By Ivana Greco
Thursday, April 23, 2026
There’s a popular story circulating among people on the
right at the moment. It goes something like this: America in 2026 is failing
families. Young people are getting married less often than in past generations. They’re having fewer children. There’s a growing divide between the sexes,
especially among Gen Z.
Recent polling showed 53 percent of Gen Z women identify as
Democrats, versus 35 percent of men from the same cohort. Political
polarization is so bad that it’s making it hard for young people to date. Even those who do get married and have kids are
struggling: to afford housing, to take care of elderly parents, even to buy gas and groceries. The United States is in the middle of a
“loneliness epidemic,” with most Americans—including a
staggering number of young people—reporting feeling isolated. We don’t seem to
value the work of the home much anymore, even as the need for Americans to do
the unpaid labor of taking care of families, the elderly, and communities grows
ever more urgent. This story resonates because it is deeply true. Every
ordinary American feels it. What we are missing is a coherent explanation of why
this is happening. What is causing this American malaise?
Some have found the villain(ess). It’s the women.
Specifically, the working women.
Anti-feminism has been around as long as feminism: The
two have formed a sort of yin and yang during the decadeslong battle over the
proper role and rights of women. In its 2026 form, anti-feminism can be
described as a spectrum. On one end are the extremists, who want to enact
lunatic measures like repealing the 19th Amendment. Further towards
the center, anti-feminism has as its target the “girlboss,” or the
high-achieving, career-focused woman who neglects hearth and home, family and
community, for the C-suite or boardroom.
This latter view has found a wide footing in more
mainstream circles. Earlier this month, Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst
at the Independent Women’s Forum, penned an article on “The Myth of the Independent Girlboss,” arguing that “the
girlboss model is incentivized to the exclusion of more traditional choices,
such as relying on a husband’s single income, which are punished by our tax
code, our antidiscrimination laws, our immigration policy, and our culture’s
ethos.” While recognizing the “millions of women [who] create real value in the
economy and deserve their paychecks,” Stepman bemoans “the wild proliferation
of ‘email jobs’ and administrative compliance positions … jobs
disproportionately filled by the fairer sex.” In March, conservative podcaster
Katie Miller claimed that “Feminism was used to get women into the
workforce to break the foundation of the American family. Motherhood is the
true biological destiny for women.” In January, the author Carrie Gress argued in a new book that feminism, in all its iterations,
simply can’t be squared with Christian morality. And back in October, the
writer Helen Andrews argued that the explosion of women in the workforce is the
result of a rigged system; “It is an artificial result of social engineering,
and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.”
According to Andrews, businesses, academia, and the like are suffering because
“female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of
many major institutions.”
These anti-feminist arguments are not carbon copies of
each other. But the mainstream forms do have a coherent throughline: American
society is being harmed by many of her working women, especially those in
elite, HR, and academic jobs. (One terminological note: Let’s distinguish
anti-feminists who would affirmatively like to see far fewer women in the
workforce from those who critique various versions of modern feminism—sometimes
they overlap, but often they don’t). There is a consistent argument here: America
would be better off without her “girlbosses.” Is it a good one?
Opponents sometimes criticize anti-feminists as
hypocrites: Miller, Stepman, Gress, and Andrews all have high-profile jobs
boosted in part by their public opposition to feminism and “feminization.” I’m
not sympathetic to that criticism; it’s fine to advocate for those in a
lifestyle you don’t personally adopt.
The real issue with the anti-feminists is that they often
make very little effort to reckon with the true cost of what they’re
advocating. The most important of these is poverty. Raising a family in America
right now is very expensive. Most mothers work because that’s what it takes to
balance the family budget. Not long ago, I talked to a mom who stays home with
a bunch of kids, and her husband doesn’t make a lot of money. She sometimes has
to decide whether their limited income should go to the grocery bill or for gas
to see Grandma. This mom doesn’t regret the choices her family made, but she’d
be the first to admit that it’s extremely hard. (Even among the upper middle
class, it costs a lot to raise kids these days.) Why are we criticizing moms
who go out to earn a paycheck to lighten that load?
Poverty is not the only wolf hunting the “traditional
family”: Insufficient social safety nets are another. A very well-off family
can have mom at home without worrying too much about something happening
to dad. Presumably they’ve gone to the expense and trouble of making sure
they’re covered by good life insurance and disability insurance, with the added
plus that mom likely has enough education and work experience to re-enter the
workforce if needed. Families in the middle or lower rungs of our class ladder,
however, don’t always have all those backup plans. If dad is an independent
long-haul trucker, maybe he doesn’t have decent health insurance or access to
good long-term disability insurance in case of disaster. Should dad get cancer
and be out of work during treatment, and mom isn’t working and has little kids
at home, it may be really hard for the family to adapt to this crisis.
Preparing for retirement, old age, illness— these and more can be very
difficult in families where only one spouse works. Two spouses in the workforce
not only means more money, it also means more security, and American families
that have a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor usually know they’re
choosing a risky option—even if they think it’s worth it.
To give the anti-feminists their due, I assume in good
faith that most of them want to protect women in “traditional” families. Scott
Yenor, the Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage
Foundation, has advocated for allowing businesses to support “traditional
family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family
wage.” But this doesn’t take into account the broader economic forces that are
shaping women and men’s work in the United States. Anti-feminists often focus
on elite jobs: the increasing number of female lawyers, for example, or women in prestigious
academia. But whatever the impact of more women accessing the Ivory Tower
or sitting on the Supreme Court (which, for the record, I think is good), this
trend is not causing the average working-class man to lose his job. Nor does it
explain why so many blue-collar men struggle to find work that pays well.
Instead, men are coming out the losers as the U.S. economy shifts away from manufacturing and construction
jobs, which are traditionally held by men, into health care jobs, which are
traditionally held by women. Let’s not forget that even when America’s
workforce was overwhelmingly male, we still had the Great Depression. Male jobs
can still be subject to macroeconomic factors regardless of what the ladies are
doing.
Put another way, even if we eliminated all the gender
studies departments in colleges across America tomorrow, this is no help to a
middle-aged man currently working at a brass plant in Ohio that recently announced it was closing
and sending its jobs to Asia. Fewer women in the C-suite will not reverse
globalization, automation, and the other broad economic forces creating
headwinds for male employment. It’s not possible to help families that want to
have a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor without squarely grappling with
the reality of the true cause of downward pressure on male wages. The problem
is not the girlbosses. It’s mostly China and robots.
Indeed, a major gripe I have with anti-feminists is that
they make it harder to achieve policy wins for moms and dads at home. In my own
work advocating for homemakers, I can attest that it is
extremely difficult to convince centrist and left-of-center lawmakers to
support measures supporting stay-at-home parents when they fear these policies
are actually a Trojan horse for trying to kick women back to the kitchen. There
are many practical measures we could take to help these parents, including
encouraging corporations to hire at-home parents who want to return to work,
considering how to reform our Social Security system to better protect homemakers, or
how to reform our 401(k) system to better protect “traditional
families.” All these and more become fraught, though, when the question shifts
away from helping families make the choices that work for them, and instead
becomes: Are we trying to protect stay-at-home moms, or are we trying to force
girlbosses into roles that they don’t want? Even reasonable measures can fail
to gain traction when they are sucked up into a broader culture war.
To be sure, anti-feminists are correct that modern
American society does not respect the work of the home enough. As our society
grapples with declining birth rates, the increasing proportion of elderly in
need of friend and family support, as well as the breakdown in community ties,
it is inevitable that we will need some sort of reckoning over our inability to
value work that does not appear in the GDP. However, trying to force this
reckoning by attacking girlbosses is essentially a poison pill. Setting up a
dichotomy in which women in paid careers are the enemy and women at home are
the heroes will not help.
After all, there is no bright line between the two. Many women in
America move in and out of the workforce depending on family needs; a woman
might take a few years off to care for babies, return to paid work when the
family’s youngest child is in kindergarten, and then leave paid work again once
grandpa needs serious care. Similarly, many moms who have full-time care of
their kids at home also work after their kids are in bed, or on weekends. I
recently talked to a mom who takes care of her kids during the day, but waits
tables at night after her husband comes home from work. This job helps pay for
extras, but it also gives her something to do that isn’t taking care of kids.
We had this conversation, as a matter of fact, because I was sitting at a table
in the restaurant where she worked and she was my waitress. She brought me a
Guinness and some fancy pizza as I worked on an essay while my husband
was putting my kids to bed after I’d spent the day homeschooling the big
kids and taking care of the babies. After we talked about why I was in a bar at
7:30 p.m. with a computer and a stack of books, she talked about why she was
there. Yes, we agreed, even though kids are great, it’s nice to have
other stuff in life.
Can the anti-feminists truly account for women like us?
Maybe we are acceptable to the anti-feminists because we do so much childcare,
but let me be clear: I do less laundry, cook less elaborate dinners, and keep
the house less clean because I write. In terms of being able to reliably find
matching socks and being sure where the new car registration paperwork is, the
family is worse off because I’m writing this after the kids are in bed. I’m
doing it anyway, because I want to. Family life necessarily involves tradeoffs
and compromises, and a wise mother understands flexibility around everyone’s
preferences and needs (including her own) is key to making the work of the home
… work.
***
My most serious problem with the anti-feminists has to do
with the one place they are having a significant impact: They’re making
work and relationships harder for young conservative women. Young liberal
women, to be clear, are too far out of their direct sphere of influence to be
seriously affected; the same is not true of young conservative ladies.
In talking to other moms who have kids at conservative
religious high schools and colleges, I hear the same thing over and over again:
There’s a lot of hostility to “girlbossing” and this is carrying over to young
conservative women who appear too ambitious or too career-oriented. I’ve heard
from one mom whose teenage daughter at a small religious high school is
encountering rumblings of “repeal the 19th” from some of the boys
she goes to school with, and finds it depressing. A recent op-ed in the
Hillsdale Collegian, a newspaper at the famously conservative Hillsdale
College, is titled “Sexism isn’t based or trad.” Its author, a female college
student who attends the Traditional Latin Mass and says she likes wearing
dresses (these are markers of modern conservative young womanhood, for those
not acquainted with this world) says she’s “tired of sexism on this campus” and
she “had never encountered anything like it before coming here.” Among other
problems, the author observes that “I’ve even heard several women seriously
argue that women are intellectually and creatively deficient compared to men.”
It’s a snapshot of anti-feminism in the wild, I guess, having escaped the
internet and entered real life.
Over and over, I have heard from younger women that it is
really hard to date in this environment, or to understand how to situate
themselves with respect to anti-feminist theories. In many ways, it can feel
like anti-feminists—having benefited from the doors opened to them in
terms of achieving prestigious, flexible jobs and a family—are now
working on closing those doors to the next generation. If I were in college
today, I’d probably view many of the anti-feminists as having achieved success
in both work and family life, and then trying to pull up the ladder behind
them.
The anti-feminists’ black-and-white thinking—women vs.
men, female careers are bad and homemakers are not—is deeply unhelpful in this
environment, because it doesn’t help guide the younger generation in what they
most need in order to find a partner: the ability to get along. My husband and
I recently celebrated 22 years since our first date. We met when I was 18 and
are now both in our early 40s. When there is marital discord in the Greco
household, usually it took two to tango. There’s no “winning” in a good
marriage, no easy divide between who is right and who is wrong. There’s just
trying to work things out around all the many inevitable problems, big and
small, that life throws at you, and trying to keep a good sense of humor about
the whole thing. It’s hard to help young people learn this lesson when Andrews,
for example, describes “cohesion” and “empathy” as stereotypically
feminine. Relationships require working hard to understand the other person’s
point of view and buckets of compromise to function well. It’s not “feminine”
to talk through problems with your wife or girlfriend, but too many young men
are being taught the opposite.
Ultimately, the problems anti-feminists identify are
real, but their villain is not. Too bad for us: They’re still capable of making
the problem worse by scaring young people with a bogeyman—or, I guess, a
bogeywoman.
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