Girl Boss vs Trad Wife: Virtue Chart

One of the unique challenges of the current age, is a loss of identity and purpose. As much trouble as men are having here, women might be having a worse time. Women have gained opportunities their grandmothers lacked, yet many seem no more certain what those opportunities are for. I am not going to try to solve all problems here, but if we can just get a clearer view of the ideal, this will be worthwhile. I may not be able to get you to Paradise, but I hope to at least point in the right direction.

The Trad Wife movement is less a recovery of the traditional past than a modern romantic reconstruction of it. It rejects the sterile numbness of modern life in favor of family, home, and traditional roles. This isn’t all bad. Not at all. Its central purpose is sound, but its practical execution is often weak.

The problem is not domestic life. It is retreat. A woman who withdraws from the world may preserve some important virtues while sacrificing the very competence and independence her household needs. Trad Wives could work, but they would need to be far more capable, productive, and resilient than the romantic ideal often suggests.

The telos—the ultimate purpose or end—is largely correct. The means of achieving it need improvement.

• Focus on Family and Household, Good 
• Practicality, Hiding from the World, Poor. (Avoiding)

But at least a nation of Trad Wives could perpetuate itself, in contrast to a nation of Girl Bosses.

The Girl Boss movement is not all bad either. Industriousness, ambition, education, and economic competence are genuine virtues. Scripture repeatedly recognizes the productive work of women, both within and beyond their households. We can and should want women to excel.

The problem arises when professional achievement becomes the organizing principle of life, and identity rather than something serving a larger purpose. Relationships, marriage, family, and posterity can become secondary—or even obstacles to success.

The archetype has difficulty answering a deceptively simple question: What is success for?

Without a higher telos, money, power, influence, and recognition risk becoming ends in themselves. These are things that may be useful to possess, but they are poor substitutes for knowing why we want them.

This is, of course, distinct from mere working women. It is making professional accomplishment an identity and an end, instead of applying it towards home and family.

This gives us a something like a Virtue Chart.

So if Girl Bosses have one virtue, and Trad Wives have another, the correct synthesis has both. The synthesis is less flattering to both camps because it demands more of both. This isn’t a matter of 50/50 compromise, as much as it is the virtues of both, subordinated to a higher telos.

So, what is the ideal synthesis of virtues, how to integrate all these virtues?

For lack of a better name, we have a Matriarch.
(Seriously, this does need a better name. Suggestions are appreciated and needed)

Lady, Family Stateswoman, Domina are also options. I do like Mistress of the Household, but that is too easily misunderstood. `

This woman is in the vein of Proverbs 31, neither secluded nor careerist. Consider what the chapter actually describes. She buys land, plants a vineyard, manufactures goods, engages in commerce, manages her household, provides for the poor, and speaks with wisdom. She is economically capable, socially engaged, intelligent and respected beyond her home.

Yet none of these achievements is presented as an end in itself. Her industry serves her household, her family, and ultimately the Lord. Her competence is not diminished by her domestic responsibilities; rather, those responsibilities give her abilities direction.

She knows what she is good at, and more importantly, she knows what those abilities are for.

The old division between “domestic woman” and “career woman” may itself be a product of the industrial age. In a productive household, there is no clean boundary between family life, economic life, education, property, community, and work. The household is not merely a place where income is consumed. It can also be a place where wealth is created, skills are developed, and institutions are built.

Modern society is starved for purpose, and the industrial order that shaped our ideas about work and family is changing rapidly. Many people will not appreciate just how rapidly until the ground begins collapsing beneath them. As my old physics professor Jack Weyland used to say, “Things that happen fast, hurt.” (Yes, the same Jack Weyland who wrote the novels.)

We should prepare ourselves and our families for a world that may demand greater independence, adaptability, and practical competence than the one we inherited.

The woman I have in mind is therefore neither a housewife with fewer capabilities nor a careerist with different priorities. She is something older—and perhaps something we will need again.

We often confuse earning a wage with economic independence. A household entirely dependent on an employer can be prosperous while remaining remarkably fragile. We should be building our own little kingdoms—not as rivals to government or islands isolated from society, but as productive, responsible households capable of governing their own affairs. There may be a financial price for this kind of freedom, but prosperity and independence are not the same thing.

The Matriarch is not a woman who retreats from the world, nor one who seeks to conquer it for herself. She is capable of engaging the world without being consumed by it. She is ambitious, but her ambitions extend beyond herself. She builds wealth, but knows that wealth is a means rather than an end. She cultivates a household, but her influence need not end at its walls.

The point is not to have less ambition, but to have greater ambitions directed toward better ends.

Perhaps the question we should be asking young women is not whether they want to be housewives or career women, but what kind of women they want to become, what they intend to build, and what they hope to leave behind.

After all, Paradise is not merely something we hope to reach. It is something we should be learning how to build.

• Household-centered, but not household-confined. Family is the organizing priority, not the entirety of her competence.
• Economically productive and resilient. She can earn, manage, invest, create, negotiate, and build assets. She seeks to make the household less dependent on institutions she cannot control. She provides for her family, while also being ready for hardship.
• Generationally minded. She asks what produces strong children, grandchildren, communities, and institutions—not merely what maximizes her own status.
• Socially and intellectually formidable. She understands the world well enough not to be manipulated by it.
• Ordered rather than maximized. Career, beauty, wealth, education, influence, marriage, motherhood, service—all goods, but goods placed in the right hierarchy.
• Cultivates people, not merely things. Her greatest productive work may be forming capable human beings—children, apprentices, neighbors, friends—and creating a household culture that outlives her.