If the conservative manosphere is associated with protein powder, pomade, and ancient Rome, then the conservative womanosphere is its aesthetic opposite: a frilly wonderland of gingham tablecloths and Bible verses, as soft as goose down and as cotton-candy pink as Polly Pocket’s Country Cottage. Which is why the cannons were so startling.
Before each speaker took the podium at Turning Point USA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit to advise feminine gentleness in all situations, tall columns of magenta smoke blasted from both ends of the stage, and the music’s bass dropped, rattling the skulls of all 3,000 women in the ballroom of the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter. This year’s event was full of such subtle contradictions.
It is difficult to tidily define womanhood, or to attach to the term a set of clear expectations. Yet Turning Point, the conservative organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, professes to understand womanhood deeply—so deeply, in fact, that it holds a conference every June to elucidate the concept: Womanhood is getting married as soon as you can, and having babies—more “than you can afford,” as Kirk often advised. It is embracing God and renouncing feminism.
But the messages from this year’s speakers and attendees were different than in years past: So diverse and inclusive that the summit occasionally felt, dare I say, a little feminist. “Never getting married is not a failure,” Alex Clark, the host of Turning Point’s Culture Apothecary podcast, said on the first day. Some speakers warned against the dreaded girlboss, but others seemed accepting of all types of women. The summit “is all about support and recognizing that everybody’s journey is different,” Alyssa Cromwell, a college junior from California, told me. “It’s just coming together, supporting women, and being a safe space to embrace ourselves.”
What was this, UC Berkeley? And what would Charlie think of it all? Before he was assassinated last year, Kirk had consistently advised women to skip college and prioritize marriage (or to go to college for an “MRS degree”). At last year’s summit, only weeks before his death, Kirk told the crowd, rather pointedly, that women who weren’t married by the age of 30 were less likely to find a husband and, therefore, less likely to have children. When his wife, Erika, who married him at age 32, tried to soften his message for all of the single 30-somethings in the audience, Kirk dismissed her words as “happy talk.”
For Charlie, the point of Turning Point was to change the culture—and, by extension, American politics. So it was odd, too, that I didn’t hear a single speaker allude, even casually, to the upcoming midterm elections, or attempt to rally women to prevent a Republican shellacking in November. Instead, this once-doctrinaire and overtly political women’s conference felt more like a Christian women’s-empowerment seminar—set not in a state with one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races but instead on a remote island where elections don’t exist.
The last Turning Point women’s summit I attended took place at the same hotel in 2024. Back then, the vibes were very different. The speaker lineup included some women with explicitly political messages, including Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, and Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and a then-co-chair of the Republican National Committee. The conference doubled as a get-out-the-vote operation for an election that Trump would win decisively. The 2024 speaker roster also included the podcast hosts Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly.
Things have changed. For the past several months, Owens has waged a digital terror campaign against Erika Kirk, spreading conspiracy theories about her husband’s death (and appearing to imply that Erika was involved in covering it up, an unsubstantiated narrative that somehow also involves Israel and Tucker Carlson). Kelly has been criticized, too, for failing to sufficiently defend Erika from Owens and her followers. Tack on the gloomy set of circumstances for Republicans ahead of November—high prices, a never-ending conflict with Iran, general Trump fatigue—and this year’s Women’s Leadership Summit came at a difficult time for American conservatives.
In her speech kicking off this year’s event, Erika Kirk gave advice you might hear at any Christian empowerment conference: Count your virtues and hone them. It was genuinely moving to hear the young widow say that she wanted her children to look back on this moment and see that their mother had kept her composure. When a protester briefly interrupted to shout that “Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!” Kirk looked pained but wished the heckler well: “Happiness comes and goes,” she said. “I hope you find it.”
Other speakers offered predictable messages: They railed against abortion and shared Christian wisdom on dating and motherhood. As usual, denunciations of cancel culture were big. One former Disney Channel actor, who claims to have been boxed out of Hollywood after protesting a school mask mandate, managed to juice the experience for a 20-minute speech. Then there was the typical array of merchandise booths, arranged outside the ballroom like candy in the Trader Joe’s checkout line: Streetwear embroidered with Charlie’s favorite sayings (Make heaven crowded). Longevity supplements. A vibrating plate that I balanced on for 10 minutes, having received assurances that doing so would produce the same health benefits as walking for 60. At the Birthright-supplement booth, women sold prenatal vitamins made from fish eggs and dandelion, and encouraged attendees to contribute their favorite baby names to a bulletin board. (“Melatonin,” one suggested. “Meli” for short.)
But the overall message of the summit was, admittedly, a little hard to parse. After several speakers reminded the young ladies in the audience that family should be their top priority, another presenter advertised an array of job-training programs for women hoping to become phlebotomists or plumbers. Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany cheerfully declared, “I believe there could be a future president of the United States in this room today!”
Attendees I interviewed appreciated the flexibility. Womanhood “can be a little bit nuanced,” a 28-year-old single woman named Faith told me. Personally, she couldn’t have imagined getting married or having kids in her early 20s. But women shouldn’t “be afraid of being okay with the way that femininity was defined in the past.”
On the first day, a short video chronicling the role of women in America’s history celebrated women’s suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment. Outside, in the merch hall, stickers bragged that a Turning Point woman “never misses Election Day” and advised women to “raise kids, raise turnout.” The following afternoon, when Savanna Faith Stone—a conservative influencer who is perhaps best known for arguing that women should not have the right to vote—took the stage, she did not mention this particular belief, and instead stuck to denouncing feminism as “Jezebel spirit.”
When I asked attendees whether America should ditch the Nineteenth Amendment, as Stone has suggested, they were flabbergasted. “I’ll always cherish my right to vote!” Erica Sims, an attendee from Missouri, told me, clutching her tote as though that right was tucked inside it.
Perhaps the most revealing moment of the conference occurred at the end of the first day, during the keynote speech from 33-year-old Alex Clark. Clark, who has worked with Turning Point for seven years, is, by now, the queen of the Women’s Leadership Summit. Her appeal, both at this event and on her health-focused podcast, is that she is funny and totally unvarnished—a speaker you might actually want to grab drinks with.
Clark played the clip of Charlie Kirk talking about marriage last year, during which he claimed that if a woman doesn’t get married by age 30, she has only a 50 percent chance of ever doing so, a statistic that does not appear to be true.
Charlie’s words had “stung a little” when she first heard them, Clark admitted, because at the time she was unmarried and sad about it. So today she wanted to offer a comforting addendum to his message: “Your marital status is not God’s report card on your life,” Clark assured the audience. Single women, she advised, can and should build beautiful lives on their own—and “become the kind of person” they’re looking for in a partner. (Lefties might call this “self-care.”) After all that, Clark delighted the room by announcing her engagement, and walked off the stage to Taylor Swift’s most tradwife anthem, “Wi$h Li$t.”
It was an empowering message—but to what end, for an organization that was built in part to win elections?
No attendee I spoke with seemed interested in the midterms. When I asked a 35-year-old from Virginia named Whitney whether she was paying attention to any races in her state, she laughed and said, “Not even a little bit.” Even the politicians barely talked politics at the summit: Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke for several minutes about Yad Vashem. Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, who is currently divorcing her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, on “Biblical grounds,” did not spend a second on Ken’s high-profile Senate campaign, or any other race. (Instead, Angela Paxton gave advice about what to do when life is not turning out the way you’d hoped: Rather than daydreaming about murdering those who wrong you, she said, turn to God. Relatedly, I would also like to get a drink with Angela Paxton.)
Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this
For the past many months, conservatives have wondered whether Turning Point would change under Erika’s leadership. The group seems to be only growing; last year, it expanded its outreach to more than 1,000 high schools across the country. But its message for young women may have evolved into something slightly less doctrinaire, and perhaps even less explicitly political. With Erika, a former New York City entrepreneur, now serving as CEO, it’s difficult to avoid the ambitious career-woman associations. Perhaps, consciously or not, the organization is making room for them.