00:05:07.380Trad 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.1.00
00:05:35.140They devote themselves to child rearing and domestic competence, right?
00:05:43.660There is a labor intensive element to their performance, right?
00:05:48.400They're not going and buying shredded cheese.
00:05:51.040They 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.
00:05:59.360so there's a lot of making things from scratch kind of a virtuous form of consumption and then
00:06:06.960there is like some pretty prescriptive weird sex stuff about submission to men about women's place
00:06:17.640being in the home about motherhood being a higher calling than paid work or worldly ambition a lot
00:06:25.080of these people are quite explicitly religious. So they will often make reference to what is
00:06:31.780called an evangelical circles, biblical womanhood, which renounces public leadership roles for women,0.85
00:06:37.160looks down on women's education, prohibits divorce, and mandates women to be sexually
00:06:43.580available on demand to their husbands without a right of sexual refusal.
00:06:49.060Yeah. So that's kind of what comes up later, right? That's when you get deeper into the videos.
00:06:54.460That's not what will immediately appear on your For You page as you're scrolling in bed, you know, at like 1230 at night trying to fall asleep.
00:07:05.020So 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?
00:07:17.160they abjure paid work and yet must make more than those husbands that have a right to sex at any
00:07:24.720given moment. Right. I mean, like this, the, the, I mean, if you do not have the jet blue fortune1.00
00:07:29.580behind you, I'm guessing it's the influencing that pays for most of this stuff. And then you have,
00:07:35.120you know, biblical womanhood, but of course, influencerdom is a form of leadership. So1.00
00:07:41.200So these women very publicly forego roles that they not so covertly actually occupy.0.83
00:07:48.800These women, it's true, do not seem to leave the home in order to work, but they are performing
00:07:53.680paid work, just not in the way that you or I do where we go to an office, but from a0.95
00:07:59.800TV studio for all intents and purposes inside of their kitchen, right?
00:08:04.560So this is like the most obvious and most frequently pointed out contradiction of the1.00
00:08:10.580Trad Wife, right, is that she is espousing a philosophy in which women reject public0.87
00:08:16.960life, abjure aspirations to leadership, and, you know, place themselves in positions of,0.87
00:08:24.400you know, real explicit material dependence on men, while at the same time, they are in
00:13:00.840So, you know, she's got kind of a cottagecore rustic vibe.
00:13:05.540There's a lot of sort of like pre-industrial revolution aesthetics around her.
00:13:11.300Although 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.
00:13:18.580It's true, the aesthetic is traditional, but I thought this was going to be more like, you know, wasn't there a reality show where people had to live like pioneers for like a week or something like that?
00:13:27.240I thought this was going to be more like that.
00:13:29.340It's just, how to put it, this is pottery barn stuff.
00:13:33.000It feels very, it feels very, like I could buy this.
00:13:36.000It'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.
00:13:43.040Like this is modern stuff that you can buy off the rack, no?
00:13:45.780Right. 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?
00:14:06.320And 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.
00:18:41.980And 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, 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's even the kind of tasteful black and white picture of her topless.
00:19:08.700Yeah. 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.
00:19:24.220Oh my God, Adrian, have you noticed that this woman is black?0.95
00:19:30.800In these three, we've got Estee Williams, we've got Nara Smith, and we've got Haley Needleman, or Hannah Needleman, excuse me.0.94
00:19:39.940We've got sort of Hannah Needleman, Ballerina Farm, giving this very like little house on the prairie shit in her cosplay.
00:19:48.760Estee Williams is really trying, clearly trying to evoke the 1940s and 50s.0.80
00:19:53.060And Nara 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 2024 fashion Instagram.
00:20:10.160Yeah. 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 is a model, but so is her husband.
00:20:24.640oh yeah he's and they are like hannah needleman mormons so there are like various what i'm trying
00:20:32.660to convey here is that there is a trad wife for any aesthetic preference that you have right
00:20:39.640it can i can i tell you an interesting observation here you know how yes i am currently on her
00:20:44.880instagram and there and you know how instagram will tell you whether people you follow have
00:20:49.120liked this picture like the first two there was no overlap at all like no one that i follow
00:20:53.240likes this but this picture of hers was liked by a german journalist i follow uh this was0.75
00:20:59.700followed by a model i met once in san francisco who seems super lefty and liberal from from the
00:21:06.600rest of her feed is mostly sort of palestine stuff right now right and then a woman that i follow0.99
00:21:13.200because she does very funny parodies of these kinds of videos so she has you know whereas with
00:21:18.740the other ones I had no, I had no overlap. So you're right. It does seem to be like a very,
00:21:23.660you know, that's, this is the trad wife for my niche, I guess.
00:21:26.420Right. Yeah. There's a trad wife for every day of the week for any kind of, you know,
00:21:32.860content you've liked before. There's a trad wife filling that niche with a gender conservative1.00
00:21:37.780content. Right. So there's kind of like, it is a form of, I really do think like ideological1.00
00:21:43.540propaganda, the trad wife, you know, it is conveying a worldview about women and about0.53
00:21:50.140women's roles that is, in my estimation, like quite malignant, right? And it is also even though0.84
00:21:56.720it has this like quite specific gender politics, it turns out to be very versatile aesthetically.
00:22:03.060So misogyny is like a liquid, it can take the shape of its container, right? And here you have
00:22:07.900misogyny being presented to you in various different cultural containers and being made
00:22:14.000appealing that way across very different audiences yeah no i mean like i'm this um
00:22:20.000nara smith video right now there's a i'm on a video that where she's making some kind of waffle
00:22:26.980that looks delicious to be honest i might have to come back to this i mean i nara smith is always
00:22:32.160wearing what i know to be incredibly expensive formal wear you know this is like have you ever
00:22:37.920heard of the like fashion magazine out of canada called essence but it's spelled s sense like so
00:22:44.840you're like so for years i thought this was called sense yeah yeah this is literally cleared up for
00:22:50.220me just now thank you she looks like one of those and it's you know it's a distressed off the
00:22:56.420shoulder cropped sweater that looks like, you know, maybe a cat got to it and unraveled it
00:23:02.600halfway. And then you realize that it costs $6,000. Like that's the stuff she's wearing.
00:23:07.580Yeah. And it's very chic. It's very trendy. It's very young. And she is, I believe,
00:23:12.100the youngest of these three women. I would have to double check that. But she is in her
00:23:16.40020s and is like pretty solidly Gen Z.1.00
00:23:26.420so we've established the trad wife's breadth right we've established her ideology this is1.00
00:23:46.620a reaction against women's participation in public life and a call for a revival1.00
00:23:53.120of a gender-inequal arrangement in private life, right?
00:24:22.000And 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 like, yeah, like a serial killer of crazy.
00:24:37.600And I'm going to start by historicizing the trad wife because she has sort of exploded into popularity since really sort of like the wane of the pandemic.0.79
00:24:45.940However, 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?
00:25:14.400So I'm talking about the trad wife as an ideological formation and a sort of messaging mechanism.
00:25:19.480I'm talking about the trad wife as a aesthetic and as sort of a means of promoting and monetizing visual content on the internet.
00:25:30.500And I'm also talking about the trad wife as like a couple of different specific people, right?
00:25:34.580And 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.
00:29:25.700I mean, in some way, this is a post-2008 phenomenon in the sense that these women all have to0.59
00:29:29.420make those jobs that no longer actually exist in their particular fields, right?0.99
00:29:33.900There is a kind of gilded precarity here. You're making lemonade out of the lemons that the 2008 financial crisis handed you. Is that right?
00:29:43.920Right. So this is also a means of relating to work that often sort of appropriated the corporate spin on the deregulation of labor. It's like you can be very flexible. You can be self-employed.
00:30:02.820Yeah. It's the age of Uber, of DoorDash, of all these things sort of becoming like an everyone's solution to everything.
00:30:09.560It's like, hey, what if we made people more contingent? That's going to be great for everyone.
00:30:14.820And so you got the girl boss, which I would actually say is like contingent with the leaner inner, right?
00:30:20.120Like I would say these are like kind of related phenomena.
00:30:22.720And 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 followed, right?
00:30:36.620And then you also had a very public avatar of, you know, corporate ambition that avowed itself as and was very easily confused with, like, feminist aspiration itself, right?
00:30:49.240So 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.
00:31:11.220This 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?
00:31:36.200Like, 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.
00:32:04.860uh and anti-feminism and misogyny also emerged around 2016 as a kind of socialism of fools0.64
00:32:14.020this rejection of the girl boss on the american left came to stand in for or like substitute for
00:32:21.560a more thorough confrontation with capitalism and gathered a lot of steam by drawing on these
00:32:28.640like pre-existing misogynist energies right yeah this is the moment of the podcast where i'm
00:32:32.720thrilled that we cannot be received in the borough of brooklyn because otherwise we're
00:32:37.720gonna get some angry emails i um there was a period of my life when i was writing a lot about
00:32:42.940like democratic primary politics and once i was i was living in brooklyn at the time and i was
00:32:47.960standing on i was getting like a lot of mean tweets and mean tweets are bad uh but i was
00:32:54.140like standing on a subway platform like near where i lived just trying to go to work and there was a
00:32:59.700guy with the Bernie Sanders like silhouette of the hair and the glasses button on his like jean
00:33:07.740jacket. And he was like clearly kind of drunk. And he was like yelling at me from across the
00:33:11.660platform because he recognized me and hated my takes. So like, you know, I know from Bernie
00:33:16.880bros and they know me, but I don't think I'm saying anything like, I don't think this is an
00:33:21.820outlier assessment, right? I think this is like a fairly well documented aspect of that historical
00:33:27.860moment, right? So you had this like kind of left wing emergence of distrust of women's public0.58
00:33:34.680ambition and of sort of like the second wave project of like trying to get women into the
00:33:40.740paid workforce and into the public sphere as a condition of their more fulsome citizenship,0.98
00:33:46.520right? So the girl boss came in to be a like sort of symbol of capitalism and feminism became1.00
00:33:52.060associated with capitalism and was distrusted, right? On that basis. And that is where things1.00
00:33:57.040stood basically through much of the Trump era. And I think the trad wife sort of bubbles up0.99
00:34:02.980from this sense, both on the right, which has never really loved women in public life,
00:34:07.560and which has, you know, since the Trump 2016 candidacy really come to emerge more and more
00:34:14.060as sort of like a masculinist project of gender grievance. And then you have this left that is
00:34:21.720also sort of interested in rejecting a desire for work and in particularly rejecting women's0.72
00:34:28.780desire for work. And you have this kind of perfect storm of the trad wife who can present herself as0.99
00:34:35.960a more virtuous, more politically appealing version of womanhood for this vast swath of0.95
00:34:45.300consumers. So she's basically, what was that phrase from Gone Girl? She's the cool girl,
00:34:49.880but for a different audience. She can hang, but if you're Mormon, not if you're like1.00
00:34:58.200drunk Ben Affleck, but if you're Mormon. Oh, hang on. My bank is texting me to make1.00
00:35:03.180sure that it wasn't fraud when somebody spent $80 at Zabars.com. And sadly, that was me.
00:35:10.020That was me. Yeah. So like the trad wife emerges around the time of Donald Trump's election,
00:35:15.520And 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.
00:35:34.060And then, you know, there's a there's a question of where the trad wife came from.
00:35:38.320And 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.
00:35:47.640But 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.0.95
00:36:00.480which is that women's lives have gotten really, really fucking hard.
00:36:04.800Adrienne, I don't know if you've noticed, but it turns out it's very difficult to be0.92
00:36:28.460There 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.
00:36:42.580But we're still doing all this work.0.82
00:36:44.460Yeah, we won't challenge your dominance in the home, right?
00:36:47.280Yeah, 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.
00:36:59.520But they didn't. Right. In a twist that Maura Donegan saw coming and anyone else was paying attention.
00:37:05.560But that people have not stopped remarking on is like, how odd?
00:37:11.040Right. But even before the pandemic, you know, you had jobs, including women's jobs, becoming more time intensive and less renumerative and less stable.
00:37:19.500And you had parenting becoming more and more intensive and demanding more and more time.
00:37:25.080You know, women now who work full time are reported to spend more time parenting than housewives did in their mother's and grandmother's generations.0.71
00:37:34.920Having met my grandmother, I would probably agree with this.
00:37:37.720No, I mean, 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.
00:37:48.900Yeah. 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.
00:37:58.200I was like, go play outside for a while.
00:38:01.000Mommy's going to have some alone time.
00:40:17.580She was a genius of coalition building.0.97
00:40:19.160And 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.
00:40:39.360Not 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 the trad wife to do. Right.0.51
00:40:59.120Yes, 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 whiff of political treachery, the ability to be assigned blame for things that they can't actually really control.0.91
00:41:19.760It is a way for women to be ambitious without being seen to be portraying their subordinate0.96
00:41:27.100And that's a really powerful combination.
00:41:29.440Well, we might mention, for instance, for our listeners who are not as familiar with
00:41:34.280the work of Phyllis Schlafly that, you know, she would sort of say like, oh, if my husband
00:41:38.400didn't allow me to, I wouldn't give this speech.0.99
00:41:40.840And it's like, well, bullshit, there's no way.0.98
00:41:42.800But like, that was the pose, right?1.00
00:41:44.680She combined in some way, the idea of an infernal trad wife with that of a demon girl1.00
00:41:49.480boss if you will or that sounds very misogynistic but uh you know but she but she basically is like1.00
00:41:54.980the the kind of hellish ancestress to both these these yeah each one contains the other right and1.00
00:42:01.860this might be a good place for us to like move towards a conclusion with our silver lining what0.95
00:42:06.820i have determined is a silver lining because if you see the trad wife as emerging as a reaction
00:42:12.900to the girl boss what you're now seeing i think in a era of like saturated trad wife content is a0.99
00:42:20.340new reactionary figure emerging which i think of as the feminist divorcee the dump his ass get out0.98
00:42:27.920of there make a feminist life on the principle of material and psychic independence from men1.00
00:42:34.060you know you had you're thinking of someone who wants to quote burn it all the fuck down0.99
00:42:39.560Well, 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?0.54
00:42:54.700And 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.
00:43:06.120And, 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.0.72
00:43:17.400And the book is doing incredibly well.
00:43:20.120And 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.
00:43:27.900There's a novel called Liars by Sarah Mancusco coming out in June.
00:43:31.860There's a new translation of Constance de Bray's autobiographical novel, Playboy, which is really very vividly and explicitly about rejecting the bourgeois family.0.98
00:43:43.260This is like this kind of emerging type, these dump his ass divorcees, who I think you have to understand as a product of the same culture that is shoving tradwives down our throats.0.99
00:43:54.080Yeah, 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 that 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?1.00
00:44:10.480Yeah. But 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 this life that we made together. And men don't tend to like it.
00:44:36.760It turns out because they're getting a much worse bargain than if they just go with the