The Wall Street Journal recently profiled a set of high-achieving conservative women — including a Palantir executive, a senior White House official, and Republican legislators — who are “having it all.”
They have children and careers, nannies and national security briefings, breadwinner husbands and the “freedom to stay at home.” These women, we’re told, have defied the left’s monopoly on ambition while still claiming the virtues of family, faith, and femininity. They are proof that even conservative women — who tend to have more children and favor traditional gender roles — can nevertheless do it all.
But the “have-it-all narrative” offered by many of these conservative women is not a genuinely countercultural model. It’s a rebranded version of the same “Lean-In” feminism that exhausted our ancestors’ generation: another hollow promise that women can divide themselves endlessly and still be whole.
May Mailman, a White House senior policy strategist featured in the WSJ story, said she married a man with a greater income than her own to ensure her the freedom of stay-at-home motherhood. Still, the Houston-based mother of two has chosen to spend weeknights in D.C., away from her children while her husband and nanny “get the kids out of bed, change their diapers, bathe and feed them and put them to bed, while making sure to run the dishwasher.” Pregnant with her third child, Mailman said, when she is home with her young kids, she is “constantly attached to my phone.”
Striking a more reflective note, Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican whose star has risen quickly in the Senate, told the Journal that she loved attending her children’s sports games: “Just missing those moments and not being present for everything … I really wrestled with it,” Britt said, referring to her decision to mount a Senate bid in 2021. Britt’s honesty is refreshing but also reveals the cost children bear when professional obligations routinely take precedence over parental presence in the home.
To be clear: These women are not the villains of the story. They are undoubtedly talented and sincere. The problem is not their competence. The problem is the framework that praises such competence.
“One of the first comments I hear from potential candidates is: ‘I want to run, but I’m nervous of how it will impact my family.’ This article does a great job of highlighting how today’s conservative women are juggling high-powered careers and families,” wrote Meredith Allen Dellinger, executive director of Winning4Women, an organization dedicated to electing GOP women to office.
The modern conservative movement — desperate to appeal to upwardly mobile women without alienating traditional values — is attempting to hold two irreconcilable truths at once: that family is central and that full-time professional ambition can peacefully coexist with familial life.
But no one can serve two masters. Something or someone always suffers, and in too many cases, those who suffer matter most.
The idea that a woman can pour herself out for a demanding career and still fulfill her calling as a mother and wife is not only a logistical strain — it’s a theological contradiction. Scripture does not prohibit women from being intellectually serious, industrious, or engaged in the world. The woman in Proverbs 31 is all of those things. But her efforts are always oriented toward the good of her household. Her sphere of greatest consequence is not her email inbox or the Fox News greenroom but the lives entrusted to her care.
This sounds radical, even among conservatives, because we have absorbed and internalized more feminist assumptions than we realize — or care to admit. When a woman chooses a security clearance over dinner with her kids, and it’s celebrated in a glossy Wall Street Journal spread, the message couldn’t be clearer: Prestige and public-facing success trump the daily, formative, soul-shaping presence of a mother. Think of the many Millennial and Gen Z women who have rightly begun to question our culture’s egalitarian impulses. Now, under the guise of conservatism, they are confusingly told they can have both: a high-powered career and domestic bliss.
This is not conservative.
Properly understood, conservatism isn’t only about voting red or opposing DEI. It’s about conserving what is good, true, and beautiful — even when doing so runs against cultural and political trends. Preserving such truths requires moral clarity. If we’re serious about conserving the family, we must be willing to critique even those within our own ranks who subtly downplay it — who tell women, whether from cable news sets or Instagram reels, that motherhood is just one commitment among many, easily juggled or outsourced. That message, no matter how well-intended, is not a defense of the family. It is a quiet surrender.
So, to the young women drifting rightward — tired of the chaos, disillusioned by feminism, and hungry for purpose and meaning — you don’t need to remake feminism in a modest dress. The system that told women they could shatter glass ceilings and still be fully present at home is now selling you that same lie with a family-values filter.
Reject the premise entirely. Fulfillment does not come from doing everything. It comes from doing the right things with devotion, sacrifice, and love. That is the kind of countercultural clarity our moment demands.