Women Can Be Powerful on the Right Too
A 2025 controversy over the phrase “handmaiden to the patriarchy” highlights a deeper question: can women exercise genuine political agency while holding conservative or right-wing views?
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Being a woman and being politically right-wing are completely compatible. There are numerous modern female political leaders who are clearly on the right or radical right.
Examples include:
- Giorgia Meloni — Italy; conservative/national-conservative, leader of Brothers of Italy.
- Marine Le Pen — France; National Rally, nationalist/right-wing populist.
- Alice Weidel — Germany; AfD co-leader, right-wing/right-populist.
- Kaja Kallas is a useful counterexample to the idea that women leaders are necessarily left-wing, although she is generally liberal/centre-right rather than hard right.
- Mette Frederiksen is another interesting case: a Social Democrat who has adopted relatively restrictive positions on immigration, demonstrating that the left/right spectrum isn't always straightforward.
Why might it feel like female leaders can't be right-wing?
There is an interesting historical and sociological reason for that perception. Women have often been associated with political issues such as social welfare, healthcare, education, equality and social protection, which are traditionally associated with the left.
But that doesn't mean women are inherently left-wing. Right-wing movements can—and frequently do—mobilize women around family, national identity, religion, security, immigration, traditional values and opposition to progressive cultural politics.
In fact, female leadership can sometimes be politically useful to right-wing parties because it challenges the stereotype that conservatism is exclusively a male political project.
So the more accurate statement would be:
Modern female leaders can absolutely be right-wing. What has changed is that women are no longer confined to either side of the political spectrum.
And there is a fascinating distinction between women leading right-wing parties and right-wing parties actually advancing policies that benefit women—those are two very different questions.
The Right Does Not Belong Exclusively to Men
The idea that women cannot meaningfully belong on the political right is difficult to reconcile with modern democratic politics. Women can be conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, nationalist, Christian democratic, populist or politically independent.
Gender does not determine ideology.
Yet there is a persistent tension within feminism over what it means for a woman to exercise political power. One tradition emphasizes a woman's autonomy to define her own political beliefs. Another argues that some political choices can reinforce social structures that historically disadvantaged women.
That distinction becomes particularly important when female politicians on the right are described not simply as politically misguided, but as somehow acting against their own emancipation.
When Political Disagreement Becomes a Question of Agency
In May 2025, during a public conversation at New York's 92NY, Margaret Hoover asked what advice should be given to the first woman elected president of the United States.
The response was: “Don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy.”
The remark continued with the observation that this would effectively exclude almost every woman “on the other side of the aisle,” while identifying Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney as notable exceptions. Contemporary reporting documented the exchange and its political context.
The significance of the remark lies less in the phrase itself than in the assumption behind it.
It reflects a particular feminist interpretation of conservative politics: that some right-wing positions concerning family, reproduction, gender roles and social hierarchy can reinforce patriarchal structures.
That is a legitimate political argument.
But there is an important distinction between saying that a political ideology can reinforce patriarchy and saying that women who support that ideology are therefore acting as instruments of patriarchy.
The first is an argument about political structures.
The second is an argument about the political agency of individual women.
And those are not the same thing.
Conservative Women Are Not a Contradiction
A woman can sincerely believe that traditional family structures are socially valuable. She can support restrictions on abortion, tighter immigration controls, religious conservatism, lower taxes, national sovereignty or other policies generally associated with the political right.
Those positions can be challenged vigorously.
But describing the woman holding them as incapable of independent political judgment risks creating a curious double standard: women are considered autonomous when they reach conclusions associated with progressive politics, but potentially manipulated when they reach conservative conclusions.
That is not a particularly convincing definition of equality.
There is, of course, a serious counterargument. Political choices do not exist in a vacuum. People can internalize cultural expectations, and women can participate in institutions whose structures disadvantage other women. A female politician can therefore genuinely exercise political agency while simultaneously supporting policies that critics consider patriarchal.
Those two things can coexist.
The existence of agency does not make a political position immune from criticism.
Likewise, criticism of a political position does not establish that the person holding it lacks agency.
The Bigger Feminist Question
This is ultimately a debate about the meaning of liberation.
One conception says that women's political freedom means having the ability to choose—including choosing conservative politics.
Another says that freedom requires questioning the social structures that shape those choices.
The disagreement between these positions is unlikely to disappear.
But democratic pluralism requires accepting an uncomfortable possibility: a politically empowered woman may make political choices that other women consider profoundly wrong.
That is still political empowerment.
The modern right therefore does not need to become feminist in a progressive sense before women can legitimately belong to it. Nor does the left have to approve of conservative women's politics in order to recognize their autonomy.
The more useful standard is simpler:
Are women free to participate in politics, organize, lead and argue for their beliefs as autonomous citizens—even when we strongly disagree with those beliefs?
That standard should apply on both sides of the political spectrum.
The 2025 controversy is therefore not really about whether women belong on the right.
They plainly do.
It is about whether political disagreement can become so deep that one side begins questioning the other's capacity for independent political agency.
References
92NY / 92nd Street Y — Institutional context for the May 1, 2025 conversation.
Washington Examiner — Reporting on the “handmaiden to the patriarchy” exchange and the discussion of Republican women.
Colorado Politics — Contemporary reporting on the remarks concerning women on the other side of the political aisle.
The Daily Signal / YouTube — Video coverage of the exchange and the discussion of Murkowski and Cheney.
