What The Hell America!

Nostalgia for a bygone gender regime is more than a weird social media trend. It reflects larger system pressures — on elites facing technological disruption that might generate social unrest, and on ordinary women buckling under the weight of modern work.

Women’s magazines, once replete with arcane rules for female submission, have evolved beyond recognition since the publication of Betty Friedan’s feminist classic The Feminine Mystique. Now twenty-first-century feminists look on with horror as self-styled “tradwives” fill their shoes with advice on marriage (“As traditional wives, we are called to honour and uplift our husbands, not tear them down”) and work (“There’s nothing wrong with getting a little job, maybe doing date-night babysitting”).

Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee sees the tradwife phenomenon as more than just a weird social media trend. Faddish nostalgia for a romanticized bygone gender regime reflects larger system pressures — both on elites, who are staring down major economic changes with the potential to generate mass unrest, and on ordinary women, who are eager to escape the grinding dual expectations of exploitative work and unsupported caregiving.

Kristen Ghodsee is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Everyday Utopia, and many other books, and chairs the Russian and East European studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing on her research on the gendered dimensions of Eastern European socialism and the transition to capitalism, she spoke with Jacobin‘s Meagan Day about how traditional gender roles have been used to manage economic shocks, the social uses of patriarchal authority, and how women’s real dissatisfaction with poor working conditions (paid and unpaid) gets redirected from collective action toward individual opt-out fantasies that ultimately undermine their autonomy.

Meagan Day

Why is the tradwife phenomenon happening right now?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of an anthropologist and historian of Eastern Europe. I have two interrelated observations. First, in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 Leviathan, which is a foundational text for Western civilization and a justification for the state, Hobbes argues that people won’t naturally obey the sovereign even though they need one. They must be trained into habits of obedience. He explains that people learn obedience from the paterfamilias — the father in the family and head of the household.

Specifically, Hobbes based his theory upon the republican Roman ideal of patria potestas, where the father had unquestioned power over the life and death of his children and slaves. Traditional gender roles within the nuclear family prepare people to accept unquestioningly the leadership of the sovereign or dictator.

So it’s not surprising that as we’re witnessing a global swing toward neo-dictatorship and right-wing strongman politics, we’re also seeing renewed emphasis on the traditional nuclear family led by a strong masculine father who trains people to be obedient. The tradwife phenomenon and the manosphere are two sides of the same coin, reflecting this shift toward authoritarian politics.

My second observation relates to economic shocks. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, when the East German economy was dismantled through the privatization and liquidation of state-owned enterprises, unemployment reached around 40 percent by 1991. The solution? Push women back into the home. Officials reasoned that since women are naturally homemakers, it made sense to reduce unemployment rates by removing women from the workforce.

In 1991, Bulgaria’s finance minister, Ivan Kostov, who later became prime minister, told the World Bank that “unemployment is a burning issue, reaching 10 percent this year. One solution could be to encourage women, 93 percent of whom are employed, to leave the workforce and return to their families, even if this means a temporary loss of purchasing power in the families.”

This strategy has been used repeatedly. When there’s an economic shock — whether that’s introducing capitalism to formerly socialist societies or, in our current moment, the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) — governments need to rapidly shrink the labor force without causing social unrest. Pushing women back into the home is one solution. There are historical precedents for this even in the United States, such as when women were brought into the workforce during World War II and then sent back into the home when the war ended.

I don’t think Donald Trump is playing four-dimensional chess — people give him too much credit. But people like Elon Musk are certainly thinking about the disruptions AI will cause in the labor market. AI will soon eliminate many jobs. There is a pressing need to prevent high unemployment that could cause social chaos. Promoting traditional gender roles with separate spheres of work, paid labor and unpaid domestic labor, has the beautiful effect of shrinking the formal labor force when jobs are disappearing. It’s likely that some of the powerful people promoting traditional gender roles realize this.

But there’s a contradiction: these same people are creating products that reduce the need for human labor while simultaneously saying we need more humans. In a recent Fox News interview, when asked what keeps him up at night, Musk said it was the falling birth rate. That’s his primary concern. This makes sense if you’re an oligarch, since two-thirds of the American economy is consumer spending. You’ll have a problem if there aren’t enough people to buy your products.

Traditional gender roles have utility in tackling both problems, promoting the idea of women both leaving the workforce and having more children. Elites like Musk realize that reinforcing traditional gender roles incentivizes women to accept not having jobs and being economically dependent on partners, which is one way to ride out the coming exogenous shock to the system, as well as to have more babies, which is important to prevent cratering consumption.

Meagan Day

Is their idea that sending women into the home will reduce the workforce enough to raise wages for the remaining workers — men — thereby resurrecting the mythical single-income family?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Yes, in theory, because a smaller workforce means upward wage pressure. But there are other effects, and that’s where the Hobbesian theory comes in. If you have a single patriarch with a family wage, it reinforces the traditional patriarchal nuclear family that produces obedience among women and children who depend on the father for material support.

This creates a patriarchal family dynamic that trains people to be deferential to arbitrary authority, dampens dissent, and deteriorates women’s autonomy and ability to exit abusive situations. We don’t actually know for certain that sending women home would increase men’s wages, especially with such a profound shock like AI. But even if it did, the cultural problems would be unbearable from the perspective of women’s rights.

Meagan Day

We’ve talked about what’s happening in the minds of elites, but what about ordinary people? Why are average women consuming tradwife content?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

It’s not good, fun, or nice to be an American worker. Capitalism sucks. Many women in the workforce are not having a good time. They’re intrigued by alternatives, but there aren’t any on offer, so they’re looking to a romanticized past.

It has a new face now, but it’s not entirely new. I remember when Trump was elected in 2016, there was a poll asking American women whether they wanted to be like Hillary Clinton or Melania Trump. Melania’s image — lounging by the pool in her bathing suit with big Gucci sunglasses — won out over the educated politician Hillary Clinton.

This reflects a strain of misogyny in American culture that has never really gone away, which women themselves internalize. Girls grow up with Cinderella stories of various types — from the original Disney version to Pretty Woman — about being chosen and saved by a rich man from a life of brutal, horrible toil. These narratives are powerful.

People want to be esteemed, and in capitalist society, esteem is indexed to wealth — wealth in money but also wealth in time. The tradwife content is wealth porn, but of a different type. It’s all predicated on the existence of a high-earning husband.

Meagan Day

Are you familiar with the “soft life” trend? It’s social media content mostly by and for Gen Z and Millennial women about living a “soft life” — don’t work so hard, don’t exert yourself, stop hustling, slow down, relax. It’s mostly highly aestheticized content about drinking green juice and engaging in self-care.

It’s not as ideological as tradwife content, but it’s speaking to the same dissatisfaction with work. It’s attractive. But the reality is that a true “soft life” under capitalism requires a rich husband or rich parents. It’s not possible to live that way all the time without giving up some hard-earned independence and autonomy. Given the pressures of work in general, to say nothing of balancing work and family responsibilities, some women are genuinely wondering if that trade might be worth it.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

It’s sad, because there’s almost a nascent anti-capitalist impulse here being hijacked toward reactionary ends. The feeling of looking at the exploitative class relations of capitalism and going “I don’t want to participate in this anymore” could turn into collective organizing, but instead it turns into individual escape fantasies. The tradwife path seems easier and more socially acceptable than joining a political organization and fighting for justice.

The truth is that the Left does have some good answers to the questions women are facing, like balancing work and family life, or even having children to begin with, if that’s what they want. The Right, on the contrary, does not really have good answers.

There’s this misogynistic view that feminism has made women selfish, that they’re not doing what they naturally should — having babies — and are becoming “childless cat ladies” instead. But women are rational beings who look at the job market, the costs of raising children, the lack of state support, and all the trade-offs they’d have to make, and some of them choose not to have children.

In Eastern Germany and Bulgaria under socialism, the state subsidized childcare. There were child allowances, paid job-protected parental leave, and other pro-family policies. That was a system that supported women to work and have children if they wanted to, and most did both. More importantly, when surveyed, most women reported that they wanted to do both.

When those enterprises were privatized with the introduction of capitalism, those resources disappeared. Officials tried to push women into the home, thinking, “Instead of the state paying for these services, women will do it for free because that’s what women are supposed to do.” They genuinely believed, as the American right does today, that most women would be happier at home with their kids, doing yoga, watching soap operas, making sourdough, or milking cows. They thought, “We’ll send women home to do work we were otherwise paying for, they’ll have more babies, and everyone will be happier.”

But the evidence contradicts this. Bulgaria, according to the United Nations, is the fastest-shrinking country in the world due to outmigration and very low birth rates, and this has happened since the introduction of capitalism. We see similar patterns in South Korea and Japan. Once women have economic independence and can make decisions about their lives, having a child means losing that autonomy unless there’s massive state support. Historical evidence suggests that pushing women home without investments like these will reduce birth rates, not raise them.

Meagan Day

The Right’s ideas may not be functional, but they are still attractive to people desperate to imagine an alternative to the unsustainable present situation. How can we convince women who want an escape from the pressures of work under capitalism to look toward a progressive future rather than a reactionary past?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

There’s a beautiful essay by Nadezhda Krupskaya from around 1899 called “The Woman Worker” about what to do with Russian peasant women who were largely illiterate and politically unaware. She argues that women only become politicized by attending political events — you have to get people together, and when a woman feels the strength of her comrades, she suddenly understands her power. The more she attends, the more radicalized she becomes.

Liberal feminists are shortsighted when they think you can talk people into seeing that the world could be different. We need to understand that what people need most after the basics — like water, shelter, food, health care, and education — is esteem. They need to feel part of a community that loves, admires, and appreciates them. The experience of being part of that community can transform consciousness very rapidly. It’s the antidote to scrolling on social media in isolation and falling down a tradwife rabbit hole.

This has to start on the ground — organizing meetings where people can talk and get to know one another, or even just going out for drinks and discussing politics and their lives. We have to be creative. The point is to construct a container for women to connect their personal struggles to the broader system. Because if we don’t, the Right will take advantage of women’s dissatisfaction to promote its agenda, which is what we’re seeing today.

Great Job Kristen R. Ghodsee & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.