Heart-Centered Masculinity and Feminism

Heart-centered masculinity enacts rather than describes alignment with what I have been calling natural law: the inseparability of being, knowing, and transmitting.

Its intelligence is not properly located in the individual, nor even in the collective as an aggregate, but in the relations themselves—in the living web through which meaning moves.

It rests, as heart-centered femininity does, on our creational identity: on the fact that we are not discrete containers of properties but participants in a prior, ongoing gift. To live in attunement with that gift is to sense the balance, harmony, and abundance that have already been given, and to participate in them with reciprocity—with what many traditions call right relations.

We are living, I think, through many crises, including a crisis of masculinity. Not only in its most brutal forms, but also in its more respectable ones. What we call masculinity has too often been severed from relationship, from humility, and from the living web of which it is a part.

I did not always see this clearly.

Until I learned the hard way about the depths of the patriarchal masculinity in my own outlook, I always saw myself as a feminist. When I taught a survey course in American history from 1865 to the present at UNLV thirty years ago, the first reading I would assign was Ida B. Wells’ late nineteenth century essays on lynching, championing her pathbreaking journalism as the work of an extraordinarily talented and courageous American.

I defined feminism for the students in my courses in terms of respect and support for the civil and political equality of women.

The historical alternative to this feminist position, I clarified using an 8 to 1 wrongly decided opinion from the United States Supreme Court in Bradwell v. Illinois, in 1873, articulated by Justice Joseph Bradley in the following words:

“The claim that under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which declares that no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, the statute law of Illinois, or the common law prevailing in that state, can no longer be set up as a barrier against the right of females to pursue any lawful employment for a livelihood (the practice of law included), assumes that it is one of the privileges and immunities of women as citizens to engage in any and every profession, occupation, or employment in civil life … The Constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.”(1)

Because many of us “naturalize” patriarchy, it is easy to encounter erroneous views of who and what women and men “naturally” are. This is yet another example of a false universalism that seeks to speak of “human nature” and “human history” in near complete ignorance of the experiences and ontologies of the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent in the millennia before the eurochristian invaders arrived.

Barbara Alice Mann’s book, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas, is a helpful corrective. As she writes:

“A framework is missing. The west simply has no suitable frame of reference for discussing gendering. At the same time, a blind faith in male supremacy as a God-given birthright has historically left western scholars unprepared to encounter, let alone dispassionately assess, woodland cultures that honored women. From the first Jesuits, gasping bug-eyed at the political, social, religious—and let us not forget sexual—freedom of Iroquoian women, down to the shrill academics of the nineteenth century, soiling themselves at the mere thought of powerful Clan Mothers, Euro-scholars have been at pains to fold the roles of the gantowisas into their own story of powerless and/or evil women.”(2)

But what I did not understand was how deeply patriarchal structures lived in me.

After an electoral defeat in 2018, I made a series of decisions that led to a personal and moral crisis. I stopped taking medication that had helped numb my emotional life. Overwhelmed by feelings I could not regulate, I pursued a woman I knew, repeatedly asking her to marry me, failing to hear and honor her “no.”

I regret this deeply.

She sought protection, and rightly so. I was arrested. I spent four months in jail awaiting trial, twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement (I had gotten into a fight my first night in jail and was both punished and protected in this way). It was a period of disorientation and suffering.

Looking back, I can see something I could not see then: this was not an aberration from my values. It was a revelation of what I had not yet faced. The patriarchal habits of mind I believed I opposed were still alive in me—in how I listened, in how I wanted, in how I failed to recognize the full integrity of another person.

In the aftermath of this experience, grief served as a path to the realignment of my heart and mind. Bell Hooks’ book, All About Love: New Visions and Sophie Strand’s book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine helped as well.

Through that process, I began to see that what we call masculinity is not one thing. It is at least three.

There is what I would call ego-centered masculinity. This is the masculinity of domination, of control, of the perceived need to assert oneself over others. It is often loud, often aggressive, and deeply insecure beneath its surface.

There is also what I would call justice-centered masculinity. This form rejects overt domination and seeks fairness, equality, and rights. It has been essential to many of the advances we rightly celebrate. And yet, it can remain abstract, procedural, and at times disconnected from the deeper relational fabric of life. It can seem to oppose domination while still operating through forms of control, categorization, and distance.

And then there is heart-centered masculinity.

Heart-centered masculinity does not abandon justice. But it roots justice in relationship. It seeks not only fairness, but attunement. Not only rights, but responsibilities. Not only recognition, but care.

This form of masculinity is not about passivity. It involves the transformation of vigorous energies—which might once have been expressed as aggression—into protection and service, into a capacity to hold and sustain rather than to dominate.

It is, I believe, deeply resonant with many Native traditions, in which the goal is not the assertion of individual will but the maintenance of balance within a larger web of relations.

This does not mean that questions of law and rights cease to matter. They matter greatly. But they are inadequate.

We cannot heal the divisions of our time by moving from domination to abstraction. Nor can we rely on institutional reforms alone, necessary as they may be. Something deeper is required.

We must learn again how to feel. How to grieve. How to listen. How to recognize the full humanity—and more than humanity—of those with whom we share this world.

There is great diversity in our society. Some will continue to prefer traditional forms of patriarchy. Others will remain committed to justice-centered frameworks. But if we are to move beyond the most destructive forms of masculinity now visible in our public life, we will need another way.

Heart-centered masculinity is not a position in a debate. It is a practice of returning—again and again—to relationship.

It asks of us not whether we are right, but whether we are listening. Not whether we are strong, but whether our strength protects rather than dominates. Not whether we can win, but whether we can remain in right relation even when we are wounded, even when we are afraid.

We will not heal the divisions of our time by choosing between patriarchy and a feminist critique of patriarchy alone. We will begin to heal them when we learn to feel again—when we allow grief to open us, when we honor the integrity of all, when we recognize that no being stands outside the web of relation that gives us life.

This is the work. And it begins, always, in the heart.

Thank you.


(1) Bradwell v. The State of Illinois, 83 U.S. 16 Wall. 130 140-141 (1872).

(2). Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 75.

Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation). Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies if they are wisely trained and regulated.

https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com