THE ESSAY: Why I Never Want to Hear About Girlbosses or Tradwives Again

They're distracting us from the work that really needs to be done

I am of the firm belief that we would all be better off if none of us wrote or uttered the phrases “tradwife” or “girlboss” ever again. They have served their purpose, as labels of aspiration, mockery, and scorn, political weather vanes, and hot take fodder. But now they’ve brittled, yellowed and soured, and are ready to be dumped into the linguistic phenomenon compost bin.

Was there value in exploring these cultural archetypes? Yes. Some. But we’ve reached a point when discussions on both tradwives and girlbosses tend to be purely reactionary, consuming us with conversations and big ideas about what shouldn’t be when what we really need are conversations about what should be.

There are two fundamental problems with these labels. The first is that they don’t reflect individual or political realities. The second is that they are both about achieving a certain hard-to-reach ideal at a moment when the women’s movement should be turning its gaze in a different direction. Instead of fighting for individual achievement and success, we should be fighting for stability, sustenance and pathways to interdependence for all. With such stability, individual achievement is made possible. But it is not the north star.

I don’t fit in one camp

Let’s start with my personal experience.

Veronica or Betty? Claudia or Kristy? Carrie or Miranda? Girlboss or tradwife? I’ve never been able to easily choose one. Even more, since a very young age, I’ve bristled at these kinds of questions, resenting the pressure to pick a type when I map all over the place. Also, I’ve resented how gendered the need to cram one’s identity into a box is, noticing that men have felt less pressure to distill themselves into simple classifications or archetypes.

I’m neither a girlboss nor a tradwife. Also, I’m both girlboss and tradmom. (I am switching to “tradmom” to make it clear that I am not subservient to my husband. From here on out, this essay will explore the raising up domestic life and care aspects of the tradwife identity, which are more familiar to many women than the notion that husbands should have dominion over their wives.)

I care about my career, work hard on my writing, very much want to be taken seriously by my peers and have relied on a good amount of external childcare throughout most of parenthood. I am also deeply invested in my domestic and family life, and take pride in being what my grandma called a balabusta (Yiddish for capable homemaker/ woman boss…it’s complicated). Being a mom is a central part of my identity, and I find parenting to be personally and socially valuable. If you are reading this, you are probably aware that I wrote a whole book about the power of care in our individual and collective lives.

I think there is tremendous purpose and dignity in care and interdependence overall, and I believe it’s been overlooked and undervalued by both the left and right, religious and secular culture, alike. Also, I am deeply grateful that I have a husband who doesn’t overlook the purpose and dignity of care, and is both supportive of my career and an active caregiver of our kids.

Statistically speaking, you don’t fit in one camp either

Now, onto collective realities.

I bet you, reader, are some mix of girlboss and tradmom yourself. You want to matter in the public sphere and the private sphere, and find worth and meaning in both. And that's whether you are politically conservative or liberal.

According to recent research: “86% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans said they value their role as parents as the most or one of the most important aspects of their identity…77% of Democratic mothers and 80% of Republican mothers report doing more than their spouse or partner when it comes to managing their children’s activities…the same portion of Republican moms—67%—work outside the home as Democratic moms, who totaled 69%.” Left and right, we value being parents, we work outside the home, and do more parenting than our male partners (with varying degrees of resentment and approval, I imagine).

Also, it sounds like nobody wants to be a girlboss anymore—or a boyboss. A new study from Deloitte found that a mere 6% of Gen Z and millennial workers “say their primary career goal is to reach a senior leadership position.” That vision of ambition and the good life seems to have aged as well as skinny jeans.

Time for a feminism focused on stability instead of winning

So what do we do with this knowledge? What does a non-reactionary, post-girlboss and tradwife vision of the future look like? A feminism, whatever that means, that just might catch some wind in these strange times? Anne Helen Petersen recently diagnosed us as being in “The Great Feminist Exhaustion.” I think by throwing away these labels and the broader constructs they reinforce we might gain some momentum.

Both the girlboss and the tradmom are oriented around success. One is in pursuit of professional success, and the other is in pursuit of domestic success while vociferously rejecting the pursuit of professional success: corner-suite and first-class airport lounges vs. making your own ketchup with your five home-schooled kids.

But what if instead of focusing on helping women pursue success, we focused on ensuring women experience stability? What if what wakes us up from this great feminist exhaustion is the fight to ensure that everyone is able to care for their loved ones, with all the emotional and practical support they need, so it is a meaningful experience for all parties? And to ensure that all people who care for others, full-time, part-time, paid and unpaid, experience economic security?

What economic security will look like will vary from women to women and likely change throughout their lives. For some, it will be receiving some kind of universal basic income, and/or being eligible for social security and affordable healthcare, during times of intense caregiving. For others, it may mean getting to work part-time, or do a job-split for some period of time without being penalized in the workplace. For others, it means working full-time in workplaces that understand what it means to be a parent or caregiver and create schedules and a culture that reflects that. For all, it means government and workplace policies, and a broader culture, being equally supportive of dads and male caregivers, and normalizing the fact that men care, too. In my book, I write about how the dad bonus—a spike in income after men become dads—goes away once dads reveal care responsibilities to their employers and demand accommodations and schedules that prevent them from being the ideal worker in greedy jobs. When they do this, they are penalized just like moms, meaning the motherhood penalty is really a care penalty.

Economic security for parents and caregivers also means access to universal paid leave, affordable and reliable housing and healthcare, child- and elder-friendly neighborhoods, and universal, affordable and flexible childcare and eldercare policies.

I’ve seen everyone from working-class feminists, Black feminists, socialist feminists, center-left and center-right, conservative stay-at-home moms, and religious and secular women, fight for some, or all, of the above. Interdependence is not the province of one political, social, cultural or economic affiliation. Instead, it is a lens we can and should all view the world through—and then get out there and create the world in that image.

We need new metaphors

For so long feminism was focused on ceilings. There’s value to that for sure, and I am hardly suggesting we should give up on making sure women have more political and economic power. It’s amazing to see how Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott do philanthropy differently than their ex-husbands, both focusing on giving to organizations that are fighting for better care for all, including care for the caregivers. But it’s also a bit depressing that they both inherited these fortunes from their husbands, and that overall men still hold a tremendous amount of power through their wealth. Also, if and when —hopefully when—we have a female president of the United States I will sob with joy for hours and hours. All this said, I think the time is right to take a break from the ceiling metaphor.

Instead, we should focus on building “floors” and breaking “doors”.

Floors represent everything I wrote above. Floors create stability for all, and would make it so no one has to choose between caring for their loved ones and economic security. Both of my grandmas spent their lives devoted to care, and experienced deep meaning from it. And both of my grandmas, whose husbands died on the younger side, were in poverty at the end of their lives because of this and had to be supported by their adult children. If they had a solid floor to stand on, and caring for their kids and grandkids counted toward social security or some other retirement plan, this wouldn’t have been the case. Perhaps they would have liked to work part or full-time while parenting school-aged children, but the culture didn’t approve of it.

When everyone has a stable floor to stand on, it makes it possible for them to imagine and pursue other dreams. It makes the climb up the ladder possible. It makes, eventually, breaking glass ceilings possible.

Doors do something different. They are the invisible barriers that make us think that what happens in our homes and what happens outside our homes are separate. They make us think that the lessons we learn from caring for our loved ones don’t belong in our professional lives, or that one must choose between being a mom and artist, or that writing about motherhood or caregiving is a niche subject, or that the stresses of care we experience in our homes are exclusively a private problem. Doors are an artifact of the Victorian era when, for the first time in modern history, the home became a distinctly private space, separate from the public sphere—largely in our cultural imaginations, but also in reality.

But my life in and out of the home, my life as a mom and everything else I do, are intimately bound up. There is true freedom in recognizing this.

Closed doors have us believing that our best and greatest hope of being working parents is “balance” rather than integration. Closed doors stop us from seeing how much we can do together to turn dependency into a strength instead of a liability. Closed doors make us think that a menu of identity options that consists of girlbosses and tradwives/tradmoms is worth taking seriously.

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