Mostly Sunny

One woman she spoke with, referred to as Erin in the book, told Calarco that neither she nor her husband were offered paid family leave through work. They didn’t qualify for the public child-care program where they lived in Indiana, but they couldn’t afford any other option. When their son was born, Erin took a night-shift job at a grocery store; she’d clock in after taking care of her infant all day. But then she virtually never slept. That’s how she ended up as a stay-at-home mom. She told Calarco that she still dreams about going back to work. When she crunches the numbers, though, they never add up in her favor.

Erin’s everyday life bears little resemblance to that of, say, Hannah Neeleman—the tradwife influencer known as Ballerina Farm, who has more than 10 million Instagram followers, employs a team of gardeners, and sells electrolyte powders with “hand-harvested French sea salt,” which she markets by concocting homemade spritzes garnished with shaved lemon peel. (Her husband is the son of JetBlue’s founder, who reportedly has a net worth of more than $400 million.) In fact, Collins said, anyone who makes stay-at-home parenting look glamorous likely has some help: if not a fleet of gardeners, then perhaps in-laws shooing the kids out of the frame, or at least pocket money to send out the laundry.

Yet the Pinterest version of stay-at-home parenting, as Collins put it, might still appeal to a lot of moms who are plunged into a far less chic reality—moms who want to feel that there’s romance in what they’re doing, or at least some dignity. Many women, Calarco found, experience a lot of shame after leaving formal employment: about not working, or falling short of exacting and expensive intensive-parenting standards, or using government benefits. (Erin, for one, was determined to not use the food stamps her family became eligible for when she quit her job.) Some of those Calarco spoke with were drawn toward communities, such as conservative mom groups and evangelical churches, that assuaged some of that lonely self-consciousness. “They tell them, No, this is your rightful place. This is the most important work that you could be doing,” Calarco said. “And that’s a really validating message.”

For some mothers, leaning into the housewife identity may be easier than accepting that you’ve been pushed out of the workforce by circumstances beyond your control. Or perhaps a lot of moms have just internalized the very American idea that parenting is their responsibility alone. For Collins’s book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, she interviewed 135 mothers in the U.S., Sweden, Germany, and Italy. In the three European countries, Collins said, mothers generally assumed they’d have parenting support from their government, their employer, and their partner. And they do get that, at least to a greater degree than mothers in the United States. All three nations have some federally mandated parental leave, for fathers as well as mothers. They have public child-care systems that, though not always perfect, are generally affordable and high quality. They tend to have more options for flexibility, such as part-time work and parental-leave days that can be used over time, when an employee chooses. There, as here, moms still tend to take on more child care than dads. But the decision between paid and unpaid work isn’t always so starkly all-or-nothing.

When Collins asked moms in the U.S. how they thought the government might better support them, she said, most “just totally drew a blank.” That they might get some help—indeed, that they might be owed it—had not even occurred to them. Collins posed a question to me: If we woke up tomorrow in a country that guaranteed six months of highly compensated parental leave, where everyone had affordable day care near their home, where part-time work existed across industries, would the tradwife exist? Even if some women would still choose to stay home, maybe the trope wouldn’t be dominating popular culture in the way that it currently is.

In the U.S. that actually exists, the average parent has to make difficult trade-offs. When the New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson interviewed 120 midlife adults about their thoughts on work-family conflicts, she found that among participants who adopted a “hypertraditional” approach to gender roles, 55 percent of women and 50 percent of men wanted a more equitable balance. Women tended to want more career possibilities, and men more time with their kids. The participants who were trying to share duties across gender lines were happier with their approach than any other group was; 88 percent of women and 81 percent of men said that they preferred it to any other option. But even they tended to feel dissatisfied. Their commitment to caregiving left them worn down, short on sleep and personal time, and worried about underperforming at work.

When Collins teaches about child-care costs, students—usually young women—find her after class, panicking, asking, “How can I possibly have kids?” The tough thing is that there’s only so much she can say to ease their minds. She tells them to remember these challenges when they vote and also when they look for jobs: What’s this employer’s parental-leave policy? Does the office have lactation rooms?