Crossroads Podcast: New York Times ‘Gets’ A Few Young Conservative Women

After spending myriad days reading the often bleak contents of women’s magazines, a talented New York journalist once reached a conclusion that deserves close attention.

Her observations are especially interesting when connected with the New York Times feature that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Here is the double-decker Times headline that pointed to the worldview of that story:

‘Less Burnout, More Babies’: How Conservatives Are Winning Young Women

The wellness influencer universe is resonating with people who might not otherwise be drawn to politics.

The conservatives at the event covered in this piece were, of course, interested in politics. That’s why they were important to the Times. The women coming to this recent event in Dallas were also focusing on things like marriage, family, children and their own physical and mental health. Faith was in the mix, too.

All of this is the bait that conservative politicos are now using to catch “young women” in this stressful age.

With that in mind, let’s return to the thoughts of that first journalist that I mentioned — Danielle Crittenden. This massive summary paragraph is from a feature that she wrote for The New York Times.

Hint: This is in the Gray Lady’s archives.

… This is what those women's magazines I waded through that day … so vividly reflected. Their readers, no matter how depressed or thwarted the articles indicated they felt, are not depressed or thwarted in the same way their mothers were. The women who buy these magazines today have heeded their mothers' advice: Do something with your life; don't depend upon a man to take care of you; don't make the same mistakes I did. So they have made different mistakes. They are the women who postponed marriage and childbirth to pursue their careers only to find themselves at thirty-five still single and baby-crazy, with no husband in sight. They are the unwed mothers who now depend upon the state to provide what the fathers of their children won't -- a place to live and an income to support their kids. They are the eighteen-year-old girls who believed they could lead the unfettered sexual lives of men, only to end up in an abortion clinic or attending grade twelve English while eight months' pregnant. They are the new brides who understand that when a couple promises to stay together forever, they have little better than a fifty-fifty chance of sticking to it. They are the female partners at law firms who thought they'd made provisions for everything about their career -- except for that sudden, unexpected moment when they find their insides shredding the first day they return from maternity leave, having placed their infants in a stranger's arms. They are the young mothers who quit their jobs to be with their babies and who now feel anxiety and even a mild sense of embarrassment about what they have chosen to do -- who look over their fences at the quiet backyards of two-career couples, wondering if they haven't done a foolish thing, and feeling a kind of isolation their mothers never knew. Above all, these women are the majority of us, women who are hoping to do everything -- work, children, marriage -- only to ask ourselves why the pieces haven't added up the way we'd like or why we are collapsing under the strain of it all and doing everything so badly.

That was a quarter of a century ago.

In that complex material, Crittenden — a convert to Judaism — was helping prepare people for the content of her bestselling book, “What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us — Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.” She remains a successful journalist and entrepreneur and is married to Never-Trump political journalist David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

I mention that 1999 book for a simple reason — it’s an intellectual arrow pointing to the existence of a wide variety of female viewpoints on complicated questions in modern life. Crittenden, to be blunt, is not a woman in an apron chained to a kitchen stove. She is, however, a journalist who is willing to discuss evidence that millions of women want to make marriage and children a high priority in their lives, even if that requires doing some hard thinking about how they pursue their careers.

This brings me back to that Times piece — written by a business and technology reporter — about the heresies that are being embraced by many young women in backward red zip codes in the American Heartland.

Just about everything readers need to know about the worldview of this feature is woven into a long overture:

“I’ll tell you this ladies,” said Dana Loesch, former spokeswoman of the National Rifle Association, as she paced the stage of a Dallas ballroom. “You cannot have it all — at the same time. Something will suffer.”

The audience of roughly 3,000 young women listened, rapt. They wore pins that read “Dump your socialist boyfriend” and “My favorite season is the fall of feminism.” In ruffled sundresses and cowboy boots, they shimmied to the “Church Clap.” When Ms. Loesch stepped off the stage, and out came Trump World rock stars Charlie and Erika Kirk, the young women came up to the microphone one by one to ask for advice — on finding a husband, on raising Christian children, on what to tell friends who judged them for wanting to marry young.

“I must have missed it in Matthew — which is ‘Go forth and become C.E.O. of a shoe company,’” Mr. Kirk told the audience, voice inlaid with an eye roll.

It was the largest young conservative women’s event in the country, hosted by Turning Point USA, the organization Mr. Kirk leads that claimed a critical role in turning out young voters for President Trump. Most attendees had come to the Young Women’s Leadership Summit not so much for advice on how to lead, but how to live. Because sure, the personal is political — but it’s also practical, palatable. They got clear marching orders. “Less Prozac, more protein,” said Alex Clark, a wellness influencer and podcast host who headlined the weekend. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”

Note that this is the “largest young conservative women’s EVENT in the country” (emphasis added), as opposed to being the largest organization or network containing conservative women in America. You could even say that there are much larger events and movements that attract thousands of young religious women for discussions of topics that really matter to them.

During the podcast, I suggested that — if Times editors wanted to hear from lots of fascinating, articulate female cultural conservatives — they might send reporters to regional and national gatherings for home-school families. Who attends? Lots of people (such as a young Justice Amy Coney Barrett) who are working hard and making sacrificial choices to help build religious and classical schools for their kids.

Are the women in those settings writing off their own passions, dreams and careers? No, but they are often making strategic early decisions to include marriage and children in their lives. Reporters could talk to the men at those meetings, too. Many of them are rethinking the building blocks of what they consider “success.”

What I am saying is that the new Times piece — with its laser focus on Orange Man Bad culture — ignored other religious, cultural, economic and technological trends that are shaping the decisions of many young women.

Let me point readers and listeners to two relevant Rational Sheep posts.

First, there’s “Digital Gen Zoomers seeking places to call home.” It focused on a feature at The Free Press with this headline: “The Good Life, According to Gen Z — Meet the Zoomers who are quitting the rat race, skipping the $8 lattes, and buying homes in towns you’ve never heard of.”

A key follow-up question about that: Is a women who wants to be a screenwriter abandoning her career goals if she decides that, in the Internet age, she can pursue that work while married, with children and living in a farmhouse her family can afford to buy in the Heartland? I would say, “No. She is not abandoning her goals. She is changing her strategy.”

Second, if people insist on seeing these issues through a political lens, they can read this post: “Democrats need to start having babies.”

That post contains a quotation I have used many times, in recent years, noting the degree to which marriage and fertility issues cannot — in America and on most of Planet Earth — be separated from discussions of religious faith and practice.

The new Times piece about the Charlie and Erika Kirk festival in Dallas mentions religion, primarily as a source of punch lines about silly rubes dwelling in Flyover Country. That’s shallow journalism.

Thus, let’s end by looking at the following material drawn from a 2010 feature in the Weekly Standard (RIP) that ran with this title: “America’s One-Child Policy. The last sentence is perfect:

... In a world where childbearing has no practical benefit, people have babies because they want to, either for self-fulfillment or as a moral imperative. "Moral imperative," of course, is a euphemism for "religious compulsion." There are stark differences in fertility between secular and religious people.

The best indicator of actual fertility is "aspirational fertility" — the number of children men and women say they would like to have. Gallup has been asking Americans about their "ideal family size" since 1936. When they first asked the question, 64 percent of Americans said that three or more children were ideal; 34 percent said that zero, one, or two children were ideal. Today only 34 percent of Americans think that a family with three-or-more children is ideal.

But on this question there are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families.

Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance. Among people who seldom or never go to church, 66 percent say that zero, one, or two children is the ideal family size, and only 25 percent view three-or-more children as ideal. Among those who go to church monthly, the three-or-more number edges up to 29 percent. But among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say three or more children is ideal, while only 47 percent think that a smaller family is preferable. When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they're making a cultural and theological statement.

Should the Times team have talked to some serious religion organizations, networks and thinkers linked to growing forms of organized religion?

Why didn’t the Gray Lady do that?

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