Historically, conservative activists like Anita Bryant and Beverly LaHaye have attempted to influence societal values through television and literature. It’s no wonder that conservatives try to appeal to women using values like the sanctity of life, defense of family, education, and religious liberty.

Bryant was an anti-gay activist who began her career as a representative for the Florida Citrus Commission. While her initial job focused on promoting orange juice to Americans, she soon made use of her televised career as a platform to advocate against queer rights, calling homosexuality “an abomination.” Bryant also founded Save Our Children, an organization founded on the anti-gay belief that queer adults “recruit” children to become queer. Save Our Children emboldened conservative religious activists to scrutinize the LGBTQ+ community on a large scale.

Beverly LaHaye worked in ministry prior to her career in politics. LaHaye created a counter-cultural organization, which became Concerned Women for America. The CWA is a legislative action committee that works to promote evangelical interpretations of the Bible in public policy.

Both of these women paved the way for conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and most recently, Erika Kirk. These modern conservatives often focus on traditional family values and American patriotism. All of these women exert conservative influence via the media, whether through television programming like Fox News, opinion-based content like podcasts, or by influencing education and legislation.

Over the past few years, social media users have noted that conservative media has become more and more popular among younger generations like Generation Z. The most talked-about conservative media is the “tradwife” trend, a new cohort of women romanticizing the life of a married mother to many children who does not work outside the home and spends her time child rearing and doting on her husband.

The Tradwife movement comes in response to the most recent iteration of feminism. The 2010s were dominated by “girl boss” feminism; the concept of empowering women as capitalist individuals rather than uplifting and liberating women as a whole. The dissonance between these two types of women highlights a clear social divide mirrored in the state of bipartisan politics today.

In The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, researchers Pierce Alexander Dignam and Deana A. Rohlinger write, “. . . [the] alt-right laments men’s status in Western society, arguing that men are under attack from leftism, political correctness, and feminism. In their view, feminism has distorted the natural gender order and demasculinized men, to the detriment of modern society.” In other words, the alt-right believes it is feminist’s fault that the greatness of America died. Dignam and Rohlinger go on to write, “men projected their fear and anger onto feminism and constructed a solution that put women back in their place.” The solution is generating content and speakers to convince women to abandon feminist ideals and return to traditional gender roles and family dynamics. This concept is a stark contrast to the talking heads of conservative women’s media today. Women like Candace Owens and Erika Kirk are both married mothers who support the tradwife movement, which they preach on their successful podcasts.

Engaging with the modern conservative movement is not a reclamation of femininity, but rather a relinquishing of the future. The tradwife movement is rooted in the disempowerment of women. Further, the weaponization of nostalgia has been contorted to eradicate decades of work that women have done themselves to seek liberation from patriarchal oppression.