Yesterday, The New York Times published a profile of my family and my work at The Heritage Foundation promoting holistic fertility care. What struck me most is that the reporter didn't quite know what to do with me. She couldn't decide whether I was a girlboss or a tradwife, complete with my “MAHA elixir” of homemade raw milk butter, which, for the record, I make with my KitchenAid and the help of my three-year-old daughter.

Her conclusion, in the comments, is very telling: “Mrs. Waters (yes, she asked to be called Mrs.) told me she was 'neither trad wife nor girlboss.' She seems fluent in both. I'm not sure a term for what she is has even been invented—yet.”

Well, I hate to ruin the suspense, but the term already exists. It's a few thousand years old, and it's called a wife.

For the reporter's generation, “Ms.” was the rebellious term, and the basis for a new women's movement, and a magazine to match. Today, the most countercultural thing a 28-year-old woman can do is take her husband's name and be open to the gift of motherhood. That reversal is why legacy media keeps shifting between praise for the girlboss—a woman whose career comes before family, or any family at all—and slapping “tradwife” on any woman who visibly puts family first.

Still, as the reporter noted in one of our fact-checking conversations, for someone who preaches family first, I seemed awfully busy with work. This is where the liberal mind short-circuits. They can’t wrap their mind around a smart, driven, and hardworking woman who prioritizes her husband, kids, and faith first, and wants to do it that way. And unlike some criticisms alleged, I have never told women they shouldn't be smart, capable, and driven. I've told them something more radical: that those gifts were never meant to be spent first, best, and longest on a corporation.

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The model I propose in my first book, Lead Like Jael, is a “seasonal” approach to life that places first things first, knowing that priorities and availability change with each new season. Rather than making career the organizing principle of life, I'm interested in building a productive home economy, where work flows from the home, hospitality flourishes, and children receive the one thing no nanny or app can replicate: a present, available mother.

Part of why I do this work is that I once bought the lie myself—that career was more valuable than marriage or motherhood—and I almost missed out on one of the greatest adventures of my life because of it.

As we celebrate America 250, I can't help but think of Alexis de Tocqueville's observations in Democracy in America. American women, he admitted, were less romantic than Europe's, but they were far better partners in every real sense: resilient, hardworking, and true aids to their husbands. He credited them, in no small part, with the strength of the young nation. How else did a “ragtag army defeat a global superpower” without the counsel of Abigail Adams or the grit of Martha Washington in the camps at Valley Forge? How did we settle a continent without women like Ma Ingalls and Rebecca Boone, who put comfort aside to tame a wild land? How did we win two world wars without brave, industrious women stepping into factories and fields before raising the Boomer generation that built the modern world? Their motivation was never self-actualization or the "me first" corporate grind. It was to be what Genesis calls a battle-mate: bringing strength to their husbands while giving themselves for their faith, their family, and their nation.

That vision of a rich and meaningful life stirs my heart, and a rising silent majority of women share it. They are neither tradwife nor girlboss. They want to build a life alongside their husbands and children through a thriving home economy, and the data suggests they're onto something: study after study finds that married mothers report the highest levels of happiness and meaning of any group of women.

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Practically, here's my pitch: use your twenties and early thirties for babies and brainstorming, investing in your family and the eternal souls entrusted to you while building knowledge and interests on the side. Then, in your forties and fifties, accelerate professionally as your children grow older if you want to. Even Forbes, hardly a Heritage Foundation newsletter, finds women's professional momentum tends to peak in their forties and fifties—after the intensive years of early motherhood—with a third of women changing careers between 45 and 54. If that's true, the dominant script of career first and kids later has the timeline exactly backward.

And let's be honest about where the criticism is aimed, and where it isn't. When Hailey Bieber launches a beauty empire mid-pregnancy, it's a glow-up. When Eva Mendes leaves Hollywood to raise her daughters, it's iconic. But when Usha Vance wears a dress that flatters her baby bump, when Karoline Leavitt takes the podium as a new mom (twice!), or when Riley Gaines or Isabel Brown or Evita Duffy Alfonso chooses family young, suddenly the eyebrows arch and the think pieces flow. Motherhood is only politicized when the mother is conservative. The rest of the time, it's celebrated. It’s just another example of elites preaching career-first, family-optional scripts while quietly living married, high-investment family lives. As sociologist Brad Wilcox puts it, they talk Left and walk Right.

Which brings me to where the Times profile ends and my work begins. A friend at our dinner table asked which "cultural agent" could convince Gen Z that having kids is cool. The challenge, I agreed, is how to make motherhood and family a high-status venture.

The lesson of our low-fertility age isn't that women wanted the wrong things. It's that we built a model of success that ordered good things wrongly and asked women and their children to pay the price. The question was never whether ambitious women could have children. It was whether we had the courage to put them first, and trust God with the rest.