Sheryl Sandberg has a thing or two to say about tradwives. The vocal feminist and honorary grandmother of the professional girlboss movement issued a stern warning about this movement in an interview with People Magazine last week.

“The message that is going out is that in order to be a good wife or a good mother, you need to do it full time,” she said. “And the truth is that that is a decision almost no women can afford to make.”

“If you look at the percentages of women who need to work outside of the home to support their families, it’s the great majority of women,” Sandberg continued. “And so these messages that ‘this is how you have a successful marriage, that this is how you have six children,’ I think, are very detrimental to women.”

She then went on to encourage women to never “limit their ambition,” a pedantic trope that assumes ambition for a woman must look the same as it does for a man.

Sandberg emphasized that the tradwife movement is not just harmful to women’s equality by reinforcing “sexist” gender role stereotypes, but that it is simply out of reach for most women. She asserted this as if to reinforce for anyone unmoved by her cartoonish millennial feminism that even if they find a traditional lifestyle attractive after all, they better drop it out of sheer necessity for a career anyway.

Admittedly, Instagram tradwives only show a polished side of motherhood that glosses over its more challenging aspects, and it’s tempting to vilify these perfectly curated and aesthetic lifestyles. But they’re doing something right when the premier token girlboss of this century is forced to make these sorts of arguments. Indeed, because so many women resonate with this “trend,” one has to wonder if the unabashed joy and calm these tradwife images convey is closer to the truth than we realize.

Sandberg and her girlboss crew are now forced to argue that the tradwife lifestyle is simply unattainable and elitist. In doing so, her arguments come across like those of parents arguing that their son should not buy a Lamborghini for his first commuter car, namely, they persuade by telling him it’s financially impractical, not by denying that it is an incredibly cool and attractive vehicle.

Tradwives are doing what career feminists have done for years. Even the traditional wife penning this article once fell victim to the Pinterest boards of the 2010s full of sharply-cut blazers, stiletto heels, and professional binders. For so many of the generation that first gleefully received Sandberg’s famous book “Lean In,” success was the clickity-clack of a woman’s empowered high heel in a law office previously staffed by only men. In reality, the feminist impulse is mostly an aesthetic one. The average wannabe “girlboss” doesn’t have a fully formed opinion on sex and gender, but she does have an aesthetic notion of what a good life would look like for her.

The tradwife trend runs counter to the feminist vision by offering an alternate aesthetic that is even more attractive, yet far more rooted in reality. The average mother of five can tell you that hardly any of her time is spent dancing in fields of wildflowers with her well-dressed and well-behaved children, but she could tell you that the rudimentary work of her day – the cleaning, the cooking, the schooling – is fun and engaging and beautiful in a way work can be if it is done in accordance with one’s biological nature.

Vapid and unrealistic though it may sometimes be, performative traditionalism hearkens to the joy of motherhood and wifehood far better than the girlboss trend could accurately predict a woman’s satisfaction with a 40+-hour-a-week job that better suits masculine predilections.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: PublicDomainPictures.net