Online, they say things such as: “I believe women get to have it all: A career. An education. A happy marriage. And children.” And: “Women—you are strong enough to succeed in both motherhood & your career. You don’t have to choose one.” And: “You don’t have to put your career on hold to have kids.”
They are not, however, the former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, or the girlboss head of a progressive nonprofit, or a liberal influencer. Those quotations come from the social-media feeds of, respectively, Abby Johnson, the founder of the anti-abortion group And Then There Were None; Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America; and the married couple Simone and Malcolm Collins, who run a nonprofit in the conservative-leaning pronatalist movement that encourages Americans to have more children. (Simone also recently ran for office as a Republican.) They all contend that women need to make very few trade-offs between having kids and building a flourishing career.
This argument, coming from these voices, is surprising for a few reasons. The idea that mothers should “lean in” to challenging jobs was popularized by Sandberg, a prominent Democrat, in 2013 and embraced by legions of liberal career women. Within a few years, attitudes had soured toward both Sandberg and leaning in. Many mothers pushed back on the expectation that they be everything to everyone, and opted instead for raging, quiet quitting, or leaning out. A sunny lean-in revival is unexpected, especially from conservative-leaning women, a group that for the most part did not embrace this message when Sandberg was making it.
The specter of conservatives wanting to trap women at home has long been a liberal boogeyman, but it is based in some reality. Historically, some on the right, including Phyllis Schlafly and earlier-era J. D. Vance, have argued that women should, at the very least, deprioritize paid work so they can focus on motherhood. Some conservatives continue to make this claim: At a 2023 pronatalism conference, the far-right businessman Charles Haywood told audiences that “generally, women should not have careers.” Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcast host, once told my colleague Elaine Godfrey that women should put family first, and that any professional enterprise—say, a “crocheting business” or the like—should come second to their kids. The conservative author and podcaster Ben Shapiro has written that girls are troubled because society has told them that they need not “aspire to bear and rear children or make preparations to build a home. Instead, we’ve told them that they can run from their own biology,” including by pursuing “more work hours.”
By contrast, Hawkins once posted a photo of her family, which includes four children, as proof that women can “do both: Have a career & be a mother.” In reference to a picture of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holding her baby son at work, Hawkins wrote that it’s a lie that “you need to end a child’s life”—a reference to having an abortion—“to have the career you want.” A female attendee at a recent pronatalist convention told a New York Times reporter, “It’s horrible to be telling young women that having kids is the worst thing you can do for your career.” Kristi Hamrick, a vice president of Students for Life of America, who has four children, told me, “I’m highly offended by the modern-day misogyny that says you can’t have a career and family, so pick career. There is no difference to turn-of-the-century misogyny which says you cannot have home and career, so stay home.”
The women I spoke with who make this argument expressed frustration with those on the right encouraging women to devote themselves fully to housekeeping and child-rearing. Hawkins told me she objects to what she calls “tradwife stuff”—stay-at-home wives who post videos of themselves, for example, milling their own flour—because “that’s not financially possible for the majority of people.” Hawkins said that she has always worked full-time and that her husband homeschools their kids. “I think especially now in the right wing, this messaging is coming across like, ‘You’re either an evil feminist career woman, or you’re a mother,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘What about women who want to do both of those things?’” Johnson, who has eight children, told me that in recent years, “this tradwife movement has been very loud. And I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it’s kind of reductionist. Like, ‘Women, you are just here to breed.’” She’s heard conservative male speakers at events use the term boss babe pejoratively. “What’s wrong with being a boss?” she wondered.
Simone Collins, who works in private equity in addition to running her family’s nonprofit, also pushed back against traditionalist views of women and work. Her mother, she told me, “basically put her entire life on hold to raise me.” After Collins was grown, she “didn’t have anything else to live for and got really depressed, and that’s terrifying to me.”
Now Collins, who has four kids, wants to model for her daughters the idea that having children and working hard at a career is normal. She told me that she works from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. Unlike the families of some of the other women I spoke with, hers relies on outside child care: Their tenants provide it in exchange for rent. “I’m just not the kind of person who can sit at home,” she said, “and only focus on kids.”
Many of these women embrace progressive-leaning views on family policy. “I think it’s a gross detriment to society that we don’t have federal parental leave,” Johnson told me. (This mirrors a growing sense among Republican voters that the government should boost support for working parents.) All of the women I spoke with mentioned something that is, at the very least, liberal coded: the importance of remote work to working moms. And yet none of them would generally be considered progressive. In our conversation, Hawkins criticized feminists of the 1970s and ’80s; Hamrick described the concept of women working as “very biblical,” pointing out the Proverbs 31 tale of a “wife of noble character” who “makes linen garments and sells them.” Johnson has supported “head-of-household voting,” in which, hypothetically, a husband could cast a ballot for his wife.
Still, the lean-in argument is taking hold among some of these women, possibly as a practical calculation that backing women into a kids-or-career corner won’t help raise fertility rates or persuade women to avoid abortion. Women attend college at higher rates than men, and men’s labor-force participation has stalled while women’s continues to grow. Only about a quarter of mothers in two-parent households stay at home while their husband works, a steep drop-off from the ’70s. Nearly half of moms are their family’s breadwinner. Despite possible differences in what they believe to be ideal, Republican and Democratic mothers work outside the home at similar rates. Today’s young women will likely end up working—and wanting to do so. “A Leave It to Beaver–style, more patriarchal approach to pronatalism is just not going to work,” Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, who focuses on family policy and has four kids, told me. (He works part-time, and his wife is a tenure-track professor.)
Encouraging Americans to have children seems to require acknowledging that few families can survive on one income. “Everyone has to work,” Collins told me. “If they make it such that you are not a conservative Christian or you’re not part of our community if you have a working mother, they’re not gonna have any more community members, because everyone has to have a job now.”
In their well-intentioned effort to encourage mothers’ career aspirations, however, some of these women may be overstating their case. (Collins told me that she hasn’t sacrificed her career for her kids “even a little bit.”) Many of them have organized their life in ways that are not available to many other working moms. All of those I spoke with work from home, which is something many women would like to do but cannot. Hamrick had a period of working part-time when her kids were young, something that most working mothers would like to do as well, but that relatively few are able to do, because part-time jobs tend to not pay well. The women I spoke with are all high up at organizations that offer a level of flexibility that, say, a nurse or a teacher does not enjoy. (Johnson, of And Then There Were None, lets her employees take naps in the middle of the day.) And they all have very supportive partners, some of whom don’t work outside the home.
The thing is, for many women, having kids can be really bad for their career. Although the “motherhood penalty” on wages varies depending on a woman’s age and profession, and has declined over time, it seems to continue to exist in the short term. That is, although their earnings might eventually bounce back, women tend to make less money immediately after having children—whether because they cut back hours; accept more flexible, lower-paying jobs; or have bosses who discriminate against them. A large study recently found that after working women have children, their income falls by half, on average, and remains depressed for at least six years. Even women who are the breadwinner of their family see their income suffer after giving birth. Hiring managers are less likely to hire mothers than women without kids, and many offer mothers lower salaries. And women with kids may avoid or be steered away from “greedy” jobs—or high-paying white-collar jobs—which frequently require people to work well into the night, long after day cares have closed.
“Of course there’s a trade-off. It’s massive,” Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a Catholic University of America economist who has eight children, told me. “You have to be blind to deny it.” She went on, “If I didn’t have children, I would have done a lot more professionally.” Nevertheless, she said, “I’m happy with this trade-off.”
When pressed, the others I interviewed, who had previously expressed unqualified positivity, acknowledged some concessions between motherhood and career. Collins believes the sacrifices should come at home: She told me that working hard and raising kids is doable if people are less particular about the parenting part. “If I spend the afternoon with the kids, the house is cleaner than it was before. The kids are well behaved. They’re fed. They’re all dressed. They look neat and tidy,” she told me. “If Malcolm spends the afternoon with the kids, I come home, they’re naked, their faces are smattered with candy smudges.” Many women, she said, don’t accept this more anarchic brand of “dad parenting,” so they cut back at work to do it themselves. “If we revised that and made it more normalized to have kids more chaotically parented or parented in a more chill way,” she said, “then I think women would be more comfortable not leaning out.”
Johnson said with some regret that she has missed key moments with her kids—for instance, witnessing some of their first steps—to keep up her travel-heavy schedule. Despite this, she said, “I’m a better mom because I am not at home 24 hours a day with my children.” Women, she added, “have this feminine genius within all of us that I believe is essential in the workplace.”
Others said they’d made compromises at work: Hamrick said her career has “ebbed and flowed,” and for years she worked part-time. Hawkins said she often tells young women that being a mother and working full-time “does require sacrifice.”
But the women I spoke with seemed especially concerned about the drawbacks that come from not having kids. They want more people to enjoy the fulfillment and sense of meaning they believe children bring to life, and to not regret missing their chance. Research suggests that a small number of Americans without children have regrets, but most do not; at the same time, some parents experience regret that they chose to have kids. Still, some women I spoke with worried that those who don’t become mothers may live to lament their choices.
At some point, Hawkins told me, women who focus on “making as much money as you can, climbing the corporate ladder so then your boss can fire you at any moment, and going on great vacations that you put on Instagram” may well look at their life and think, Wait a minute. What is this really about? Hawkins hopes that when they do, “it’s not too late” for them to have children. So she tells women they can have it all—even though for many women, that’s much harder than it sounds.
The post Why Voices on the Right Are Telling Moms to ‘Lean In’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
