‘MAHA Moms,’ RFK Jr. And The Illusion Of Power

There’s a lot that goes into “making America healthy again” ― and mothers are taking on most of the work.

The MAHA movement, created and led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has relied on mis- and disinformation to villainize many parts of everyday life, including vaccines, food additives and dyes, and household cleaners. Much of the rhetoric is about health being linked to an individual’s choices — or, in the case of kids, the choices of their parents.

Nearly 40% of parents in the U.S. identify as supporters of the MAHA movement, according to an October 2025 survey. More than 80% of those parents identify as Republicans who support President Donald Trump. A minority of MAHA parents don’t identify as conservative, but still question the legitimacy of the current medical establishment.

Women — and moms in particular — have increasingly been attracted to conservative politics since the pandemic, largely because they perceived mask and vaccine mandates as a threat to their autonomy as parents, Katie Gaddini, sociologist and author of upcoming book “Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power The American Right,” told HuffPost.

Now, so-called “MAHA moms” approach the health and wellness space from the belief that they know what is best for their families. In the name of “medical freedom” ― a concept Kennedy has put forward to seemingly grant people the power to make autonomous decisions about their health ― a mother is now the sole person responsible for keeping her children healthy and safe.

MAHA moms are expected to research vaccines and other health concerns, cook clean food, and keep their homes both tidy and toxin-free. They may homeschool their children because they don’t like what is being taught in school systems, giving them more oversight and control into what their kids are learning.

The result is conservative women both being empowered and further restricted to traditional gender roles, Gaddini said.

“The MAHA movement encourages women to do a significant amount of emotional, physical, mental labor around health and wellness. It affirms again and again this idea of what a good mother looks like,” Gaddini said. “But it also breaks with more traditional roles because these women hold significant amounts of power.”

HuffPost spoke with Gaddini about the power of motherhood in the MAHA movement, intensive mothering as an entry point into conservative politics, and the paradox of women who make a living promoting stay-at-home mom life on social media.

I’m interested in the role of mothers and the rise of ‘momfluencers’ within the MAHA movement. What do you make of this overlap between the MAHA movement and conservative moms?

A lot of the women involved in the MAHA movement are moms, and they are politicking under the identity of mother and maternalism. But the MAHA movement is composed of very strange bedfellows because on the one hand you’ve got crunchy liberal women disillusioned with mainstream medicine, and on the other hand you have conservative Christian homeschool moms.

I would say that there are a lot of conservative moms in the MAHA movement, and there are also a lot of conservative MAGA moms who are not MAHA.

It’s a really fragile coalition because you have women who are historically and even presently quite politically opposed to one another on a range of issues, probably including abortion and reproductive rights. And on the other hand, they’re united by this singular vision of making America healthy. So it’s a super interesting coalition to watch because it’s bringing natural foes together for the first time.

What kind of role are right-wing women playing in the MAHA movement?

One of the things that is so fascinating about their role is that this population ― although there’s a strain of them that have been anti-vaccine for a long time ― by and large, they were not concerned with health and wellness until the pandemic. So there’s been a change for them in political focus since the pandemic, where now they are concerned with food dyes and more concerned with vaccines and what type of medical professional they’re taking their children to, if at all. They’re concerned with using natural remedies or essential oils.

On the one hand, it’s a really natural fit because conservative Christian women see themselves as carrying their responsibility for home and hearth: the food their family eats, the education their children receive. So this falls under their purview as they’ve already understood their role, but it’s a new dimension to their role.

One example I like to give is I was part of this Facebook group with several hundred conservative Christian moms, and they really became interested in health and wellness after the pandemic. It even extended into what type of body wash their husbands use, and sharing tips for ‘How can I get my husband to use this non-toxic body wash?’ And I love that example, because I think it really shows that even the minutia of what body wash their spouse uses falls under the responsibility of home and health for them now, and the list goes on and on.

It sounds like the pandemic was a real inflection point. I’m curious what the different concerns were for conservative Christian women before the pandemic versus after?

Some of them are very much the same. Pre-pandemic there was definitely concern about immigration. Though in 2016, the concern was much more about Muslims coming into the country. Latin Americans weren’t as primary of a concern to the women I spoke to. There was still kind of a holdover in the war of terror. The economy still featured, abortion still featured. There’s been slight tweaks to those issues, but they’ve generally stayed the same.

What’s happened from the pandemic is that a whole new population of women became politicized. Maybe they didn’t care about politics before or their political involvement was very minimal. At most they voted, if at all. Whereas now they are marching at state capitals. That’s more the change that I’ve seen, is this new population of conservative women becoming much more concerned with politics and involved in politics.

What do you think galvanized that new population of conservative women? You talked about politicking under the identity of mother… Do you think motherhood was used as an access point for them to step into these new political spaces?

I think these women would say that motherhood is the highest calling. It’s the most important role and job that they have in this lifetime. That sentiment stayed the same. But during the pandemic, they felt that their role as mothers was being challenged, was under attack, was being threatened. That is as a result of proposed mandatory vaccinations, mask mandates in schools, a whole host of distrust in the media and the state health officials.

A lot of the reporting at the beginning of the pandemic was uneven, there was a lot of misinformation out there. All of that deepened distrust and deepened this sense of ‘We can’t rely on anyone else, we can only rely on ourselves.’ And then they felt under threat from different factions, from medical doctors and school officials when it came to their children. That, combined with the burgeoning alternative media ecosystem, caused them to really ― like a mama bear ― rear up and take up this mantle of politicking as a mother.

And they’re not going back. That’s what I was really interested to see in my research in 2022, 2023. Like, OK, the pandemic has died down. Are they going to go back to their previous lives? And the answer is no. As one woman told me, “My eyes have been opened. I can’t unsee.”

Interesting. I’m curious whether the majority of the women you interviewed have jobs or if their primary job was to be at home with the kids?

It really varied by social class. Women who were more working class and lived in more rural areas, often did have to work. Women who were more middle and upper class, naturally, were stay-at-home moms and home-school moms.

This is where it’s become a bit murky and complicated. Because even though I would say most of these conservative Christian women would say that they believe in traditional understandings of gender ― where men work outside the home and women stay home ― that division is very complicated right now because there’s other forms of work that previously were not muddling up the private and public.

So, we have political activism or content creators on social media. A woman might say, “I’m a stay at home mom and a homeschool mom,” but she has a massive social media following and posts on there multiple times a day. Candace Owens is a great example of this because her little byline is that she’s a full-time mom and part-time podcaster. The amount of work she puts into writing books and speaking events and whatnot hardly seems like a part-time hobby. So there’s those kinds of complicated dynamics at play when it comes to being fully a stay-at-home mom. That’s the minority position even if they might call themselves that.

It makes me think of Charlie Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, who encourages motherhood above all else, but is now a leading conservative Christian voice after she became CEO of Turning Point USA. Or Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative icon in the 1960s and ’70s who preached that women should be homemakers, but was also an extremely successful activist, attorney and author.

The contradiction was a lot harder to hold together in Phyllis Schlafly’s day, but now with social media it’s given a lot of conservative women a gendered loophole where they can say, “I really am a stay-at-home homeschool mom, and I just do a few posts, and that’s just a pastime.” Social media has really been beneficial to holding up that narrative.

It seems to me that all this extra labor of making America healthy again is falling on women. Researching vaccines, cooking clean food, home schooling, making sure food isn’t genetically modified or doesn’t contain artificial dyes. The list goes on and on. What does that say about the role of motherhood for women in the conservative movement?

Many of them would say they don’t see that as a burden. It’s not something that’s expected of them; I don’t think it would be phrased that way. It would be something that they want to do. They’re grateful to do it. It gives them authority in their household. It gives them power. It is an area that is their domain, and that is something they take pride in. It reaffirms their role as a mother again and again and again every time they are researching body wash for their husbands. That is proving to them that they are being a good wife and a good mother. It’s reaffirming that identity, which they hold so dear and is really held into high esteem within Christianity.

Would you say that the MAHA movement encourages traditional gender roles?

On the face of it, yes, it does encourage a sense of traditional intensive mothering. But it’s also subverting traditional gender roles in a lot of ways. They’re operating, oftentimes, in the public sphere and public politics. They’re having significant amounts of influence. Many are bringing in quite a lot of money.

In your upcoming book, “Esther’s Army,” you profiled six different archetypes of right-wing Christian women. Can you talk about any through lines or themes you saw while conducting research for the book?

One theme uniting these women is this feeling of being under attack. The threat varies and differs according to the different type of woman, but there’s a sense of “I’m under attack: My role as a woman, my role as a Christian, my role as a mother, as a wife is under attack. There is an intolerant liberal elite mob coming to get me, and I need to assert my place in the United States.” The threat is sometimes posed as immigrants, sometimes it’s trans women in sports, sometimes it’s the CDC or medical doctors and vaccine schedules, but that threat language and that feeling of being under attack was heightened in the pandemic and is fueling a lot of their politics.

The pandemic really changed everything. I don’t know that we’ve really grappled with that when we talk about U.S. politics today. It feels like we’ve forgotten just how significant it was, and at least what I’ve seen, is how it changed for so many women in terms of switching on the light bulb, activating them politically, the issues they care about, the form of politics they get involved with. And I don’t see them going back. They’re here to stay.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.