Episode 18: Trad Wives

[Music] Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moira Donigan. And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right. Now Adrian, today we are talking about a little phenomenon that sort of flickering at the edges of my cultural consciousness but really exploded into an unavoidable, unavoidable thing I had to reckon with. Yeah, really over the past, you know, I'd say, you're or so. Let me ask you, what do you know about the tradwife? I have not followed tradwifferry to the extent that maybe I should have. What do you mean? What do you know? I, it's what you're describing. They flicker into mostly my Instagram timeline from time to time. They are reliably Frankensteinian, but then I sort of react in an abjector and the algorithm goes back to serving me the content I really want, which is people making chili crisp. So I haven't paid any sustained attention to any of them. I should say that, you know, longtime listeners will know that you equated me with one me and Michael Hobbes with one such tradwife. That's right. And where husband, I don't remember her name, but I remember he was the hog father. That's this for some reason that stuck in in my game, male brain. I checked him out. It was not what I had hoped. But still, disappointment and the name have lingered. But the hog father, maybe the only proper name I can attach to this particular phenomenon at the moment. Yeah, well, who could forget the hog father? I know. I would say that hog father is a little bit unusual in that a lot of the tradwife figures, who as you mentioned, really are a product of social media. They all have husbands or in some cases, boyfriends, which is also something we can get into. Interesting. But it's rare that those figures become main characters in the tradwife universe. This is a world of ladies. Yeah. But you are referring to the husband of a woman named Hannah Needleman, who more frequently goes by Ballerina Farm, who is probably the most famous lucrative and iconic of the tradwives. And, virtually, she is also married to a man who is not just the hog father, but is also the heir to the jet blue fortune. Oh. So there's also a degree of variously concealed and flaunted wealth in the tradwife world, which is something we can also get into. So she'll do these nice projects. Like today, we're knitting peanut bags for my father laws planes. Yeah. The sort of little bit of information that people like to say about Hannah Needleman, Ballerina Farm, is that most of her videos and most of these videos, I would say, in general, rely very heavily on depictions of cooking. And shot always includes a very rustic looking aga in her farmhouse that, you know, she stands in front of in her floral button up prairie dress. Well, she, you know, makes cheese or whatever. And the aga, the oven, retails for about $30,000. I did not. I mean, now that you're saying it, obviously, there is in America a oven that we chose for $30,000. But until five seconds ago, I did not know this. And we're doomed as a species, aren't we? You're going to learn so much. So let me ask you this. So she has this fantastic oven. That's what I know about her now. How real is any of this? Like, does she live in like a place that I would think of as trad, tradwifi? Is she in Montana? Or does she like broadcast at a silver lake? Well, actually, there is a variety. So I would classify tradwifi as a really unembrillotum, applying to women who are, you know, they are content creators online. They produce a lot of content that features images of themselves, right? It's highly video-based front-facing camera, often set in a kitchen, but not only. And it is a lot of cooking. It is a lot of home crafts. It is a lot of housework content. Sometimes a cleaning videos are a part of this. But, you know, more often, it is cooking. And it is time with children. I was going to ask, child rearing. OK. There is a lot of emphasis on appearance and aesthetics. These kitchens don't all have $30,000 ovens in them, but they are all very beautiful kitchens. They do not look anything like my kitchen, which has, you know, vinyl floors and a weird layout. They don't look like the New York City galley kitchens, which are basically like, you know, glorified closets. These are expansive, spacious, brightly lit kitchens with expensive cabinetry and, you know, a aesthetically pleasing bowl of citrus plays just so in the background. Tread citrus. Tread citrus, right? And there's like sort of a variety of aesthetics that these women partake of or perform, right? But they all have a fairly standard ideological agenda, which is that they present themselves as stay at home wives and mothers. They renounce and often express like a degree of sort of pity or contempt for work outside the home, namely paid work. They devote themselves to child rearing and domestic competence, right? There is a labor intensive element to their performance, right? They're not going in buying shredded cheese. They are milking the cow and then making mozzarella from their cow's raw milk and then shredding it on a very rustic looking, you know, cheese grater. So there's a lot of making things from scratch, kind of a virtuous form of consumption. And then there is like some pretty prescriptive, weird sex stuff about submission to men about women's place being in the home, about motherhood being a higher calling than paid work or worldly ambition. A lot of these people are quite explicitly religious, so they will often make reference to what is called an Evangelical Circles Biblical Womenhood, which renounces public leadership roles for women, looks down on women's education, prohibits divorce, and mandates women to be sexually available on demand to their husbands without a right of sexual refusal. Yikes. Yeah, so that's kind of the what comes up later, right? That's when you get deeper into the videos. That's not what we'll immediately appear on your for-you page as you're scrolling in bed, you know, at like 12, 30 at night trying to fall asleep. So if I had to guess, you're interested in these women because not just because they drive you crazy, which I'm sure they do. But there's also, of course, a performative contradiction here, right? They abdu're paid work and yet must make more than those husbands that have a right to sex at any given moment, right? I mean, like, if you do not have the jet blue fortune behind you, I'm guessing it's the influencing that pays for most of this stuff. Then you have, you know, Biblical womanhood, but of course, influencerdom is a form of leadership. So these women very publicly for-go roles that they not so covertly actually occupy. These women just do not seem to leave the home in order to work, but they are performing paid work, just not, you know, not in the way that, you know, you or I do what we go to an office, but, you know, from a TV studio for all intents and purposes inside of their-insider the kitchen, right? So this is like the most obvious and most frequently pointed out contradiction of the tradwife, right? Is that she is espousing a philosophy in which women reject public life, your aspirations to leadership and, you know, play themselves in positions of, you know, real explicit material dependence on men while at the same time they are in fact monetizing their accounts. These accounts are full of Sponcans and affiliate links and, you know, they are highly monetized profit-making on enterprises. Right. They are also positioning themselves as leaders of other women in a public-facing platform. And they are often making most of the money and the men who are supposed to be, you know, both their proxies in the world and the center of their lives are really relegated in this tradwife's pursuit of internet fame, of leadership over other women, of influence, to like the subordinate role in which they don't really seem to come up that much. They're afterthoughts. I will say- They're off-fathering hogs. But I will say of the tradwife husbands, the trad husbands, there is an interesting phenomena in which they are kind of trophy wives for these women, right? They- Right. The tradwife husband is often wealthy but in a way that does not rival her fame, the tradwife's fame. He is frequently very beautiful in like a conventional way that tradwife husband, the trad husband is often has like kind of a kendall beauty. We could talk about this woman, Nara Smith, who is a tradwife and a model and her husband is also a model. He's got some ridiculous name. It's like Lucky Blue, as I think his name. And they are, you know, appearing in the videos often to consume- at the end of the video to consume what the woman has spent the video making, right? To express some kind of like playful admiration and desire for the woman, to be an object of desire for the presumably female audience watching all this. And then to fucking disappear, right? They are just there to confirm a woman's status for other women, which is what men often use, you know, trophy wives and in these heterosexual contexts to do. So it's very layered with contradictions, right? And we can talk and we'll talk a little bit later about the like origins of women's gender conservatism in public and its hypocrisy, which is of course a very long tradition that I think we could talk about for some time. Yeah, I feel like we're going to get to fill us roughly at some point in this episode. Oh, you're issuing a spoiler. I'm sorry. This is like, yeah, you know, I was like, huh, who does that make me think of? Well, so before we get to fill us, as we always do, maybe let's watch one of these videos. I do really need to like find out what ballerina farms is actually all about. So I'm going to watch one of these. So I'll just describe what I see. It's a, I would say, conventionally attractive person, having a baby strap to her and a, oh my god, a very large group of children in the sort of room behind her. I would say it's about six or seven. Oh, and I think there's the husband. Is that the have my first hog father siding? And she's describing what's currently going on. They've been repacking eggs. And yeah, beautiful. Yeah. So just people living in the moment, not a cell phone site. Yeah, I said the one, you know, on the top of the board. Hannah Needleman, ballerina farm is like kind of the biggest example of the trade-wide phenomenon. She is somebody who has a lot of followers. She is a Mormon. She lives in Utah on a farm that was purchased for her and her husband by their, by her father-in-law, about an hour outside of Park City. And they, it's a working farm. Yeah, they were, they were packing eggs. Yeah. Label ballerina farms. Yes. You can go buy the hog father's pork. It is ridiculously upright. I'm 14. A lot of that here. But like they're, they're very obviously clearly making their money from Yeah, her position as a tradwife leader. And through the support of her father-in-law, she has, she just delivered her, I believe, eighth or ninth child. And two weeks after the birth of that most recent baby competed in the Mrs. America pageant, which is different from the Miss America pageant. So she is a beauty queen. I think she won. She is also a julieard trained ballerina. And the handle? Yeah, and occasionally she'll, you know, like pirouette with no a baby on her hip or crawling at her or something or she'll, or very pregnant. She's frequently very pregnant. So you know, she's got kind of a cottage core rustic vibe. There's a lot of sort of like pre-industrial revolution aesthetics around her. Yeah, although I have to say, I mean, just based on this one video, I just watched less so than I would have thought from your description. It's true. The aesthetic is traditional. But I thought this was going to be more like, you know, that it wasn't a reality show where people have to live like pioneers for like a week or something like that. I thought this was going to be more like that. This is, it's just how to put it. This is pottery barn stuff. It feels very, it feels very like I could buy this. It's not, she didn't sort of find, she didn't go to an archaeological dig and like make me this kind of pin. Like this is just modern stuff that you can buy off the rack, no? Right. So this is sort of a consumer referent, right? To a style of architecture, clothing furniture that is meant to evoke a rustic aura without actually entailing a ton of like effortful work, right? And I should say like less we linger too long on ballerina farm. If her sort of aesthetic reference point isn't the 19th century, there are other aesthetic reference points for the tradwife. So like I just sent you a video by somebody calling herself Estée Williams, who is doing a front-facing camera video. So this is not a parody because this looks like a parody. No, this is a sincere house. Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Wow. This is your friend. The God designed two genders. Yeah, there we are. It's all out there. So she is sort of in this video giving her viewers a explicit ideological prescriptive path talk, right? She's like as a tradwife, this is what I believe. She does this a lot. Not all tradwives do do this. Right. Others like ballerina farm would never like a healthy protective masculine and faith-centered man who appreciates the divide of gender roles. Yeah, she's like sort of like listing the like a how-to, like how to become a tradwife, right? What do you notice about her love? So I don't know how to say this, but she's heavily made up. Now I know that these kind of ring cameras at all these influencers use kind of play that up. Like I think it doesn't actually work very well with people's normal complexion, but even by those standards, she looks like an influencer who just started out and just like lit within an inch of her life. Her hair is very, it has kind of some kind of blowout, I would say. It looks a little merrily monroesque. Like it's again like trad, but like not very trad. Like this, the whole thing has more like what's her name? Don Draper's wife in Mad Men vibes. Betty Draper, right? And there's no way around this. She also is definitely accentuating her cleavage, which you know, as semi-professional not cleavage-notice her. I could not help but notice. She is, yeah, that's clearly part of what we're doing. Yeah, you know, like the cut. The cut of the dress is very feminine. It, you know, has its neckline sort of at her sturdom, right? Yeah. So it's not wildly revealing, but it is very tight. Yeah, at that part. Yeah, her waist is shockingly small for someone who has, you know, has a, let's say, more robust upper torso. Right. And she is sort of playing up this very 50s silhouette. Yeah, yeah, right. And, you know, and I think you're correct that she is going for Marilyn Monroe with a hair. And that's a different aesthetic, right? That is a more mid-century aesthetic that she's referencing. So like the historically informed fantasy is from, you know, like 70 to 100 years more recently than Ballerina Farm. All her eyebrows are interesting. They're very 2016. They're very square. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it feels like a grab bag, right? It's like, it's a little bit like those kind of trad art history accounts, like any kind of traditional do almost. There is no specificities. She's not committing to a particular bit. Like those, you know what did eyebrows like that in 1950 or 1960, I think, right? Like the historical accuracy is not actually the aim. It's like historical evocation, right? Yeah. Yeah. The idea is that this is something that you can do now. Right. And like this is what this is. This is like the stress leather. It's meant to look old, but it's actually a postmodern prestige, basically. Right. Well, I mean, one reason that the trad wife aesthetics are sort of historically ill informed, right? Or historically, a set a size out of any kind of accuracy is that the imagined past that the tradwife ideology is prescribing as aspirational. In fact, never existed. And that's something we will get to a little later in the episode when I go into historicizing the tradwife. But then I'm going to send you, I've sent you this one other tradwife, Nora Smith, who I think has a very different look. Yes. I mean, for what do you notice about Nora Smith? So she appears to be, and you know, I'm picking up on run. It's a very subtle clues here. Very, very pregnant. She's extremely pregnant. Each of these videos often has her belly exposed, which, you know, makes sense if you don't want to switch to maternity gear. Well, it's also giving Rihanna who, oh, yeah, the pregnant belly as a fashion accessory. That's a good point. And so there is a, she also has a hog father, unlike the actual hog father, I would say this, you know, eight out of 10 was the hog father. Frankly, it's a solid five for those of you haven't seen him. And she is definitely there's a lot more skin. I mean, just to be totally blunt, there's even the kind of tasteful black and white picture of her topless. A new pregnancy photo shoot. Yeah. Which, you know, that's that's a pretty common thing on Instagram. But, you know, given the sheer amount of closeness that I observed in the previous two, this is definitely noticeable. And then the other thing is, you know, I don't want to, she does not read as white. And that's I think. Oh my god, Adrian, have you noticed that this woman is black indeed. In these three, we've got Estee Williams, we've got Nora Smith and we've got Haley Needleman, Hannah Needleman, excuse me. We've got sort of Hannah Needleman, Ballerina Farm, giving this very like little house on the prairie shit in her cosplay. Estee Williams is really trying, clearly trying to vogue the 1940s and 50s. And Nora Smith is not doing that. She's got a very modern look. Her kitchen is very sleek and modern. She's going for less old-timey in her aesthetic. Her aesthetic, frankly, just looks like a like 2024 fashion Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. So Nora Smith is half South African and half German, lives in Los Angeles, is married to a model. Remember when I said about trophy husbands, she's a model, but so is her husband. Oh yeah, he's. And they are like Hannah Needleman Mormons. So there are like very, my planet can be here, is that there is a tradwife for any aesthetic preference that you have, right? It can't tell you an interesting observation here. You know how I'm currently on her Instagram. And they're and you know how Instagram will tell you whether people you follow have liked this picture. Like the first two, there was no overlap at all. Like no one that I follow likes this. But this picture of hers was liked by German journalist I follow. This was followed by a model. I met once in San Francisco, who seems super lefty and liberal from from the rest of her feet is mostly sort of Palestine stuff right now, right? And then a woman that I follow because she does very funny parodies of these kinds of videos. So she has, you know, whereas with the other ones I had no overlap. So you're right. It does seem to be like a very, you know, that's this is a tradwife for my niche, I guess. Right. Yeah. There's a tradwife for every day of the week for any kind of, you know, content you've liked before. There's a tradwife filling that niche with a gender conservative content. Right. So there's kind of like it is a form of I really do think like ideological propaganda, the tradwife, you know, it is conveying a world view about women and about women's roles that is in my estimation, like quite malignant, right? And it is also even though it has this like quite specific gender politics, it turns out to be very versatile aesthetically. So misogyny is like a liquid, it can take the shape of its container, right? And here you have misogyny being presented to you in various different cultural containers and being made appealing that way across very different audiences. Yeah. No, I mean, like I'm this Nara Smith video right now. There's a, I'm on a video that where she's making some kind of waffle that looks delicious to be honest. I have to come back to this. I mean, I, Nara Smith is always wearing what I know to be incredibly expensive formal wear. You know, this is like, I've never heard of the like fashion magazine out of Canada called Essence spelled S sense. So you're like, so you're like, so you're as I thought this was called sense. Yeah, yeah, this is literally clear to me just now. Thank you. She looks like one of those and it's, you know, it's a distressed off the shoulder cropped sweater that looks like, you know, maybe a cat got to it and unraveled it halfway and then you realize that it costs $6,000 like that stuff she's wearing. Yeah. And it's very chic. It's very trendy. It's very young and she is, I believe the youngest of these three women. I would have to double check that, but she is in her 20s and is like pretty solidly Gen Z. So we've established the tradwife's breadth, right? We've established her ideology. This is a reaction against women's participation in public life and a call for a revival of a gender, in equal, a private arrangement, private life, right? And within heterosexual marriage and also all these women are married. There's also a genre of this woman called the stay-at-home girlfriend who is technically not married, but they tend to have smaller followings and be like Nara very sort of like trendy consumption based. So like, that's like kind of the diagnosis or my introduction of what the tradwife is. And now Adrian, you poor man, I am going to subject you to my grand unified theory of the tradwife. Do it. And this is the part in the show where I'm going to start to sound like, you know that picture that like still from it's always sunny and Philadelphia where the guys got everything like like a serial killer. It's charni's law of crazy. Yeah, it's a pippies, pippies, pippies, Sylvia. Yes. Yes. This is what I'm about to do to you, right? And I'm going to start by historicizing the tradwife because she has sort of exploded into popularity since really sort of like the weight of the pandemic, right? However, the tradwife existed more on the fringes of our popular culture significantly earlier. In fact, I would date her back to about 2016. And like when we talk about the tradwife, like I've just given you three examples of the tradwives, right? But like these other sort of emergent phenomena that come out of the internet, we're talking about kind of a lot of things at once that are kind of hard to place boundaries around and define in definite terms, right? So I'm talking about the tradwife as an ideological formation and a sort of messaging mechanism. I'm talking about the tradwife as a aesthetic and as sort of a means of promoting and monetizing visual content on the internet. And it's also talked about the tradwife as like a couple of different specific people, right? And in this sense, the sort of tradwife as a genre can be compared to something else that was in the zeitgeist around 2016, which is this other internet phenomena around women that was often termed the girl boss. Do you remember the girl boss? I remember the girl boss. Yes, but wow, that's interesting. So the girl boss is the ancestor to what I just watched. I am going to introduce you to what I term the girl boss tradwife dialectic. And remember my wall of crazy. So like in the what we can term the Obama era, the odds in 2010s, right? They're emerged a figure of a set-asized women's professional ambition called the girl boss. And there's a few specific individuals that people talk about when they talk about the girl boss who emerge as sort of avatars of this type, right? There was the founder of a fast fashion clothing brand called Nasty Gal, who actually wrote a memoir, coining the term girl boss, and she was sort of the original girl boss. It became a TV show too for some reason. It also became a TV show very briefly. I think on Netflix, when Netflix was turning out a lot of like higher budget original content in that era. And then another famous girl boss was the founder of the makeup brand glossier, Emily Weiss, who had a various set-asized life created this aspirational, expensive makeup brand, and also performed her self-discipline and ambition in a very public way on Instagram, the way that these tradwives perform submission and domesticity, right? And then the third of my like girl boss avatars is a woman named Audrey Gellman, who was a democratic political operative in like New York City, Mayoral, and and municipal politics. She used to work for Scott Stringer, who was a major figure in New York City politics for a long time. She was a PR girl. She was like a political PR girl. And she also dated Terry Richardson, the misogynist photographer, like over like like those like teenage girls and yeah, very to it, very ox, right? Like very 2008. Yeah. And during the Obama, later Obama years, she pivots and starts a startup, which she calls the wing, which is an all women's co-working space, which became a avatar of the girl boss, right? It's about professional life. It is a public space about professional life. It is a set-asized professional life. It's got like, it had like kind of a Tweet aesthetic at the height of this organization's power. I wound up taking a couple meetings at the wing from like women who asked me to meet there. And it was incredibly pink. It was very, very pink in a way that I found like, honestly a little overwhelming, but it was nice to look at. It was meant to be photographed, right? So a lot of this girl-boss aesthetic played out on Instagram. And sort of maybe the main avatar of the girl boss was Franklin Hillary Clinton, who was unapologetic ambition, who's sort of Frank public complaint about misogynist sexism as they inhibited her career and who's really superlative ambition. Like to the biggest job came to a head and sort of provoked a lot of anxieties around the girl boss in 2016, right? Yeah, I mean, the most famous sort of meme of Hillary Clinton at that time was probably the one with her texting on her phone, right? Right, a blackberry. Right, a blackberry. So famously. With the sunglasses on. Exactly. On a plane from one very important place to another. Now, the girl boss is in some way though different from the leaner inner. No, because the leaner inner is kind of doing it in traditional hierarchies, whereas the girl boss kind of creates her own hierarchies. Am I right to think that? I mean, in some way this is supposed 2008 phenomenon in the sense that these women all have to make those jobs that no longer actually exist in their particular fields, right? There is a kind of gilded precarity here. You're using, you're making lemonade out of the lemons that the 2008 financial crisis handed you. Is that right? Right. So this is also a means of relating to work that often sort of appropriated the corporate spin on the like deregulation of labor, right? It's like, you can be very flexible. You can be self-employed. Yeah. It's the age of it's the age of Uber, of DoorDash, of all these things, sort of becoming like an everyone's solution to everything is like, hey, what if what if we made people more contingent that that's going to be great for everyone? Right. Yeah. And so you got the girl boss, which I would actually say is like contingent with the leaner inner, right? Like I would say, these are like kind of related phenomena. And you had a moment of sort of working class dissatisfaction in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the sort of ambivalent recovery for workers interests that follow up, right? And then you also had a very public avatar of, you know, corporate ambition that about itself as and was very easily confused with like feminist aspiration itself, right? Right. So the corporate world became feminized in the popular imagination around this figure of the girl boss, right? And so anti-capitalist resentments workers resentments, resentments about wealth inequality got mixed in in the popular imagination or sort of portouc of these wells of misogyny that already existed there. This is one, I think very significant element in Hillary Clinton's electoral defeat in 2016. Not only one, don't email me, but like a very significant factor, right? And also something that really sort of shook the base of feminism's place in the sort of cultural imagination and has since 2016, right? Like I think we've talked on this podcast a little bit about the characterization of anti-Semitism as a socialism of fools, right? Like it's a way where instead of being angry at the structure that is actually depriving you of what you need to live a healthy and dignified life, you can sort of misplace that anger and resentment onto these other people who you've made unfairly avatars of that exploitation based on an identity marker for which they're already marginalized. An anti-feminism and misogyny also emerged around 2016 as a kind of socialism of fools. This rejection of the girl boss on the American left came to stand in for or like substitute for a more thorough confrontation with capitalism and gathered a lot of steam by drawing on these like preserving misogynist energies, right? Yeah, this is the moment of the podcast where I'm thrilled that we cannot be received in the borough of Brooklyn. Otherwise we're going to get some angry emails. There was a period of my life when I was writing a lot about like democratic primary politics. And once I was I was living in Brooklyn at the time and I was standing on I was getting like a lot of mean tweets and mean tweets are bad. But I was like standing on a subway platform like near where I live is just trying to go to work and there was a guy with the Bernie like the Bernie Sanders like silhouette of the hair and the glasses button on his like gene jacket and he was like clearly kind of drunk and he was like yelling at me from across the platform because he recognized me and hated my takes. So like you know I know from Bernie Bros and they know me but I don't think I'm saying anything like I don't think this is an outlier assessment right and it's like a fairly fairly well documented aspect of that historical moment right. So you had this like kind of left wing emergence of distrust of women's public ambition and of sort of like the second wave project of like trying to get women into the paid workforce and into the public sphere as a condition of their more fulsome citizenship right. So the girl boss came in to be a like sort of symbol of capitalism and feminism became associated with capitalism and was distrusted right on that basis. And that is where things stood basically through much of the Trump era. And I think the tradwife sort of bubbles up from this sense both on the right which has never really loved women in public life and which has you know since the Trump 2016 candidacy really come to emerge more and more as sort of like a masculineist project of gender grievance. And then you have this left that is also sort of interested in rejecting a desire for work and in particularly rejecting women's desire for work. And you have this kind of perfect storm of the tradwife who can present herself as a more virtuous more politically appealing version of womanhood for this vast swath of consumers. So she's basically what was that phrase from Gone Girl? She's the cool girl but for a different audience. She can hang but in case you're but if you're Mormon not not if you're like drunk and afflick but if you're Mormon. Oh hang on. My bank is texting me to make sure that it wasn't fraud when somebody spent $80 at saybars.com and sadly that was me. Yeah so like the the tradwife emerges around the time of Donald Trump's election and she finds a lot of fertile ground right there's a lot of people sort of interested in these performances of domesticity and in wondering what it would be like if there is perhaps a neglected virtue in women's renunciation of the public sphere in general but really of paid work in particular. And then you know there's a there's a question of where the tradwife came from and I think there's always been these like sort of strands on the right of you know gender traditionalism and dissatisfaction with women's postwar emergence into the public sphere but then you also have specific historical conditions that have emerged over the past like 30 years or so that make the tradwife more appealing even beyond these like ideological shifts of the 2010s and I was just talking about which is that women's lives have gotten really really fucking hard. Adrian I don't know if you've noticed but it turns out it's very difficult to be both a parent and a full time worker. Wow yeah no I'm giving it here first. And in heterosexual couples the sort of balance of domestic labor and childcare never really evened out in a way that was commiserate with women's large-scale entrance into the workforce right there is this sort of like postwar Betty Friedan deal that feminism made with heterosexual marriage which is you husbands don't stop us from going out and working and having lives outside and having financial independence. And we're still doing all this work. Yeah we won't challenge your dominance in the home right. Yeah which we all found out to our somehow to our collective surprise in March of 2020 when everyone was sitting in this you know in their in their houses and presumably could have divvied things up 50-50 but they didn't. Right. In a twist that's more adonigan saw coming and anyone else was paying attention but that people have not stopped remarking on as like how odd is it yeah I mean I guess. Right but even before the pandemic you know you had jobs including women's jobs becoming more time intensive and less renewable and less stable and you had parenting becoming more and more intensive and demanding more and more time you know women now who work full time are reported to spend more time parenting than housewives did in their mothers and grandmother's generations you know a time. Having having met my grandmother I would probably agree with this. No I mean like in a really sweet way but like you know definitely like she was able to make time for other things you know and kids just kind of ran around and got themselves into and out of trouble of various kinds. Yeah I mean previous generations had models of parenting that had more social permission and crucially more legal permission. Yeah. For a kind of like benign neglect. Yeah. It's like you know play outside for a while mommy's gonna have some alone time. Yeah. What's something you could do in our grandparent generation that mothers cannot do now right so you and at the same time that like jobs are becoming harder parenting is becoming more intensive also the state is withdrawing the welfare state has been curtailed access to it is dramatically lessened especially since the 1990s. You know in the 1980s and 90s black feminist scholars like Patricia Hill Collins were writing about this as a set of converging social forces that were putting way too much tax on the time and work of black women but as the welfare state has receded as capital has extracted more and more from us that quality that she called overburdening has extended up into the middle class and across racial lines so now it's something that women are experiencing even if they're middle class even if they're white and I think when you're exhausted like that the notion of withdrawing from the public sphere of not having to be responsible for everything of not having a really exhausting job that might not have a ton of dignity or make you a ton of money like I I don't think it's smart I don't think it's far-sighted but I understand how that fantasy can take hold and especially after the pandemic you know it's one that I think a lot of women are seeing as something aspirational especially when it's presented to them and these algorithmically fine-tuned aesthetically pleasing ways especially because there is still the ghost of the girl boss in this as we were saying in the very beginning these are women who've gone to business for themselves but they've made their family to some extent their business and I guess that's you know from mommy bloggers to now the tradwives this is one of the themes of the digital attention economy that in some way it does hold out this promise that is for the vast majority of people trying to realize it unfulfillable but this idea that you can have your private life be identical with your work life and still you know make money and living. Right I mean this brings us back to Schlafly right who was a 1970s public anti-feminist crusader and I think it's fair to say to kill the ERA yeah yeah she killed the ERA there's the reason that women's equality is not and tried in the United States constitution is one person and her name is Phyllis Schlafly and she was a political genius she was a genius of organizing she was a genius of coalition building and she was a malignant force who advocated for gender conservatism who advocated for women to be largely excluded from the public sphere who spoke in really contemptuous shocking terms about actual harassment in its victims and who lived a life as a political activist and public intellectual uh not just a public figure but a national leader a leading thinker a person of incredible fame and renown whose prescription for women would have forbid them from all of those things right and I think this is something that gender conservatism allows some women to do it certainly allows a tradwife to do right because it is yes it allows them to launder their ambition so that it is not subject to the things that women's ambition is otherwise subject to the suspicion right like whiff of political treachery the ability to be assigned a blame for things that they can't actually you know really control it is a way for women to be ambitious without being seen to be portraying their subordinate status yeah and that's a really powerful combination well we might mention for instance for our listeners who are not not as familiar with the work of Phyllis Schlafly that you know she would sort of say like oh if my husband didn't allow me to I wouldn't give this speech and it's like well bullshit there's no way but like that was the pose right she combined in some way the idea of a infernal tradwife with that of a demon girl boss if you will or that sounds very misogynistic but you know but she but she basically is like the the kind of hellish ancestors to both these these yeah each one contains the other right yeah and this might be a good place for us to like move towards a conclusion with our silver lighting or what I have determined is silver lining because if you see the tradwife as emerging as a reaction to the girl boss what you're now seeing I think in era of like saturated tradwife content is a new reactionary figure emerging which I think of as the feminist divorcee the dump his ass get out of there make a feminist life on the principle of material and psychic independence from men you know you had you think of someone who is thinking of someone who wants to quote burn it all the fuck down well you know Liz lens who just wrote this like very successful book called this american ex-wife which is sort of a memoir manifesto of divorce as a feminist gesture right and it explicitly rejects the sort of gender balance inherent in in the bourgeois family and inherent in the kind of family that these tradwives are advocating for their viewers to take upon and you know Liz is quite explicit in her politics quite like straight in and unapologetic which for me are compliments in her rejection of marriage and family life in feminist terms and the book is doing incredibly well and it's coming out at a moment of this like real resurgence of women's divorce writing often with less explicit politics but not always there's a novel called liars by Sarah Mancuzco coming out in June there's a new translation of constant stabraze autobiographical novel playboy which is really very vividly and explicitly about rejecting the bourgeois family this is like this kind of emerging type these dump is asked of or says who I think you have to understand as a product of the same culture that is shoving tradwives down our throats yeah I think that seems right we should mention that our sister podcast the feminist president did an interview with with Liz lens and you're you're really right that like the way she frames it in that book right is the opposite of what you just showed me I forget the spurt the second person's name the Marilyn Monroe look alike right that's me yeah what the intuitive quote unquote natural quote unquote a normal family divying up of roles looks like Liz's point is divorce is the moment when you stop going with the implicit the intuitive the quote unquote natural and you have to just put a pen to paper and say here's what we owe to each out here's what we owe our children here's what we owe you know this lives that we made together and men don't tend to like it it turns out because they're getting a much worse bargain then if they just go with the implicit right and it's it's I think you're absolutely right that there's a there's a rejection of this or it would feel awfully materialistic and awfully unemotional and an empathetic to make this all so horribly blunt and explicit and and this is like no this is what divorce is good for you can say what your job is and what it is not and with that I think we can tell our listeners you know consider taking the apron off yeah consider the wonderful world of divorce yeah put away put away the buttered churn and dump that hog father and get yourself a I don't know what to yeah or you own hog you know every girl's dream every her own hog father all right and you've been listening to in bed with the right thank you so much in bed with the right would like to thank the Michelle our claimant institute for gender research for generous support gender for Portillo for setting up our studio our theme music is by Katie Lau a producer is Megan Calthus