Ambitious Women Aren’t the Problem

What Victorian literature and modern social science reveal about why smart men marry smart women—and why Matt Walsh doesn’t get it.

As the societal pendulum swings to the right, an increasing number of men are abandoning women. The latest offense comes from conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who posted the following tirade on his Facebook page last week:

I don’t dislike Matt Walsh. If you haven’t seen his Am I Racist, the #1 documentary of the decade, I highly recommend it. I appreciate Walsh’s deadpan humor and think of him as a sort of conservative comedian. But compared to his compatriots Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire, Walsh is just not that smart. That is fine. Intelligence is not everyone’s strong suit, and Walsh has a plethora of other positive traits to make up for his lack of book smarts. But what that means is that he assesses “what a man wants” from the standpoint of “what a 100-IQ man” wants, misattributing his aversion to “ambitious, career-driven women” to his desire for traditional values—and completely missing the point about how human beings mate. The fact is that Walsh, seeing the world from the perspective of an average-IQ person who did not go to college and who rose to fame through his comedic bent, assumes that men are not attracted to career women because he himself is not smart enough to understand a career woman.

According to social scientist

Rob Henderson

, “assortative mating” is far greater for intelligence than for any other behavioral trait. On his Substack, he writes,

A study from 2005 that tracked assortative mating in marriages found that if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is sixty-five percent. This figure is probably higher today.

We know the following: Men who hold college degrees will typically seek partners who hold college degrees as well. College-educated women are much more likely to pursue an ambitious career and live for the pursuit of knowledge than women who only hold high school diplomas. And contrary to what conservatives might have you believe, college is, in fact, correlated with higher IQ, with every additional year of education providing an IQ boost of 1 to 5 points. Therefore, smarter men desire smarter women—and smarter women are more likely to seek out ambitious careers. After all, IQ is also correlated with income.

What these findings tell us is that human beings do not choose their spouses based on who will best carry out each household role. Human beings choose their spouses based on who is most likely to understand them intellectually and emotionally.

I am all for traditional values. The happiest women, after all, tend to be in long-term stable marriages with children. Many women who rage against men or enter non-traditional, polyamorous relationships defy their basic biological impulses, and over half of childless women will eventually regret not having children. I agree with Walsh’s general thesis that it would do us good as a society to revisit traditional marriage values, but I do not believe that this translates to the undesirability of ambitious women or necessitates that women who uphold traditional values be “kind, feminine, [and] nurturing.” A woman can be intellectually fierce, unabashedly ambitious, and also a fantastic mother.

Walsh advocates for a return to a time when women were more docile, but that time has never existed. In fact, we can look to the Western society that most staunchly upheld traditional marriage values—Victorian England—to demonstrate that men have never exclusively desired “kind, feminine, [and] nurturing” women. In a more traditional society, in fact, women who were the most cerebral, capable, and ambitious, tended to be the most desirable because they stood out from the pack.

Unfortunately, I have not enjoyed the privilege of existing in Victorian society, but I have read almost every important work of Victorian literature, and because literature is a close reflection of a particular society’s milieu, we can look to the Victorian greats to understand how intelligent men—the great writers of the era—depicted the typical desirable or marriage-worthy woman.

Perhaps the best example of a Victorian literary woman who is at once sharp and traditional is Bleak House’s Esther Summerson. At the outset of the book, Esther tells us that she is not clever enough to adequately tell her story, but as the novel progresses, we see her grow into a confident, witty, and ambitious woman who manages household deeds, guides moral decisions, and influences the men in power around her. One can only imagine that if women were allowed to hold careers in Victorian society, Esther would have brought sanity to the chaos of Chancery, perhaps even outshining the bumbling lawyers at Kenge and Carboy as they fumble through the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case.

Prefer mysteries? Wilkie Collins gives us Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone. When her fiancé, Franklin Blake, is suspected of stealing her priceless Moonstone, Rachel maintains both her dignity and a level head, leading multiple men throughout the novel to fall in love with her force and charm rather than her aptitude as a housewife—she’s desired because she’s strong-willed and unpredictable.

Or how about the sharp Lady Glencora Palliser from Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series? Lady Glencora, though ambivalent about her marriage, is one of Trollope’s most powerful female characters, pushing her husband’s political ambitions while exerting her own form of power—both in the household and in the public sphere.

There are, of course, many other Victorian female characters written by women—Dorothea Brooke, Jane Eyre, Margaret Hale—who exemplify these traits, but I believe that I have made my point clear: traditional marriage values and ambition are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many young girls would benefit from having a strong female role model in their lives rather than a more docile woman whose sole purpose is motherhood. Motherhood is wonderful. It is not the only noble pursuit for women.

So if Victorian literature teaches us anything, it is that ambition does not make a woman undesirable; men, after all, don't marry “roles”—they marry minds. And while conservative commentators like Walsh have a habit of viewing relationships in purely functionalist terms—a man earns, a woman nurtures—human beings aren’t factory parts. We bond over shared language, emotional depth, and intellectual parity. A man who does not desire an ambitious woman does so not because he wishes to restore traditional gender roles but because he is too dense to understand her. Most men don’t want 1950s housewife cosplay—they want a partner who inspires them, challenges them, and grows alongside them.

In our fractured, chaotic, and valueless culture, I understand better than anyone the need to return to traditional values. But the idealization of docile women—and the rejection of ambitious, intellectually driven ones—is both inaccurate and psychologically shallow. As Victorian literature reveals to us, traditional femininity has always included intellectual sharpness and moral strength. Human beings, after all, are far too emotionally complex to settle for relationships built on role-play alone. Human beings simply desire to be understood.

So no, Matt—ambitious women aren’t the problem. The problem just might be you.

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