Oh please, the right is reviving a tired trope about women

Robin Abcarian, Tribune News Service

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. 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 organisation, 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 favourite 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."

"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 ofwomen — 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."

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure it was the 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.) 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.

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."