The greatest trick the patriarchy ever pulled

What fresh bullshit are women being sold today?

Is there a gender issue you’d like me to write about? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments!

Phyllis Schlafly, proto-influencer

Last week, The New York Times published a story that stopped me in my tracks because it was unbelievable, even for these bleak times. It was titled “‘Less Burnout, More Babies’: How Conservatives Are Winning Young Women” and described a large “women’s event” in Texas hosted by Turning Point USA, an organization led by Trump acolyte Charlie Kirk. The pitch to young women was pretty standard pro-natalist propaganda, only wrapped in faux-concern for women’s mental and physical health. Former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch told attendees that “you cannot have it all - at the same time. Something will suffer,” a claim already made by plenty of feminists warning of the perils of the second shift. The solution: drop out of the workforce, sit home and procreate. The event’s headliner put it thus: “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (also, “less Prozac, more protein,” which, what?)

The “less burnout, more babies” part made me chuckle: what a ridiculous sales pitch. Then I got sad thinking about the young women buying this putrid nonsense, who will one day find themselves completely burnt out on raising kids without a social safety net while trying to believe they made the better bargain. Anyone who has ever raised a baby knows that it is often grueling. What got me was the interrupted sleep, an exquisite form of torture. Even during the day, the world was gray and foggy. I would have done almost anything, sold any state secrets (if I had any) for one uninterrupted night. Raising more than one child? That’s half the sleep and double the fun! Unless you have help, and lots of it, burnout is almost guaranteed.

That is not just woke propaganda. Researchers have been studying parental burnout for a while. Burnout is higher in societies with norms of intensive mothering and stark individualism, like the US. It is particularly bad for poor mothers. Some remedies that actually work include paid parental leave and sick leave, affordable childcare, workplace flexibility, and an equal division of domestic labor. In other words, there are systemic, structural and cultural fixes for parental burnout (I wrote about them here). Giving up one’s financial independence - not to mention the intellectual challenges of a job, a sense of achievement, wearing actual pants and hanging out with people who can wipe their own butts - is not one of them.

And yet, there is something tantalizing about the idea. Dana Loesch is right: you can’t do everything, all the time, like being the default parent while also running on the treadmill of capitalism. So just let go. Give in. Stay home, get treated like a princess, live the soft girl life, make paper from scratch in billowy dresses. You’ll discover that daily life isn’t Instagram-ready only after you’ve already given up your power. The greatest trick the patriarchy ever pulled was convincing women that having choices was the problem.

Before Dana Loesch and Charlie Kirk, women’s fatigue was weaponized by Phyllis Schlafly, a 1970s attorney, aspiring politician, and antifeminist crusader. Like Loesch, Schlafly was a career woman preaching the stay-at-home gospel; like today’s influencers, she presented women’s rights as bad for women. Speaking of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed equality of rights regardless of sex, she said, “Since the women are the ones who bear the babies and there's nothing we can do about that, our laws and customs then make it the financial obligation of the husband to provide the support. It is his obligation and his sole obligation. And this is exactly and precisely what we will lose if the Equal Rights Amendment is passed.” She asked, “Why should we lower ourselves to ‘equal rights’ when we already have the status of special privilege?” She was instrumental in defeating the ERA, and women got to keep their special privilege and the discrimination that came with it.

Before Schlafly, early-20th-century anti-suffragist women framed their fight as preserving “True Womanhood.” As researcher Amélie Ribieras wrote, both Schlafly and anti-suffragists were motivated by “gendered class interest:” being middle-upper class women married to prominent men gave them leadership positions in their communities, and they fought to maintain that status quo. “The antifeminist fight led by Phyllis Schlafly (consisted), first and foremost, in preserving the socioeconomic and cultural influence they already enjoyed,” wrote Ribieras. Gender researchers have another name for this: a “patriarchal bargain:” the concessions women make to patriarchy to stay close to power. This particular patriarchal bargain only works for some. Preserving “traditional womanhood” may serve as a means for influencers trying to capitalize on this political moment; it may also work for women who genuinely want to be stay-at-home moms and can afford it. But, especially considering the dearth of working-class provider jobs for men, it’s going to suck for many others. Selling it to young women as a salve for burnout is false advertising. I can’t believe we have to argue this again, but such is the deja vu of our MAGA age.