When my grandmother Quen was on her deathbed in her 60s, she called the whole family into her room, including my mom, who held me, then a 6-month-old baby, in her arms. I was flushed and fat-cheeked opposite Quen, whose face was gray and sunken from the ravages of ovarian cancer. “You were the love of my life,” Quen said, looking at her husband of over four decades, “and I should have left you the day I married you.”
She had tried to leave once. In high school, my mom came home one day to find her mom packing her bags, but my grandfather John got Quen to stay by telling her that he would die first and then she would be free. This was before no-fault divorce was legalized in her home state of Indiana and across the country, which allowed people to end their marriages without having to prove wrongdoing.
As everyone looked on, Quen continued: “You promised me a second chance. You promised me a better life, a happy life.” I was far too little to remember the speech, but my mom told me about it often. John liked to dress Quen in furs and fine jewelry to show off his business success; she lived a life of financial comfort but also silent misery. My mom called it a “deal with the devil.”
It was a while before I heard about my mom’s own deal with the devil. When I was in high school, my mom told me that she had gotten pregnant as a teenager in the 60s and placed her baby up for adoption. She was one of an estimated 1.5 million women, most of them white, who, in the pre-Roe era, were hidden away in homes for unwed mothers until they could give birth and surrender their “illegitimate” babies to married couples. “In exchange for their babies, they could reenter normative life,” writes the historian Rickie Solinger, who calls it a “neo-Faustian deal.”
Inside these maternity homes, women were prepared for a future as “proper” women, wives, and mothers—including through classes on cooking, sewing, and social etiquette. It was all part of a system designed to reinforce marriage and the white nuclear-family norm.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my family’s deals with the devil. We’re in the midst of a revived feminist backlash, where the sexual revolution is being blamed for women’s unhappiness and specious claims are being made about Gen Z women longing to be tradwives (in reality, they are the most feminist-identified generation of women yet). At the same time, the right-wing is attempting to reframe early marriage and motherhood as a common sense middle ground between the “girl boss” and the “tradwife.” You can fast-track a family and then build a career later, they swear.
It’s all part of a broader attempt to push women into the home—and into dependence on men. Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation released a report on “saving America by saving the family.” It is more accurately a plan to make single motherhood more economically precarious than it already is by gutting welfare benefits, while offering new financial bonuses to married couples—including a $2,500 newborn investment that would be distributed to men and women who marry before the age of 30. That is to say nothing of the report’s proposal for government-funded “marriage bootcamps.”
Republicans are also attempting to repeal no-fault divorce, which would trap women in unhappy marriages, just like in my grandmother’s era. And far-right extremists who want to take away women’s right to vote are getting mainstream endorsements from the likes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Of course, conservatives have already succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision defending the constitutional right to abortion, which led to the closure of that era’s homes for unwed mothers.
They are glorifying a period that devastated the women of my family—along with countless others. Like so many women sent away in the pre-Roe era, my mom was left traumatized—right on up until she died 13 years ago. She grieved her first child for the rest of her life, while Quen looked back on her lifelong marriage with regret. In both their cases, the “devil” was the nuclear-family ideal—as constructed by white middle-class patriarchal values.
I was born in 1984, nearly 20 years after my mom was sent away. Sex had been her downfall; it had gotten her punished in ways that were every bit as enduring as her own mom’s Faustian bargain. But I understood that there was so much more available to me all these decades later, thanks in large part to the successes of the feminist movement. So, in my 20s, I insisted on my right to have sex—freely and adventurously—and to not be destroyed by it.
I was not destroyed by sex, but I was often disappointed by it as I ran into enduring gender disparities—from slut-shaming to the orgasm gap. This was not the result of too much feminism but too little of it. The notion of sexual empowerment had been swiftly co-opted, commercialized, and turned into a self-help project, as opposed to a collective movement for social justice.
Scholars have shown that my generation of women came up in a shifting cultural landscape where the most privileged among us—usually white and middle-class women—could guard against the threats associated with the virgin-slut dichotomy by appearing to be powerful and in control. We could claim some greater freedom of movement, just so long as we played the part of the sexually liberated. Maybe that was my deal with the devil—or, more accurately, my survival strategy within the patriarchy.
When I eventually got married in my late 20s, it felt like a win against reactive cultural commentators in the 2000s and 2010s who had warned that casual sex could damage my generation’s ability to love. We were told to go ahead and marry “Mr. Good Enough” instead of searching for “Mr. Right.” Otherwise, some argued, we would end up sad, lonely, childless, and filled with what-ifs (just imagine what my grandmother would have said to this).
This argument was often considered well-meaning, even feminist at the time—and yet it’s the same specter of regret currently being used by the right-wing to convince young women to put marriage and motherhood before their careers.
Conservatives are selling the lie of the nuclear family as a safe haven in a world that Republicans are making more hostile by the hour. They have spent decades trying to strong-arm women into marriage—through everything from seductive lifestyle content to suffocating public policy. Why work so hard to revive this ailing institution? There are a great many reasons, most of them benefiting privileged white men. But let’s not lose sight of this reason: The nuclear family is where we lose sight of each other. It’s where our collective problems are disguised as individual ones.
Every time my mom mentioned her own mother’s “deal with the devil,” I knew that she was trying to hand me operating instructions for this life of mine. The same was true when she told me about being sent away in shame as a pregnant teenager. She was warning me about how a woman could find herself trapped in sex and marriage. For a long while, the lesson I took was that I could escape the trap through the right series of choices—there was so much more available to me than to my mom and grandmother, after all.
Now, I see that my grandmother played by the rules and was punished for it; my mom broke the rules and was punished for it. The real lesson in these maternal parables: Even the best individual choices leave us stuck within a system rigged for oppression. That compromised freedom is still too much for right-wingers who claim that early motherhood and marriage is an empowering decision while trying to restrict our ability to make any other choice.
Adapted from MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory. Copyright © 2026 by Tracy Clark-Flory. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
