Of all the things women want or need, a moral lecture from Sheryl Sandberg is not one of them. In a LinkedIn post and separate interview with People earlier this month, the former Meta executive warned that “tradwives” are “detrimental to women”. Then, this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sandberg is restructuring her foundation to further push back against the trend.

A tradwife is online shorthand for a female content creator who promotes traditional (“trad”) views of family life and domesticity. Those beliefs happen to run counter to Sandberg’s whole “girlboss” schtick, and so represent “old, outdated, and very, very, very sexist notions of what [gender] roles are”, in her eyes.

Women have heard this all before. In 2013, Sandberg’s book Lean In became a massive hit. The answer to women’s woes, she explained, was corporate success. Ask for that raise. Seek that leadership position. Not being able to manage family, marriage, kids, work, and friends is all in your head!

Over a decade later, Sandberg is now regurgitating the same subtly condescending views, specifically belittling a group of women who have decided that there is more to life than corporate shilling. For someone who claims to be all about helping women, she is launching a full-scale campaign against them.

Sandberg’s crusade is exemplar elitist feminism — a class-based luxury belief that treats professional work as the only legitimate female path, regardless of what women say they want for themselves. If women put off marriage and family formation for work, so be it: the most important way they demonstrate their value, in the eyes of elitist feminism, is to bring home a paycheck.

Ironically, Sandberg’s own message is precisely why her case against tradwives is so flawed. She claims that influencers who promote unrealistic visions of what’s attainable are “detrimental to women”. She told People that “if you have the resources and you want to be a tradwife, that’s great,” but full-time homemaking is a decision “almost no women can afford to make” because “some of them are breadwinners.”

This discredits Sandberg’s whole edict that women who work can “have it all”. And if more women are breadwinners because of her message to take on more at work, she has — by her own admission — made their available options worse.

The women who have likely lost out most from Sandberg’s elitist feminism are those who have been most directly impacted by longer-term anti-trad efforts. The progressive Center for American Progress (CAP) last year found that more than half of the women Sandberg says can’t quit work — the involuntary breadwinners — are single mothers. Nearly 70% of black mothers are breadwinners for their family. Over half of female breadwinners lack a bachelor’s degree, and most work in low-paying fields such as healthcare and education. These are the women who potentially had least to gain through the opportunity to work but a lot to lose with the erosion of marriage. As Kay Hymowitz has described for decades, marriage has become a class privilege — common among elites while increasingly rare among low-income women.

Of course, there are trade-offs inherent to all decisions about work, marriage, and children. All three require time and resources, and both working and non-working women have to consider that with their spouses and families. Women who decide to have kids but previously prioritized career progression may have to consider the unpleasant reality that it means stepping back. In the face of exorbitant childcare costs, others will have to face giving up work entirely. Some may elect to continue working and forgo having children.

Every woman has the right to be respected for her decisions. That’s what Sandberg doesn’t understand in her condescending fight against tradwives. “There are so many messages that tell women what their place is that limit their ambition,” she states, all while her own message assumes a woman’s place is in the office. She portends a negative view of raising kids and managing a household, as if those things were unambitious and lazy. Her comments imply a sort of savior syndrome: women beneath her don’t really know what they want, so they need her to tell them that staying at home is holding them back. She also complains that tradwives are glamorizing the home. But isn’t that exactly what she’s doing with work?

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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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