Gen Z Women Want a Gaggle of Kids and Sourdough Bread
We sometimes like to think that every social movement produces an equal and opposite reaction. For every stark minimalist, there’s a gregarious maximalist; for every Marx-worshiping socialist, there’s an Ayn Rand–infatuated capitalist; and for every scowling atheist, there’s an overeager Bible-thumping Christian.
It would be a neat and tidy rule if it were true, but it isn’t. That’s nowhere more clearly spelled out than when considering the Gen Z women delivering a verdict on radical, careerist feminism.
The results of a recent EduBirdie study confirm something that’s been developing quietly in the background. Not only are more online voices advocating that women find a way to stay home and raise kids — albeit not always with women’s best interests in mind — but a plurality (47 percent) of Gen Z women would rather pursue some version of the “tradwife” life.
That datapoint isn’t totally coming out of left field. Organizations dedicated to romanticizing life in a C-suite for women are already dealing with the consequences of that shift. Late last month, LeanIn lost about a quarter of its staff (some by choice, some via layoffs) as its boss, Sheryl Sandberg, announced the nonprofit would be focusing on attacking the “manosphere” and “tradwife” movement. This comes as the organization’s 2025 report found that, for the first time, women are “less interested in advancing” in the workplace than their male counterparts. (READ MORE: Declawing Feminism)
It would be somewhat unfair to Sandberg to say that she’d rather women be stuck in cubicles from 9 to 5 while their kids are kept entertained by strangers at daycare — although she has certainly made her career glamorizing that lifestyle. In a recent interview with People, she claimed that the tradwife message is that “in order to be a good wife or a good mother, you need to do it full time … If you have the resources and you want to be a tradwife, that’s great … That’s for you to decide.”
Successful online tradwives are hardly just your run-of-the-mill stay-at-home moms (clearly, most of them are making money posting online, and some of them are very open about it). That said, their glamorization of traditional gender roles is hardly a problem. As Madeline Osborn pointed out at the Federalist, “Romanticizing what the heart seeks is natural and good, whereas the decades-long march to romanticize separating women from their babies has done far greater damage to our society.”
Taken together, these kinds of trends don’t simply indicate some petulant cultural mood swing. The era of the girlboss is over (this despite the fact that our economy is hardly ideal for moms who want to stay home with their kids). This isn’t some swinging social pendulum. Human beings, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, rarely behave like animated hunks of lead, and Gen Z women are evaluating the feminist lies shoved down their throats in school and are finding them wanting.
Individuals, fortunately, can learn. Because individuals make up a society, society also learns — albeit at a much slower rate. This, I think, is what has happened on the feminist front. Mercifully, we’ve noticed that women are rather unhappy; more so, in fact, than they’ve ever been. This is despite the fact that they’ve been doing the things organizations like LeanIn have assured them will make them happier. They’re more engaged in the workforce than ever before, but they keep telling pollsters they would really rather stay home with their kids.
There’s a clear gap here between the life so many women are living and the life they keep saying they want. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, statistically speaking, women have been more unhappy than men since 1990. They’ve been telling pollsters they’re not interested in working in a cubicle since well before 2016, when Gallup noted it.
The popularity of the tradwife on social media is just the latest sign that feminism is gradually being rejected — or at least tempered — by the impulses natural to female biology.
Feminism isn’t being rejected because it was difficult to try, but rather because it was tried and, for most women, failed to deliver anything but an abysmal and unsatisfying way of life.
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