The young women bent their heads over their books one morning in July — studying, if such things can be studied, how a woman should be. One of them read aloud from a passage about Olympe de Gouges, the early women’s rights advocate, who had slammed the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for writing, in her words, that “man was made to reason, woman to feel.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, the president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, stood at the front of the conference room, leading one of her periodic book club sessions for summer interns and young staff members. She had designed this discussion of 18th-century ideas specifically to confront a charged new political movement. “I actually hear this a lot right now, that women are ‘feelers’ and men are ‘thinkers,’” Ms. Guilfoyle said. “Rousseau is saying if we embrace this,” she added, “we are going to be not just harming women, but all of society.” From a squat brick office park in Washington, D.

C., the Clare Boothe Luce Center is staking out what seems like a fraught position these days: that it is possible to be a conservative woman who values motherhood and family, but one with a career, an egalitarian marriage and a voice.