Sheryl Sandberg Pivots From Fighting Corporate America to Fighting Stay-At-Home-Moms
For decades, liberal elite GirlBoss Feminism pushed professional success as essential to self-fulfillment for women. The #tradwife movement is a rejection of that—so it must be defeated, says Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame is moving on from pushing women to climb that corporate ladder. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Sandberg is now pivoting from pushing women to fight for more money and power in corporate America to fighting against women who choose to stay home and not work. The new object of her efforts and financing is the tradwife movement: content creators who glamorize things like housework, child-rearing, and being traditional wives to working husbands. Sandberg’s nonprofit has shed a quarter of its staff “as the founder focuses the feminist organization on pushing back against the ‘tradwife’ and manosphere movements that prioritize women’s roles as housewives.”
In a post on LinkedIn, Sandberg explained her thinking: “The problem with the romanticized vision of the tradwife is that it signals to women that to be a good wife, partner, or mother, you have to do it full-time,” wrote Sandberg. “This gives working women one more burden to carry on top of everything they already manage: guilt.” As she explained to People Magazine, “I’m worried that the glamorization of the tradwife trend risks putting that guilt back into women—guilt that many of us have worked long and hard to shed.”
What's so funny about this is that the tradwife movement is not actually the product of the manosphere. It’s a women-led rejection of the guilt that very wealthy liberal women like Sheryl Sandberg inflicted on stay at home moms for decades for not working, or for failing to rise high enough at work. For decades, liberal elite Girlboss feminism pushed professional success as essential to self-fulfillment for women, implying that women who worked part time or (Heaven forbid!) chose to be stay at home moms were somehow less than.
Now that a group of women have found glamor and satisfaction in doing just that, Sandberg is spending millions to defeat them.
It’s true that the tradwife content creators are often very wealthy themselves, glamorizing labor that for poor and working class women is a huge slog.
But so what? It’s nice to have a glamorized portrayal of a job that’s mostly very unglamorous labor. Just ask any journalist or lawyer or doctor. Why shouldn’t moms get the same treatment?
Sandberg writes on LinkedIn, “Women already hear versions of this message everywhere. A woman who applies to medical school or pursues a demanding career is still met with, ‘Are you sure you want to do that—don’t you want kids one day?’”
Really?
The majority of medical school students now are women—for the seventh year straight! Apparently, whatever mythic character is saying this to women is having zero impact.
Truly, when is the last time you heard a woman shamed for having a career? But I bet we can all name women who have been shamed for not having one.
We live in a culture that is firmly on the side of women. So why is it a problem if a woman—or a man, for that matter!—want children raised by a stay at home mom?
Sandberg writes that “When both husbands and wives earn salaries, divorce rates reduce by half.” But that’s because the elites are much less likely to get divorced than poorer Americans—not because women who work are inherently happier, more empowered, and more fulfilled.
Sheryl Sandberg’s GirlBoss feminism is defined by this kind of anachronistic thinking, pretending the women of today face the same kinds of hurdles of yesteryear, so that unbelievably wealthy women can cosplay as heroic while themselves continuing to shame the women who made the choices they didn’t.
“Here’s what I hope women hear in this moment: Build a career, raise a family, do one, do both, do something entirely different—it is your choice,” writes Sandberg. “Whatever path you choose, pursue it with your head held high—not weighed down by outdated expectations or myths about what women can or should do.”
But Sandberg herself is unable to accept that some women might choose to be homemakers independent of “outdated expectations or myths about what women can or should do.” The subtext here is text: Pick what I picked or you’re a pawn of the manosphere!
We should always want more choices for everyone in a free society. But it’s important to point out: Only one side here is throwing millions of dollars at defeating the other side.
Absolutely love this.
There is a huge judgement on women choosing to stay at home and prioritise their families, it’s great to see some women making this appear aspirational and meaningful to them.
I worked evenings and weekends because I wanted to look after my children myself. It made no sense to me to work to pay another woman to look after my children.
Funny how childcare is only an important job when someone is being paid to do it for someone else, but had no value or importance otherwise? Or the idea that it doesn’t matter how much time you spend actually looking after your own children?
These “Girlboss feminists!” as you call them (a good sobriquet to coin btw) think it safe to assume they are not God-centered as they’re constantly trying to fill a void in themselves to keep “the revolution” - of the flavor-of-the-moment - going. Or is it simply a desperate attempt to stay relevant in their twilight years? Seems they’re perpetually “redefining” to up end society.
Sad. Hope they like their cats.