Notice: those considering applying for the Hancock Club from Missouri & North Carolina should do so now. Their Chapter Inaugural Dinners are being planned.
Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families was an incomplete project.
In that book I attempted a defence of the philosophy, theology and practice of the dynasties of the West. When I finished it, proud as I was - I realized that it was missing an essential element. I had written a book which presumed masculine roles and objectives.
Leaving a Legacy described the dynastic project in terms of masculine action: command, estate-building, initiation through danger, succession in business. But every great dynasty described in that book was also sustained by women whose contributions were of a different but equally essential character. The richness of the book’s offering for women in dynasties was not comparable.
Today I am announcing a new book which will I hope will correct that omission. It will attempt a deep theology, philosophy, history, and practice of the Dynastic Woman.
Like its predecessor, it will journey back beyond modern assumptions about roles and ethics that we no longer think to question, bound up as we are in contemporary norms and vocabulary. It will attempt to reconstruct from first principles what made the women of the West great, what gave them purpose, and what allowed them to achieve their place in history.
Modern discourse offers only impoverished models for women. Feminism dismantled an older understanding of womanhood without replacing it with a sustainable alternative. It treats the household as a prison, motherhood as an obstacle to self-realisation, and the virtues historically cultivated by women as instruments of oppression. Ironically, in so doing, it foreclosed many of the domains by which women wielded substantial influence over civilization.
The reaction is equally impoverished despite its superficial conservatism. The trad-wife thing, to take the obvious example, is a performance of homemaking that lacks any serious theological or historical foundation. It reduces womanhood to a visual display of domestic labour, detached from the actual structures of authority, education, and spiritual responsibility that characterised the aristocratic household. At bottom, it is a reaction to feminism conducted on feminism’s own materialist terms.
The home-schooling mother model is a significant improvement but still shares a visceral and fatal error which precludes its wider adoption. These approaches treat the domestic as something small. None advances the majesty of the Christian aristocratic tradition: that the household is the foundational unit of civilisation, that its proper ordering is a matter of cosmic significance, and that the woman who presides over it wields a form of distinct and profound authority.
An alternative model has its roots in the Latin domina - feminine of dominus. This is a model of womanhood which needs no external empowerment; she held authority inherent to her station. She governed the household, and the word household in pre-modern usage encompassed more than the physical dwelling. It included the whole domestic economy: servants, children, stores, accounts, correspondence, hospitality, tenants, and a governing stake in the spiritual life of the land. In aristocratic houses, this amounted to the governance of dozens or hundreds of people and substantial economic resources.
The Paston Letters, the correspondence of an ambitious gentry family in fifteenth-century Norfolk, gives insight into what this model matured into. During her husband John’s absences, Margaret Paston governed the estate. She directed legal strategy, negotiated with tenants, managed the harvests, handled the accounts, and at one point organised the armed defence of the family manor at Gresham when it was besieged by a rival claimant. She wrote to her husband requesting crossbows, quarrels, and armour for the defence.
What emerges from such sources is a division of authority closer to the relationship between a king and queen than to any modern arrangement. Complementary spheres of competence, with overlapping influence and mutual dependence. The husband governs the estate; the wife governs the household. The husband represents the family in the public sphere; the wife cultivates the private sphere that makes public action possible. Xenophon, in the Oeconomicus, presents the household as a microcosm of the polis and the wife’s governance of it as a form of statecraft. Christian dynasties received and elevated this vision.
The intellectual formation proper to such a station was serious. Eleanor of Aquitaine was raised at one of the most cultured courts in Europe, literate in Latin and vernaculars, trained in music, poetry, and estate management. The daughters of Sir Thomas More received the finest education then available, studying Latin, Greek, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy alongside their brother. Isabella of Castile took up Latin as an adult queen, studied philosophy, history, and canon law, and ensured that her own daughters, among them Catherine of Aragon, received an equally demanding formation.
This is the background against which the question of empowerment must be rethought. These women exercised authority that was recognised, honoured, and structurally embedded in the institutions of Christendom. Empowerment implies a deficit that must be corrected from outside, but the Christian woman’s true authority was intrinsic to the social order itself, conferred by station, sanctified by sacrament, and reinforced by custom, liturgy, and law.
Yet - crucially, and this is where I suspect my work will become challenging - the domina was also veiled. Her authority coexisted with a hiddenness, modesty, and submission that the modern mind has been conditioned to reject. The sophisticated theological recovery of this point is perhaps the most important task before us.
Gertrud von Le Fort, in Die ewige Frau (The Eternal Woman) has been a profound source of inspiration. The veil, for von Le Fort, is not a suppression of woman but the sign of her deepest power: the hidden, interior, generative force that sustains the visible order from within. The Blessed Virgin’s fiat, her let it be done to me, was the most consequential act in human history, and it was an act of receptive surrender, and the hinge upon which all of salvation turns. The Incarnation itself waited on a woman’s yes. Mary is crowned Queen of Heaven because she first received the Word in perfect hiddenness.
The ‘domina’ - the Dynastic Woman - participates in this same mystery. She is the hidden foundation upon which the visible edifice of dynasty rests.
Much of the value that readers found in Leaving a Legacy seems to have come from its etymological explorations, in the attempt to clarify terms which are still in use but have been perverted. I suspect there is similar work to be done here, with similar potential impact.
To give an (incomplete, unrefined - stay tuned) example: Genesis 2:18 describes Eve’s relationship to Adam with the Hebrew phrase ʿēzer (עֵזֶר) kə-neḡ-dōw. (כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃). The standard English rendering, ‘helper’, misleads the modern ear, which hears subordinate assistant.
The word ezer appears some twenty-one times in the Hebrew Bible - but often used of God Himself as the helper of Israel: a rescuer, a strong ally, a saving presence. Other times, it denotes nations to whom Israel appealed for military aid. These uses flow naturally from the root of ezer - ʿāzar (עָזַר), which expands the meaning to denote surrounding, protecting, aiding.
Kenegdo, built on the preposition neged (נָגַד), meaning standing boldly before or manifesting opposite, names one who stands facing him as his counterpart. The woman is given to the man as a rescuing counterpart, equal in stature, opposite in mode. A helper - an aide - but more.
If woman’s authority is real, and if its mode is generative and hidden rather than representative and public, then the rituals that sustained it deserve careful attention. The dynastic woman is the keeper of much of the ritual architecture that Leaving a Legacy called for.
The great dynasties did not transmit themselves through law and inheritance alone. They transmitted themselves through rites. The presentation at court or at the ball, which marked the daughter’s formal entry into the society of marriageable women. The mother’s preparation of her daughter for betrothal. Marriage negotiations and the drafting of the dowry. The marriage itself as sacrament and as alliance. The churching of women after childbirth. The dowry chest passed as the physical sign of a spiritual inheritance. The family book of hours, the recipe book, the letter-archive, the devotional passed from mother to daughter across generations.
Without the dynastic woman, none of this survives. The dynastic project, described in masculine terms in Leaving a Legacy, is impossible without her.
The central argument of the new book follows from this. The household itself should be understood as an heirloom, a living institution passed from mother to daughter, or from mother to daughter-in-law, as the estate is passed from father to son. The household’s rituals, calendar, charity, aesthetics, and domestic arrangements, together with the authority and responsibility that govern them, should be documented, cultivated, and intentionally transmitted. A family that preserves its estate while losing its household preserves only the shell.
The stakes of this recovery are civilisational. The West is in the midst of a birthrate collapse that no policy lever has yet moved. Mothers are scarce, and daughters scarcer. I believe that the recovery of the dynastic woman rests upon actions which few are now willing to countanence. These must be complete with real authority, real education, real transmission, real theology, and a civilisation willing to honour her.
Somewhere in this complex of veil and crown, fiat and authority, hiddenness and power, lies the answer that will save civilisation itself, by rediscovering the path back to flourishing families that once defined the Christian West. This recovery will also provide the true empowerment that women seek.
I am considering a few titles. The Dynastic Woman: Power, Virtue, and Eternal Households is the leading candidate. I welcome suggestions and reactions from readers who have stayed with me this far.
The book will take some months yet to complete. When it arrives, I hope it will stand beside Leaving a Legacy as the other half of one argument, and that the two together will offer a coherent account of what the Christian aristocratic tradition asked of its families, what it gave them in return, and why the recovery of that exchange may be the most important project of our time.
The Hancock Club is a private members’ club founded by author Johann Kurtz. The Club provides personal introductions between curated successful families. From building fifth-generation family businesses to restoring centuries-old estates, our members possess unparalleled expertise in every aspect of legacy building.
Our strengths include:
Raising faithful children committed to dynastic projects
Building leading family businesses with firm succession planning
Creating beautiful estates which are financially robust across generations
Producing elegant events which connect children with virtuous peers
Forming long-term relationships of honor with leading local families
Investing in culture and art, whether historic or newly commissioned
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Bravo. I’ve tried the modern mother life and it almost destroyed my husband & I. Most women are miserable and misguided.
Luckily, my husband and I were pushed into taking over the family farm & look after the older generation. It surprised me how wholesome and fulfilling life instantly became. Living in commune has been extremely rewarding. We have an extraordinary sense of place and a strong responsibility to the community. My husband works outward and I work on the home engine room, managing finances, education, asthetics, family tradition, culture and faith.
I cringe to think I almost left all of this behind for a good career in the city. Lucky to have my mother to guide me on the matriarchal lifestyle which I took for granted. My family has an incredible legacy which almost disappeared, but which I now cherish everyday.
If you’re coming to this from zero base, I’d recommend to start by investing in a beautiful home estate and community. Your children will always return.
Johann, I’m so very grateful to see you take this next step and bring women fully into the conversation. Naming the household as a place of real authority, formation, and transmission feels long overdue. The idea of the “domina” is so powerful. I love that it restores a sense of gravitas to what is often invisible and reframes the household as a living institution rather than a backdrop to public life. As we know, what once belonged to the household has been fragmented and outsourced to the public sphere- to our detriment. What you are describing begins to draw those functions back together into a coherent whole.
Where I find myself thinking alongside you is in how these ideas might translate beyond the context of wealthy women to middle-class women who face very different economic realities, but who would also benefit from frameworks that restore the status and integrity of their work in the domestic sphere. A conversation to be continued another time.
Thank you for taking this on. I very much look forward to seeing how you develop these ideas and to reading your new book.