Highlights
“The perceived price of having children has really increased since I first talked to women in the mid-1990s,” Princeton University sociologist Kathryn Edin told the New York Times in 2021. “Even among the poorest women, there’s a recognition that a career is part of a life course.”
Dr. Edin’s words are even more true today. I was recently in a resale clothing store in Los Angeles, chatting with two employees I’ve known for a while. Both women are single and in their late 20s. Neither went to college. They were both working minimum-wage jobs, living paycheck to paycheck. The conversation turned to dating and men, and one of them declared, “Men are trash.” The other nodded. “We don’t even need men today,” she said. “Let’s just stay together—women supporting women.”
I looked at them with concern. Here were two women parroting the slogans they’d absorbed from social media, Netflix, and women’s magazines: you don’t need a man, career first, family can wait. Yet in the same breath they were complaining about crushing rent, debt, and how three roommates still weren’t enough to make ends meet in one of the most expensive cities in the country. These are exactly the women who would benefit most from a stable, loving partnership with a good man—not just for romance, but for the structure, emotional support, and financial teamwork that families provide. Instead, they’ve internalized a message that tells them partnership is optional at best, oppressive at worst. The cultural script written at the highest levels of media, academia, and entertainment has seeped all the way to the sales floor, poisoning the hopes of everyday girls who can least afford to follow it.
Girlboss Messaging
Lately, there’s been a lot of conversation about the risks of delaying marriage, motherhood, and family. I contributed to that discussion in a piece for the Institute for Family Studies titled “Wilcox Is Right: A Warning from a Woman Who Waited Too Long.” I shared my story of putting off children while chasing other goals, only to confront the painful reality that time waits for no one. The collection of IFS essays resonated widely and sparked a broader debate.
But pushback has been swift and predictable: critics accuse us of unfairly “blaming girlbosses” for the broader decline in marriage and births. They point to research showing educated, professional women are actually more likely to marry today than their less-educated peers. Matt Yglesias, for instance, has framed the concern as “yelling at young ambitious women,” implying that those sounding the alarm are scolding high-achieving women for their choices. Patrick T. Brown wrote a substack, then later a piece titled “Don’t Blame the Girlboss For the Falling Birth Rate” in The FP, framing it as attacking girlboss women themselves.
Let me be clear: I’m certainly not yelling at young ambitious women, and I don’t believe anyone at IFS is either. What I’m calling out—and what desperately needs to be called out—is the girlboss messaging itself. It has saturated our culture for decades, telling every girl since kindergarten that independence is everything, men are optional (or obstacles), and love, marriage, and motherhood can be postponed indefinitely without consequence. The fact that college-educated women are still marrying at higher rates does not disprove the damage. If anything, it makes the problem more urgent. It’s a textbook example of what Rob Henderson has called “luxury beliefs”—ideas that bring social status to elites at little personal cost to them, while inflicting real harm on everyone else.
"Luxury Beliefs"
Luxury beliefs thrive among the credentialed class because they can afford the downsides. A woman with a six-figure salary, a network of high-achieving friends, and perhaps family wealth to fall back on can experiment with “I don’t need a man” rhetoric and still land on her feet. She may delay marriage into her 30s and still find a partner when ready and afford the higher-stakes medical bills of late pregnancy. The research lays this out: marriage rates for college-educated women have remained remarkably stable, around 70% by their mid-40s. But for women without college degrees—the very women in that clothing store—the story is different. Their marriage rates have fallen sharply (from 79% to 52%). These women face high rents, stagnant wages, and fewer “marriageable” men in their social circles. Without the buffer of elite credentials, the girlboss/anti-family ideology leaves them more vulnerable, not less.
Girlboss messaging saturates our culture, telling every girl since K-5 that independence is everything, men are optional, and marriage and motherhood can be postponed indefinitely.
This is the cruel irony. The same cultural script that elites promote as empowering trickles downward through social media, television, and pop feminism until it reaches working-class women who have the fewest resources to absorb its costs. They internalize the message that strong, independent women don’t need husbands—then wonder why they’re drowning in debt with three roommates and no clear path to stability. They repeat “men are trash” while quietly longing for the very partnership that could provide the life structure they crave. And when they eventually want children, they discover that biology doesn’t negotiate. Fertility declines, options narrow, regret sets in.
I know this from personal experience. In my IFS essay, I described how I bought the girlboss narrative hook, line, and sinker. I delayed family formation in pursuit of other dreams and the idea I’d be the “cool stepmom” without kids of my own, convinced that motherhood could be slotted in later. What I didn’t fully grasp until it was almost too late is how much I was giving up—not just the chance to have children, but the daily joys and supports that come with building a life alongside a man who is equally invested. The cultural messaging never mentioned those trade-offs. It only celebrated freedom.
Too High a Price
We’re now living with the downstream effects. Birth rates continue to fall. Loneliness is epidemic. Young women reporthigher rates of anxiety and depression even as they outperform men in education and early-career earnings.
Meanwhile, the men we’ve been taught to distrust are struggling, too—facing declining labor-force participation, purpose gaps, and a culture that treats them as “the problem,” masculinity as “toxic,” and fathers as optional. The breakdown in trust between the sexes isn’t liberating anyone; it’s leaving both sides isolated and the next generation smaller.
The solution isn’t to shame individual women for their ambitions. Most young women are not ideologues; they’re simply repeating what they’ve heard since childhood. The solution is to stop pretending the messaging is harmless. We must name it for what it is: a set of luxury beliefs that sound progressive in Ivy League seminars and Hollywood boardrooms but play out as tragedy on minimum-wage retail floors and in cramped apartments across America.
Instead of rivalry, we should promote partnership. Men and women are not enemies; we’re teammates. Healthy relationships built on mutual respect, shared goals, and realistic expectations about family have always been the surest path to human flourishing. Motherhood is not a trap—it’s one of life’s most profound fulfillments. Family is not a luxury for the privileged; it’s the foundation that everything stems from. Love between a man and woman is not outdated; it’s the very thing that built civilizations and still holds the power to heal what’s broken.
We owe it to the two young women in that clothing store—and to every girl absorbing these toxic messages—to tell a different story. One that values their ambitions without denying their deepest longings, that refuses to pit the sexes against each other, and that celebrates the quiet strength of building a family rather than going it alone.
The girlboss, anti-men, anti-family era sold us independence at the cost of connection. It’s time to admit the price was too high.
Lisa Britton is a writer for Evie Magazine and a contributor to publications, including the LA Times. A passionate advocate for boys, men, and fathers, she was born in Nova Scotia as the youngest of five children. Her work in Washington D.C. has earned attention from members of Congress, presidential candidates, a First Lady, and a President of the United States.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
