Voices on the left and right box women into narrow paths that don’t much line up with the desires of the heart or economic and social realities.
At the Turning Point USA leadership conference last week, young conservative women heard from female politicians, influencers, and career women on how to buck a liberal feminist lifestyle: get married, have babies, ditch seed oils, and embrace Make America Healthy Again.
Some audience members, and reporters, noticed an irony in successful, educated career women saying to young women, “Stay at home and have babies.” As is the case at many of these conferences, some speeches made good points — ones that encouraged young women to prioritize marriage and family life, make healthy lifestyle choices, and consider the harms of birth control — and others were rather off-putting.
Take, for example, TPUSA President Charlie Kirk’s discussion about women and college. Kirk said that if young girls were serious about finding a husband, they would make it their “purpose of being” every day to seek out a man, including going to college for the sole purpose of finding a husband. If women go to school with the explicit purpose of finding a person to marry, he added, they will succeed.
He also asked the crowd: “Do you want an amazing career or an amazing family?” implying that the two were mutually exclusive. Kirk formulated the search for a husband as a clinical, almost professional, pursuit. His wife, to her credit, emphasized the importance of finding the right man (she met Kirk in her 30s, when, he says, women are statistically less dateable).
When one teen questioned why, at a leadership summit, TPUSA platformed career women who told crowds to “get married and have babies,” Kirk told her that “maybe they know something you don’t know.”
Kirk and others like him encourage young women to get married young without thinking too hard about why or to whom, in the same sense that feminists decades ago encouraged young women to pursue careers at the expense of family life without considering what implications delaying marriage would have. Both are extremes. Both box women into narrow paths that don’t much line up with the desires of the heart or economic and social realities. Conservative commentator Brett Cooper said as much at the event. From a Washington Post report:
Feminists and the left, Cooper said, had made a “grave error” when they chose to champion the idea that “a woman’s value and happiness existed only in her work.” As a response to that error, the “tradwife” aesthetic made sense. But perhaps, Cooper ventured, the pendulum had swung too far in some corners of conservatism — which had become as “polarizing and puritanical as what the left was doing years ago,” she said.
“Some people might think that I’m crazy for getting up here on conservative women’s conference and saying all of this,” Cooper said. “But I think it’s important to say this because I know that, personally, I fall somewhere between these two extreme binaries that we have been presented with. I’m sure that many of you do as well.”
“I’m not here to say that you need to chase being a wife and a mother and finding an amazing career and stay healthy and not eat seed oils and be engaged in politics and, and, and,” Cooper continued. “That is really not reasonable. That’s not the point.” (Later, over email, she explained her decision to address this in her speech. “I believe young women want — and deserve — a nuanced approach to work and family,” she wrote. “Life is more complicated than an X thread.”)
She’s right: Women (and men) can’t have it all. No matter whether an individual is single, married, childless, or not, their life will be full of trade-offs; thankfully, life rarely dictates that women must make a black-and-white decision between a cubicle and a countertop.
Conservatives are gaining ground in the culture war. Women, especially, have helped lead the right’s cultural revolution. It’s a good time to make the case for motherhood and family life — which doesn’t require making the case against women having careers.