She’s also a woman who sells this image strategically. The white working-class Americans to whom Ms. Trump’s father directed many of his appeals hew more closely to traditional views of marital obligations and gender norms than those who are college educated, even as most working-class mothers are employed outside the home and are more likely to be raising children on their own.

Ms. Trump’s clear ambition remains unobjectionable in part because she seems to require nothing of men. She affirms her status as a wife and a mother first and a businesswoman second. While she speaks to the challenges of combining work and family, she makes no demands that her husband “lean in” at home — maybe Mr. Kushner does do the dishes, but they aren’t Instagramming it.

Her push for paid parental leave is certainly laudable and especially out of the box for the Republican Party, but the policy she urged her father to propose wasn’t really about parents — it offered maternity leave only, emphasizing that the task of raising children remains the domain of women (even “women who work”). And her soft-focus feminism is put to use covering for her father’s boorishness: Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted of his refusal to do any child care whatsoever for his five children, but his daughter nevertheless deems him “a feminist.”

For some people — perhaps people who voted for her father — there is a post-feminist salve in the neotraditional marriage model Ms. Trump promotes. It’s a palatable way to mesh old sexist ideas about women as nurturers and helpers with the realities of modern American life. Ms. Trump embodies a feminine ideal, even while she lives a more feminist reality.

For working and middle-class women, though, the space where that ideal rubs up against reality is more likely to produce friction than anything else. Many Americans remain psychologically stuck between some vision of the 1950s white suburban family and the revolutionary, and still unfulfilled, promise of gender equality. While a majority of Americans agree that women should not return to traditional 1950s roles, that calculus changes when women have kids — a majority also believes that mothers should stay home with young children.

This is an especially precarious set of expectations for families who, unlike the Trump-Kushners, live in constrained financial circumstances. For heterosexual couples of all income levels, having children often leads to discord precisely because mothers and fathers tend to slide into more traditional roles — leaving women to tend to the trivial details of adult life, like changing diapers, picking up the dry cleaning or, in Ms. Trump’s case, setting up a new house and getting the kids acclimated to a new school.