Conservative Women Will Be at the Heart of America’s Family Revival | The American Spectator

It was a heartwarming sight: the vice president of the United States disembarking from Air Force Two, holding his pajama-clad, cape-wearing little daughter with his young sons in tow. The scene also conveyed some important lessons about family. For one, it offered a glimpse of Vance’s personal determination to keep family life strong even amidst the pressures of the vice presidency. The image of Vance’s daughter resting her head on his shoulder communicated something else vital to family life: No matter their status or power (or lack thereof), parents are irreplaceable in the hearts of their children.

The Vance family is not an outlier. Role models and family-friendly rhetoric abound in the conservative world. Young conservative women like Riley Gaines and Karoline Leavitt exude happiness about being mothers. Cabinet secretaries Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy routinely include their children at official events. The late Charlie Kirk extolled the importance of marriage and family, exhorting men to embrace the sacrifices of family life to experience its joys, and he was joined in doing so by conservative activists like Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles.

These are small but encouraging signs that the Trump administration intends to get “family” right, both in policy proposals and personal practice. The conservative transformation of America requires both — good policy and good families. And indeed, the conservative “pro-family” agenda is taking shape, energized by new ideas, new coalitions, and a focus on working families. It upholds the sacredness of the family and recognizes the importance of strong families to a healthy civilization.

“The purpose of family policy,” according to Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Patrick Brown, is “to strengthen the fundamental unit of social life, the locus of childbearing and rearing, not simply to help adults find meaning and support amid difficult patches.” Practically speaking, good policies should support the integrity of the family, “prioritize expanding choices for parents, and stress the importance of making it more achievable to have and raise children.”

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On that score, hopeful signs include new discussions about government’s role in supporting families, exciting opportunities afforded by emerging technologies, the popularity of the parental rights and school choice movements, innovations that strengthen safety nets for needy families, and Trump policies designed to maximize economic prosperity. 

But more is required, for both the big picture and the achievement of concrete solutions.

First, the big picture: How do we create a society that supports families? On economics, I will leave the details to others, except to reiterate the obvious: Wages, healthcare, housing, and tax policy must support and incentivize strong family life. For families, the big picture, however, is more than economics — it includes culture. One of the GOP’s past sins was to treat “culture war” issues as unseemly, unsophisticated distractions from core economic concerns. The subsequent leftist capture of our cultural institutions, accomplished over decades, has made family life incalculably more difficult. The successive onslaughts of the sexual revolution, divorce, abortion, pornography, addiction, gender ideology, and social media have shredded the traditional fabric of family life. This in turn has engendered new problems that threaten America’s economic and political stability, including the demographic decline. 

A pro-family agenda, then, must care about and shape the culture, turning it toward the good, the true, and the beautiful — for the sake of families, and for America. This is one area where conservative women’s voices are essential. In 1988, Pope St. John Paul II emphasized in Christifideles laici that “two great tasks” have been “entrusted” to women in particular: witnessing to the dignity of marriage and motherhood and “assuring the moral dimension of culture … namely of a culture worthy of the person.”  The moral distortions, degradation, and dehumanization rampant in our culture today, however, suggest that the dominant voices shaping the culture have been progressives, not conservative women (or even conservative men). 

It is refreshing, then, to see an unapologetic pro-family attitude in Washington today on issues like gender ideology and the problem of technology. It is discouraging, however, to see Republicans scatter and hide on issues like mail-order access to the abortion pill, or to see them jump on the IVF and marijuana bandwagons, with little regard for human dignity and the impact on families.

In some instances, the administration has committed an “own goal,” proposing policies that contradict its pro-family stance. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump ordered federal workers to return to full-time, in-person work. Presented as a win for government efficiency, the blanket dictate is an ’80s throwback, a return to pre-internet, inflexible work arrangements that are particularly unfriendly to families. Unnecessary in-office requirements mean a return to brutal daily commutes, which steal time better spent with families. Workplace flexibility, including remote work and hybrid options, benefits everyone by supporting family life and producing highly engaged and happy employees. Evaluating job performance based on quality of actual work (merit!) instead of hours spent in the office is a pro-family policy. Where were the pro-family voices in the administration on this issue? Vetting policies in light of family impact — something the underutilized Family Policymaking Assessment was designed to do — would help avoid these missteps.

This brings us to the second point: Structuring one’s own family life, consistent with conservative principles. 

Here too, conservative women have an important role to play in shaping the solutions on offer. A woman’s “experience of motherhood,” writes Pope St. John Paul, equips her with a “specific sensitivity towards the human person” and wisdom in recognizing “the individual’s true welfare.” The future of the family depends on women’s commitment to nurturing the children entrusted to them and shaping the culture that surrounds them. 

A recent Wall Street Journal titled “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All’” completely missed the mark. It purported to celebrate “mission driven” conservative women in media and politics but ultimately shoehorned them into the one-size-fits-all feminist paradigm of “having it all.” The Wall Street Journal’s framing maps onto progressive narratives that center the individual (regardless of commitments to family) and equate happiness with ambition, success, wealth, and other material goals. The needs of children barely registered.  

The Wall Street Journal article drew serious backlash from conservatives who rightly reject the “having it all” paradigm. Over at the Institute for Family Studies, scholar Brad Wilcox crunched the data and found: “Across America, most married mothers of young children do not aspire to be this sort of Supermom — instead, they are hoping to be super mothers by not working at all outside the home or by working part time.”

Parents (and employers) must face facts: Children have objective needs, not only physical, but also emotional and intellectual, that must be met. Writer Maria Baer decried the Journal’s lopsided perspective for ignoring “the most vulnerable stakeholders” in a woman’s quest to “have it all” — her children. As counselor Erica Komisar explains, “In the first three years of life, children require consistent, predictable, and emotionally attuned care, usually from a parent — most often the mother.” Nature privileges mothers in fostering strong attachments and making them attuned to their babies through pregnancy, birth, and nursing. This is a beautiful fact of life. When women embrace this, it’s not surprising for their career trajectories to look different from those of men or women without children.

“Real life is seasonal,” notes Komisar. “Choosing to focus on your child’s early development does not mean you’ve ‘given up’ your career forever. It means you’ve made a strategic investment that will pay off in your child’s mental health, your relationship with them, and your long-term satisfaction as a mother and professional.” Komisar concludes, “[W]omen can have it all — just not all at once.” She urges men to “step up” and be “supportive partners.”

Choosing how best to care for children requires prudent and prayerful discernment by mothers and fathers together in light of family goals, individual capacities, and concrete situations. They must ask the right questions: What has God called us to do? And what does our family need?

And then they must continually reassess how they balance work and family, even when “work” is mission-driven at a high level. My parents were both strongly committed to ending the injustice of abortion. Besides raising ten children, my mother helped found a local pregnancy resource center, ran a nonprofit, and volunteered at our church and schools. My father, a professor of constitutional law, traveled extensively, defending the unborn in courtrooms, Congress, and conferences. Many of their closest friends were similarly generous and committed to ending abortion. But my parents regularly recalibrated their commitments to the pro-life cause as our family’s needs changed. They recognized the harm to family life when children become “orphans for the cause” (figuratively speaking), when their needs are eclipsed by parents’ devotion to important causes or mission-driven careers.

A few years back, Arthur Brooks penned a thoughtful piece on ambition, fulfillment, and the phases of life to explain the timing of his resignation as president of the American Enterprise Institute. The peak of professional life and public influence, he observed, arrives and departs sooner than most people anticipate. The wise person who lives a life of purpose and invests in relationships will enjoy lifelong happiness. “Time is limited,” he wrote, “and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. … [T]he costs of catering to selfishness are ruinous…. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness — not just in later years but across the life span — is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one’s relationships.”  

Put differently, never forget that the only place we are irreplaceable is in our relationships. 

The conservative transformation of America, including getting “family and work” right, may well depend on asking the right questions.

Mary Rice Hasson is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and director of the Person and Identity Project.

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