After years spent emphasizing family life in the public eye, she will now run the group her husband built.
Sept. 18, 2025
Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk told Turning Point USA executives that he had a plan for the organization’s future in the event of his death. This week, it was put into action: On Wednesday evening, Erika Kirk was elected the new chief executive and chair of the board of Turning Point USA.
When Mrs. Kirk gave her first public remarks after her husband’s death last week, she pledged that she would be a core part of making the organization’s mission even stronger, telling listeners that the campus tour would go on, that there would be more tours in the years to come and that the radio and podcast shows Mr. Kirk was proud of would go forward.
“I’ll make Turning Point USA the biggest thing that this nation has ever seen,” she said. “I promise.”
For years, at Mr. Kirk’s side, Mrs. Kirk emphasized the importance of prioritizing marriage and motherhood over career. “Boss babe culture,” she said in 2021 at a Turning Point event, “is completely antithetical to the gospel.” In June, headlining a summit on women’s leadership, Mrs. Kirk sat alongside her husband as he told the crowd that every woman should “submit to a godly man.”
She is one of a raft of conservative female leaders right now who are building prominent careers and public-facing lives while emphasizing a particular message: telling young women to focus on getting married and starting a family, rather than having a public-facing life. And it’s a message that is resonating at political gatherings, on partisan podcasts with sprawling audiences and on Instagram accounts with 10 million followers.
There’s a long history of American women attempting to strike this balance. In her book “Right-Wing Women,” the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin recounts attending the National Women’s Conference in Houston in November 1977, as the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment raged. Nearby, Ms. Dworkin writes, the anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly was holding her own counter convention. Ms. Dworkin describes Ms. Schlafly as “that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys.”
“It is likely that her ambition is to use women as a constituency to effect entry into the upper echelon of right-wing male leadership,” writes Ms. Dworkin, some of whose books were reissued this year and have found a new audience among Gen Z readers.
Ms. Schlafly, meanwhile, argued that feminist leaders were teaching women to see themselves as victims. “Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness,” she wrote.
The “womanosphere,” a set of right-leaning podcasts targeting young women in a counterpart to the manosphere, is brimming with figures in the Schlafly mold.
Katie Miller, the wife of top the Trump aide Stephen Miller, resigned from her role as Elon Musk’s Washington operative to start a podcast, assuring listeners that she would be focusing mainly on wellness and parenting rather than politics. Jessica Reed Kraus parlayed her personal writing about motherhood into a powerful role in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has found a foothold in the Trump administration through Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Then there’s Brett Cooper, a new face at Fox News, who in June at a Turning Point USA event explained that she had scaled back her popular YouTube show from 10 episodes a week to two. This limited her own financial ceiling, she acknowledged, but allowed herself to orient life around the son she was expecting. (On this note, the audience cheered, raucously.) Ms. Cooper struck a balance between promoting a tradwife lifestyle and criticizing it — encouraging her fans to do work they found meaningful, but also making clear she felt that feminism sold women a bill of goods in underscoring the primacy of having a career.
“I’ve been on tour and we do a meet and greet after every show and I have had the opportunity to meet such incredible young girls — young women who at my age are stay-at-home moms and already have a couple of kids,” Ms. Cooper said to the crowd. “A young woman told me just a couple days ago that she had dropped out of medical school so that she could prioritize finding a job and a career that would offer her the flexibility to have the family that she wanted.”
In a similar vein, Alex Clark, the Turning Point USA podcast host of “Culture Apothecary,” said in an interview that she would instantly swap her own high-flying achievements for a husband and children.
“I’m very proud of all my accomplishments — I’ve gotten to do some amazing things, testify at the Senate with R.F.K.,” said Ms. Clark, whose fans throng her for selfies and whose show regularly ranks among the top health podcasts on Apple. “I would give all this up tomorrow. If someone said, ‘OK, here’s your choice you can keep all this or have marriage and kids,’ I would say, ‘I’m taking marriage and kids, bye.’”
As for Mrs. Kirk, she will soon make her first public speech as leader of the organization that her husband founded, doing so in a setting as harrowing as the circumstances that put her in this position, on Sunday at Mr. Kirk’s funeral.
On Instagram shortly after the death of her husband, she told her six million followers, “They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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