Welcome To The Soft Girl Revolution

A few months ago, I learned of a movement called “tradwives.” These are young women, usually religious, whose marriages are traditional in the sense that the women reject modern feminism and choose to be homemakers, while their husbands are the breadwinners. I wrote about it here.

Needless to say, the pushback by the left against such old-fashioned attitudes and behavior has been extreme, with tradwives being mocked from one end of the liberal spectrum to the other. Feminists proclaimed tradwives as racist. Critics called the lifestyle “creepy.” Even the frilly dresses these women favor are deemed white supremacist.

That’s why I found it hilariously funny to learn some progressive feminists are discovering this lifestyle, too. They just call it something else.

Apparently, some women are tired of competing in the workplace and want an easier life. “In the beginning, there were the girlbosses, typically elder millennials who built empires, dedicated their lives to work, and preached a single creed: that of money,” states this article by Priscilla Lucifora. “According to them, men needed to be ‘beaten’ at their own game – in the realm of work, power, and economic well-being, hitting them where it hurts: in their wallets and in male-dominated fields. Becoming richer and more powerful than men, replacing them, was the only way to be a feminist.”

Now, it seems, “girlbosses” are so last year. Instead, let’s welcome the “soft girls” revolution.

I stumbled across this movement in an online article from Glamour magazine. I haven’t read this rag since I was a young feminist in the 1980s, but in those days it was unrelenting in its push for equality in the workplace and published endless pieces of advice on how to look, act, dress and behave to climb the corporate ladder and compete with the male patriarchy.

But the online article I saw, written by senior editor Stephanie McNeal, is entitled “Welcome to the Soft-Girl Revolution: How Young Women Are Rejecting Girlboss Culture for a Life of Leisure.”

Essentially, many career-driven young women are learning a bitter truth: competing in the workplace is exhausting. “Soft girls” have found a new lease on life by embracing traditional womanly roles, and doing so with all the ultra-femininity they were urged to reject in the first place to erase those gender norms.

“The soft girl doesn’t value the grind or getting ahead,” writes McNeal. “She prioritizes slow living. Her days are filled with a nearly obsessive focus on self-care, from making the perfect morning smoothie to tending to her skin and trading in hardcore HIIT workouts for leisurely ‘cozy cardio.’ Long-term, the soft girl dreams of making dinner for her husband and, if she’s got them, staying at home with her kids. She’s not interested in making partner or founding her own company. She’s in touch with her feminine energy, her menstrual cycle, and her moods.”

If this life of leisure is not supported by a husband, some women seek “relationships with men between 10 to 14 years older who can ‘financially’ meet them at their level.”

But most “soft girls,” it seems, are adopting traditional marriage with a breadwinning husband. “Motherhood is … the desire of many soft girls, especially those who can stay at home with their kids,” writes McNeal.

Traditional marriage. The horror!

Many soft girls “daydream about a simpler existence in which they are a wife and a mother first,” notes McNeal, who interviewed a 24-year-old woman who “is currently working full-time and says she was often taught she needed to hustle and strive for career success when she was growing up. But she finds herself now longing for a different kind of satisfaction. ‘I think many women are becoming more in tune with their natural desires, embracing their femininity and choosing to build a more simple life, recognizing the beauty in traditional values,’ she says. ‘Family-based life allows for simplicity, focus, less stress, and a reclaiming of time.’”

“Should we worry?” frets Lucifora. “Expanding further, one might also consider the resurgence of marriage in this wave. After a period of decline, marriage is once again becoming desirable for Gen Z. More and more girls on TikTok express a desire to marry young or to feel content in their roles as non-working wives or girlfriends, showcasing their daily lives as ‘stay at home girlfriends.’ For any 30-something woman, these are nothing short of alarm bells and red flags, indicating a frightening return to antiquated norms.”

Fortunately for the pearl-clutchers, this trend can be blamed squarely on the favorite boogieman of the left, the “difficulty of living under late-stage capitalism,” exacerbated by working conditions, declining salaries, rising prices and “a global crisis from various perspectives.”

The soft-girl movement has the added advantage that it can’t be accused of racism or white supremacy since, according to this BBC article, it got its start among Nigerian social media influencers and has since gone mainstream. The desire to be a homemaker clearly crosses cultural and racial lines.

While I poke fun at the irony of feminists discovering the joys of traditional womanhood, this doesn’t mean I disapprove of the sentiment. Far from it. Study after study after study after study has confirmed the benefits of a stay-at-home parent (usually the mom) on the emotional development and well-being of children.

McNeal, among others, still worries about the dangers of being a homemaker. “While many of these comments are made in jest,” she writes, “the truth is that being in your ‘hot stay-at-home mom era’ can be a slippery slope into becoming a #tradwife, another corner of TikTok where young, usually religious women extol the virtues of the patriarchy. … It’s true that living the girlboss life can be challenging. Burnout is real, and hustle culture is totally toxic. In many ways it does seem kind of empowering to take up the soft-girl ethos, to break away from the rat race, and stop feeding into the machine of labor. But it seems that in an effort to make things better, soft girls may be swinging to another extreme.” [Emphasis added.]

I doubt the “soft girls” care.

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