Episode 18: Trad Wives

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

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 year or so.

Let me ask you, what do you know about the trad wife?

I have not followed tradwiffery to the extent that maybe I should have.

What do you mean?

What do you know?

It's what you're describing.

They flicker into mostly my Instagram timeline from time to time.

They are reliably Frankenstinian, but then I sort of react in abject horror, 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 acquainted me with one, me and Michael Hobbes, with one such trad wife and her husband.

I don't remember her name, but I remember he was the hog father.

That's this for some reason that stuck in my gay 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 may be the only proper name i can attach to this particular phenomenon at the moment yeah well who could forget the hog father i would say the hog father is a little bit unusual in that a lot of the trad wife 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 very, 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 crucially, 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-in-law's planes.

Yeah.

The like sort of little tidbit of information that people like to say about Hannah Needleman at 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 very rustic looking aga in her farmhouse that you know she stands in front of in her floral button-up prairie dress while she you know makes cheese or whatever and the aga the oven retails for about thirty thousand dollars i i did not i mean now that you're saying it obviously there is in america a oven that retails 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: 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 a place that I would think of as

trad wifey?

Is she in Montana or does she like broadcast out of Silver Lake?

Well, actually, there is a variety.

So, I would classify trad wifery as a really an umbrella term 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 like 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.

Okay.

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 placed just so in the background.

Trad citrus.

Trad 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 degree of sort of pity or contempt for work outside the home, namely paid work.

They devote themselves to childrearing and domestic competence, right?

There is a labor-intensive element to their performance, right?

They're not going and 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 uh what is called in evangelical circles biblical womanhood which uh 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 will

immediately appear on your for you page as you're scrolling right in bed, you know, at like 12:30 at night trying to fall asleep?

Um,

so if I had to guess, you're interested in these women because not just because they drive you crazy, which I'm sure I'm sure they do,

but there's also, of course, a performative contradiction here, right?

They abjure paid work and yet must make more than those husbands that have a right to sex at any given moment, right?

I mean, like, this, the, the, I mean, 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.

And then you have, you know, biblical womanhood, but of course, influencerdom is a form of leadership.

So these women very publicly forego roles that they not so covertly actually occupy.

These women, it's true, 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 or I do when we go to an office, but, you know, from a TV TV studio, for all intents and purposes,

inside of their kitchen, right?

So this is like the most obvious and most frequently pointed out contradiction of the trad wife, right?

Is that she is espousing a philosophy in which women reject public life, absorb aspirations to leadership, and

place themselves in positions of real explicit material dependence on men, while at the same time, they are in fact monetizing their accounts.

These accounts are full of Spawn Cons and affiliate links, and you know, they are highly monetized, profit-making 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 trad wife's pursuit of internet fame, of leadership over other women, of influence, uh, 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 all fathering hogs.

I will say, of the trad wife husbands, the trad husbands, there is an interesting phenomena in which they are kind of trophy wives for these women, right?

They, right?

The trad wife husband is often wealthy, but in a way that does not rival her fame, the trad wife's fame.

He is

frequently very beautiful in like a conventional way.

The trad wife, husband, the trad husband is often has like kind of a Kendall beauty.

We could talk about this woman, Nara Smith, who is a trad wife and a model, and her husband is also a model.

He's got some ridiculous name.

It's like Lucky Blue is, 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 Phyllis Schlafly 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 Phyllis, as we always do, maybe let's watch one of these videos.

I do really need to find out what Ballerina Farms is actually all about.

So I'm going to watch one of these.

I'm going to show you what's going on in the farm kitchen right now.

So, I'll just describe what I see.

It's a, I would say, a conventionally attractive person having a baby strapped 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

my first hog father sighting?

And she's describing what's currently going on.

They appear to be packing eggs.

And

yeah, beautiful.

Just

people living in the moment, not a cell phone in sight.

Yeah, Hannah, except the one, you know, on the tripod recording all this.

Hannah Needleman, Ballerina Farm is like kind of the biggest example of the Tradwife 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

by her father-in-law, about an hour outside of Park City.

And it is a working farm.

Yeah, they were packing eggs.

Yeah.

Labeled ballerina farms, yes.

You can go buy the hog father's pork.

It is ridiculously uppriced.

I'm 14.

There's a lot of that here.

But like they're, they're very obviously clearly making their money.

from

her position as a trad wife 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 Juilliard-trained ballerina.

Hands the handle.

Yeah.

And occasionally she'll, you know, like pirouette with, you know, 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, wasn't there 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, I could buy this.

It's not, she didn't sort of find,

she didn't go to an archaeological dig and was like, make me this kind of pin.

Like, this is, this is 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, lest 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 trad wife.

So, like, I just sent you

a video by somebody calling herself Este 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, no, oh, no, yeah, wow.

Race your family.

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 pep talk, right?

She's like, as a trad wife, this is what I believe.

She does this a lot.

Not all trad wives do do this.

Right.

Others like Ballerina Farmer would never.

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 trad wife, right?

What do you notice about her look?

So I don't know how to say this,

but she's heavily made up.

Now, I know that these kind of ring cameras that 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 is just like lit within an inch of her life.

Her hair is very,

has kind of some kind of blowout, I would say.

It looks a little Merrily Monroe-esque.

Like 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, yeah.

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 noticer, I could not help but notice.

She is, yeah, that's that's clearly part of what we're

framed in a specific way.

Yeah.

The cut of the dress is very feminine.

It,

you know, has its neckline sort of at her sternum, 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, who 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 the 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 i also her eyebrows are interesting

they're very 2016 they're very square yeah yeah

so it's 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 tradition will do almost there is no specificity she's not committing to a particular bit like those you no one did eyebrows like that in 1950 or 1960 i think right like this right historical accuracy is not actually the aim it's like historical evocation, right?

Because the idea is that this is something that you can do now.

Right.

And like, this is what this is.

This is like the stressed leather.

It's meant to look old, but it's actually a postmodern pastiche, basically.

Right.

Well, I mean, one reason that the trad wife aesthetics are sort of historically ill-informed, right?

Or historically aestheticized out of any kind of accuracy is that the imagined past that the trad wife 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 trad wife.

But then I'm going to send you, I've sent you this one other

trad wife, Nara Smith, who I think has a very different look.

Yes.

I mean, for what do you notice about Nara Smith?

So she appears to be, and you know, I'm picking up on some very subtle clues here.

Very, very pregnant.

She's extremely pregnant in 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 famously popularized 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 ten.

Whereas the hog father, frankly, is a solid five for those of you who haven't seen him.

And

she is definitely, there's a lot more skin.

I mean, just to be totally blunt, there is even a kind of tasteful black and white picture of her topless.

A dude pregnancy photo shoot.

Yeah.

Which, you know, that's a pretty common thing on Instagram.

But, you know, given the sheer amount of clothedness 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 Nara Smith, and we've got Haley Needleman, or 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 evoke the 1940s and 50s.

And Nara Smith is not doing that.

She's got a very modern look.

Her kitchen is very sleek and modern.

Uh, she's going for less old-timey in her aesthetic.

Her aesthetic, frankly, just looks like a like 2024 fashion Instagram.

Yeah, right.

So, Nara Smith is half South African and half German, lives in Los Angeles, is married to a model.

Remember what 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 what I'm trying to convey here is that there is a trad wife for any aesthetic preference that you have, right?

Can I tell you an interesting observation here?

You know, how I am currently on her Instagram, and there, 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 a German journalist I follow.

Uh, this was

by a model I met once in San Francisco, who seems super lefty and liberal from the rest of her feed.

It's 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 these, this is the trad wife for my niche, I guess.

Right.

Yeah.

There's a trad wife for every day of the week for any kind of

you know content you've liked before there's a trad wife 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 trad wife you know it is conveying a worldview 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, that, where she's making some kind of waffle that looks delicious, to be honest.

I might 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, have you ever heard of the like fashion magazine out of Canada called Essence?

It's spelled S Sense.

Like, so you're like, for years, I thought this was called Sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is literally cleared up for 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 like $1,000.

Like that's the 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 trad wife'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 inequal private arrangement in 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 trad wife is.

And now, Adrian, you poor man, I am going to subject you to my grand unified theory of the trad wife.

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 in Philadelphia where the guy's got everything everything like yeah like a cereal Charlie's wall of crazy yeah it's pepe's pepe sylvia yes yes this is what I'm about to do to you right and I'm gonna start by historicizing the trad wife because she has sort of exploded into popularity since really sort of like the wane of the pandemic right however the trad wife 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 trad wife like I've given you three examples of trad wives 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 trad wife as an ideological formation and a sort of messaging mechanism.

I'm talking about the trad wife as a aesthetic and as sort of a means of promoting and monetizing visual content on the internet.

And I'm also talking about the trad wife as like a couple of different specific people, right?

And in this sense, the sort of trad wife 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 trad wife dialectic.

And remember my wall of crazy behind me as I speak.

Beautiful.

So like in the, what we can term the Obama era, the otts and 2010s, right?

There emerged a figure of asceticized 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.

Became a TV show, too, for some reason.

It also became a TV show very briefly, I think on Netflix when Netflix was churning 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 very aestheticized 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 trad wives perform submission and domesticity, right?

And then the third of my like girl boss avatars is a woman named Audrey Gilman, who was a Democratic political operative in like New York City mayoral and municipal politics.

She used to work for Scott Stringer, who was a major 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 who overlight light those like teenage girls in

very odds, 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

an an avatar of the girl boss, right?

It's about professional life.

It is a public space about professional life.

It is aestheticized professional life.

It's got like, it had like kind of a twee 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 bos aesthetic played out on Instagram.

And sort of maybe the main avatar of the girl boss was frankly Hillary Clinton, whose unapologetic ambition, whose sort of frank public complaint about misogyny and sexism as they inhibited her career, and whose 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.

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?

Oh, Blackberry, sorry, 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 where the whereas the girl boss kind of creates her own hierarchies.

Am I right to think that?

I mean, in some way, this is a post-2008 phenomenon in the sense that these women all have to make those jobs jobs that no longer actually exist in their particular fields, right?

There is a kind of gilded precarity here.

You're using...

you use 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 we made people more contingent?

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 that 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' interest that followed, right?

And then you also had a very public avatar of corporate ambition that avowed itself as and was very easily confused with like feminist aspiration itself, 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 partook 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 the 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.

And 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 pre-existing 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.

I, um, 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 lived, 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 jean 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?

I think this is like a very, 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 trad wife 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 masculinist project of gender grievance.

And then you have this left that is also sort of

interested in rejecting a desire for work and particularly rejecting women's desire for work.

And you have this kind of perfect storm of the tread wife 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, she's a, she, she can hang, but in case you're, but if you're Mormon, not, not if you're like drunk ben affleck, but if you're Mormon.

Uh-oh, hang on.

My bank is texting me to make sure that it wasn't fraud when somebody spent $80 at zabars.com.

And sadly, that was me.

That was me.

Yeah, so like the trad wife 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 question of where the trad wife 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 post-war 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 trad wife more appealing, even beyond these like ideological shifts of the 2010s that 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 doing it here first.

And in heterosexual couples, the sort of balance of domestic labor and child care never really evened out in a way that was commiserate with women's large-scale entrance into the workforce, right?

There was this sort of like post-war 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 Maura Donegan saw coming

and anyone else who's paying attention, but that people have not stopped remarking on.

It's like, how odd.

And then, 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 remunerative 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 grandmothers' generations.

You know, a talent.

Having met my grandmother, I would probably agree with this.

No, I mean, like, in a really sweet, in a really sweet way, but like, you know, definitely like, I mean, 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

for a kind of like benign neglect that was like, go play outside outside for a while.

Mommy's going to have some alone time.

Yeah.

Was something you could do in our grandparents' 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 like 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 don't think it's smart.

I don't think it's farsighted, 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 in these algorithmically fine-tuned, aesthetically pleasing ways.

Yeah, 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 into business for themselves, but they've made their family to some extent their business.

And I guess that's from mommy bloggers to now the trad wives.

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

the woman who killed the ERA, yeah.

Yeah, she killed the ERA.

The reason that women's equality is not enshrined 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 sexual harassment and its victims, and who lived a life as a political activist and public intellectual, 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 forbidden them from all of those things, right?

And I think this is something that gender conservatism allows some women to do.

It certainly allows the trad wife to do, right?

Which is that...

going to need it to, yeah.

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, the like whiff of political treachery, the ability to be assigned 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.

And that's a really powerful combination.

Well, we might mention, for instance, for our listeners who are

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 trad wife 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 kind of hellish ancestress to both these.

Yeah, each one contains the other, right?

And this might be a good place for us to like move towards a conclusion with our silver lining, or what I have determined is a silver lining.

Because if you see the trad wife as emerging as a reaction to the girl boss, what you're now seeing, I think, in an era of like saturated trad wife 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 to be aware of that.

You're thinking of someone who wants to, quote, burn it all the fuck down.

Well, you know, Liz Lenz, 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 the bourgeois family and inherent in the kind of family that these trad wives are advocating for their viewers to take upon.

And, you know, Liz is quite explicit in her politics, quite like strident 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.

writing, often with less explicit politics, but not always.

There's a novel called Liars by Sarah Mankusco coming out in June.

There's a new translation of Constance Debray's 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 ass divorcees who I think you have to understand as a product of the same culture that is shoving trad wives down our throats.

Yeah, I think that seems right.

We should mention that our sister podcast, The Feminist President, did an interview with Liz Lenz.

And you're really right.

The way she frames it in that book, right, is the opposite of what you just showed me.

I forget the second person's name, the Marilyn Monroe lookalike, right?

Yeah.

What the intuitive, quote-unquote, natural, quote-unquote

normal family divvying 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 other.

Here's what we owe our children.

Here's what we owe, you know, this life that we made together.

And men don't tend to like it, it turns out,

because they're getting a much worse bargain than if they just go with the implicit.

And it's, I think you're absolutely right that there's a there's a rejection of this.

It would feel awfully materialistic and awfully unemotional and

unempathetic to make this all so horribly blunt and and explicit.

And Liz 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 the buttered churn and

dump that hog father and get yourself a, I don't know what to think, yeah.

Or your own hog father.

You know, be your own hog that's every girl's dream to be 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 R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfas.