Tradwife content is everywhere right now.
Tradwives (shorthand for “traditional wife”) showcase lives centered around homemaking on social media while their husbands serve as the primary breadwinner. They raise their children without any outside help, they cook, they clean and importantly, they romanticize their role in the home—and only in the home. Often, they go as far as to don outfits from the 1950s post-WWII era.
On the other side of the coin is the “girlboss,” a term that exploded in the mid 2010s, promoting the hustle of ambitious women working toward their career goals. Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” became its manifesto, arguing that women weren’t rising fast enough because they weren’t advocating for themselves at work loudly enough. This oversimplification blamed women’s lack of representation in leadership roles on individual women themselves. It downplayed any systemic, political or economic barriers to women’s advancement in the workplace.
The tradwife and the girlboss are often cast as opposites: If the tradwife is imagined as a fully present mother devoted to the home, the girlboss is presumed to be an absent one. By that logic, the more time she spends building a career, the less time she must have for raising her children.
Each of these tropes carries vastly different implications for how women approach motherhood and paid work. And between them are endless debates about whether women should lean into their careers or return to traditional domesticity. The result: Motherhood has become a political battleground.
In the 2024 election, Trump supporters were far more likely than those voting for Biden to say that society should prioritize marriage and children. And the trend is accelerating—particularly among conservative women. In 2022, a study found that 28% of conservative women believed their gender should return to its traditional role. Two years later, the number was up to 37%.
But lawyer, activist and Founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First Reshma Saujani’s new documentary No Country for Mothers argues that Americans are fighting the wrong battle. I spoke with Saujani, who said that instead of asking whether women should become tradwives or girlbosses, we should be questioning why the U.S. remains one of the only wealthy countries that offers so little support regardless of which path women choose.
“Moms are not broken, the system is,” Saujani said. “And we’ve been too divided to fix it.”
The False Choice: Tradwife vs. Girlboss
The binary itself is misleading.
Both the “tradwife” and “girlboss” identities have become brands—yet neither represents the complexity of modern families. Most women move in and out of both caregiving and paid work throughout their lives. In fact, women make up almost half of the workforce while also taking on the majority of caregiving.
Even many tradwife creators monetize their content, illustrating that these identities are often more complex than they appear. They earn money through their posts just as the 73.9% of mothers who participate in the workforce do through their jobs.
Taking on caregiving and full-time work outside of the home is not always by choice. Most households can’t survive on one income. In families with children, two-thirds now feature two parents working outside of the home.
And the cost of raising a child from birth to adulthood—not including higher education—has exceeded $300,000 and counting, perhaps contributing to the U.S. birth rate reaching a record low. People are literally getting priced out of parenthood.
I spoke to economist Dr. Kathryn Anne Edwards, who was featured in the documentary. Edwards said that free high-quality childcare would allow families to work and free up budgets for other childcare costs. But that’s not the reality of the United States right now.
“The economic cost of selling the care of children in a private market is that families can be priced out of it, and by extension work, or have to pay to work,” Edwards said.
The tradwife versus girlboss debate assumes women have a choice. But the data suggests most women aren’t choosing—they’re managing.
Why Culture Wars Are Politically Useful
If the debate isn’t valid, why does it dominate public conversation?
Focusing the conversation on tradwife versus girlboss serves a political purpose, as the cultural symbolism often takes center stage. Instead of focusing on why families are having trouble keeping up with the cost of living, policymakers can shift the blame to whether women work outside of the home. The result is that economic questions receive far less attention.
“If society just wanted women to stay home, we’d have welfare benefits for all children,” Edwards said. “If society just wanted women to work, we'd have paid family leave and free child care. We have neither. We should have both. ”
During election years, the conversation has focused on family values and gender roles—while childcare costs, paid leave and workplace flexibility go unaddressed.
The Long History of Family Policy Failure
We almost had a system that might have lessened the pressure on working women and families.
In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a national network of federally funded childcare centers. Despite bipartisan support, President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, saying the legislation would move the country toward “communal approaches to child-rearing.”
This veto reshaped the trajectory of American family policy—and the country has never revisited childcare at that scale.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan significantly reduced funding for many social service programs, including childcare and related family programs, reinforcing a smaller federal role in supporting families.
The situation we’re in today, with daycare and preschool costing families thousands of dollars per year, was not inevitable. It reflects political choices made over decades that have now compounded into a childcare crisis.
According to Saujani, “This film is about building the mothers’ movement that can finally win childcare. I want to pass paid family leave—not as a favor to moms, but as a basic economic necessity. These are policy failures, not personal ones. It’s not your fault childcare costs more than your paycheck. It's not your fault you have to go back to work two weeks after giving birth.”
Saujani pointed to New Mexico, which passed the nation’s first universal childcare law in history, and New York, which invested $2.2 billion in childcare. Now, she says, it’s up to Congress to catch up.
Why Economics Doesn’t Care Whether You’re a Tradwife
Economics asks questions like: Can families afford children? Can parents—especially mothers—remain in the workforce? What happens when childcare costs exceed wages? What are the long-term earnings penalties of motherhood?
In short, motherhood isn’t simply a personal lifestyle decision. It’s an economic issue. And the lens of economics makes the real question clear. It’s not which identity women should adopt, but whether the system supports them either way.
This support can take many forms: affordable childcare, paid family leave, child tax credits, predictable work schedules, workplace flexibility, wage growth and maternal healthcare.
“Many women want to stay home but need to earn money,” Edwards said. “Many women want to work but can’t afford or find care. Economics identifies the cost to those constraints, and they are significant, not just in terms of the overall economy but the failure of the economy to enable the lives that people want.”
There Is No Winning a Culture War
The tradwife-versus-girlboss debate assumes women have a choice. The bigger question is whether public policy gives families the ability to make one.
“The way the culture war is set up is as if we need to decide which mothers we like and then build policy and investments around them,” Edwards said. “That’s the wrong order. We need to build policy and investments that support fami