The New York Times published an article about the Luce Center today highlighting the conservative vision of womanhood we’re sharing with young women—one we believe offers something truer and more compelling than what they’re hearing from the culture. There’s a story behind the article. When reporter Vivian Yee registered for our Washington, DC Summit in June, I wanted to avoid the kind of “creative” reporting we experienced after last summer’s Summit. So, in the weeks before the Summit, I hurriedly wrote a series of questions and answers explaining what we believe about women and planned to give it to Vivian as a booklet. As we worked on it, we decided it was something worth sharing more broadly. That booklet became a book called The Truth About Women: 23 Questions All Conservatives Should Be Able to Answer About Women, which is now available on Amazon. When I met Vivian in person at the Summit, I handed her the first edition and offered to answer any questions she may have. She told me definitively that she was not writing an article about us, that she was just there to observe. Then she spent hours sitting at a table with our interns. Five days later, she told me she had spoken with her editor and wanted to observe our summer internship program up close. In all, Vivian spent six days with us, attending seminars and spending hours in conversation with our staff and interns. The result is this article, published today. Vivian is not conservative, so I certainly wasn’t expecting an endorsement of our work. But from my interactions with her and her previous reporting, I was hopeful she would take our ideas seriously and represent them fairly and accurately. I think she did. Here’s a few excerpts: “The Luce Center, a donor-funded nonprofit, says its mission is to mold young women into ‘strong, conservative leaders’ like the center’s eponym, the congresswoman, diplomat and conservative activist Clare Boothe Luce. “With a new book, campus events and other programming, Ms. Begg is trying to offer a vision of womanhood and marriage that she says avoids the ‘false choices’ presented by conservatives and liberals. “From some conservatives, including people Ms. Begg considers ideological allies on other issues, the message is ‘a diminishing of women’s intelligence and a discouraging of women from using their gifts, their God-given gifts,’ she said. “From some on the left, young women hear ‘the denial of biological sex and the devaluing of marriage, motherhood and family,’ Ms. Begg said…. “The summer internship program, which is paid, offers Ms. Begg another avenue to counter what she sees as harmful messages. “The interns don’t fetch coffee or answer phones. Instead, they receive a crash course in practical and professional skills, alongside tutelage in conservative principles. One day is dedicated to media training and public speaking, another to constitutional law. In July, the interns visited the United Nations in New York. A National Review columnist, Caroline Downey, came to speak about what she described as Gen Z’s dangerous embrace of socialism. Later came training in self-defense and firearms and a tour of the Museum of the Bible…. “During the book discussion, Ms. Begg invoked Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument that education in critical thinking would train girls for the professions, as well as to be wives capable of raising virtuous children. “The women’s rights advocate, she told her audience, said that ‘we should never understand domestic life as inferior.’” I’m grateful for the time that Vivian spent getting to know our work and the remarkable women involved with the Luce Center. Link in comments to the article and two books mentioned in the article, The Truth About Women: 23 Questions All Conservatives Should Be Able to Answer About Women and Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. @cblwomen @VivianHYee @erikabachiochi @carolinedowney_