My mother dropped out of college after two years to get married, and so did her daughter, my older sister. My mom was 19 and my sister was 20 -- both just about at the median age for women to marry for the first time in their days: my mom in 1941, my sister in 1964.
Not much had changed in the expectations of women in that nearly quarter century between the marriages of mother and daughter. But a lot soon did. My sister’s wedding came just a year after Betty Freidan’s book The Feminine Mystique launched so-called second-wave feminism. Soon more families acknowledged that Mom might want to get out of the kitchen and the laundry room, and women emerged into previously off-limits roles in many workplaces. And more has changed: Nowadays people are getting married later in life, or not at all, and they’re having fewer children.
Two-thirds of families today have two earners, and almost half of all workers nationally are women. Yet, still, for every dollar that men earn, women earn about 82 cents. And while women have moved into roles in society that my mother wouldn’t have imagined, the notion of gender equality is far from realized: In the current Congress, just 28 percent of the lawmakers are women; among the Fortune 500 companies, only 10 percent have women as CEOs.
The role of women in the workforce is hard partly because, according to surveys, moms still shoulder a disproportionate load of the work at home. And, significantly, there’s a nationwide shortage of direct care workers for both children and the elderly, leading millions of women to decide that they need to stay home to provide care.
That problem is on the verge of ballooning into a crisis as a result of two Trump administration initiatives: first, cuts to Medicaid that were just rammed through Congress, which will reduce the dollars available to hire caregivers; second, the crackdown on immigrants, who comprise more than a quarter of the long-term care workforce. And then there’s the cost, even if families can find caregivers: That option will be pushed out of reach for many families by persistent inflation. (2:05)
Common sense, then, suggests that families would benefit from federal initiatives to expand care options and make them more affordable, so that women could remain in the workforce and succeed there. You might think that the U.S. would finally join every other industrialized country in requiring employers to provide some paid family leave.
The Trump team takes a different approach: It is trying to encourage women to have more babies and to stay home and care for them. So the just-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” gives a $1,000 “baby bonus” to virtually every child born to an American citizen during this presidential term. The hope is that this will hike the U.S. birthrate, which has been declining since 2007 – leaving the country with too few new workers to support an aging population.
There’s an easier solution to that issue than trying to grow more workers from little seeds – a more fair approach than trying to squelch economic opportunities for women. We might turn, as America historically has, to immigrants, who comprised one-fifth of the U.S. workforce in 2023. But the Trump agenda favors deporting, not supporting, immigrant workers.
Interestingly, a baby bonus has been tried elsewhere — in one form or another, in Russia, Italy, Greece and Hungary — and nowhere has it convinced parents to have more babies. You would think that their experience would be instructive. But when has the Trump administration been discouraged by clear signs that its direction is futile, or even harmful?
And, anyway, big families are part of the America envisioned by the evangelical right, which is an important part of the Trump coalition. Its advocates include Vice President JD Vance, who has said that parents should have more political clout than childless people, and that Americans without children should pay higher taxes. And there’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose blended family with his third wife includes seven children, and erstwhile Trump pal Elon Musk, who has acknowledged parentage of 14 children. Blessings abound!
Look, as the product of a so-called traditional family, I’m not going to argue against that option as one way people may choose to live. But as government policy, giving little cash payouts to families to try to get more babies born -- and thus convince more moms to stay home -- seems at best ineffective.
It’s just one of the almost unnoticed effects of the right-wing policy agenda that this White House and Congress are pursuing. And it strikes me as pretty messed-up.