by coarse language and sexual innuendo, but also by a detestation of men and young children, babies in particular.
What’s missing that makes today’s women so different from those of yore? The answer is kind, gentle femininity, the characteristic that makes a woman beautiful both internally and externally. Those willing to look beyond social media will find that there still are a few places we can go to help us cultivate gentleness in our own lives and in the lives of our daughters.
Look to the Books
The first is literature.
“Human literature teaches us what it is to be a man,” Russell Kirk wrote in “...