Book Review: Make Him a Sandwich: Why Real Women Don’t Need Fake Feminism by Candace Owens

In the fractured and contentious conservative Evangelical world, there are still some positions on which most can agree. Most agree that abortion is an evil scourge on our society, that pornography kills the soul, and that gender theory has no place in women’s spaces. However, there remains one issue where many are afraid to tread, much less mention. It’s the proverbial elephant in most churches, as well as a continual cause of discord and upheaval in our institutions. Drop this f-bomb and watch a civil war erupt. 

The most recent example is the online skirmish that surrounded a Blaze TV post in which one of their star presenters, Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, addressed a mixed audience at a TPUSA event. In the clip, she admonishes men to put away youthful passions and assume their rightful roles as protectors. The backlash from men on the right was swift. Many bristled at being lectured to by a woman, even if her points were valid, as she was taking on the role and authority of a man. So, they lit the fuse; they called her a feminist. Stuckey’s response was to double down on her remarks and assume her detractors either didn’t like being called out for their cherished sin or were simply envious of her influence. 

The predictable factions emerged: White knights fell over each other to defend her God-given right to exercise her gifts, and the patriarchy-bros rallied around the feminist-fatigued men. Here is where Candace Owens enters the conversation. Owens was at one time quite friendly with Stuckey, even moderating a theological debate between her and Owens’s Roman Catholic husband. Formerly a regular speaker for TPUSA, Owens has in recent years, rebranded herself as an anti-establishment Traditionalist Catholic to great success. Though mostly known for her far-out investigative reports, Owens’s eponymous podcast recently achieved first-place status and is especially popular with a younger, male-leaning demographic. Owens, whose rhetorical skill and media savvy no one can deny, has tapped into Gen Z’s growing rejection of the “longhouse” and yearning for traditional structures. While the evangelical elite continues to deny feminism’s corrosive effect in our churches, Owens is welcoming the disaffected and rootless with open arms in her latest book, Make Him a Sandwich. 

This is not to say this book serves its intended purpose; quite the contrary. In Make Him a Sandwich, Owens skillfully points out the symptoms of feminism, but is wholly inadequate to discern their root cause nor provide biblical solutions. This is because, despite her conservative bona fides, her underlying assumptions remain distinctly liberal. This book also speaks to the deficiencies of complementarianism. In an effort to forge a third-way between third-wave feminism and old-world patriarchy, complementarianism created a gray area in regards to male and female roles. This allowed internalized feminism to metastasize in our churches, effectively opening the door to a new crop of online populist influencers like Owens.

The Positives

Owens shines most when questioning things the culture deems indisputable. In her chapter “Happily Ever After,” she debunks the false promises of happiness and fulfillment that accompanied the feminist charge to break through the metaphorical “glass ceiling”. She cites several studies showing the decline in women’s well-being in the wake of feminism, whether through their own self-reporting or via statistics that show an increase in vices like alcohol consumption and opiate usage. She also points out the innate differences between men and women when it comes to the cutthroat corporate world. “The women’s movement has successfully convinced women that they need to enter this harsh battlefield. The result has been that women have all-too-willingly swapped the traditional aims of homemaking and motherhood with a flawed belief that it will render them happier” (p. 82). 

In “Department of Non-Education,” Owens rightly points out the effectiveness of this message when detailing feminism’s detrimental effects on the family, which she attributes to a diminution of motherhood and domesticity. Because feminists wanted to compete with men in the job market, they fought for more governmental assistance in sharing the parenting load. Thus, many working mothers outsourced their children’s formative (including moral) instruction to secular, pluralistic institutions that were all too glad to instill their humanistic values. The result, as we know, has been widespread leftist indoctrination. Owens goes on to lionize the “mama bears” who spoke against the social justice insanity in school board meetings. She further calls on mothers to embrace their role as nurturers and protectors of the precious lives entrusted to them. “We get to cultivate the minds of those who will sustain human existence for the next thousand years and beyond” (62). 

Owens appears to have great respect for God’s natural order when she extols her husband’s complementary male attributes, or recognizes the biological differences between her male and female children. In this respect, there is much in this book that conservative Christians can align with. Despite these strengths, Owens is profoundly misinformed on the topic of feminism, which makes Sandwich structurally unsound and ultimately unsatisfying.

The Critique

Owens is known for her investigative reports which involve unmasking nefarious actors, pushing back against narratives, and encouraging viewers to start asking questions. It’s interesting then why she doesn’t take this approach when discussing first wave feminism, which she describes as merely a movement that “focused on equal political and occupational opportunities for women” (26). It’s well-documented that the first wave suffragettes were equally, if not more, subversive than their successors. As Carrie Gress writes in The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us,  America’s first wave feminism was energized by occultism. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, often considered the mastermind of the movement, grew disillusioned with the confines of domesticity and longed to explore the intellectual pursuits that men enjoyed. She found her escape hatch through the esoteric beliefs of spiritualism which utilized “spirit tables” as a conduit to the demonic realm. While in need of guidance for the movement’s inaugural conference at Seneca Falls: “Stanton…sat down at the McClintock’s spirit table, picked up the Declaration of Independence and began reading it aloud. At once the women decided to use it as the basis of their own Declaration of the Rights and Sentiments.’We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal…’ (Cress 2024, p.49) Stanton went further, drawing on satanic intervention when crafting a serpentine revision of Genesis 3 in The Woman’s Bible, “‘…where Eve is a heroine and Satan a charitable philosophical instructor of women’’’ (p. 52). The fact that Owens bypasses such blasphemy shows a myopic view of feminism’s history and an ignorance of its insidious nature. 

Owens’s insistence on qualifying later iterations of feminism as “fake” reveals her own inadequacy to speak on the subject. This is further evident when Owens attempts to offer an alternative to the culture’s version of female empowerment, which elevates immodesty over discretion. Owens spends half of the book castigating easy targets from Cardi B (their online beef was the impetus for the book) to Taylor Swift. While a call to modesty is sorely needed today, her solution is not much better. She writes, “to be a real feminist today is to acknowledge that we don’t need feminism to make choices for ourselves. My challenge for every woman is to weigh the goals and objectives in her own life. What do you want?” (p. 145) This advice follows along the same lines of Stanton’s vision of a world where women can forge their own path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of God’s will. Owens shows time and again how her own source of truth lies within her own feelings. She contends that her feminist detractors fail to see that adhering to traditional values and prioritizing the home will bring them to their true end goal. “The point should be happiness” (p. 220). She ventures into new-age mysticism when urging women to embrace the “inherent power” of their natural beauty. “Do not relinquish your magic,” she adds (p. 212). It’s this kind of syncretistic moralism that makes Owens’s applications both incoherent and contradictory.

Conclusion

While feminism remains a hot potato among conservative influencers, Owens saw an opportunity for online clout and said, “Hold my Standace cup.” Make Him a Sandwich maintains a veneer of traditional conservatism but lacks the Christian foundation on which Western civilization was built. One cannot help but attribute this to Owens’s lack of theological depth. Her Jordan Peterson-esque “nine true rules for women” offers such pearls of wisdom as “Have Some Shame,” “Stop Lying,” and “Make Him a Sandwich.” These precepts, while not wrong on their face, do not address feminism at the heart level. The message her adherents come away with is that in order to be truly happy (like her), they have to check these boxes. Theologian Sinclair Ferguson believes that this tendency towards legalism can be traced to Genesis 3:1 where the serpent twists God’s gracious command into a severe prohibition: ““Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”  Ferguson frames Satan’s argument this way: “‘Don’t you see how restricting God is? God is really saying that ‘you’ve got to earn things from Me.’”  Ferguson continues, “And, in a way, that gives her a legalistic view of God. Legalism, in its essence, is to take God’s law away from God’s loving person.”

Owens does not seem to grasp that feminism is the same kind of deception Eve faced in the Garden. The forbidden fruit women are now tempted by comes in the shiny guise of “equal opportunity” and, in the Christian world, “mutual submission.”Owens sees feminism as a good idea that has been co-opted by Marxists, so she ends up peddling the same lie but in a “trad-wife” package. Her moralistic prescription for fighting against feminism can only create smug rule-keepers rather than genuine spiritual transformation (Matt. 23:13,15). Instead of a formula, women need an authentic relationship with the triune God who created us for his glory (Isa. 43:7, Col. 1:16), and in whom alone true purpose, fulfillment, and joy are found (Ps. 16:11).

We should all pray that God will reveal this truth to Owens.