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Meet the Group of Young Women Redefining Success for a New Generation
- TheSwishCompany
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
STORY: Hannah Brusven
PHOTOGRAPHY: Abigail Thomsen
Pulling up to a downtown Nashville hotel on an August weekend, no one would have been surprised to find a crowd of young women in cowgirl boots and sparkling Western wear. But these women had not flown in from across the country for a bachelorette weekend on Broadway, or a ride on the pedal bikes– they had come to wrestle with a question women of their generation have been given surprisingly few satisfying answers to:
What does success look like for young women in 2026 who are eager to contribute to the world, but also hope to become wives and mothers?
These hundred women, ranging from high school seniors to young professionals, are a part of the Network of Enlightened Women, or “NeW” a group founded in 2004 by Karin Lips.
WHAT IS NeW?
Karin was a college student, just like these attendees, looking to find like-minded women with traditional values on campus. Now, her organization is helping another generation challenge a different orthodoxy at campuses all over the United States: the assumption that a successful woman’s life must be measured primarily by professional or domestic achievement.
For some attendees, that mission had already altered the course of their college experience. Alyssa Bicanchi revived the NeW chapter at the University of Tampa as a freshman after discovering that its former chapter had become inactive.
“I was a freshman at the time, and I just started going into the offices and saying, how do I register to start a club?” she recalled.
It took approximately a year and a half of meetings, administrative work, and, as she described it, “getting past all the backlash” before the chapter formally launched. The demand was nevertheless apparent. “We did have a lot of girls that were interested right away, which was amazing,” she said.
NeW’s eight full-time and two part-time staff members, most of whom are engaged, recently married, pregnant, or mothers, share a passion for helping women flourish in every season of life just as they are experiencing. The speakers, too, not only sported baby bumps on stage or pointed to their children in the back of the room, but many brought their moms along for the day. It was, for certain, a family affair.
THE TYPE OF SUCCESS THEY INHERITED
These young attendees' questions are hardly surprising considering the versions of success Gen Z women have inherited. For years, they have been presented with two radically opposed paths: become the tirelessly ambitious “boss babe” or retreat into an idealized filtered version of the “tradwife.”
“I’m honestly tired of the boss babe-tradwife discussion. It’s so overdone,” Bethany Miller, managing editor of The Conservateur, told the audience. That feeling was palpable with the attendees.
The labels and fatigue may be new, but the underlying conflict is not. Young women have repeatedly been taught that professional ambition and domestic life compete for the same finite space. Success means earning more, advancing faster, remaining independent, and postponing anything that could restrict your options. Marriage can wait, they are told. Children can wait, TikTok says. Home is apparently only where you recover between more consequential pursuits.
That pressure affects not only the choices young women make, but what they feel permitted to say they want. Kayla Huston, NeW’s communications manager, frequently works with students preparing for media appearances and has wrestled with this balance.
“I don’t want [women] to be afraid of admitting that being a mom and a wife is a priority,” she said. “I feel like they sometimes either feel, I don’t know if embarrassment is the word, but afraid to admit that because someone might judge them or think they’re not serious.”
Popular culture reinforces that message from several directions. Kim Kardashian famously advised women in business to “get up and work,” reducing success to relentless productivity. Online celebrations of the “DINK” lifestyle present childlessness as the route to greater freedom, travel, and disposable income. In 2023, model and actress Emily Ratajkowski declared it “chic” to be divorced by 30, turning even the dissolution of a marriage into a fashionable form of self-reinvention.
The alternative presented online is often just as narrow. The tradwife aesthetic appears to reject corporate ambition, but it can reduce domestic life to floral dresses, sourdough bread, and beautifully filtered kitchens. One path treats the home as an impediment to meaningful work; the other can treat it as an escape from meaningful work.
Neither vision adequately answers the women sitting in that Nashville conference room. They did not want careers at the expense of family, but neither did they believe their abilities and ideas would disappear when they became wives and mothers. They were looking for a third possibility in a life in which ambition is not abandoned, but rightly ordered.
A LARGER DEFINITION OF SUCCESS
That third possibility begins by recognizing that no single arrangement will allow every woman to flourish. Emma DeGrado, NeW’s media relations coordinator, described the organization’s approach in deliberately personal terms.
“We see women, each woman, each member as a person. We want that person to flourish,” she said. “We want to empower women to navigate the questions that come with balancing work, motherhood, marriage, and family.”
As conference speaker and The Swish Magazine Summer 2026 cover star Reagan Conrad put it, “We make plans for a career since career day in Kindergarten… and then daily work to get the grades to get into college, to get the career… but we’ve removed all preparation for family life in society.”
This preparation is at the heart of NeW’s mission, one that aims to integrate and embody the Classically Feminine approach, which does not measure a woman’s success by job title, income, marital status, or a perfectly maintained domain. Classical Femininity positions a woman's talents and opportunities rightly ordered towards what is true, good, and beautiful and does not consider a woman’s education, creativity, professional skills, relationships, and domestic work as competing identities but as resources for stewardship.
For Huston, that vision became tangible when she had her son in April 2025. Before becoming a mother, she had assumed that she would stop working once she had children. Instead, after giving herself time to experience motherhood and discuss the decision with her husband, she moved into a part-time version of her communications role.
“I still get to be creative and help with the social media and all that…” she said. “And it’s not something that I ever thought I’d be doing.”
Her experience also challenged the assumption that professional and maternal responsibilities must inevitably diminish one another. “Work made me a little bit more efficient. I don’t have time to waste anymore,” she explained.
She realized how the expression of a woman’s gifts will change from one season to another. There may be years devoted to establishing a career, years centered more fully upon young children, and later years in which experience gained through both professional and domestic life creates new leadership opportunities.
“This is the time that I’m in. This is the season I’m in,” she said. “It’s okay to kind of put some things on the back burner and know that you’re not going to be able to do it all; you really just have to prioritize those things, and that’s okay.”
In her present season, Huston is prioritizing her husband, son, and family while attending fewer social events.
For attendee Vanessa Mayer, a George Fox University student working seven days a week between a retail position and a policy institute, the present season looks markedly different.
“I guess I would categorize the season of life as the building blocks,” she said. Mayer described NeW as “such a great networking place to be in,” but said the community also allows her to think aloud with women whose backgrounds and experiences differ from her own. Hearing those perspectives, she explained, “kind of helps me determine what I think about it.”
Her life is currently centered on paying for college, gaining professional experience, and discovering opportunities she had not anticipated. It is demanding, but she does not view preparation as a lesser season simply because she has not yet arrived at the life she is building toward with a husband and children.
The event’s advice was also not simply philosophical, but practical. Attendees heard from women like speaker Chrissy Clark, host of the Underreported Stories podcast, who gave women a challenge to not look at their phones until nine in the morning to keep a clear head. Speaker and The Swish Magazine Autumn 2025 cover star Hope Harvard’s advice also applied to every facet of life, with practical encouragement to apply makeup as an affirmation that you are faithfully and wonderfully made.
INVITATION TO THE SUCCESS IN THIS SEASON CLASS
The 2026 Network of Enlightened Women Leadership Retreat showcased women a little further ahead of the audience, in age and stage, bringing practical wisdom and guidance for a flourishing life. Now, NeW is bringing their message to a wider audience with their upcoming Success in This Season course that is "designed for women who want strategic advice for different seasons of life after college: career, marriage, motherhood, and more.”
Over six evening sessions, participants will hear from several experts sharing their own stories of navigating life’s seasons, the cultural narratives and policy decisions holding women back, and how to refine their own communication skills to discuss these important topics and questions.
For the young women gathered in Nashville, the answer was not to exchange professional ambition for domestic ambition or to make one identity consume every other part of life. Rather, NeW's message was to cultivate their abilities, prepare seriously for both their skills and family, and learn to recognize what faithfulness requires in each season.
That distinction matters far beyond the individual woman. Women who learn to order their gifts wisely in 2026 are building stronger homes, no matter their stage of life, without withdrawing from public life. They bring greater purpose and satisfaction to their work without a career to provide their entire identity. They form families, shape institutions, mentor younger women, preserve traditions, and create the cultures in which the next generation will understand its own responsibilities. That is the opposite of a retreat. When women flourish across the changing seasons of their lives, their families, workplaces, and communities flourish with them.
Perhaps the women in Nashville were not redefining success so much as recovering its fullest meaning, one the world desperately needs.
Applications for the upcoming Success in This Season course close September 7th.
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