Do Women Need To “Earn” Chivalry? The History Behind Chivalry And Where It Stands Today

Chivalry allows for women to be respected in ways that our souls innately long for. Evie readers know this to be true – chivalry isn’t sexist, it’s sexy and even feminists can't help but love it. But when we put out social media posts affirming that we need to keep the flames of chivalry alive, the manosphere loves to clap back by asserting that they won’t act chivalrously for women anymore because women don’t deserve it.

Is it true? Do women need to actually “earn” the chivalrous behavior they’ve come to expect and love? Sorry, yes! So if you want to be met with warmth and love, you better cut the cold, caustic behavior.

Is It Our Birthright That Men Bend Over Backward for Us?

To best understand modern chivalry, we actually have to travel back in time many hundreds of years to the origins of warrior honor codes. In Europe during the Middle Ages, a formal code of chivalry was reportedly established to make the role of a knight more honorable and less violent. Slaying dragons for a damsel in distress wasn’t exactly what we had going on back then. 

No, historians have likened 11th-century knights to hired thugs, who plundered villages and subjected innocent people to their battles, looting, burning, and even raping. 

The word chivalry likely evolved from the French term for cavalry, or “chevalerie,” and became a set of ideas, not hard and fast rules, for how knights should behave. This included but was not limited to bravery and strength, prowess in battle, loyalty to his lord and family, and respect for women, the weak, and the poor. 

According to one 12th-century writer, chivalrous knights had a duty “to protect the Church, to fight against treachery, to reverence the priesthood, to fend off injustice from the poor, to make peace in your own province, to shed blood for your brethren, and if needs must, to lay down your life.”

Eventually, European chivalry transformed knighthood from thuggery to a superior, masculine status symbol. A knight would have exclusive access to a private club of sorts, he’d build family lineage, he’d be initiated into special orders with symbolic clothing and weaponry, and he’d accumulate wealth. 

In turn, a woman was expected to acknowledge her man’s good deeds, praise him when he acted in virtue, and maintain his home and family while he was tasked with bravery in the outside world.

Church leaders were keen on chivalry as a martial code particularly in the context of the Crusades, as they relied on young men’s devotion to Christendom. After all, historians believe that religious feuds like the Muslim invasions into Europe were what triggered mounted heavy cavalry (knights as servant-soldiers fighting on horseback) as a common Western warring protocol. 

But chivalry as a vocation was more secular in nature – knights were expected to be honorable soldiers to their political leaders. Europe wasn’t the only region of the world where chivalry developed as a framework for maintaining feudal hierarchy.

The Gentlemanly Guide Goes Global

Japan’s feudal era looked quite different from Europe’s, but in both instances, lords and warriors followed a masculine code of conduct. Though it has many stark differences, the Bushido is the Japanese equivalent of chivalry – a warrior’s code to gain respect.

European chivalry did draw influence from Christianity but mostly served as protocol for a knight to politically honor his lord. Japanese Bushido was even less religious given the Japanese people didn’t only follow Zen Buddhism, but also drew influence from secular Confucianism. 

Women aren’t considered complete entities in Buddhism and cannot attain enlightenment, though you won’t find many Western yogis sharing this discriminatory detail. And though the quote derives from fiction, Confucian women were indeed taught: “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.” For this reason, the Japanese take on chivalry isn’t nearly as female-centric as the European equivalent.

Up until the relatively peaceful Tokugawa period (1603–1867 AD), families and clans mostly wrote their own individual doctrines. An author named Inazo Nitobe – actually praised by American President Theodore Roosevelt for his work – later codified the core principles of Bushido in his book titled Bushido: The Soul of Japan. These included righteousness, heroic courage, benevolence, honesty, respect, honor, loyalty, and self-control. 

“A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle, he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes, he keeps level his mind,” Nitobe wrote. “Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death.”

These tenets of Bushido were more likely philosophical and private, rather than the more concrete medieval commandments from Europe. Samurai were sometimes warriors, but many were simply government workers or civil servants who answered to feudal lords known as daimyo. I mean, the term samurai originally meant “one who serves.” 

Even if they weren’t necessarily followed to a tee – after all, Samurai and knights engaged in some truly wicked behavior – both the Japanese and European codes set the standard for proper male behavior in professional and personal lives. Manhood shouldn’t simply be martial; it should be a constant act of benevolence, compassion, loyalty, and much more.

Though ladies may fawn at the idea of a horseback knight in shining armor or a rugged samurai brandishing his katana, the modern, romanticized image of the samurai is just as much of a glamorized archetype as the European medieval knight is.

World-Weary Victorians Revived Crusaders and Camelot 

Knighthood and our romantic understanding of chivalry came out of a world where ever-warring factions and families were ravaged by disease and debauchery. The obvious antidote to the chaos of the Middle Ages, a way for one particular faction to rise up above all others, was to use a chivalric code to train their men in ways of loyalty, servitude, and, most importantly, order.

But out of the Middle Ages came the Enlightenment, and following that was the dawn of the Victorian era. These years after the late 1700s were first refined by the sophisticated wit of Enlightenment thinkers but then redefined by Romantic ideals, such as “intense emotion and feeling as the truest form of aesthetic experience.” During this time, we get the works of poets like Lord Byron and John Keats who made use of the medieval knight and the fair maiden in their written work.

The dreamiest depictions of them all? Paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites gave us a neat and tidy vision of what the knights in shining armor looked like in fable, but not fact. We’ve all seen – and probably gushed over – art by Edmund Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and more. I mean, what girl hasn’t dreamt of being the maiden in Leighton’s “The Accolade"?

Victorian England in particular was keen on medievalism because some felt jaded by their nation’s rapid industrialization. They looked back at days of yore with rose-tinted glasses, where chivalry, religion, Arthurian romance, and honor was what supposedly kept their world stable. But the pomp and pageantry, glistening armor, and beautiful damsels was not a realistic view of the era that birthed chivalry. It was a retelling, sure, but that doesn’t mean that the chivalric ideals that saw a rebirth at this time weren’t highly influential and valuable to Victorian men and their descendants. 

Just Say Thank You

Chivalry worked because there was an agreed-upon, unspoken understanding between men and women of their unique gender roles. It may seem a bit feminist to admit, but chivalry is indeed benevolent sexism. For a man to be chivalrous by protecting and caring for a woman, he is inherently treating her as different from him. 

Feminists might cry that chivalry reinforces a negative belief that “men are the more capable gender” but what it really reinforces is that men are well-suited to do different things from women – and that sacrificial dynamic is totally valid. Sure, if she takes it the wrong way it might feel like she’s being infantilized or deemed helpless, but really what’s going on with this dynamic is that a man is elevating the needs of a woman beyond his own.

Men aren’t offering to open the door for you or pay for your meal to belittle you or patronize you. Unless they’re as dumb as a doornail, they know that you’ve made it this far opening doors on the daily and affording your own food. They know we’re not incapable, lost little creatures. 

Mary Beth Bonacci, a faith-focused columnist, put it perfectly when she wrote that “men are chivalrous because women are special – because while we lack commensurate physical strength, we are created in the image and likeness of God, and endowed with a special gift for bringing forth and nurturing new life. And men respect that by respecting us.” 

This relationship only works out harmoniously if the women in the picture are doing their fair share to receive that “special treatment,” however. So yes, in a sense women do actually need to “earn” chivalry just like people in general “earn” affection by being polite, respectful, and affectionate in turn. As the great philosopher Virgil once mused, “love begets love,” so if you want a man to shower you with honest love, you’ve got to honestly love him back.

When women demean masculine interests like sports or roughhousing for young boys, perpetuate the lie that all men are trash, unfairly pit them against the opposite sex, whine about how much their marriage makes them need wine, tell them their very existence is toxic, and try to nudge them out of the picture for marriage and fatherhood…they’re certainly not doing their part to be treated kindly by the opposite sex. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, or don’t be so shocked when your vitriolic behavior meets its match!

I’m no champion for the “manosphere,” since I’d prefer us to not just sit in separate corners, but I would sympathize with manosphere-adjacent thinkers who aren’t feeling too inspired to act chivalrously when women are working double-time to do anything but earn their respect. 

If a man opens a door for you, look him in the eyes and thank him. If a man lets you go first at the drinking fountain, look him in the eyes and thank him. If a man gives up his seat for you on public transit, look him in the eyes and thank him. But most importantly, be genuine about it.

On another note, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but men also really need their own spaces to be men. It goes back far before the “man cave” where the guys all gather to watch NFL – male-only haunts like barbershops or fraternal lodges and social clubs had served as a way for men to engage in masculine behaviors that might be a bit off-putting to the opposite sex. Pushing back against the eradication of single-sex spaces is another great way for us to “earn” chivalry by showing them that we respect their right to reconnect with manliness. 

It actually takes a lot of strength to admit that women and men, while created equally, have many fundamental differences in physiology and psyche. Think about it – chivalry actually places women in a unique position of power. By holding knights accountable to a proverbial code, for instance, women had the power to prevent brutality, corruption, selfishness, and bloated egos. I don’t know about you, but that’s much more my brand of girlbossing than the load of garbage that neoliberal feminists have tried to sell us.

Closing Thoughts

If #NastyWomen really think they’re being infantilized by chivalry, they’re taking a myopic view of the world around them. Not only is their rejection of chivalrous acts a fundamental denial of biological differences between men and women, but it inadvertently erases beautiful dynamics of masculinity and femininity that we see in many cultures around the world. After all, the societies that don’t have a strong sense of chivalry are actually the ones that engage in “toxic” patriarchy.

Similarly, men who have fallen victim to the manosphere’s blackpilled traps need to take a step back and realize that it’s not all doom and gloom. Chivalry doesn’t make a man a simp; it makes him sexy, and the more that we insist it stays alive, the better we’ll all feel about one another. 

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