00:02:26.080So I think the topic of your book is absolutely fascinating. Tell our listeners just a little bit about it.
00:02:35.380Sure. So essentially, other countries have social safety nets that they use to help people manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, to give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and to ensure that people actually have the time and the energy to contribute in an equitable and sustainable way to a sort of shared project of care.
00:03:00.160In the U.S., we've instead tried to kind of DIY society. We've, you know, kept taxes low, slashed holes in the safety net, told people to just make good choices. But the problem is that, you know, we can't actually DIY society. That's too much risk for people to manage on their own. And it left families and communities struggling. And so we've managed to make it through by relying on women to hold it together instead, to fill in these gaps in our economy and in the social safety net.
00:03:25.320You know, it's as the default caregivers for children, for the elderly, for people who are sick, and then also to hold the kinds of unpaid and underpaid jobs in our economy, sort of the low wage jobs that are often too labor intensive to be highly profitable.0.99
00:03:38.700And it maintains this illusion of a DIY society through women's labor, which makes it seem as though we don't actually need a social safety net.0.88
00:03:47.400Right, right. Exactly. Because women's labor is essentially invisible in a lot of ways. It truly is.1.00
00:03:55.320Absolutely. And it's the kind of labor that is easily hidden in the home or behind other kinds of walls. It's not highly valued in our economy, which makes it easy to perceive as both kind of less economically necessary and also less important to the people who rely on that kind of care.
00:04:12.500Right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, one of my biggest gripes with social media, among many, many gripes, is that it flattens the labor of women. It doesn't show the labor inherent in caregiving, child-wearing, running a household. It makes it all look beautiful and easy breezy and pretty. And it is labor. It is a job. And when we don't see that labor, I think we take it for granted.
00:04:39.780Yeah, we see. I mean, social media is great at showing the products of that kind of labor, the beautiful cakes or the lovely lunches that people prepare or the art projects that you do with your kids. But it's not great at showing the messiness behind the scenes, the work and the slog. And I think it gets it sort of the and then there's sort of this disconnect. So why are you struggling if you're happy about this? You know, if you're happy about all this stuff that you're doing at home and all these wonderful things that you're doing with your kids, you know, why are you complaining?
00:05:04.500It becomes very easy to gaslight women who try to complain, who try to say, who even try to ask for more support and kind of managing the risk and the responsibilities that they're facing.
00:05:14.160Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I have to say, you know, we have this ethos in America that, you know, if you're asking for help as a woman, you're doing it wrong.
00:05:26.040I mean, we see so many women who don't talk about their child care, who feel guilty for having child care.
00:05:34.440And and that just it seems ridiculous for me because it's it takes a village to raise these children.
00:05:41.000And we deserve we deserve affordable child care.
00:05:46.040Absolutely. And I think it has to do I think one of the reasons that women sort of hide those responsibilities,1.00
00:05:49.840but also hide the support that they get comes from the fact that they're judged either way
00:05:54.320in the sense that in the workforce, women are penalized for, you know, seeking flexible work0.88
00:06:00.200accommodations by their employers in many cases. Whereas on the flip side, they can also be0.96
00:06:04.960criticized by society for relying on paid childcare, other people to help with their
00:06:09.740children, with their household responsibilities, even though, you know, there's too much responsibility
00:06:14.160for all of us to manage on our own. It's not possible to hold a full-time career and be a
00:06:18.360full-time parent, you know, and be able to do all of those things equally well all the time. We're
00:06:22.720told by media and by sort of messaging that's designed to guilt and gaslight us into doing
00:06:28.100this work that we should be able to do it all. But it's not possible. And yet, because of the
00:06:32.300risk of judgment, we often shy away from acknowledging both the support we need and
00:06:36.360the support we get. It's true. It's true. I mean, I get asked almost every time I'm at a book event
00:06:44.160how I manage to do it all, how I manage to write books, make podcasts, and have three small
00:06:50.820children. And I actually think it discounts a lot of different labor in that question.
00:06:58.840Making books and podcasts is my job, and therefore I have child care from nine to five
00:07:04.920every single day so that I can do my job. And I know a lot of female authors who don't like to1.00
00:07:12.240be asked this question because they're like, you would never ask a man that. But the fact is,
00:07:17.000our lives are different than men. And I think young women need to see and know like the kinds
00:07:23.780of things we do to cobble together our careers. And it's and certainly in the context of the kind
00:07:29.600of child care crisis that we are in the midst of, it's not surprising that many, many young
00:07:34.780families, many families in general feel like they have to use remote work as a substitute for
00:07:39.500child care, for paid child care. I think acknowledging that it does take, you know,
00:07:43.660even careers that you can do from home or that you can do remotely, it still requires child
00:07:48.780care to be able to do that work, let alone do it well. No, I can't do anything with my children
00:07:55.420around. Nothing. I've been doing a lot of book events and a lot of virtual book events.
00:08:01.280They're always right after dinner, right before bedtime. And inevitably, one of my children is
00:08:06.640in here and they're naked. OK, they just take off all their clothes and they're running around
00:08:12.460like naked monkeys flinging boogers at the screen. It's not possible. But I do think and you've done
00:08:19.480you've done the research. So I want to I want to hear what you've seen and what you know. Now that
00:08:25.260there is more remote work, is the child care burden now following on a lot of those mothers
00:08:31.140who are working remotely, even though they're working? Yes, absolutely. Essentially, that's
00:08:36.140Yes, we've seen women go back into the workforce in numbers that parallel the pre-pandemic kinds of trends. But a lot of those women, because we're in a worse child care position than we were before COVID, are now trying to make it work with less child care, often by using remote work, either as a full-time substitute for child care or as a way to say, well, maybe I can only get child care from 9 to 12 every day or 9 to 3 every day.0.98
00:09:01.460And so I can just make it work for those extra hours.
00:09:03.680And it's deeply impossible in many cases.
00:09:16.740OK, we are going to take a quick break.
00:09:18.680And when we get back, I want to dig into what you think as an academic, as someone who studies these things about our favorite topic, the hashtag TradWives trend.
00:09:31.460you matched on hinge you're vibing then her energy completely changes what do you do
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00:10:16.660and we are back why do you think trad wives have become so popular i mean why why are they just1.00
00:10:29.940getting so much attention on social media i mean i think it seems like a solution to the kind of
00:10:35.640crisis that we find ourselves in it's an appealing model because it suggests that you can step out of
00:10:41.880the rat race of trying to do it all that you don't have to try to compete with men in the workforce1.00
00:10:46.440and also be this perfect mother at home because, you know, those are the expectations that women0.99
00:10:50.800increasingly are up against. They're expected to be both the ideal worker and the ideal mother,1.00
00:10:56.360the ideal partner, the ideal, you know, community member. It's a lot of responsibility to put on
00:11:01.560any one person in particular. And so the trad wife thing I think is appealing in part because
00:11:06.860it suggests that there's a way out. It's appealing for women at least because it suggests that there's0.99
00:11:10.700a way out. It's also appealing for men in part because, I mean, we saw this with, you know,0.62
00:11:14.460the Harrison Butkers of the world, there's this idea that, you know, women are just happier at0.66
00:11:18.140home, that kids are just better off if mothers are at home. And what that does, though, is it
00:11:22.060allows men to feel like the good guys, even if they're exploiting women. It allows them to feel
00:11:27.400as though, you know, I'm not hurting my wife by having her be the one to sacrifice her career.
00:11:31.560This is great for her. This is great for our kids. And it's, you know, it's increasingly popular,
00:11:35.640I think, on a more structural level because of the kind of DIY society that we've put ourselves in,
00:11:40.780that it's almost impossible without that kind of social support, without universal child care,
00:11:45.760without universal paid family leave, without paid sick leave or other kinds of supports in our
00:11:49.960system, that makes it impossible to simultaneously have a career, a paid career, and also be a
00:11:55.780parent, you know, the kind of parent that you want to be. And so it's really our social system that
00:12:00.360makes this appealing because it's a system in that context without things like universal child
00:12:04.980care. Many families end up having to sacrifice one parent's paid work. I talk in the book about
00:12:09.860how almost 75 percent of stay at home moms have incomes of less than household incomes of less0.79
00:12:14.880than fifty thousand dollars a year. And so these aren't these are women who they're not overwhelmingly0.99
00:12:19.400women who've chosen this path. It's because they make too much money to pay for to get government1.00
00:12:24.440support for child care, but not enough money to afford to pay for full time child care.
00:12:29.440And so even though once they get into that system, then they want to feel good about themselves.
00:12:33.260They want to feel like they've made the right choice. And that's where something like the
00:12:36.740trad wife trend tells them. It tells them, no, you're making the perfect choice for your family.0.76
00:12:40.400You're making the perfect choice for your children. This is even great for you. And it
00:12:44.340tells their partners, no, you're not hurting your wife by having her stay home. This is great for
00:12:47.980her. It's great for the kids. It's great for the community. And so it's sort of this mutually
00:12:51.760reinforcing cycle of a DIY society that puts too much responsibility on families, which then forces
00:12:57.580families into these kinds of positions and then makes them sort of susceptible to this kind of
00:13:02.080trad wife messaging that makes it seem all okay, despite the, despite the toll that this often1.00
00:13:07.160takes on women in the process. Despite the toll that it takes on women. And, you know, we talk a0.99
00:13:12.320lot about possible political motivations that might support the trad wife movement. And I think it does0.99
00:13:19.960go beyond the, you know, certain motivations to take women out of the workforce, to keep women in
00:13:26.340the home, to subjugate them, to take away their agency. I think it also has to do with the fact
00:13:32.000that, you know, there are politicians and political parties out there who don't want to pay for social
00:13:37.860social services, who don't want to pay for universal child care. And having women do that1.00
00:13:44.180child care is the easiest way to not have to spend on it. Exactly. And it's not just child care. You1.00
00:13:50.280know, having once women are at home caring for children, then it's very easy to also task them0.57
00:13:54.280with caring for aging parents, with caring for people in the community who need support. And so
00:13:58.280essentially, by pushing this kind of labor on women, by underinvesting in things like child
00:14:02.620care, it makes it easy to create, you know, to make women into this reserve force that can be
00:14:07.280exploited both for their, you know, unpaid labor and their underpaid labor, pushed into filling in0.98
00:14:11.800all of these gaps, which makes it possible to have a much smaller social safety net and thereby
00:14:16.200keep things like taxes low for the billionaires and big corporations who don't want to pay their
00:14:20.700fair share. Yeah, the billionaires, the very rich men who do not want to pay their fair share.
00:14:25.740Yeah, I read a stat recently that the value of having a woman who works inside the home is close to $100,000. When you think about caregiving for elderly parents, child caregiving, house cleaning, cooking, all of the things.
00:14:47.240Absolutely. And essentially, I mean, this is part of why men want to buy into the perks of patriarchy, why they want to buy into this myth that women are just happiest at home, because there's perks not only for them in terms of what they don't have to spend, but also research shows that it allows men to get ahead more easily in their careers.
00:15:03.500Men make more money when they have a stay-at-home wife than if their wife is also working for pay.
00:15:08.320And that's in part because it's much easier to focus more of your energy on paid work if you have someone that you can sort of dump all that responsibility onto.
00:15:16.300And oftentimes, the irony is that it doesn't work the same way the other way around.
00:15:19.400Women who are the primary breadwinners for their families actually do more of the housework, more of the childcare than women who make the same amount of money as their partners.
00:15:28.140And it has to do with the fact that they start to feel guilty and their partners might make them feel guilty for earning too much, for going against those kinds of gender scripts. And so it's not that, you know, just trying to be the girl boss CEO is going to save you. If anything, that's going to potentially complicate things even more down the line. But this is a deeply unequal system on so many fronts.0.55
00:15:47.540On so many fronts. I mean, it is a I'm married to a very supportive man. I couldn't do the kinds of work that I do if he wasn't. And yet it remains a struggle even for us to reach a place of parody in terms of who does what in the household. And we're we're at a very good place right now with it. But it is a constant struggle. It is. We're finally at the place where, you know, Nick Astor does doctor's appointments.
00:16:14.540But for a long time, he simply didn't know how to schedule them. And I mean, like, I had to teach him to do that. And that seems almost insane. But like, I know dads who can't even name their child's teacher or their child's pediatrician.
00:16:28.120Yeah. And it gets to the fact that, you know, we train girls to be mothers from the time they're old enough to hold a baby doll. And we don't do the same for men. And it's not that men are incapable of doing this work. It's just that they are not taught from these early ages to be thinking in terms of caregiving responsibilities.
00:16:44.480And women, on the other hand, are tasked with being caregivers for their younger siblings, for their neighbors, for their cousins. This is baked into us from such an early age that we notice it in ways that men haven't been trained to, in many cases, not universally, but in many cases in that same way.
00:17:00.680And so it often does take it's a learning process. And it's at the same time when men are able to step up and do that work, not just doing what they're asked to do, but noticing what needs to be done, stepping up, taking responsibility, taking ownership over those kinds of tasks.
00:17:14.580You know, things like doctor's appointments or, you know, my husband is amazing with scheduling all the kids like after school activities, which is a huge amount of health in terms of just taking ownership of that.
00:17:24.260And it makes a huge difference in terms of the amount of energy and time that, you know, one person doesn't have to expend on making everything work every day.
00:17:33.680Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You talk a lot in the book and in your research about the myths around child care that many Americans, even most moms, believe that kids are better off with one parent at home when that's not actually the case. How did this myth arise?
00:17:54.500Yeah, I mean, here we have to kind of, I talk in the book, I kind of link this back in part at least to the sort of satanic panic around childcare that happened in the 1980s and 1990s.
00:18:04.340There were some cases of kind of high-profile accusations against child care providers that turned out to be wildly overblown and oftentimes completely fabricated and that at the same time garnered substantial media attention and substantial attention from conservative policymakers who used these to make the case that children are not safe in child care and that children are better off at home.
00:18:28.140And what that did, it shifted the public perception. This was in the wake of rising employment for women in the late 1990s, where the peak of women's workforce participation for mothers of young children. And this kind of messaging helped to stem the tide and helped to start to push things back in the other direction as we've seen, you know, push us toward this trad wife trend.
00:18:45.260by creating the perception that child care is only a benefit for mothers and that it's not
00:18:50.380actually a benefit for children or for families in general or for the economy. And so it's become
00:18:55.880treated as this thing where, okay, well, you can put your kid in child care if you need to work
00:18:59.640for pay. But if you don't need to work for pay, if you could afford to stay home, why would you
00:19:04.000make this choice? And that ignores the fact that the vast majority of child care providers are
00:19:08.840able to provide high quality, supportive, developmentally appropriate care that is good
00:19:13.640not only for parents who are able to engage in paid work, but also for kids who benefit
00:19:18.320in terms of their socialization, in terms of their cognitive development. I mean,
00:19:22.040there's so many benefits to high quality care. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's just that,
00:19:26.620I mean, honestly, as you keep saying over and over, we live in a system that doesn't want to
00:19:32.740provide that kind of care, that doesn't want to put the money and the investment into supporting
00:19:38.960a system that would give universal child care. We are going to take one more quick break. And
00:19:44.580when we get back, I want to talk about a time in America where it seemed quite possible that
00:19:50.720we would have universal child care. I want to date with Rawls, Carty says. Rawls? Rucka asks.
00:20:02.260This is the love story of real hinge couple Carty and Rucka, written and read by me,
00:20:07.560Nicola Dinan. Listen to the free audiobook now.
00:20:49.840There was a glimmer of hope a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away
00:20:54.560where it seemed like America might actually be able to do this.
00:20:58.640We might actually be able to get universal child care.
00:21:02.360Tell me about that and tell me how it all fell apart.0.98
00:21:05.140So essentially during World War II and with so many men off fighting in battle, we needed women to hold down the domestic economy at home. And we also needed them to fill jobs in the wartime economy and, you know, defense production, Rosie the Riveter kinds of things.0.64
00:21:19.200And at the time, workforce participation among women and particularly among mothers of young children was very low. I mean, higher for black women and immigrant women and very low income women, but especially for sort of married mothers of young children, especially white married mothers of young children, you know, one in 30 is a number that some estimates have suggested for, you know, around that time in terms of mothers who are working for pay.
00:21:39.580And so, you know, the War Manpower Commission, who was in charge of figuring out how do we keep the economy going, figured out that they needed as many women in the workforce as possible and that mothers were going to be one of the key demographics that they needed to get involved.0.61
00:21:52.620And they tried propaganda campaigns, but, you know, maybe not surprisingly, that didn't work because these mothers already had a job.
00:21:58.000They were already home watching their children, you know, taking care of their kids.
00:22:01.240And so what it ultimately took after a lot of sort of foot dragging from Congress was the Lanham Act, which was a defense spending initiative, which was ultimately used to create child care centers in key defense production centers around the U.S.
00:22:16.300and offered high quality, 10, 12 hour a day care,
00:22:20.420sometimes in some places, even round the clock care
00:22:22.440for places that had factories that were open at all hours
00:23:06.640I mean, essentially, as soon as men returned from war, the Congress decided to shut down the child care centers that had been opened through the Lanham Act by cutting off the funding,
00:23:14.380By saying, sorry, we're not going to keep funding these centers and without that kind of government support. And as we see with the kind of market based child care model that we have today, many of these centers couldn't afford to stay open, especially providing that kind of high quality care without the level of government investment that they were getting during the war.
00:23:30.880And so these centers shuttered. And then even, you know, things went further than that in the sense of many states and employers put back in place policies that prevented married women and mothers of young children from having access to job discrimination against mothers was perfectly legal at the time in terms of paid work.
00:23:47.840And so that was another lever. And then there were also sort of propaganda and cultural levers put in place to Stephanie Klintz in her book, The Way We Never Were, talks about how women who refused to go back home, women who didn't want to leave their paid jobs were threatened with things like electroshock therapy for not being kind of real women, for not being willing to go back to their proper place in the home, despite the fact that they had been working for pay and holding these jobs and building ships during the war and had clearly shown they could do it.
00:24:14.960They're now, you know, this is laying the groundwork for the 1950s and sort of our traditional version of womanhood that we often reference today.
00:24:23.080Right, right, right. And that's so funny because, yeah, we when we think about the quote unquote traditional womanhood, traditional motherhood, I think a lot of people get that scene from the 50s in their heads.
00:24:35.320The 50s, the early 60s, Betty Draper, June Cleaver. But only 10 years before that, these women were building ships.
00:24:44.340Exactly. And it's really, I mean, the version of motherhood and womanhood that we see depicted in the media at the time, it's important to acknowledge that that's manufactured as well. That's not necessarily how many mothers at the time, how many women at the time felt about paid work.
00:24:57.400And really, so I talk in the book about how the ideas for this actually started well before World War II and go back to the 1930s and the Depression-era New Deal program that Franklin Roosevelt put in place, where a group of kind of, you know, at the time, big business elites decided that they wanted a way to push back against that kind of large-scale social safety net programming, which they knew would cost them in terms of higher taxes on corporate profits.
00:25:26.220And so what they found, they were looking for ways to kind of persuade us that we didn't need this kind of social safety net. And what they found was a group of Austrian economists who were developing neoliberalism, which is a sort of economic theory that posits that countries don't actually need social safety nets because if people don't have that kind of support, they'll make better choices and keep themselves safe from risk.
00:25:46.180And, you know, this has been thoroughly debunked. The reality is that that's not how risk works. People in the context of more risk don't always make better choices. But this was a popular idea. And the National Association of Manufacturers, this big business lobbying agency, paid to bring these Austrian economists to U.S. universities, install them in these high profile positions, and use them to train the next generation of economists.
00:26:07.620People like Milton Friedman, who then went on to kind of be the architect of our U.S. economy and also helped to was kind of the brains behind the General Electric Theater and a number of other big propaganda campaigns.
00:26:19.420That was a popular television program that was hosted by Ronald Reagan and ran for many decades and really promoted this idea of sort of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, the sort of traditional motherhood, traditional womanhood kind of a model.
00:26:32.040And this really was, you know, the foundation of popular culture for many decades and was directly bankrolled by these corporate elites that were trying to push this model of a sort of DIY society that we have laying the groundwork for today.
00:26:46.740Oh, it's very depressing. Very depressing. How do you stay optimistic?
00:26:53.640I mean, my hope is that I think I stay optimistic because at least for now, we still live in a democracy, which means that we can there are more of us than there are of them.
00:27:03.220You know, there are these people who I talk about as sort of the engineers and profiteers of this DIY model.
00:27:09.860Like, yes, they have a lot of money and they have a lot of power, but we can still technically outvote them.
00:27:14.180And so what we can do is reject these kinds of myths that keep us focused on our own little individual lives and think about how can we fight together for the kinds of policymakers and the kinds of policies that would better support all of us.
00:27:28.380My friend, Emily Amick, who has the Emily in Your Phone Instagram account, she's on the show a lot. She has a new book coming out called Democracy in Retrograde. And she talks a lot about how if we don't get civically engaged at the local level and get involved in the school boards, it will all be taken over for us by people who who do have these views that women women should be the child care and caregiving providers.
00:27:57.040Yeah. And it's important to acknowledge that those women are that it's not necessarily that all women line up on one side of the equation while all men line up on the other.
00:28:04.380I mean, certainly. And I talk in the book about how there are myths also that help to divide women and persuade some women to focus on how they can support the status quo and to reject the need for a stronger social safety net, even if they benefit from that myth themselves.
00:28:17.720I talk about one mom that I call April, who's a white evangelical Christian mom who, you know, she's a stay-at-home mom and her family gets by on the $30,000 a year that her husband makes as a pastor at their church.
00:28:29.820She would benefit very directly from a stronger social safety net, but she rejects universal child care, rejects universal health care, rejects the idea of raising the minimum wage.
00:28:38.560And talking to her, essentially what came out of the conversation is that she rejects these things because she wants to be able to use the fact that she doesn't rely as heavily on the safety net as a source of moral superiority over the kinds of mothers that she judges for relying on that social safety net.
00:28:56.180She drew on sort of racist and classist stereotypes to talk about how if mothers need that support, they must be making bad financial choices, going out and getting their nails done, going out partying and hiring babysitters and saying that she was too frugal to ever make those kinds of choices herself.
00:29:10.300And so it's that kind of moral superiority thinking that encourages women to oftentimes even vote against their own interests when it comes to the social safety net.
00:29:18.700Yeah. And I think that that's only being exacerbated by a lot of the trad wife trends in terms of, yes, there is a moral high ground that these women are on and you are failing as a mother if you're not living up to that.1.00
00:29:34.920Exactly. And it reinforces this idea that not only should you be a stay-at-home mother, but you should be able to have a version of stay-at-home mothering that is only possible, really, in the context of high levels of financial resources. But you should be able to achieve that without any sort of external financial support.0.61