The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family.

For starters, there are lots of kids. There’s a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there’s a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together.

Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year.

Those advocating these policies typically don’t specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women’s childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it’s fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be.

Most American families, however, look very different from the MAGA dream. In 2024, 74 percent of mothers with children under 18 participated in the labor force. As of the previous year, 45 percent of moms, and a full 69 percent of Black moms, were breadwinners in their households. There are nearly 25 million working moms in the country, about 14 percent of the total labor force. And in 2023, the average American estimated that a family of four needed $85,000 per year to get by, an amount difficult to achieve on one income.

These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives’ goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-long global trends in women’s employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren’t coming back. But can President Donald Trump’s allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality?

After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars.

The history of moms at work

Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history.

“People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,” said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. “The household was an economic unit,” Darling said.

As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for........

© Vox