American women want to opt out

Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies. 

These women seem to want to leave at least in part because of Donald Trump. Gallup found that this trend began in summer 2016, shortly after Trump became the Republican nominee for president. It continued to climb during the Biden presidency, but there’s a 25-point gap in the desire to leave between those who approve of the country’s leadership and those who don’t. That suggests that getting away from Trump plays at least some role in the appeal of the fantasy of expatriating.

But the desire to leave America can also express itself in ways that sound, at first glance, apolitical. 

A recent BBC article about the trend spoke to a 31-year-old who decided to move from LA to Lisbon in 2021. “There’s not a strong work-life balance in the US,” she said. “I wanted to live somewhere with a different pace, different cultures, and learn a new language.” In Portugal, she says, she feels “more like a whole person again.”

Well, sure: Who hasn’t wanted a better work-life balance than the one the US offers? Who hasn’t wanted more than a minimal social safety net; a capitalist hustle culture; and a guiding belief that everything must be earned, including things like child care and health insurance, which in other countries are considered human rights that the government will take care of for you?

It’s the child care, it seems, that is increasingly the last straw for women — the way it’s becoming both more compulsory and more difficult to do.

In the same article, the BBC quoted a 34-year-old who moved from the US to Uruguay after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “I have children, and I don’t plan on having more, but the increasing governance of women’s bodies terrified me,” she said. She added, “People don’t realise how far behind the US is on maternal care, parental leave, and healthcare, until they leave the country.”

America is a hostile country if you’re having children. Child care is so expensive that it can eat up the salary of at least one parent, which frequently leads to women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Parental leave is rarely mandated: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has made much of her decision to go back to work three days after giving birth. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country, and we have for a long time. And if, for all these reasons and many others, you get pregnant and you find that you’d prefer not to be, it’s become increasingly difficult to act on that choice in a safe and legal way. 

So a person might wonder: Why not simply leave? Go somewhere that doesn’t make you choose between work and children, somewhere you can leave behind both the stresses of capitalism and the pressures of family life. Somewhere you can have kids and also afford to spend time with them.

We often talk about the idea of fleeing America and its feeble social safety net as a liberating, progressive act, as though by leaving the US a person has the chance to become James Baldwin in Paris. But the idea of escaping the work-life balance trap has darker echoes in contemporary American pop culture. When I think of the fantasy of the ex-pat through this lens, it comes to look strikingly similar to the fantasy of the trad wife. 

When your kids are your job, you never have to choose between them

Trad wife influencers have become some of the most discussed figures on social media, hitting the viral sweet spot of content that is both aesthetically soothing and politically inflammatory. 

Trad wives post online about their lives as stay-at-home wives and mothers. Most of the popular ones are thin and conventionally pretty, and they post videos of themselves making their children’s favorite cereal from scratch, wearing full makeup in sun-drenched kitchens. More controversially, many creators who identify as trad wives promote the idea of living according to what they call Biblical principles, submitting to their husbands, and musing over how much better life is when women are out of the workplace. 

Trad wife influencers, like the ex-pat fantasy, started trending up in 2016, when the prototype, Alena Kate Pettitt, published her first book, Ladies Like Us. In 2020, the popularity of these influencers crossed from niche to mainstream, as a population confined to their homes looked for ways to start romanticizing domestic drudgery. 

The political stuff attracts attention, but it’s the aesthetic of the domestic work made beautiful and aspirational that maintains an audience. A 2025 study from King’s College London found that while only 7 percent of female viewers of trad wife videos approved of the idea of men as sole household decision makers, 79 percent were attracted to the “calm, relaxed lifestyle” trad wives appear to maintain — a life where you have enough time in the morning to whip up a scratch-made batch of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. 

Part of the trad wife fantasy is the idea that while you get to spend unlimited time with your children, you are simultaneously pursuing a lucrative career. The most successful of the trad wife influencers can make astonishing amounts of money, enough to pay for those expensive Aga stoves. This means that the trad wife of fantasy is a woman who has escaped the trap of trying to have both family and work in the US, just like the ex-pat of fantasy. But there’s a key difference: For the trad wife, family and work are the same thing. Her family is her work, her art, her aesthetic labor. 

Escaping men in a time of backlash

Much has been written already about the escapism of the romantasy trend, and why it’s grown as a way to deal with the horrors uncovered by Me Too and its long, vicious backlash. Romantasy, as Daniel Yadin wrote for the Drift, allows its presumed-female readers the fantasy of opting out of unpredictable and potentially violent human men and going for fairies or gentle blue aliens instead. 

I have begun to read the fantasy of fleeing the US and the fantasy of the trad wife as versions of the same escapism, translated to motherhood. Both fantasies thwart the trap American capitalism lays for all its women. They are about finding a way to have a job and have a family, and not let either one ruin your life. 

They are also among the most potent and widespread of the fantasies with which women are presented right now. The Christmas movie industrial complex must realize this, which is why the two happy endings possible for the discontented city career girls of the genre are to either move back to their hometowns or to become royalty in small but idyllic European countries. 

It has been nine years now since the publication of the infamous Access Hollywood tape was followed swiftly by the election of Donald Trump. It has been seven years since the outrage over Trump’s election powered the ferocious rage of Me Too. It has been three years since Trump’s Supreme Court appointees led the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away women’s federally mandated legal right to an abortion. It has been two years since Trump was found criminally liable for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, and one year since America went ahead and elected him for a second term anyway. 

American women spent years in furious feminist activity. Women sued state governments and federal governments; they exposed their employers and sued them, too; they told their most private stories of harassment and abuse and discrimination, risking their careers and sometimes outright losing them. 

All this they did —  to, in the end, little apparent result. Now, as the backlash to Me Too continues to play out, the fantasies women are exploring are all about a kind of exhausted resignation — an opting out. 

Why not imagine leaving the workforce? Why not imagine leaving home? There’s no way to win, a woman might think, if we stay as we are. So if the fight is pointless, why not simply walk off the battlefield?