American fertility rates are falling and some right-wingers know who to blame: the much-derided “girlboss.”
Katie Miller, a podcast host and the wife of top Trump staffer Stephen Miller, warned her followers that “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” saying that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies—not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Emma Waters, author and policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, posted that “Girlboss feminism has a body count—in birth rates.” At First Things, Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum argued that the rise of the professional woman is the result of taxpayer subsidies and policies that discriminate against men. Get rid of those “unjust incentives and penalties,” she suggests, and more women will pursue “traditional family life.”
These critiques of professional women are part of a broader shift in attitudes about how young women choose to live. The age of millennial feminism, which emphasized work as the core of one’s identity, was dominant from about 2008 to 2020. But that era is coming to a close with few defenders. Take the reaction to a new memoir by the writer Lindy West, a leading light in the movement whose recent defense of polyamory was greeted by a near-universal shrug of disinterest, even disapproval. Many women are now searching for a better balance of work and home life—some satisfying middle ground between the sourdough-baking trad lifestyle and the 60-hour-a-week grindset mentality.
