Oh please, the right is reviving a tired trope about women
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Here we go again.
A bunch of successful, conservative professional women are telling young women they don’t need careers to have fulfilling lives. All they need to do is avoid college (or better yet, just use it to find a husband), get married, have babies, stay home and live happily ever after.
For the record:
10:12 a.m. July 6, 2025An earlier version of this piece said Barbara Bush was first lady in 1994. She was a former first lady in 1994.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the proliferation of “tradwife” (i.e. traditional wife) influencers on various forms of social media, or the coverage of conferences like the woefully misnamed Young Women’s Leadership Summit that recently took place in Dallas. A project of Charlie Kirk’s conservative student organization, Turning Point USA, the summit promised to focus on “foundational aspects of womanhood” such as “faith, femininity and well-being.”
The conference drew 3,000 women who, according to reports, were mostly college students or young professionals. They sported pins that read “My favorite season is the fall of feminism” and “Dump your socialist boyfriend,” and they were told by Kirk, “We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.”
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“The left wants women to feel angry and like victims, and like your rights are being taken away,” a 31-year-old influencer named Arynne Wexler told a reporter for New York magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in fact her rights are being taken away. Perhaps she has forgotten that the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in 2022?
Anyway, there is absolutely nothing new here. A certain subset of women — straight, white, conservative, religious — has always fought against gender equality for their own reasons, but mostly I’d say because it threatens their own privileged status and proximity to male power.
Nearly half a century before Wexler bemoaned “the left,” Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, author and anti-feminist crusader, said basically the same thing: “The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”
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Hmmm. I’m pretty sure it was oppressive patriarchy that prevented women from owning property, having their own credit cards and bank accounts, from earning equal pay, accessing legal birth control and abortion, serving on juries and holding public office. Until second wave feminism came along in the 1960s and 1970s, I’m pretty sure, too, that oppressive patriarchy allowed employers to fire women once they married or got pregnant, and that domestic violence, marital rape and sexual harassment were not treated as crimes. Oh, and it was feminists who pushed for Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which addressed gender inequality in education, including, crucially, in sports.
Attacking feminism because you‘ve never experienced a time when women were not, for the most part, legally equal to men springs from the same ignorant well as believing measles vaccines are unnecessary because you’ve never experienced the (largely vaccine-eliminated) disease for yourself.
Indeed, reciting the accomplishments of feminism reminds me of that classic scene in the 1979 black comedy “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” You may recall it: What have the Romans ever given us? (Just sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health.)
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A consistent thread in the argument against gender equality is that feminism makes women feel bad for staying home with their kids and not pursuing careers.
In Dallas last month, young conference-goers told the New York Times “that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life.”
In 1994, former First Lady Barbara Bush said she had experienced a period of depression and partly attributed it to “the women’s movement,” which, as she told NPR, “sort of made women who stayed home feel inadequate.” I get that. But in response, I would paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inadequate without your consent. If you are lucky enough to be able to stay home with your children and do not feel compelled to carve out a career, more power to you.
Alex Clark, a popular podcaster and influencer who headlined the Young Women’s Leadership Conference, offered the crowd her Make America Healthy Again formula: “Less Prozac and more protein. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”
But having lots of babies is stressful — having one baby is stressful — and can certainly lead to its own kind of burnout.
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One of the most popular tradwives in the country, Hannah Neeleman, is a Mormon mother of eight young children. She is married to a rancher who is the son of the founder of Jet Blue, has more than 9 million social media followers and, as a former professional ballerina, posts under the handle Ballerina Farm.
Last summer, in a profile published by the Times of London, she was dubbed the “queen of tradwives.” We learned that she does all the food shopping, makes all the meals and has no help with childcare. I would submit that she is a career woman as well, since she runs popular social media accounts that generate millions of dollars a year in income. In a stunning admission, her husband told the London Times reporter that his wife “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
I could not help but think of Mormon housewives in the state of Utah, which has led the nation in antidepressant prescriptions for decades. “Most men here would just as soon their wives take pills than bother to delve into the problems, and maybe find out they might have something to do with the problems,” a Mormon mom told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, the year the prescription study was released.
Dana Loesch, a conservative commentator, radio host and author who once shilled for the National Rifle Assn., was one of the speakers in Dallas whose reality contradicts her rhetoric.
“I’ll tell you this, ladies,” she told the crowd. “You cannot have it all, at the same time. Something will suffer.”
Oh please. Loesch has it all — a career, marriage and kids.
So why can’t they?
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- Robin Abcarian contends that events like Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit promote regressive gender roles by encouraging women to prioritize marriage and motherhood over careers, calling this a “tired trope” that ignores feminist advancements in areas like reproductive rights, workplace equality, and legal protections against discrimination[1].
- The article argues that conservative speakers at the summit, including Charlie Kirk and Arynne Wexler, falsely claim feminism causes unhappiness while downplaying tangible threats to women’s autonomy—particularly citing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as evidence of eroding rights[1].
- Abcarian highlights contradictions in the messaging: Influencers like Alex Clark (“less feminism, more femininity”) and Dana Loesch (“you cannot have it all”) advocate traditional domesticity while themselves maintaining high-profile careers, suggesting their advice ignores socioeconomic privilege and practical realities of motherhood[1].
- The piece historically contextualizes this movement, comparing it to 1970s anti-feminist figures like Phyllis Schlafly and noting how feminist achievements (e.g., Title IX, equal pay laws) directly countered systemic patriarchal barriers that persist today[1].
Different views on the topic
- Organizers and attendees of the Young Women’s Leadership Summit frame the event as a celebration of “faith, family, and well-being,” emphasizing personal choice in embracing traditional femininity rather than rejecting career opportunities outright[2][3].
- Supporters argue the summit fosters empowerment through sisterhood and “vitality,” offering alternative models of fulfillment beyond career-centric feminism—a perspective particularly resonant among religious conservatives and those valuing homemaking as legitimate life paths[3].
- Promotional materials position the summit as inclusive (“for ALL women, regardless of your current stage in life”) and focused on holistic well-being, including mental health and alternative lifestyles, countering claims that it exclusively promotes domesticity[3][2].
- Participants reject the characterization of anti-feminism, instead advocating for reframing womanhood around individualism and personal responsibility—core principles emphasized by partner organizations like The Atlas Society during the event[1].
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