This is the real “trap” created by two-earner culture. There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.

That pressure has major human costs. If you look at expressed female desires in our society, there is both a substantial unmet maternal preference for part-time work over full-time work and a general desire for more children than American women are currently having. These two desires are intimately connected: No matter how gender-egalitarian society becomes, the physical realities of gestation and childbirth make it natural for most families to desire at least a temporary division of labor during the years when their kids are young, a temporary period of male breadwinning to balance the burden borne by mothers. And a working world that doesn’t accommodate this natural desire will end up with, well, what we increasingly have in the West — a lot of well-off dual-earner couples but fewer successful relationships and fewer children than either sex desires.

Part of the problem here is that in reacting against a social conservatism that seems hostile to female ambition, much of feminism has subjected itself to corporate capitalism instead, and embraced a “lean in” norm that essentially asks women to accommodate themselves to career paths made for men. This leads to angst when professional women have children and the demands of corporate life push them back into the old division-of-labor patterns. But worse, it requires a lot of cultural deception about how easy it is to postpone having kids, joined to a crude, “freeze your eggs” form of corporate patriarchy (draped in wokeness, but no less anti-woman for all that) that’s good for Apple and Google but lousy for long-term female happiness.

Nor is the existing liberal answer to some of these dilemmas — universal day care of the kind that Warren now champions — a sufficient response. Day care can be great for families (again, for the record, our own kids have been in wonderful programs), and to repurpose Strain’s line, the good things about family life that social conservatives rightly celebrate are perfectly compatible with pre-K and nursery school and early-childhood care.

But there are many families that don’t want full-time day care just as there are many families that don’t want two full-time jobs, and their desire can be entirely reasonable. Great preschools are no easier to build than great high schools, and if you think your kids might be better off in the care of a parent or with some extended family member, then a system designed around a dual-income plus day care norm will likewise feel like a burden, or a trap.

The better way here, as I have argued with tedious frequency , would be for conservatives skeptical of the two-earner norm to make common cause with feminists skeptical of the corporate bias against female biology and for both to unite around supports for family life that are neutral between different modes of breadwinning. Don’t subsidize day care, don’t subsidize stay-at-home moms; just subsidize family life, and let the sexes figure out how best to balance work and life, their ambitions and their desire for kids.

The practical obstacles to this kind of feminist-conservative centrism may seem substantial, but the practical case for odd alliances is just as strong. As Lyman Stone recently argued in First Things, the evidence from Europe suggests family policies are most effective when they’re understood as part of a flexible pro-family consensus, rather than as attempts to impose a single normative model on women and families. In other words, a pro-family conservatism that simply rejects the two-earner household as a failed experiment won't be able to establish a successful policy consensus. But neither will a feminism that writes off the aspects of traditionalism that reflect what many women want.