How Erika Kirk Turns Grief Into Her Version of Women’s Liberation
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05/54570845116
Edited by Eli Bardash, Juliette Calderon, Owen Andrews, and Sarah Ahmad
The appointment of Erika Kirk to CEO of Turning Point USA following the assassination of her husband, Charlie Kirk, has the potential to impact the discourse around conservative female empowerment and liberation. Charlie Kirk, the CEO and founder of youth activist organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA), was assassinated on September 10th, 2025. Following his death, his wife, Erika Kirk, has taken on the role of CEO of TPUSA. In her new role, she is shifting the organization’s focus towards women, encouraging them to find liberation within motherhood, partnership, and femininity rather than through a career. With increased public attention after Charlie Kirk’s death, Erika Kirk's unique ideology is becoming stronger and more persuasive, especially among conservative women. However, the growing support for Mrs. Kirk’s message is built on grief and vulnerability, which is an opportunity for her to manipulate TPUSA’s audience and further push her mission onto the conservative women of America. This manipulation ultimately leads to the definition of women’s liberation being distorted into an anti-feminist movement.
TPUSA’s stated purpose is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the conservative principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government. But their mission goes much further. Mr. Kirk promoted what he interpreted as the New Testament, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” from First Timothy 2:12. In June, Charlie Kirk spoke at the TPUSA’s Young Women's Leadership Summit, where he encouraged the attendees to trade their feminism for femininity and to “forgo a career to stay home and raise children.” As the public face of the organization, Mr. Kirk often spoke on college campuses, persuading students to join TPUSA. At the time of his death, he was just beginning his tour of 20 college campuses. Erika Kirk, speaking at his memorial, pledged to carry on his mission as the new leader of TPUSA.
Erika Kirk has prior experience running her own businesses and organizations, mostly centered around the Christian faith. Contradictory to her positions of leadership in these companies, her stated view is that men, and not women, should lead. In her speech at the memorial, she encouraged men to continue being strong leaders for their wives and to embrace “true manhood.” In contrast, she told the women listening to her to be encouragers and preservers. She told the women that if they are a mother, that is the single most important ministry they have. At the Young Women's Leadership Summit in June, she emphasized reviving “Biblical womanhood,” which encouraged separate and complementary gender roles in Christian marriage. “The enemy loves to make you feel like you’re running out of time, but you can always have a career, it is not going anywhere … but children, family, your husband, marriages, that is not a renewable resource,” Erika Kirk said during the summit. These ideologies surrounding the place of women in relation to men have always been central to the movement. However, now that Erika Kirk has gained more publicity and authority, her ideas are quickly spreading to the rest of conservative America.
After Mr. Kirk’s death, many who followed him and TPUSA are in a state of collective grief and are therefore turning to Erika Kirk for a sense of hope and continuity. “She is just this motherly figure for us. Charlie was that father figure and she is the mother figure for us,” said a 19-year-old TPUSA member interviewed by CNN. An opinion piece written for The New York Post by a conservative woman, Libby Emmons, further promotes Mrs. Kirk’s views. Emmons attended Charlie Kirk's memorial service and described her experience with the other mothers at the service. She wrote that as an attendee at Mr. Kirk's memorial, she spoke to women who have strong and vibrant careers, but that most of them only wanted to talk about their children. Emmons then used this claim to bolster Mrs. Kirk’s idea that being a wife and a mother is always a woman’s greatest accomplishment.
Mrs. Kirk took her chance to speak at her husband's memorial as an opportunity to promote her anti-feminist views to the audience, exploiting their vulnerability from a state of grief into a state of manufactured hope. TPUSA has reported a surge of new followers, including high school and college campus students affected by the loss of Mr. Kirk. Clearly, Mrs. Kirk has a new level of power that she is using to transform the definition of female liberation from building independence to returning to the domestic sphere of the household.
In the 1970s, the idea of women's liberation was used to encourage and empower women to build their own careers and to move away from the traditional roles of the housewife. Women were able to vote and purchase property, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for workplaces to discriminate against women. However, Erika Kirk has turned this into a new idea of women “liberating” themselves from the workplace, even though she herself is now the CEO of a multi-million dollar company. Real liberation for women must include empowerment for all women, not only those that Mrs. Kirk deems worthy. Erika Kirk’s definition of liberation is solely designed for Christian women who can afford to stay home and become the servants or “encouragers” of their husbands.
In order to reclaim the idea of liberation, we must redefine it as rooted in choice, equality, and autonomy. Liberation can mean different things to different people, but true liberation means that each of us can choose to live the lives we most want, subservient to no one.