“Girlboss” and “Tradwife” are Opposing Identities. Women Should Reject Identity Altogether, and Choose Vocation Instead.
The supple rigor of a vocational mindset is the antidote to BOTH the progressive feminism that dominates most of the mainstream AND the pseudo-traditionalism that aminates growing parts of the right.
As Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman demonstrate in their thought-provoking 2024 book, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, decisions about childbearing are now considered morally neutral, flowing only from one’s self-understanding and individual desires. The regnant feminist perspective holds that any preference for more marriages and more children is traditionalist judgementalism. It asks us to politely ignore, even in our own minds, the moral fact that each human life is a blessing. It also requires that we reject the societal fact that those with more children are those making greater investments in everyone’s future. Whether a woman has one child or two, ten children or zero, is supposed to be a question of personal preference alone.
These presumptions foreground a Beauvoirian notion of individual identity (which motherhood threatens) as the be-all, end-all of women’s liberation. This is the progressive feminist milieu, in which the virtue of chasing a sexually liberated, professionally empowered ideal is not up for debate. This pursuit of oxymoronic, sexualized androgyny is the air most of us breathe. They call it “girl power.” Everything is awash in it, from Disney movies to the typical English class.
Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that this near-universal valorization of professionally ambitious promiscuity is not reflective of what most women truly want. As Louise Perry argued in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022), girls’ well-documented discomfort with hook-up culture is inextricable from today’s notion of women’s sexual pseudo-empowerment. Moreover, modern feminists’ failure to acknowledge the well-established desire of most women to spend more time mothering and less time working involves no mystique, but an unwillingness to recognize women’s average differences with men. Declining marriage rates, a fertility crisis, and increasing rates of female anxiety and unhappiness are all perpetuated by a hegemonic bill of goods about women’s desire for a functionally androgynous identity.
The shallowness of the “girlboss” ideal, in which each woman is a disembodied incarnation of a self-expression that may or may not include motherhood of a child or two, understandably repels many thoughtful women. Looking for a framework in which pregnancy and birth are met with unique joy, family life is valued, and women are not expected to be the same as men, some women are drawn to the “tradwife” identity and its pronatalist orientation instead.
But the perils of an identitarian paradigm are very much at work in tradwifery, too. The fetishization of maximal fertility on the right ultimately imperils the futures of exactly the women who are best disposed to take us past today’s mainstream feminist hegemony and toward something better: a future in which more motherhood of more kids is a holistic expression of well-formed, multifaceted, vocational womanhood—not just another cheap identity.
The Perils of Identitarian “Maximal Maternity”
Before I delve into what those perils are and why they matter, let me offer a contextualizing caveat: A woman who has a lot of kids and delights in them is obviously doing nothing wrong and likely doing a lot right. In 2024’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, mother of eight and economist Catherine Pakaluk describes women of large families who see their children as blessings. These are inspirational examples of godly stewardship entirely compatible with and constitutive of the vocational womanhood for which I’m arguing.
Unfortunately, a very different mindset concerning marriage and motherhood has reared its head on parts of the right, in a precise identitarian inversion of mainstream feminist indifference to the traditional family. For mainstream feminists, a woman’s truest self is impeded by maternity. For certain politicized pronatalists, a woman’s truest self is inextricable from and encompassed by maximal maternity. As Helen Roy explains in her recent essay, “Fertility Idolatry,” to this way of thinking, female virtue is expressed only through marriage and motherhood. Hence, the earlier a woman has children and the more children she has, the greater her virtue and her value.
This growing tendency on parts of the right to equate womanhood solely with male sexual fulfillment and/or physical motherhood opens up cultural space for the neo-pagan misogyny that is now rearing its head in an increasingly influential “manosphere.” Exhibit A: The valorization of Andrew Tate and those of his ilk—who abuse and discard women and then brag about it—that is increasingly attractive among right-leaning young men. Exhibit B: The cultural elevation of Elon Musk—who endorses having babies but is indifferent to marital fidelity, having fathered thirteen children with four different women—and the political normalization of Donald Trump—an admitted adulterer who fathered five children with three different women—as “conservative” figures on the side of the political spectrum that supposedly celebrates family values. Exhibit C: The many viral posts on social media proclaiming the value of teen pregnancy and telling twenty-something women to “just get pregnant,” and “go into debt if you have to.”
This sort of “bro” misogyny is dangerous for the women it deplores and delimiting for the man-children it validates. The degradation of women as existing to fulfill unintegrated male desires—or bear children without male commitment—is “toxic masculinity” incarnate. Indeed, it is women’s mistreatment by men—the failure of unvirtuous men to extend to women, and especially to poor women and to the children in women’s care, the protection due a physically more vulnerable person with equal human dignity—that inspired the early women’s movement. As Erika Bachiochi has explained, the legal codification of men’s obligation to comply with the dictates of Christian virtue (i.e., chastity, nonviolence, marital fidelity, etc) in relation to women and children was a central impetus for first-wave feminism.
For many women who are attracted to the “tradwife” lifestyle, the dangers of an increasingly misogynistic online and IRL “manosphere” may seem personally remote. Keturah Hickman, for example, dismisses concerns about “online red-pill bros,” telling us that we should simply “ignore them” because theirs is “uncharitable, unchristian behavior that should not be fed into.” Hickman grew up the oldest of twelve children, values her upbringing, and is now the wife of a virtuous man who cherishes her. The rise of online misogyny on the right doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her.
In the zeal to claim and embody an identity in the ongoing mommy wars, it can be tempting to ignore the mistakes of those on “our side” who we see as misguided or extreme. From my vantage point on the “other side,” as a professionally ambitious woman who came of age in the secular mainstream, I understand this impulse as well as anyone. And I understand why it’s not one we should indulge.
Both the “Girlboss” and the “Tradwife” Archetypes Limit the Lives of Women
American women today want more children than we’re having. Indeed, thirty-something women like me, who came up in the progressive feminist mainstream yet wound up happily married mothers of several children are luckier—and more countercultural—than we should need to be. In my early 20s, I was enrolled in a PhD program about four hours away from my hometown, where my fiancé was in law school and my parents lived. It soon became apparent that my professional ambitions were, given the particulars of my department and my prospective dissertation committee, on an impending collision course with my personal ones.…
Read the full article at Fairer Disputations.