Let’s say you’re a particularly driven girl. You grew up thinking you’d do the best of everything, find the best of everything, be the best of everything. You have setbacks here and there—even some glorious failures—but overall, you find a way to come out on top in most situations.
Ambition can be directed at any number of goals, but I think it’s safe to say that there are some personalities that are simply driven, who delight in running full speed at whatever they set in front of themselves. These driven types learn the rules of the game quickly, and they run at the goal faster than most people, with fewer mistakes. For the ambitious woman, certain things— like career, financial goals, or health and physique aspirations—go along nicely with innate drive.
When I was young, motherhood and domestic efforts were presented as the exclusive preserve of the unambitious female: the relaxed, maybe kinda dumb, passive girl. Ambitious young women, after all, were meant to leave home and pursue some career that was worthy of the energy and sheer drive they had in themselves. I remember my own mom, who worked full-time my entire childhood, saying wistfully about one of my friends’ moms, “Well, she stays at home. Of course she has time to straighten the house and keep her kids’ rooms orderly.”
I remember this concept fascinating me. There were moms who just cleaned their kids’ rooms for them, and kept the house nice and kind of stayed in the house making life easier on everyone else? I aspired to be the kid or spouse of a stay-at-home parent, but I couldn’t figure out why anyone but a really unambitious person would sign up for that role. All of my cultural and entertainment heroes forbade it.
The movies and television shows of my youth portrayed the spirited, ambitious woman going one way—toward career and adventure—and the calm, sweet, unassuming girls going another, into a life of service and, presumably, boredom.
But, slowly, culture began to turn. There were a lot of divorces, for one thing. There were a lot of unhappy kids and broken families. The thing about ambition is that it accustoms you to thinking you should be the best at everything, all the time. You start to hold yourself to impossible standards in every aspect of your life. So while a rational observer might ascertain that “having it all” simply isn’t possible, the young go-getter doesn’t understand this. For most of her life, she’s been the exception. She can excel in sports and honors classes and get into the kind of college most kids can’t. Why can’t she have a happy family life and a successful, demanding career, too?
Over time, the cultural and real-life examples of exceptional women with unhappy children and broken homes continued to pile up. Art, culture, and entertainment started to present female ambition as a less-sure path to all the things. American culture shifted and began to present a “having it all, just not all at once” concept as a kind of go-getter consolation prize. Maybe one pretty big thing in particular—a happy, successful family—was less attainable for the boss babe. But she could segment her life into distinct “career” and “family” eras and have it all, eventually. Just not all at once.
That “just not all at once” qualifier speaks volumes.
Today, in our cultural imagination, the adventurous or ambitious woman is barren, or perhaps has children as an afterthought to an abundant professional life. We can’t quite figure out—on the screen or in real life—how an admirably badass woman could raise happy, well-adjusted children while maintaining a stable, loving marriage. We admire ambitious women, and we like the type of woman who can manage children and a home competently. But we can’t seem to picture these two things going together.
Just try to name one woman, one public persona, known to be at the top of her game professionally, who has children (and a husband!) who enjoy the kind of secure, stable and loving home life that most of us find admirable. It’s difficult to do. Mrs. Incredible—formerly Elastigirl—might fit the bill. Then again, the 2004 animated film The Incredibles makes it clear that both formerly incredible parents had to give up their professional careers—and let their superhero skills and awesomeness atrophy—in order to have a happy family of their own.
In 2025, a generation after “just not all at once,” ascended, popular culture now offers the ambitious girl a brand new alternative to the boss babe track: reject your ambition, reject the path to career success, and focus on marriage and having all the things that really matter.
What Ambitious Women Want
Things have gotten more extreme in the post-COVID era. The cultural imagination has bifurcated, roughly along political lines, into two different pictures of what an ambitious woman should want.
The first option is a career professional, respected by men and women in her field, who got there on her own steam. This woman’s professional success is not the product of nepotism, nor has it come to her through an advantageous marriage. Taylor Swift, AOC, and Serena Williams fit into this category, but probably not Hillary Clinton, Greta Gerwig, or Lena Dunham. The career women who fit this profile have children towards the end of their fertility window, if they have them at all, after their careers are established. They “have it all, just not all at once.” Their marriages are capstone marriages, representing the heights to which they have climbed.
The second option is the ubiquitous tradwife, the support nexus standing at the center of a successful, beautiful, and admirable family. The tradwife rejects “having it all” in favor of having all the things that really matter. We have fewer movies and TV shows about this woman, for obvious political reasons, but the Right and the digital-age influencer culture have produced some obvious examples. The Financial Times‘s recent inquiry as to whether a big family of five or more children is “the ultimate status symbol” with a picture of stay-at-home (but also wildly successful professional businesswoman) Hanna Neeleman of Ballerina Farm is exhibit A of this second life path.
Now, influencer “tradwives” modeling an at-home lifestyle—often homeschooling children or running a farm but always baking—are not far from the professional option highlighted above. As many before me have pointed out, they are professional women who have successfully marketed themselves. These women “have it all,” full stop, even as they minister unto their “what really matters” clientele.
Tradwife influencers represent a second, non-corporate-career lifestyle for ambitious women to aspire to. This example did not exist in my childhood. It is totally and thoroughly new, and it represents a kind of lynchpin of current Rightwing cultural commentary. It is a beacon to young women who are ambitious enough to chase the “best” life possible, but who are understandably wary of giving too much away by chasing the popular boss babe track of my 1990s childhood.
Unlocking Access to High-Status Women
Today, it is rare for a competent, ambitious young girl to pursue no profession or career at all. Without the influence of a rarefied religious group with a focus on young marriage and the subservient status of women, most ambitious American girls will pursue a college education and, indeed, a career, if for no other reason than that these are available and subject to her discretion. For both the 1995 and the 2025 woman, a marriage proposal is not something she can control. As an achievement, it is nebulous at best, a result of chance or good fortune. Thus, the lately developed tradwife path, while enticing enough to influence clothing styles and affect zoomer culture, isn’t something the ambitious girl can exactly guarantee for herself.
For traditional religious groups, though, the tradwife ideal is deeply appealing. That’s because presenting tradwife lifestyle as a high-status ideal gives men access to higher-status women without the need to first achieve something similarly ambitious in their own careers. The tradwife is to marry young, before corporate work life corrupts her and renders her unattractive to the right kind of man. The right kind of man is of course marriage-minded, but he needn’t be actually accomplished or actually able to provide a comfortable lifestyle any time soon.
If the tradwife culture can successfully conquer last generation’s “have it all, just not all at once” philosophy, then perhaps ambitious and talented American girls can be persuaded to defer college or professional achievement for the sake of finding a good man. This is one reason so much content on the Right focuses on fertility, women’s education, college, marriage, “the wall,” and so forth. Separating college and career from ambitious, religious girls’ dreams of a high-status lifestyle means relatively low-status men lacking in career achievements have a shot. This 2020s selling point of serious religion is rarely acknowledged explicitly. Even so, no careful observer of American religion and the massive increase in young male interest in traditional religious denominations can deny that at least some of the appeal has to do with unlocking access to higher-status women.
These are not high-status women as we used to think of them—i.e. mid-career boss babes—but rather equally ambitious girls who enjoy the social and financial privileges of being raised in a religious tradition by married parents. Girls who, in previous decades, would have immediately gone off to college and towards a career without a second thought. Girls who, regardless of the financial assets and talent the men bring to the table, will consider it their duty as tradwives to provide the kind of lifestyle seen in tradwife content.
And here we stumble upon the central flaw of the 2025 guide to female ambition: tradwife content displays explicitly, chapter and verse, the wife’s contribution to the home while cloaking or denying altogether the massive financial contributions the man must contribute to make the tradlife enterprise possible. This is not an accident.
Trad men would of course be the first to deny that they are interested in anything like female ambition. They are explicitly looking to avoid female ambition, they insist. They want a simple girl of humble disposition, who nevertheless in her simplicity and non-ambitious soul aspires to have way more than the average number of children and cook way more exceptional food than the average American woman while keeping the house way more orderly and decorated and also protecting the family from way more of the effects of modern American institutional decay by homeschooling and acting as the main cultural and spiritual director for her large family.
Ambitious girls need not apply!
But of course, doing anything way more than the cultural average is the natural habitat of the ambitious girl, the go-getter, the unique self-starter. This career path, just like that of the boss babe, requires a special set of skills and is not likely to be taken up by unambitious women.
This is the big lie of the current sex wars: the insistence that right-leaning men are searching for unambitious women to solve nearly all current cultural problems, plugging all the holes modernity has riddled into the fabric of American life, and doing so quietly, unseen, unpaid, in the home. The idea that anyone other than extremely ambitious women working towards a high-status vision of the good life would be willing to take this on is absurd.
A Serious Lack of Funds
There are a number of wealthy online influencers who cosplay as poor people, or who otherwise fail to have the kind of money Ballerina Farm’s millionaire JetBlue-founding father-in-law brings to the overall aspirational picture. But overall, the serious lack of funds implicit in the real tradwife lifestyle for everyday people is a constant bummer. And this presents a serious question: is the erstwhile boss babe really interested in tradwifing it on a budget?
As a farm owner myself, I can confirm that everything gets a lot uglier and a lot less matchy-matchy once the big bucks behind Ballerina Farm (and the OG tradwife, The Pioneer Woman, whose husband’s family ranks #17 among America’s biggest landowners) go away. Show me a tradwife of limited means, and I’ll show you a woman with a lot less enthusiastic and aspirational audience.
The aspirational content at the core of tradwife life is definitively upper-middle-class. It’s an image of a better home, childhood, and marriage without the requisite maternal career burnout. The person who achieves the enviable tradwife lifestyle in real life is often the very same gal who could achieve the girlboss lifestyle: a woman of unusual ambition and talent, who first goes to college and then meets a husband of similar talent and ambition. These two overachievers are able to unlock a tradwife lifestyle for her as—once again—the capstone of one or both of their successful work lives.
The sad reality is that, in 2025, everyone on display is a boss babe. There are no average-effort gals and simple down-home boys achieving enviable lifestyles, unless one or both of them is receiving some major financial help from family. Does this matter? Well, it matters about as much as the lack of a happy family life haunting the 1995 girlboss career track mattered.
One of today’s aspirational pathways offers professional status to the ambitious girl but leaves family and matrimony firmly out of her control. The other prioritizes marital and familial bliss, but, unless the girl is very lucky in the marriage market or has a successful career before marrying, explicitly denies her the funds and worldly security necessary to recreate anything like what these tradwife influencers are displaying.
Ambitious girls beware.
