In the soft-wooded hush of Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill Club, America’s daughters were assembling. Tiny bouquets dotted the conference room, and the merch table overflowed with stickers bearing the slogan: “I’m proud to be a conservative woman.”
The Clare Boothe Luce Center’s annual leadership conference for young women promises to nurture “strong, conservative leaders” and help “young women flourish… while strengthening their families, communities, and country”. With more than 120 there, this was its biggest gathering yet.
Clad in what I thought was my smartest outfit — white shirt, black trousers, ballet flats — I realised my miscalculation the moment the elevator doors opened. Before me stood Mia, 21, from North Carolina, in a long white dress and stilettos, her curls immaculate. It was a sea of voluminous blowdries and meticulous makeup. Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one, while I looked like the Senate librarian.
Over breakfast, I met some of them, as they daintily picked at their syrupy pancakes with scarlet nails: Maddy, a sparky 20-year-old in baby blue, was working as a Comms intern for her “hero”, her state’s first female senator; Cecelia, the youngest and sternest, was interning for the conservative and religious First Things magazine. Paige, another congressional intern, grinned at me: “Today is so fun!”
They were fresh-faced and ambitious. Most were under 21, and were in DC forging the beginnings of their political career, only a few among the swarm of interns that descends upon the city each summer. They came from colleges all over the country, often from campuses that were allergic to their political persuasions, and they hoped that the people they met here would one day be their colleagues in congress or on the senate floor.
Kimberly Begg, the centre’s president, is a Catholic attorney, who has five children, and has worked for various conservative causes throughout her life. She took this job last year, feeling a desire to teach the values she’s living to the next generation. “I want them to know what it means to be a good woman,” she said. “Not just how to excel at work, but how to live. ”
“Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one.”
Her summer interns are taking note. One of them, Anastasia, told me she’d learned “how to look good on camera and spread the message”. When I asked her about this message, she responded brightly: “That you can be a mom and be ambitious.” I would hear this repeatedly: you shouldn’t disvalue mothering alongside your greater career goals; ; you can most definitely have it all. The practicalities of this were never addressed — can you stay home while running for senate? Instead, we were told that womanhood isn’t possible without babies.
The first speaker was the 30-year-old Mary Margaret Olohan, a redheaded White House correspondent for The Daily Wire. She’d grown up in an Irish Catholic family, “proudly” one of 11 children, and had been homeschooled. She began her career as a publicist during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings, where several women accused the now Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct during his confirmation hearing. “I don’t know if you were politically cognisant then,” she told her fresh-faced audience, “but that’s when I was radicalised.” Olohan quit her job to become a journalist, a “truth-seeking one”, convinced that the “Pro-Abortion” media were trying to stop Kavanaugh’s appointment, and now she covers abortion as a beat.
Today, she’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office: “There’s things you have to do to get noticed, I wear bright colours, have a peppy smile, I make sure I look good, really good.” Recently, she’s been reporting on the doxxing of ICE agents. Yet she told us that she’ll always make space for Mass during her work day, even if it means missing a scoop.
Like every other speaker that day, Olohan offered career advice with the caveat that there are “more important things to remember. You should never prioritise your career over finding your spouse… You should try and put yourself in the position that you can be at home. Like me, if God willing, I have a family, I can be at home writing.”
As girls queued for selfies, Maddy, who writes for her student newspaper, told me she was excited that such a young woman could be breaking such big stories. “She was just so cool. I mean, how old is she? And she’s everywhere.”
But not everyone felt so inspired. Courtney, a dazzling blonde from Utah who is currently interning in Congress, sighed. “We’re all girls here, so I may as well just tell you, I’m 17 weeks pregnant. And it’s really hard. I’m the only girl in my office, and I’m just totally exhausted. No one gets it.” She looked around the room. “This is what I hoped DC would be like.” She clearly admired Olohan: “I really want to do that too. To fight abortion, trans stuff, to fight for America. I want to make a difference. But I’m so tired now, and I haven’t even had the kid yet.” And yet for all her talk about balancing work and homemaking, Olohan had offered little practical advice: “I mean, she’s not even married yet. How can she tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Courtney asked me.
The other girls, whose youthful naivete no amount of make up could conceal, had no answer. “I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have your family around. Someone to look after the baby, right?” Maddy ventured, as the rest of us nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know how to trust someone else with my kid,” Courtney replied. “And don’t even get me started on daycares.”
There was a fracture at the table now: tiny, but visible. None of the other girls was married. None had boyfriends. Maddy said she’d gladly date someone “if he’s not intimidated by a strong woman”. She was here to network, but Courtney was here to find out how to live.
Courtney had become pregnant by “accident”, and married her boyfriend earlier this year, “because what else can you do?” All the girls I spoke to were vehemently pro-life, except Maddy, who thought there “should be some exception for rape”. Paige and Courtney weren’t so sure; they grimaced at Maddy’s mention of rape. “Two wrongs just don’t make a right,” Paige told me.
Besides, Courtney was grateful for her unexpected pregnancy. “Now we have to become real grown-ups, we have to step it up,” she said. Her husband is 23 and still has two years of college left. He is spending the summer delivering Amazon packages. “He’s a good man, for that. He wants me to stay home.” She showed us wedding photos taken at the Utah State courthouse.
What really struck me, though, was that in a room of worshipping conservatives, who were excited by what the new administration had been doing, there was no mention of Donald Trump until after lunch. The values of being a “conservative woman” — being polite in your power, being nurturing with your strength — didn’t seem to align with Trumpian chaos. He was the unmentionable representative of a more turbulent revolution.
When I asked about Trump, Paige perked up: “He’s not perfect. But he loves America.” “I just wish he’d get off Twitter!” Courtney sighed. The girls liked Melania Trump and admired her reticence. “People are so mean to her, it’s so disrespectful,” Courtney said. “Feminists especially.” But their real heroine was Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s feisty 27-year-old press secretary. “They say [Trump] doesn’t like strong women, I mean just look at the women surrounding him. Look at her, she’s amazing,” Courtney said. Leavitt, who had a baby on the campaign trail, went back to work just four days after giving birth. To these girls, she’s the ultimate embodiment of conservative womanhood. She grinned through it all with her hair freshly blow-dried.
“Everyone knows conservative women are the happiest in America,” McFarland told the cheering crowd. Like many others that day, McFarland offered happiness like a revolutionary compact: work harder and look better, don’t waste energy on girls who “suck the energy from you”. Don’t out-man the men but outshine them.
We heard from Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s lawyer, and Paula Scanlan, who spoke with steely hurt about her time on a swim team with Lia Thomas, the transgender athlete. “Women are naturally kind and caring,” Scanlan said. “It’s really challenging to break through that.” Courtney nodded beside me.
In line for the bathroom afterwards, a group of girls discussed Scanlan’s courage. “She can’t be more than 20,” one said, admiringly. An 18-year-old from California sighed, “That’s the problem with being young. Guys just can’t match our maturity. I have to date, like, a 25-year-old.” The line dragged. Despite the day’s lengthy applause for single-sex spaces, the girls broke into the men’s bathroom. “This is so funny,” a 20-year-old from Maryland told me. One girl dry-shampooed while another fixed her lashes. Another took a mirror selfie to send to her mum.
As I was leaving the conference, I exchanged numbers with Maddy. “It’s funny,” she said when I complimented her outfit, “it was actually my mom’s wedding dress.” “She gave it to me.”
Was that it? Did this maternal gesture in some way sum up the entire movement? In this room, femininity wasn’t something to rebel against or escape from, but something to inherit and slightly refashion, like your mum’s old wedding suit. The girls identified as “first-wave feminists”, because they weren’t looking for equality, but a way to make peace with everything they’d been told to seek. Here, the pursuit of love didn’t conflict with ambition, nor was faith at odds with intelligence.
Yet, as Courtney seemed to realise, there were holes in the story of conservative womanhood these girls were being sold. “Tradwife or Girlboss, maybe you don’t have to choose,” read one of the conference’s ads; and in many ways, the movement on offer here felt like a soft-lit inversion of the girlboss era, with self-empowerment refashioned as political purpose. Where the girlboss promised liberation through self-branding, the conservative woman here was encouraged to become her fullest self by serving others, her God, her country, her family. Yet both models offered the same tired bargain: perform perfectly, and you’ll be rewarded.
Courtney was waiting for that reward. She left hopeful that she would “figure it all out”, become a mother in a few months and then become something else too. And the day’s agenda only offered a more orderly container for those things, one with clear expectations and attractive packaging. But Courtney’s tired eyes and unasked questions still hover over the whole thing: a reminder that no amount of lipstick or prayer can gloss over what this brand of femininity can’t sustain.
We were told all day that boys have it harder now, and the women nodded along, because nodding is easier than asking what hard really means. They’d been “going dancing”, having “movie nights”, cooking each other “cute little dinners”. But they were also getting on in the world. And at some point, the fervour they built up trying to change America would have to be sacrificed for their truer calling: motherhood. Then, it would be the boys left standing in the Oval Office, the Senate floor, or even in their own homes, making decisions.
That siren call of conservative womanhood is not shouted but whispered. A murmur that tells you your instincts are sacred, your sacrifice noble, your submission a kind of strength. It makes giving things up feel like choosing them. Even while Courtney abandoned her political dreams (at least for now) she felt her greater purpose would arrive with her baby. I could easily feel the allure of such a promise. But that’s what I left shaken by: how quietly a life could be rerouted, not by force, but by suggestion. This way they could have it all, supposedly, but the rooms of real power were still off limits, reserved for the boys who never had to choose.
