Inside the Conference Recruiting Young Women to be Tradwives

A dispatch from Turning Point USA's Pitch to Gen Z Women

By Madeline Peltz, independent journalist and author of the forthcoming book, GOOD GIRLS AND ALPHA MALES: HOW THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA IS TARGETING GEN Z.

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If there’s a “ground zero” for the “pink pill,” it’s Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit (WLS). Every year, the right-wing mega-group brings together thousands of young women and girls from across the country, giving them a chance to hear from their favorite conservative girlypop influencers, snap insta-worthy photos, and network with like-minded people in Gen Z.

You’d think that a “leadership summit” would focus on professional development and skills building for a group soon to enter adulthood, but that would be incorrect. For the last 11 years, WLS (formerly Young Women’s Leadership Summit), has recruited Gen Z women into conservative ideology by turning the far-right vision of gender roles into an Instagrammable aesthetic.

These themed events are designed around the fun factor: selfie stations, booming hype music between speakers, a vendors’ hall selling right-wing Christian lip tints and bracelet stacks. But as delightful as the smoke machines and free Pilates classes are, the message that comes with them is deeply concerning. WLS has long encouraged young marriage and motherhood. But over the last few years, TPUSA has moved the goalposts to include the demonization of birth control and even advocating against a woman’s right to vote.

Credit: Madeline Peltz, YWLS 2025

I have been covering Turning Point USA and the conservative media for nearly a decade, and my forthcoming book Good Girls and Alpha Males is a years-long investigation into right-wing efforts to recruit Gen Z through digital media and on-the-ground organizing. I’ve attended WLS twice in the last four years and interviewed more than a dozen young conservative women and girls there.

There are a few other conservative nonprofits that target young women, but Turning Point takes it to a whole other level. The organization has a robust network of “field representatives”—entry-level positions where you serve as a liaison between colleges in their designated region and TPUSA. The field rep works with students to set up new chapters, facilitate campus events, and help get them attend TPUSA conferences. Many of the students I’ve spoken with were drawn into the Turning Point universe through unsolicited outreach from a field representative. Field reps also help them to find funding for accommodations and travel so they can attend WLS and other events.

TPUSA’s outreach efforts are creative, to say the least. In 2025, I attended a panel of high school chapter leaders where a young girl said that the organization paid for a mechanical bull to come to her school for a day. Initiatives like this plant a seed in the minds of kids that may blossom into more sustained involvement later on. In 2023, there was a meet and greet for a kangaroo. And without fail there’s the volunteer “hype squad,” a group of especially enthusiastic students who dance, wave signs, and take pictures in the aisles of the conferences before the speakers start to get other attendees excited.

Through Charlie Kirk’s digital activism, Turning Point USA played a huge role in influencing young people to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. In targeting young women, they’ve championed the Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement, blending Christian fundamentalist values with the anti-vaccine movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Last year’s conference was a victory lap for the MAHA movement. “This is Whole Foods meets the West Wing,” Alex Clark, host of Turning Point’s health and wellness podcast Culture Apothecary, said when she opened the 2025 event. “We’ve been stacking wins that they said were impossible.”

But a dark cloud hung over WLS 2026. Over the past year and a half, MAHA has drifted from the Trump administration following a string of betrayals and capitulation to corporate interests. Not only that, but Charlie’s widow and successor as CEO, Erika Kirk, is under constant attack on social media—most notably by Candace Owens, a mega-popular podcaster and one of Charlie Kirk’s best friends when he was alive. Today, the organization’s message is being drowned out by an angry chorus of voices that claim she has betrayed her husband’s legacy.

Erika Kirk was the first to speak this year. In her remarks, she railed against feminism and urged young women to prioritize marriage and family according to biblical principles. But her speech was overshadowed by a heckler just 15 minutes into the conference.

“Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!” A young woman’s voice rang out clearly from the crowd. The woman was removed from the hotel ballroom and the crowd rallied behind Erika, but she struggled through the rest of her speech with a single tear streaming down her face.

Erika is ill-equipped to step into the power vacuum left by her husband. For years, Charlie Kirk used this event to lecture young women on the importance of “biblical womanhood” and organizing their early life around attracting a husband. His approach was consistently belittling and dismissive. He once told a 14-year-old girl in braces she should only go to college to get an “MRS degree.” Another time, he told a freshman in college she would be “miserable” at 35 if she prioritized her goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon over finding a husband. I was in the room both times.

“How many of you every single day it’s—your purpose for being is finding a husband?” He said last year in a joint stage appearance with Erika. “Every hand should then go up.”

Alex Clark, who for years has struggled with critics like me pointing out that she encourages young marriage and pregnancy—even though she herself is over thirty and childless—reflected on this comment in her remarks this past weekend.

“I’ll be honest, I was sitting in the audience and it stung a little bit,” she admitted. “Because I was sitting there as a woman in her 30s who very much wanted marriage.” Needless to say, many of the young high school and college-aged students who attend WLS are also single and childless, listening to Charlie Kirk promise them they’ll be “miserable” if they don’t change that soon.

But Clark also defended her late boss. “It was fatherly tough love.” She gave a speech about the importance of having a “God-honoring single season” before you find your husband, then concluded by announcing she is now engaged to be married.

WLS included some new faces this year, notably a 20-year-old anti-feminist influencer named Savanna Faith Stone, best known for saying she thinks the 19th Amendment was a mistake and endorsing a “household voting” system wherein only a husband has the right to cast a ballot. She’s not alone in this opinion: Alex Clark has expressed a similar sentiment. Despite this, WLS had signs and merchandise throughout the conference encouraging voting, like a sticker of a cartoon 1950s housewife proudly declaring “Moms Are the Red Wall.”

Regardless, speakers’ advice on how to be a “good” conservative girl ranged from tempered (Alex Clark said “The Lord knew that I had a lot to learn” by denying her a fiancé in her 20s) to batshit insane. On the last day, sisters-in-law Millicent and Noleen Sedra, two Christian influencers from Australia, gave back-to-back speeches.

“When women tell me, ‘what am I, his servant, what am I my husband’s servant?’” Millicent Sedra shouted, visibly pregnant in a flesh-colored floral dress. She opened the Bible she was holding and leafed through it.

“Yes! That’s kind of the whole point. We are called to serve. Stop despising serving, and start serving with gratitude.”

Her sister-in-law, Noleen, was no more measured. “Feminism actually has satanic roots,” she said, claiming that historians cover this up. “They’re not going to tell you that women were put on the witch trials because they were killing children, they were midwives that were bringing abortions.”

As the MAHA movement has grown disillusioned, anti-reproductive rights talking points have risen to the surface. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, had a prominent speaking slot.

“I pray that you will commit to joining me on the battlefield to abolish abortion,” she said on the first night.

Other content was more subtle. The conference included at least nine sponsors linked to the anti-abortion movement, including a new app called Plana. On its website, the app claims to be a free-to-use one-stop shop for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies—and the site promises to connect women with a “care coordinator” to help her understand her options. Plana claims they offer “honest medically accurate information about all pregnancy options,” including abortion, “without bias or pressure.”

But at WLS, Plana’s founder Phoebe Entermann told a very different story. She said the app is currently raising $11.6 million to build a platform to help persuade women away from choosing abortion. “If we want life to win, and it can, we have to offer motherhood and adoption as aspirational, proactive wellness-focused care. That is the reframe.”

“Me and my team have spent a long time and a lot of time looking at how abortion is marketed as freedom,” she said. Plana, she claimed, is designed to reach young women “inside their world.”

“You have to design it native to their cognitive narrative.”

The fight against reproductive rights doesn’t end with abortion. Kate Johnson, a conservative influencer married to the digital media juggernaut Benny Johnson, said that “God created” the “biological reality of ovulation” and using birth control to prevent pregnancy is “not yours to take control of.”

Turning Point’s campaign against birth control goes back years, led by Alex Clark. She believes she developed an autoimmune disorder because she took the pill. Her activism has snowballed into a broader push against contraception in partnership with the anti-abortion movement.

Isabel Brown, another “pink pill” influencer who recently went viral for saying young people should have “more kids than they can afford,” also went after birth control.

“The innate desire that you have as a young woman to have children is somehow now antiquated too,” she claimed. “Somehow, in the era of birth control suppressing our natural hormonal instincts, it’s become abnormal or even anti-woman to want to have children.”

The second Trump administration is now turning this talk into action by targeting Title X, a federally funded program that provides reproductive healthcare, including contraception, to almost 3 million people. New guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services wants Title X grantees to emphasize so-called “natural family planning” over access to contraception to receive funding. And the administration has called common forms of contraception ‘abortifacient’ birth control.

WLS’ Gen Z-focused messaging is the on-ramp for young women to get on board with a right-wing policy agenda that seeks to shrink the sphere of their civil rights. Turning Point sells young women on an unrealistic vision of marriage and motherhood that is financially secure and protected from the right’s wrath directed at single women.

In order to receive these benefits, you have to give up your right to self-determination.

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Pre-order GOOD GIRLS AND ALPHA MALES: HOW THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA IS TARGETING GEN Z, and follow Madeline on Substack, Instagram, and Bluesky.