By Catherine Pakaluk
(Regnery, 256 pages, $30)
Women are shedding the “girlboss” mindset of no man needed, no children wanted. Though the term originated with millennial businesswoman Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS, the paradigm has much deeper roots. A combination of contraception, increased access to higher education, ingrained feminism, and careerism brought family and work into increasing conflict for the American woman.
The girlboss lifestyle reached its peak in the 2010s, and the glow is starting to wear off. Hardcore feminists always rejected the paradigm because it wasn’t sufficiently anti-patriarchal. But other women are reconsidering the girlboss narrative because it gives short shrift to love, marriage, and maternity.
In recent years, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, giving rise to the “tradwife” phenomenon on the right. Unlike the girlboss, the tradwife embraces an aesthetic that imitates traditional images of femininity, often hearkening back to times before the sexual revolution. The archetypal tradwife bakes bread, wears long, flowy sundresses, and takes pride in cooking a meal for her husband and children. She’s the pioneer woman with an Instagram audience.
In some ways, the tradwife paradigm has gained prominence because it attempts to respond to the consumerism and isolation of modern life. The family has been under attack, both philosophically and politically, for decades. Americans are waiting longer than ever to get married — if they get married at all. On top of that, American women aren’t having enough children to sustain a stable population. Replacement rate is 2.1 births per woman, but American women had 1.64 children on average as of 2020.
The tradwife trend emphasizes good things that many women desire, like marriage and family, but it is first and foremost a consumer phenomenon reliant mainly on aesthetics. Unable to survive apart from the social media ecosystem, the trend lacks a basis in anything substantial. There’s no religious component, nor is there a substantive concept of womanhood beyond what women wear and do. Without a foundation, tradwife-ism is prone to exaggeration on nearly every front. If cooking for your family is good, then churning your own butter is better. If having one child is good, then having five children is better.
Now, if you asked the women interviewed in Catherine Pakaluk’s book Hannah’s Children: The Women Defying the Birth Dearth, they’d probably agree that bigger is better when it comes to family — but not because they’re part of the tradwife trend. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Though large families used to be fairly common — 20 percent of women had at least five children in 1976 — only 5 percent of women have five or more children today. The number of big families started dropping in the ’70s, but it stabilized by 1990, with the number of women with five or more children hovering around 5 percent for the past three decades. The 5 percent are, as Pakaluk notes, “strangely immune to the trend toward below-replacement fertility.”
Despite their persistence as a small but consistent demographic population, these women with above-average fertility haven’t been taken seriously. Instead, they are generally regarded as outliers with little to contribute to demographic studies. As a mother of eight herself, Pakaluk wanted to illuminate the ways that women with many children make decisions regarding fertility and how they understand their motherhood. For her research, she spoke with dozens of mothers across the United States, all of whom have at least five children.
Across various differences — like religion, location, level of education, and the age at which they became mothers — the women Pakaluk interviews all expressed a similar attitude toward childbearing. These mothers expressed a “deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood,” she writes. Having children requires sacrifice, but these mothers chose children time and again, despite the opportunity costs.
In nearly all cases, these mothers saw maternity as being intertwined with deeply held religious convictions. They spoke about their children as “eternal beings,” shared memories of turning to God in prayer to discern their readiness for another pregnancy, and viewed their motherhood as participation in a long “chain of being” connecting past, present, and future. Most strikingly, these women “adopted a posture of openness to children as a way of life and not a mere season,” Pakaluk writes.
From the outside looking in, these women are living the tradwife dream — they have a house full of children and a loving, lifelong marriage to a dedicated husband and father. But the defining frameworks in their lives are faith and trust in God’s providence, not an image-conscious social media phenomenon.
Understanding the decision-making process of mothers with five or more children is central to Pakaluk’s project, and she spends considerable time examining the costs of childbearing. Ultimately, Pakaluk says, women today face a different calculus than their grandmothers did:
In the horse race between family and career enabled by the Pill, the family — unless valued very highly — loses to the alternative: dividing time between career and family, having children plus income, status, and other goods — but fewer children.
The forces discouraging childbearing are immensely strong, and the only real force capable of overcoming the costs is a religiously motivated openness to life. By comparison, the tradwife trend is merely reactionary, though that’s certainly part of the appeal.
By emphasizing the importance of marriage and family life, conservatives run the risk of putting undue pressure on young conservative women to get married as soon as possible — and many of those young women, eager to take advantage of peak fertility, certainly put that pressure on themselves. In a way, it was comforting to read the stories of the women in Hannah’s Children, some of whom were pregnant well into their 40s when Pakaluk spoke with them. Life is neither as short nor as long as it seems when you’re a twentysomething.
The desire for marriage and children is a good one, but it’s a desire best expressed by an openness to marriage and children on God’s timeline, not your own. There’s a fine line to walk between seeking out a good thing and trusting that you cannot miss what God intends for you. This is, after all, what both the girlboss and the tradwife miss: the good life is a collaboration with God, not a project of self-actualization on one’s own terms.
Pakaluk focuses on women with big families because they’re living a radically different life than most women. But the real lesson from Hannah’s Children is that the best number of children to have is the number of children God gives you.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
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