NeW held its first national conference on Capitol Hill last month and recognized four new chapters -- from as far west as California and as far south as Texas. The goal is to “cultivate a community of conservative women and expand intellectual diversity on university campuses.”

And NeW is attracting some serious attention -- from both sides of the political spectrum. Speakers at their July conference included conservative firebrand Ann Coulter and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. But Professor Ann Lane, a former director of UVA’s women and gender studies program, is no fan. “I’m not opposed to the group’s existence -- I just don’t like it,” she told TIME magazine. “I particularly don’t accept their premise that men and women occupy such culturally different spaces.” As TIME’s reporter notes:

“As female college activist groups go, the Network of enlightened Women, or NeW, is a very different breed. They don’t distribute condoms on the Quad or march for a woman’s right to choose. Instead, they bake chocolate-chip cookies and protest campus productions of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, a controversial play about female sexuality that conservatives say degrades women and glorifies rape.”

The idea for NeW came after Agness spent a summer in Washington interning for Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. “I loved being around other conservative women and wanted to find more women like that at UVA,” she says. “Unfortunately, all the women’s groups on campus were really liberal and biased. And when I asked a [women’s studies professor] if anybody would be interested in sponsoring a conservative women’s group, she just laughed at me.”

A UVA student magazine also found the idea humorous. Soon after the group started, it published an article about NeW with a cover illustration, Agness said, “of a woman dressed in a perfectly ironed pristine shirt with a checkered apron, connected to a machine with 12 babies popping out while stirring her batter and reading her recipe with the headline ‘Manifest Domesticity.’

“We were really portrayed as baby-making machines, and at that point I knew we were onto something. We were a threat.”

A threat to radical feminists, all right. But to conservative young women, NeW is a tonic -- one that offers far more intellectual stimulation than modern liberalism. Here’s hoping it has another highly successful school year.