Former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg made a name for herself pursuing performative initiatives in the name of feminism, like “banning” the word “bossy” to describe girls and encouraging corporate women to “lean in” by hiring more nannies and housekeepers. Now, her nonprofit, Lean In, has announced it is reducing staff and focusing efforts on what the organization sees as real threats: the “manosphere” and the “tradwife” movement.
In a recent post on LinkedIn, Sandberg lamented the “romanticized vision of the tradwife,” claiming that it induces guilt in working women:
This gives working women one more burden to carry on top of everything they already manage: guilt. Arianna Huffington says it best: “As a working mother, it feels like they take the baby out and put the guilt in.” As I told People magazine last week, 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.
As someone who has dedicated her career to romanticizing and glamorizing women spending 9 to 5 in cubicles under fluorescent lights, it’s no surprise Sandberg is a bit touchy on the growing trend of romanticizing homemaking — the ultimate expression of genuine freedom. In fact, we should be doing more to glamorize the housewife life, and Sandberg’s campaign against it is itself anti-woman.
Romanticizing the career woman has always been acceptable, but now that women are waking up to the fact that pant suits and high heels aren’t quite as glamorous as Carrie Bradshaw and Rachel Green made them out to be, the feminists are lashing out. They’re scrambling to respond to the popularity of Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who just gave birth to her ninth child, or South African influencer Nara Smith, who triggers working moms with her Lunchables made from scratch. Both have millions of followers.
Feminists like Sandberg argue that nice depictions of homeschooling children, beautiful gardens, and sourdough bread are unrealistic, “privileged,” curated content for social media, and only “reviv[e] the professional guilt women spent decades dismantling,” especially mothers. Of course, these types of images are not realistic, but they’re also not “bad” for women. 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.
Anti-feminist Leila Marie Lawler has written about this more at length, arguing that the illustrations might be idealized, “but they are not bolstering any ideology designed to separate people and pit them against each other.”
“I say it’s normal and good to depict in a loving way what the heart seeks — if the prize is fitting with our nature, created by God, and fitting with what our ultimate end really is,” Lawler writes.
The idea that a woman has a natural desire to be in the home is, of course, offensive to Sandberg and her ilk, but they attempt to mask this by claiming they are simply arguing for women to have a “choice.” The irony is, we now know that is also a lie. Now that more women are making that choice and leaning out of the corporate life, Sandberg is attacking women for the wrong “choice.”
Lean In staffers could be focusing their efforts to help the corporate girl bosses who have chosen to work outside the home by advocating for more maternity leave or more flexible hours and work-from-home policies, but that’s not what they’re doing. Instead, they’re choosing to attack women and families for choosing a different path. The fact that Sandberg is focusing what’s left of Lean In’s shrinking staff on trying to guilt women back into the office, rather than fighting for what working moms actually need, tells you everything about whose interests this movement has always served.
It was never about women’s freedom. It was about one very specific vision of womanhood — and the tradwife, in all her romanticized, sourdough-baking, baby-wearing glory, exposes that lie simply by existing.
