Sheryl Sandberg's Feminist Empire Is Crumbling And She's Blaming Stay-At-Home Moms

This week the Wall Street Journal dropped a quiet bombshell: Sandberg’s nonprofit, Lean In, has shed roughly a quarter of its staff over the past year. More than a dozen employees—some of them top-paid executives earning more than $290,000—are gone, either laid off or walking out the door. The organization that once boasted more than fifty staffers and burned through $10 million a year in salaries and benefits is now run by a 25-year-old former Meta product manager with zero nonprofit experience. Her big idea? Using AI to “help women harness the power of their careers.” And what is the new leaner Lean In focusing its remaining energy on? Not on helping women navigate real life. Not on maternity leave, or childcare costs, or the exhaustion so many mothers feel. No. They’re launching a full-scale war on the “manosphere” and the “tradwife” movement—the growing group of women who have looked at corporate feminism’s promises and said, politely but firmly, “No thank you.” Sandberg herself took to LinkedIn to warn that the “glamorization” of traditional womanhood risks “reviving the professional guilt women spent decades dismantling.” Let that sink in. The woman who wrote the 2013 feminist manifesto Lean In is now openly furious that some women are choosing the lives they want and she insists the wanting itself must be shamed out of us. Choice was never the goal. Direction was. Every time I see a story like this about girlboss feminism, I’m reminded of Simone de Beauvoir’s infamous line: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” There it is—the admission at the heart of modern feminism. Choice was never the goal. Direction was. The women’s movement sold us a sparkly lie: that a career was liberation and the nursery was oppression. Get the corner office, they told us. Outsource babies to daycare. Climb the ladder, lean in, and never, ever look back. If you felt a tug toward home life, that was just internalized patriarchy talking. If you wanted to rock your own baby instead of handing her off to a total stranger, you were betraying the sisterhood. Sandberg and her crew didn’t trust women to make the “right” decisions, so they tried to remove the wrong ones from the menu entirely. Now the reality is catching up to their ideology, and they’re panicking. The December 2025 Women in the Workplace report found something astonishing: for the first time, women are less interested in being promoted than men. The corporate ladder is losing its appeal. Young women are watching their older sisters burn out, divorce at record rates, and medicate their anxiety and depression. Meanwhile, a growing number of women are building beautiful, rooted lives around marriage and motherhood, and they’re not apologizing for it. Enter the tradwife. She’s not a monolith. Some bake bread and homeschool. Some run small businesses from their homes. Some simply decided that raising their own children full-time was worth more than another promotion. They’re not oppressed. They’re not brainwashed. They’re exercising the very choice feminists once claimed to champion, until too many actually chose it. That’s what has Sandberg and company rattled. Their entire project was built on the assumption that once women were “freed” from the home, they would never look back. But many did look back. And a lot of us liked what we saw. They’re exercising the very choice feminists once claimed to champion, until too many actually chose it. I’ve heard the counterarguments a thousand times. “Tradwives are just cosplaying privilege.” “It’s easy to stay home when your husband makes a lot of money.” Fair enough—some are. But the data doesn’t lie: women across income levels are reporting higher life satisfaction when they have the option to prioritize family. The real privilege isn’t the trust fund; it’s having the cultural permission to admit that careerism isn’t the highest good. For decades we were told the opposite. Now that women are taking this path, the movement that claimed to speak for us is calling it false consciousness. This is the same pattern we’ve seen for seventy years. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique about the “problem that has no name”—the quiet despair of suburban housewives—and concluded the only solution was to get every last one of them into the workforce. Never mind the women who found deep purpose in home and love. Never mind the children who thrived under their mothers’ daily care. Those stories were inconvenient to feminists. De Beauvoir was even more explicit. She didn’t want women to have the option of staying home because she knew what would happen if they did: too many would take it. The architects of second-wave feminism understood something about female nature: that given genuine freedom, a huge percentage of us would choose relationships, babies, and the domestic arts over climbing corporate hierarchies. So they set out to close that door. Sandberg’s Lean In was the corporate-friendly sequel. It dressed up the same ideology in PowerPoint slides and TED Talks. “You can have it all,” it whispered, “just lean in harder.” What it really meant was: You must want what we tell you to want. Now comes a desperate pivot to fighting online “misogynists” who dare to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a woman’s highest calling isn’t another Zoom meeting. The glamorization of homemaking isn’t the problem. The problem is that women are finally free enough to admit that careers are fine, but they were never meant to be our entire identity. I’m not saying every woman belongs at home. That would be just as tyrannical as saying none of us do. The entire point—the one feminists refuse to concede—is that we get to decide. Some women will thrive in the office. Some will find joy in teaching, medicine, entrepreneurship. And yes, some will light up at the thought of being there when their toddler takes her first steps, of teaching her ABCs, of building a home that feels like a sanctuary instead of a rest stop between work shifts. All of those are valid. All of them are feminine. None of them require the approval of Sheryl Sandberg. The real misogyny isn’t a man on the internet praising his wife’s cooking. It’s a multimillion-dollar feminist nonprofit that panics at the sight of women making choices it doesn’t like. The real misogyny isn’t a man on the internet praising his wife’s cooking. It’s a multimillion-dollar feminist nonprofit that panics at the sight of women making choices it doesn’t like. It’s telling your daughter that her desire to nurture is suspect. It’s spending $10 million a year in salaries to convince women that the ancient, beautiful work of motherhood is somehow beneath them. Lean In is shrinking because its message is shrinking. The culture is shifting not because of some right-wing conspiracy, but because women are exhausted from living someone else’s script. We tried the experiment. We leaned in until our backs broke. And now a growing number of us are standing up straight, looking around, and saying: “Actually, I’d rather lean into my family.” If that terrifies the old guard of feminism, good. It should. Because the women they claimed to liberate are finally, truly free. And many are choosing differently.