Opinion: Erika Kirk and the twisted empowerment of right-wing women

Erika Kirk portrayed as a saint. Art by Basil Allen.

In September, conservative activist and Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. About two weeks later, Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, took the stage at her husband’s memorial to deliver a speech.

She was dressed in a white pantsuit and heels, with a gold cross around her neck and long blonde hair cascading down her back. Under the bright lights of the stage, she glowed, her eyes glittering with tears and sparkly eyeshadow. At moments, her voice faltered, but she carried on. She had no other option. Kirk’s speech was not for an intimate event, a gathering of friends and family. It was for a stadium of people, decked out in MAGA hats and TPUSA memorabilia and for an audience online, tuning in from across the country and around the world. 

Erika Kirk couldn’t grieve privately. From the moment he was shot, her husband ceased to be a person. He was no longer a man but a martyr. Her husband had been the face of a movement, and now it was her job to carry on his mission. Erika Kirk rose to the occasion. 

Now the CEO of TPUSA, it was Erika’s turn to take the world by storm. In recent months, Kirk has been everywhere — interviewing Nicki Minaj at AmericaFest, endorsing JD Vance for a 2028 presidential run, smiling modestly at the State of the Union and seemingly always ready with a sparkly blazer and some fireworks. Kirk has become a MAGA darling. She is the perfect symbol: a good Christian woman besmirched by the heartless libs for simply loving her husband and being a mother. 

In some ways, she is the picture of traditional womanhood. In other ways, she’s the ultimate symbol of female empowerment. 

With a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in legal studies, Kirk is more educated than her husband, who dropped out of college at 18. Kirk founded a charity, a Bible program and a clothing line before she ever got involved with TPUSA. As a young woman, Kirk was passionate and ambitious. Now, she’s educated and successful. She’s exercising her autonomy, balancing her career with motherhood. She’s a CEO and a prominent political leader, as powerful or more than many of her male counterparts. That is the feminist dream. 

And yet, Kirk has not used her position to serve and uplift other women. She’s a figurehead of the Trump administration, which has degraded women and stripped them of their rights from day one. Despite the seeming contradictions of this position, Kirk is just one in a long line of women at the helm of anti-feminist movements. 

Her story is reminiscent of Phyllis Schlafley, a conservative activist and author who fought against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and helped establish the insidious “family values” justification, which has been utilized by conservatives to oppose the rights of women and queer people. Like Kirk, Schlafly was intelligent and driven, a Harvard graduate who served on multiple political campaigns. 

These women’s seeming hypocrisy has been used as a cudgel against them, a feminist checkmate in the game of “ideological inconsistency gotcha.” Progressives point out the dissonance, as if to say, “How could you have been so silly? Don’t you see that your own career proves that women can be as capable as men?” Unfortunately, this refutation is ineffective, because it misses that the role of these women in oppressive systems may be hypocritical, but it isn’t accidental. 

Their presence doesn’t undermine the messages of these regimes. In fact, their presence is critical.

Schlafly’s advocacy was so successful, in part, because she was a woman. She was able to utilize the language of feminism to argue against it, recognizing the real discontent of many women but blaming it on feminists, rather than the patriarchy. She argued for women’s rights, specifically, their rights to be mothers and wives.

Like Kirk’s encouragement of childbearing and strict gender roles, these assertions of the goodness of traditionality, in contrast to feminist ideas, frame feminism as if it stands in opposition to women finding love and having families. Due to their position as career women, it then appears as if conservatives are the more accepting, nuanced community, in favor of women having families and careers. Feminists, in this lens, become loveless child-haters, as if advocacy for mothers has not been a central component of most feminist movements. 

Women like Shlafly and Kirk also serve as evidence that women and marginalized people can be successful in conservative regimes. Their presence sells the lie that as long as you are smart enough, hardworking enough, gritty enough, you can be successful. It codifies the idea that your identity is not a barrier to success — your competency is the only thing that truly matters. This presents the right as an egalitarian meritocracy, a place where people receive rewards for excellence, rather than handouts for identity.

In reality, the competency of women and other marginalized groups is completely irrelevant to these oppressive forces, which sort people from birth. 

Some people believe that women shouldn’t have equal rights or equal pay because they are less skilled than their male counterparts, but hate goes deeper than that. Regimes like the Trump administration do not restrict the opportunities of marginalized people because of competency issues, but because marginalized people are seen as fundamentally lesser than the dominant group. 

As a woman, or a member of another marginalized community, you can succeed within oppressive regimes. But this success is not rooted only in talent. It’s rooted in compliance. If you are obedient, if you are a charismatic mouthpiece for propaganda, if you disregard all morality and grovel at the feet of your leader, you may be one of the lucky few who gets ahead. If you are a good follower, a good woman, you will submit. So, despite these women’s positions in board rooms or on the global stage, they are no more free than housewives unable to act without their husbands’ permission. They must still serve the needs of men, above all else. Their empowerment is a mirage as it is contingent on their submission.

Pointing out the submission inherent to these women's power is not intended to strip these women of their autonomy. They have agency. They wake up every day and choose to prioritize personal gain at the expense of people just like them. At first glance, these women may appear empowered, even feminist. However, they are only serving their own self interests, and in doing so, serving their oppressors.

One woman’s success will never be enough. One woman’s success will not prove all women worthy of respect. Especially if these women succeed at the expense of all others, they’re not gaming the system, they’re just upholding existing power structures. True liberation will always be collective.