00:00:00.000Hello, all! Welcome to Under the Influence. I'm your host, Jo Piazza, and today we're
00:00:10.920going to talk about my favorite subject, tradwives. Tradwives and history. But first, some big
00:00:18.080news out of the world of Mormon mom-talk influencers. Many of you may remember the soft-swinging0.96
00:00:24.780scandal from a few years back. It happened out in Utah right around when I released the
00:00:29.900first season of Under the Influence. And it was a sordid tale of Mormon spouse-swapping and what1.00
00:00:37.760they called soft-swinging, which I guess is just heavy petting and anything but the D? Whatever.0.99
00:00:46.800Anyway, there is going to be a new show on Hulu starting September 6th called The Secret Lives
00:00:53.300of Mormon wives. Yes, yes. If you had any doubt that these women desperately, desperately want
00:01:01.740to be famous, well, that doubt should just be erased right now. And we will be covering all
00:01:07.480of it. All of it. There will be special bonus episodes. There will be show recaps on the
00:01:12.920Over the Influence newsletter. And look, I've got big news coming about our trashy tradwife1.00
00:01:20.140thriller. Huge news. And our audience is going to hear it first. But today, today, we are talking0.98
00:01:26.740trad wives. We're talking trad wives and history. Now, a lot of people claim that the trad wife
00:01:32.780is a throwback to a 1950s, 1960s nostalgia. Is that true? Is that true? Or is that just part
00:01:40.820of the cultural mythology? Frankly, I think anyone that says that has an incredibly short memory
00:01:45.460for what it has actually been like for women in this country for the past hundred years.
00:01:50.140Today, we are talking to journalist Clara Bingham. She's got this awesome new book out called The Movement, How Women's Liberation Transformed America from 1963 to 1973.
00:02:02.580The book is an oral history of the women's liberation movement told through first-person anecdotes.
00:02:08.020And in it, Clara does an awesome job of describing the rise of the feminine mystique, the backlash against feminism, and she draws these great parallels between the past and the present-day tradwife phenomenon.
00:02:20.140Today, we are talking about the importance of women's economic independence, historical amnesia, and the continued and often failing fight for gender equality in both the professional and personal spheres.
00:02:38.720I am very, very excited to have you on today. We are going to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart.
00:02:46.280But first, first, I have been having guests introduce themselves in an unconventional way.
00:02:53.920I want you to introduce yourself and tell me about you, but don't tell me anything that you do for work.
00:03:17.620I'm a 61-year-old mother of three adult children married to my second husband, who is – both of them are fabulous, by the way – and living in a Brooklyn townhouse in what I call bougie Brooklyn, Cobble Hill.
00:03:43.200I actually just moved here from the Upper West Side and am stunned by how much bougier it is here than there. And I love to ski. That is my insane passion when I'm not working or taking care of people.
00:04:00.600And now that I don't have to take care of people because my children are all grown up, which is extremely exciting, and that will happen someday to you, I get to have real free time and do fun things occasionally with my life.
00:04:25.280It's wild. Although I have to say, I made some big decisions this year. I've got three. They're little. They're seven, four, and 20-ish months. I don't even know how old that baby is at this point. But I'm trying to do way more for me. I just booked a trip to Paris by myself for my best friend's 50th birthday.
00:04:46.240and I'm attempting not to feel guilty about any of that
00:04:50.980because I'm a better mom when I can show up
00:05:37.800So I've just written a book that's coming out this week, actually, called The Movement, How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963 to 1973. And it's an oral history of the women's liberation movement.
00:05:55.380So for this book, I interviewed about 100 women who were veterans of this second wave feminist movement, as we call it, and have pieced together a narrative arc of the story of the birth of women's liberation of second wave feminism.
00:06:17.220And it's all told through first-person anecdotal stories, and it reads almost like reading dialogue because it's an oral history.
00:06:28.900And what I think is different and exciting about this book is we are hearing from these very intimate stories from women who were on the front lines of change.
00:06:40.640And the fact is, it was the first time in thousands of years that women changed and were able to actually seek and achieve a certain degree of equality.
00:06:55.780And so it's just a fascinating, I think, story of how women broke through this endless thousand-year barrier of being considered second-class citizens and rose to a point of passing legislation, changing the culture.
00:07:19.500And the book also goes into sports and art and how it was really a universal perfect storm that happened all over the country in so many different segments of society.
00:07:33.720And I now realize when I wrote it, of course, as a history, it took five years. And I had no idea that we might have a woman of color running for president. And that when I first started, I also didn't know that we would lose our constitutional right to abortion.
00:07:55.060So, so many things have changed since I started the book and have made the book much more relevant to today.
00:08:04.680Yeah, you never know how important a book is going to be in the world when you start writing it because it takes so long for books to come out.
00:08:15.100But your book feels more important than ever, and I feel like it's going to fly off the shelves, given where you're falling in the news cycle, which is not always the case, because usually our crazy news cycle buries the best of books.
00:08:31.300But this one feels very, very important.
00:08:52.000But there's so much that I want to dig into.
00:08:55.380This book is coming out at such an interesting time when we're seeing feminism beat up a lot in the media and in the culture, dragged through the mud.
00:09:07.640We're seeing a lot of cultural forces out there claiming that feminism was a failure, that young women have been lied to.
00:09:18.120This show is largely, we're about a lot of things.
00:09:20.900We're about being badass women in the world, but we talk a lot about influencer and internet culture.
00:09:27.960And, you know, there's a lot going on on that social media that claims that feminism just didn't work out for us.
00:09:35.940And so I'm curious, you know, as you're getting ready to launch this book, Baby, into the world, what your thoughts are on that world that we're seeing right now?
00:09:45.140Well, I just find it completely fascinating and also a regurgitation of exactly what was happening in the 50s before feminism took place, before second wave feminism occurred.
00:10:03.560And it's an age-old argument, and it's gone through so many cycles, and it comes up almost every generation. So that's why I think my book is an important document, because it gives almost a blueprint of what it used to be like, how it changed, why it changed, and can be used now as an important cautionary tale.
00:10:29.380Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, we have I feel like I've been listening to your amazing content podcast and it's really helped me understand the trad wife phenomenon. So we have trad wives and influencers in the whole social media scene that is that in at least in that world is is very hostile to feminism. And then, of course, we have J.D. Vance and Donald Trump.
00:10:57.720Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly. And you're all a piece.
00:11:01.520They're all a piece. They are. And I say a lot on this podcast that we are in many ways repeating what we saw happening in the 50s. I went to a talk by St. Margaret Atwood, and she said similar things. But, you know, you are the expert at this. Can you walk us through what was happening in the 50s that is similar to what we're seeing today?
00:11:31.520So the similarities are pretty mind-blowing.
00:11:35.740I actually went back and looked at The Feminine Mystique, which is the first few chapters of my book mention it as well.
00:11:46.220It was a book written by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, and sold millions of copies very quickly and launched her into a level of celebrity and also helped to launch the second wave movement.
00:12:04.680And in it, she describes something called the Feminine Mystique, which was a creation of mostly the advertising industry to encourage women to go home and achieve a certain mystique stature magic as housewives.
00:12:28.600And this was all happening right after World War II.0.59
00:12:32.060So we have World War II. It ends in 1945. During the World War, a lot of women went into the workplace and were taking over jobs for men. But then after the men came home, all the women went back home and were told that they needed to completely change their identities back to being housewives.
00:12:55.800And there was there was a huge amount of prosperity in the country. Many, many white people moved to the suburbs and everything started to change for women because in the even the 20s and 30s and 40s, there seemed to be some progress.0.60
00:13:15.620suffrage was one in the 20s, and women started getting educated and joining the workforce to
00:13:23.360some degree. And then World War II, of course, was a big boost. But then after that, there were0.64
00:13:28.920several factors that kept women at home in a new aggressive way that hadn't existed before.1.00
00:13:37.480One of them was the Cold War. It became quite political to be against communism. Communism at the time was all about collective living. And women in communist countries were working. There was, you know, state run child care.0.57
00:13:56.180So being able to prove that women were at home and happy and taking care of their children was a capitalist sort of policy in a way.
00:14:07.900Then the other thing that was very capitalist and had a lot to do with this was women at the time held 75 percent of the purchasing power in America.
00:14:17.480And so after World War II ended, consumer sales would need to take place of war contracts.
00:14:26.180And so advertisers, the mad men that we watched so much who were on Madison Avenue, began aggressively selling new processed foods, cleaning agents, waxes, polishes, detergents, labor-saving electrical appliances that were all coming on the market.
00:14:46.920And there was a lot of research around behind how to sell these products.
00:14:57.220And Betty Friedan went deep into that research, and it's fascinating.
00:15:02.620And her chapter nine is called The Sexual Sell.
00:15:05.860And she interviews advertising execs all about how their goal was to help women feel that their identity as mothers and wives and house homemakers was something they could be very proud of and therefore go and buy all of their items that were advertised relentlessly in the women's magazines and on television, creating the feminine mystique.
00:15:35.120But, of course, what Betty Friedan found out when she went back to her Smith class and interviewed her classmates, albeit all of them white, privileged, educated, and all of them living in the suburbs and married, she discovered they were miserable.
00:15:54.000And many of them were in therapy and they didn't have an identity.
00:15:58.280They felt that they were being swallowed up by their children.
00:16:02.620And so she then went and looked into the statistics, which are quite amazing. And this is something that I really think is so important for today's followers of Hannah Needleman, for example, to know.
00:16:20.120that the number of women who were in college in 1920, it was 47% of college students were women
00:16:32.300in 1920. That dropped to 35% in 1958. And in the mid-1960s, 60% of female students dropped out of
00:16:42.600college to get married. Whoa, whoa. The purpose of college was to get an MRS degree.1.00
00:16:52.980So, all right. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stop you on that. We're going to,
00:16:56.040and we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're, I mean, I just,
00:16:59.640I'm going to end you on a wow. And then we're going to come back with some more wow.
00:17:02.400okay we are back you just told us those staggering staggering statistics about women in college and
00:17:18.600i mean look past is prologue i think and we have so much to learn so much to learn from1.00
00:17:27.380the so-called tradwives of the past. And I constantly say that I think the tradwife movement0.99
00:17:33.420now really embraces a false nostalgia. And I think you really identify that in your book,0.99
00:17:40.820because how did the so-called tradwives of the 50s and 60s, how did they feel about their lives?
00:17:48.000Well, many of them who Betty Friedan interviewed and who bought her book with alacrity
00:17:56.340all over the country were absolutely miserable because they the ones especially who were educated
00:18:03.100felt as if they weren't able to be themselves be who they needed to be and this is something
00:18:11.480that I think is so important it's fine if you want to be a housewife go for it if you have a husband
00:18:17.880who can support you and your family who isn't going to leave you who isn't going to die on you
00:18:24.160who doesn't beat you, who you happen to be happy with, and you have the money to stay at home,
00:18:31.860that's great. But proselytizing that sort of behavior and moralizing it, as of course,
00:18:39.500J.D. Vance does to such an extreme degree, is so dangerous because it's really all about privilege.
00:18:48.080And one of the things that Betty Friedan has been criticized for is she was really only writing about white privileged women who were educated and lived in the suburbs.
00:18:59.200And, of course, meanwhile, women of color, black women who didn't have as much money were living the, quote, double day, which is they were taking care of their own house and children and doing everything and then going and working and taking care of a white woman's house and children.
00:19:14.680So that so much of this new retro concept of the traditional wife is really just about white privilege, first of all. And I think it's also incredibly ignorant because what came in the 50s and 60s with women staying at home, not getting educated, not working, was they were not part of the power structure of America.0.59
00:19:41.820I mean, for example, in 1970, only 7% of all doctors were women. You could almost never have an OBGYN who was a woman.0.77
00:19:55.160Which is bananas because I never want a man all up in my vagina.1.00
00:19:59.380Well, I can because my first OBGYN when I got birth control as a 16-year-old was a guy, and it sucked.0.52
00:20:07.920I'm sorry. It just sucked, okay? I don't want to talk to a guy about my lady body.0.97
00:20:12.160Exactly. And those guys were also controlling how women were giving birth.1.00
00:20:16.920So birth was extremely medical. Women would get knocked out with chloroform, husbands not allowed in the operating room, babies yanked out with forceps.
00:20:28.880And it was the idea was that the male doctors had control over women's bodies and didn't share very much information.
00:20:37.860Now, 38 percent of doctors are women.0.99
00:20:40.760So the only way you get that is by having a free and equal society where women can get educated.
00:20:49.680For example, back in 1970, only four percent of all lawyers were women.
00:20:56.100women were not in they weren't professors they couldn't go to a lot of colleges had1.00
00:21:03.320restrictions on how many women could be in medical school law school all the professional schools0.90
00:21:08.840most of the very good schools didn't accept very many women so the world was a a gender segregated0.90
00:21:16.660society and that's what happens when women you know in large numbers stay at home and it's just
00:21:25.260where traditional conservative, mostly Christian conservative men want women to be.
00:21:34.560The same Christian conservative men who are really controlling one of the major parties
00:21:41.660in our country right now. I watched the Democratic, or I watched the Republican convention,
00:21:49.480And it was a real show, man. And the thing that got me the most was the number of women who I'm seeing are complicit in this. I look at a lot of the conferences that Turning Point USA hosts for young women that claim to be empowering women that mostly just seek to get them back into the homes.0.67
00:22:12.680I know. I find it very confusing. And what I think my cynical take on this, and that has a lot of historical context connected to it, is that the Republican Party is using women as a tool.
00:22:34.280and ultimately they are those women are working against their own interests but they might not
00:22:40.820really know it um and for example usha vance yes jd vance's wife you know went to yale law school
00:22:50.920she went to yale undergrad she then went to cambridge and got an advanced degree she is now0.98
00:22:56.000a kick-ass her was until she had to quit. Litigator at a law firm has three kids.
00:23:03.860Usha Vance could not be doing, couldn't be who she is without the laws that were all changed1.00
00:23:11.360in the 60s and 70s that allowed women to enter the workforce for the first time ever in human1.00
00:23:19.480history. And so it's, of course, what they, does J.D. Vance want to roll back the clock on Usha
00:23:27.100Vance? I'm not so sure. But I think what Usha Vance and the other, you know, conservative
00:23:33.920women are doing is they realize this is a way they can get powerful, that they can get into0.95
00:23:39.980a place of power. So they're using it. Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, and I think that that is true of so1.00
00:23:47.380many politicians, too. I mean, not to not to get all in the woods here, but, you know, I think that
00:23:53.180there is a lot of, oh, I see this moment. I will seize this moment. I will get this power as opposed
00:24:00.000to what can we do for the common good? How can we better society? But I mean, that's a conversation
00:24:06.260for a whole other day and maybe universe at this point, to be honest. But I agree. And I also have
00:24:14.820to say, I'm so curious what you think about this from a historical point of view, because when I
00:24:22.060talk to young women who find this kind of content, who find Tradwife content aspirational, they tell
00:24:29.880me a few things, and I hear the same things over and over again. They say, the corporate world
00:24:36.720has failed women, has failed mothers. We see all of you, the women my age in their late 30s and
00:24:43.660their 40s. All of you are burnt out. The struggle and the juggle was real. Corporate America didn't
00:24:50.720step up for you. It didn't protect you. It didn't nurture you as a human being or an employee.
00:24:57.840They see that as a failure. And then they say, you know, feminism told us that we could be equal.1.00
00:25:03.800It hasn't worked. We cannot climb this ladder. Doesn't it look nice to just bake all day and
00:25:11.280raise chickens. And of course, that's not what any mother is doing in the home because the work of a1.00
00:25:15.780mother and a woman is never finished. These influencers flatten all of the labor. But the1.00
00:25:21.160young girls want something that just looks easier than what they saw my peers and I and your peers
00:25:28.140doing for the past 20, 30, 40 years. And I understand their point of view. It's just naive.
00:25:36.040And the point of view, the thing that I think where feminism failed, but I wouldn't blame it on feminism. I would actually blame it on conservative backlash forces. The big failure here is child care.1.00
00:32:56.300So Phyllis was demonic and brilliant and reminds me a lot now of the conservative women in the Republican Party because she had six children.1.00
00:33:23.820she wanted to get ahead in the Republican Party, but she had supported Goldwater, which made her
00:33:32.680unpopular when he lost. And she was looking for a subject that would help launch her sort of new
00:33:40.560political career. And lo and behold, something called the Equal Rights Amendment turned up.
00:33:46.120And the Equal Rights Amendment, which, as some of your listeners probably know, never became part of the Constitution, but it was a very simple one-liner, which just said that women, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
00:34:10.120That's it. That's all it was. And it passed with flying colors, just like child care. Lots of Republicans voted for it, too, in the House and the Senate. And Phyllis realized that this might be a topic that she could take advantage of.
00:34:26.360And she started attacking women's lib and said that it was an assault on the role of the American woman as a wife and mother and on the family as a basic unit of society and that women would be forced out of the home if the ERA became law.0.99
00:34:46.660They would be forced to go into the military and be in combat and they wouldn't get their husbands would no longer take care of them financially.
00:34:55.260She just sent out all of these red herrings, all of them lies, none of them real about what the real impact would have been of the ERA. But she ignited a very important part of the party, which later, of course, thrived in the 80s, which was a Christian conservative part of the movement.
00:35:18.820And in the end, she won because the ERA needed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. And by the early 80s, they couldn't pull it off because Phyllis had used this propaganda so well and scared so many.
00:35:38.560She enlisted a lot of housewives and they would go to different state legislatures with homemade buns and cookies and give them out to all the white men who, of course, everybody in the state legislators, everyone voting for the ERA were all men because there were very few women in politics and in any sort of form of leadership in public.0.95
00:36:02.560So men were making these laws, and Phyllis became the perfect lightning rod for them, and they would hide behind her thought and her propaganda that women liberers, as she called them, didn't speak for a majority of American women, and that American women do not want to be liberated from their husbands and their children.
00:36:27.860wow wow wow and wow yes i mean it is but i what i think is very interesting is that i do talk to
00:36:39.100a lot of young women and they've never heard the name phyllis shaftley that's the problem
00:36:43.920and a lot of this history is being forgotten um and i don't know how to continue to amplify it
00:36:54.740Your book is such a good way to do that, but also how can we amplify it to all of the young women who are not reading who are simply on TikTok all day, which is a lot of people.
00:37:06.400It's TikTok. The content of TikTok needs to get better.
00:37:19.940It's brainwashing. And it's consumer culture, as we know, as you've done such a great job of pointing out. And consumer commercial interests are also behind a lot of it. As influencers get so much money from different products and brands who, you know, want to encourage women to stay at home so they'll buy what they want to sell them.
00:37:46.540Exactly. Exactly. I mean, so much of this is about capitalism. It's about politics. It's not about what women want and women deserve. And we've seen this happen before. And we'll see it happen again. So that is why your book is so important. I'm going to buy it for five young women. I'm going to buy another five copies and put them in little free libraries.0.96
00:38:05.640oh thank you because i just think you know it's very important to remember where we came from1.00
00:38:12.220and that the struggle the struggle now is real the struggle has always been real feminism is not0.99
00:38:18.000to blame um and no one's life is is beautiful covered in white linen and laying in a bed of0.99
00:38:27.160roses with clean children and nice chickens chickens are usually assholes okay i've never0.98
00:38:34.020really like ducks. Ducks are great, though. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The reality is not what0.97
00:38:41.700you see on the social media. It's not. I loved having you. Tell people where they can find you
00:38:46.540and your brilliant book. So they can find my book starting July 30th in any store, we hope,
00:38:53.580in your neighborhood. And of course, on Bookshop, which is my favorite place to buy books online
00:38:59.040because it supports independent sellers and Amazon.
00:39:04.800And the Amazon, it is there, but I love bookshop.