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The following is an edited excerpt from “Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith,” which comes out March 24. It has been published with permission from Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
Girl-boss feminism is on retreat. After decades of telling women that true happiness lies in career success, Sheryl Sandberg — the author of the 2013 bestseller “Lean In” — has taken to the pages of People magazine to warn women about the detrimental threat posed by the tradwife movement.
Sandberg ends her interview with a bland plea: “Women should choose how they want to spend their lives.” Yet the sentiment rings hollow. Throughout the interview she downplays women who want to be stay-at-home mothers, reminding them that it isn’t practical or cost-effective and insisting that “you are not harming your marriage and you are not harming your children by working and by being ambitious.”
Of course, countless studies have found that placing very young children in daycare and prioritizing career success over family can come with real costs — especially for women who feel economic pressure to place their children in daycare just to make ends meet working less-than-glamorous jobs.
Instead of criticizing the tradwife movement, we should ask what it reveals. Many women still aspire to marriage and children. The real task is meeting them where they are and investing in solutions that make traditional family arrangements more attainable in the first place.
Of course, the tradwife movement isn’t the solution. It can be an overcorrection of its own — and, without a doubt, an indictment of the girl-boss feminism mantra.
For much of the last century, progress for women meant movement out of the home and into the workforce. From Rosie the Riveter in the 1940s, to the career women of the 1980s, and finally to the “girl boss” of the 2010s, female empowerment was increasingly framed in economic and individualistic terms: more freedom, more earning power, more sexual liberation, and more visibility in male-dominated spaces.
To be a modern woman was to want more.
But by the time the 2020s arrived, ushered in with the global COVID-19 pandemic, the narrative began to falter. The once-celebrated “girl boss” — a symbol of a self-starting, career-driven woman who leaned in, broke glass ceilings, and curated her #hustle on Instagram — was losing her shine. In her place, a more domestic figure emerged from the edges of TikTok and Instagram: the “tradwife,” or the traditional wife. Cotton aprons replaced pantsuits, baking bread replaced attending business meetings, and a soft and receptive femininity was no longer taboo but increasingly admired.
The peak of girl-boss feminism arguably came in 2019. A century after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, Politico declared 2019 “The Year of the Woman.” By all appearances, it was a triumphant moment for modern feminism. Media outlets cheered as women reached the highest levels of politics, business, and academia.
During President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address that year, he received a bipartisan standing ovation when he celebrated that more women were in the workforce than ever before. A then-record number of women had been elected to serve in Congress. NASA, Nike, and universities across the country spotlighted female achievements in their fields. Girl-boss feminism had succeeded in reframing womanhood around metrics once reserved for men: titles, salaries, influence, and independence. The movement seemed unstoppable.
Then, something unexpected happened: the world shut down. The COVID-19 pandemic delivered what no amount of cultural critique could: a global chill pill. It was the ultimate permission slip for women to return to their homes and children — or to face the reality of life without marriage or children head on. Even before this, though, the rate of antidepressant use “went up 400 percent over a 10-year period” with women twice as likely to take such medication than men. While 16.5% of women overall were taking such medication for depression, anxiety, and loneliness, 23% of women between the ages of 40 and 59 were in 2016. Despite having more freedom, education, and economic power than any generation before them, many women felt something important was missing.
Girl-boss feminism, a modern, career-obsessed take on womanhood, celebrated individual ambition and corporate success, often at the cost of marriage, motherhood, and community. It told women that their value lay in their productivity and professional titles, rather than in their faith, family, and God-given identity. These women were told they could have it all, only to discover that “all” was not enough.
The pandemic exposed this dissonance with sudden clarity. Offices shuttered, daycare centers closed, and schools went remote. Women were, quite literally, sent home. And to the surprise of many, some didn’t want to leave again — or, at least not in the way they had before. Flexible work, part-time jobs, and stay-at-home motherhood have continued to see a resurgence as many women decided that it makes more sense, either financially or emotionally, to stay home with their young children.
Like a chicken with its head cut off, girl-boss feminism may still be making headlines, but the life has gone out of it. The girl boss failed. She championed abortion, autonomy, and winning the battle of the sexes — placing herself above children, career above family, and freedom above responsibility. She rejected limits, and in doing so, she lost herself.
Of course, the answer to the girl-boss is not the tradwife. Most conservative-leaning women don’t see themselves in the narrow life scripts offered by either vision. They are strong, capable, and thoughtful women who long to prioritize their faith, their families, and their communities without reducing their lives to a cultural trend. Most of all, women are hungry for wisdom to discern what faithfulness requires here and now — and the courage to embrace that season without fear or apology.
Despite the tradwife’s general rejection of paid work outside the home, it struck me that these women were not reacting against work itself, but against a system that told them their worth was measured by career success. In this way, the movement is not so much a return to the 1950s or another bygone era but is an indictment of the 2010s: years marked by weakened families distrustful of predatory and self-seeking financial and political movements and a corporatized feminism that no longer spoke to women’s real needs.
Despite the attention-seeking nature of some of its representatives, the tradwife movement clearly was addressing a felt need in the modern woman. The popularity of the movement suggests that the project of female liberation is incomplete — and in many cases, headed in the wrong direction. It shows us the unfulfilled dreams many women long for: homes that are alive with meaningful labor, marriages that are strong, children who are cherished, and a life that aligns with what we value most.
Even Gloria Steinem, now in her 90s and a feminist leader of the sexual revolution in the 20th century, has recognized the centrality of the home for women’s success in this cultural and political moment. “The lesson is less in the national and world atmosphere and more in the home and employment atmosphere in which we have some control,” she said in a New York Times article published after the 2024 presidential election. “We shouldn’t give up the power we have.”
It’s striking that the questions women are now asking about hustle culture echo the very ones posed by second-wave feminists, such as Betty Friedan in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique:
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’
Except instead of the home, this feeling of emptiness is coming from within the walls of corporate culture.
One could even reframe Friedan’s question, as I have done here, to reflect the emptiness of hustle culture: Each working mother bears it alone. As she answered emails between meetings, juggled deadlines and daycare pickups, ate a rushed lunch at her desk while drafting presentations no one would remember, joined late-night conference calls while folding laundry, scrolled through pictures of the kids she barely saw that week, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: “Is this all?”
Friedan aimed her critique at the constraints of domestic life in the mid-twentieth century. Yet 60 years later, women are asking the same question about the restless, career-driven culture Friedan helped inspire.
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Emma Waters is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and the author of the forthcoming book “Lead Like Jael: Seven Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith.”
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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