With Karoline Leavitt departing as press secretary, the White House loses one of its most conspicuous women. Leavitt, a 29 year-old mother of two, says she feels she “cannot be the best mom” to her young children “while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary,” so she must pursue a less demanding line of work. She has not, of course, abandoned her career altogether; she will return to President Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. Still, her statement is notable for its outlook. Leavitt describes two choices, irrevocably in conflict: She can either be good at her job, or be a good mom — and motherhood won.

Conservatives have always let women into the vanguard on a conditional basis. A right-wing woman earns some status by conforming to gender norms, and she often finds the most professional traction by defending her own subordination. Phyllis Schlafly was a genuine anti-feminist, invested in her definition of the family; but in taking up that fight, she “foreclosed her chance” at the foreign policy career she’d wanted, historian Nicole Hemmer argues. For the women of the White House, power still comes with a tradeoff. Their roles hinge not only on their competence, or their commitment to Trump, but their compliant femininity.

Leavitt leaves the briefing room as the right’s woman problem becomes harder and harder to ignore. Pete Hegseth is blocking promotions for women in the military while his wife, Jennifer, trails him around the Pentagon. On a reality tv show, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told his teenage daughter that he did not want her to go to Harvard, because it “can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.” White House aide Natalie Harp’s influence exists only in relation to her “Guardian and Protector in this life,” Donald Trump. Earlier this August, the Heritage Foundation released a video with staffer Liana Graham, who urged women to “question a vision of empowerment” that promises freedom if they “override” their “natural rhythms or timelines” through fertility treatment. If a woman wants marriage and family, she added, “work should be ordered around those hopes.”

Leavitt didn’t come up with such a binary view of motherhood on her own. The modern right has a fatalistic message for women, including the White House Press Secretary: We can’t have it all, and if we try, we’ll face “realities that aren’t talked about enough,” as Heritage put it. “The sacrifice of motherhood poses a challenge to the foundation of a self-centered ideology” like feminism, according to a column in Evie Magazine. That shift, toward a version of motherhood that blots out everything else, did not happen overnight. In Captivating, the 2005 Christian bestseller, John and Stasi Eldredge celebrate an acquaintance who gives up her career “to die a thousand small deaths to her self every single day” and stays at home with her baby. “Women who feel stifled by the biblical teaching on submission have yet to understand the biblical meaning of freedom,” wrote the influential anti-feminist Beverly LaHaye in 1980. A woman can wield power on the right, like LaHaye and Schlafly and Leavitt, but only in attenuated form.

There are, of course, conservative women who nurture their ambition alongside their families. Katie Miller apparently thinks it’s “important to work and have something outside of just my children.” May Mailman, a former Trump official, flew from D.C. to Texas each weekend to be with her children. “I don’t have a victimhood mentality,” she told the Wall Street Journal, but she does have a nanny. Maybe they’re hypocrites, or simply ignorant of the tradeoffs. But a third and more complicated option presents itself: If hierarchy is the bedrock conviction of the right, a woman can submit herself to men and still lord over her inferiors. Her lofty place as number two entitles her to liberties unavailable to others. In a piece for the Conservateur, Sonny Joy Nelson, an ex-Trump official, said it felt like “a mom-fail” to bring her toddler to work on his birthday because she had no one to watch him. Nelson wasn’t making a point about the importance of childcare, but rather the family-friendly “village” she’d built at the White House. If the administration was good for her motherhood, it must be good for everyone else.

So Jennifer Hegseth works behind the throne, observing Pentagon briefings when she isn’t homeschooling her children. Miller homeschools, too, and podcasts, and spends a vast amount of time on X, where she hectors women over falling birth rates. They aren’t powerless; they’ve chosen the lives they’re leading. They exercise their autonomy in a way that reduces it for themselves, and, to a great extent, for others. Roe is long gone, and some loud voices are calling for bans on IVF. Conservatives shape childcare policy around an expectation that women will be stay-at-home mothers. As Rachel Cohen Booth reported for Vox, Project 2025 “called to eliminate Head Start” while public funds pay parents to stay home or cover some other form of “familial, in-home child care.”

Downstream from policy, young, conservative women find that men are questioning their right to become lawyers or vote, the New York Times reports. With extremists in control, the right’s coming around to the idea that women are pre-rational creatures controlled by their wombs. On X, where trads compete for clout, a woman who expresses anything short of total contentment in motherhood is not only selfish but deviant or deluded. Some men “who believe women have been ‘tricked’ into working,” by feminism or some other force, “imagine women are so different from them, wired so differently, that there’s no way they could possibly have the same aspirations or desires as men,” argued Cartoons Hate Her on Substack.

Nelson, the former Trump official, hasn’t dropped out of the workforce completely. She’s started her own comms firm, which means that she, like Leavitt, hangs onto some influence for now. They might even have long careers, as long as their loyalty to Trump overshadows the right’s demands for their gender. Leavitt’s employer, MAGA Inc., boasts a $403 million war chest to spend on future campaigns — and a reactionary young mother will always have some value to the right. But valuable is not the same as equal. To the average trad, men are men and women are women, ipso facto, we have different desires and different roles to play. We cannot imagine a world that contradicts our nature, they say. And if a woman accepts this, if she believes she can’t have anything because she can’t have it all, a little authority might sound preferable to complete dispossession. She walks into a trap, locks it shut, and tells her sisters and daughters to do exactly the same.