Trad Wife Answers TOUGH Questions | Estee Williams
Viral trad wife sensation Estee Williams joins the show to discuss her life as feminisms public enemy number one.
July 2, 2023 - The Michael Knowles Show
10:39
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| You can be a trad wife, like my guest, Esty Williams, a 25-year-old woman who has gone viral. | |
| I'm sure you've seen her TikToks and Insta stories and MySpace posts and Zanga journals and AOL Instant Messenger emojis and anything else. | |
| She's been the subject of very nasty articles by the libs in the media. | |
| Esty, thank you for coming on the show. | |
| Hi, Michael, and thank you so much for having me. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| First off, When I first saw your name, I was tempted to pronounce it Este, as in louder, but it is Este. | |
| Yes, no accent, so it's the American version. | |
| Very American, very traditional. | |
| For those who don't know, Este, what is a tradwife? | |
| Well, a tradwife is just short for traditional wife, and it is a homemaker, and she cooks, she cleans, she takes care of the home and the children, if there are any, and The online world gave it the term tradwife for short. | |
| What motivated you to pursue this traditional life? | |
| Were you raised on the farm somewhere? | |
| I mean, were you raised in this way? | |
| Or was it a conscious choice to become this thing? | |
| Well, I was somewhat raised traditional. | |
| My mom was a traditional wife until my parents got divorced. | |
| And then, of course, that threw our family for a spin. | |
| And I think I felt the need to fit the mold of the world and go get a degree, find a career. | |
| And I did go to college for almost two years. | |
| And then I dropped out because secretly, I always wanted this lifestyle. | |
| Of course, you need a husband to have this lifestyle. | |
| So when I met my now husband, everything just came into place. | |
| And that's really the inspiration behind it. | |
| It's just, it was a dream. | |
| So do you think that one of the driving forces behind the traditional movement for men, and especially for women who want to be trad wives, do you think it's things like divorce? | |
| Do you think it's people coming from a culture that is broken, that lived out all of the pathologies of the liberal age of Aquarius hippy-dippy sexual revolution, and realize that the fruits of that revolution were just poison, and so they're rebelling against that? | |
| Yeah, I think that's actually a great point. | |
| And at least for my generation, I grew up being told that you need a career and the boss babe era, right? | |
| And I think a lot of women are realizing that they want to embrace this natural role as a woman and be a mother, be a wife. | |
| And that isn't, you don't need a career to feel fulfilled as a woman. | |
| How has your family reacted to it? | |
| My family is nothing but supportive, and in fact, a lot of the women in my family are boss babes, but we celebrate each other's differences and what makes all of us happy, and they show nothing but support. | |
| Well, that's wonderful to hear. | |
| Do they think you're a little crazy? | |
| I mean, I know, because I have a lot of liberal family and a lot of liberal friends. | |
| I grew up in New York. | |
| Perhaps I consciously moved away from some of those ideas too, but they think I'm nuts. | |
| They're kind of nice about it, most of them, but they think I'm pretty crazy. | |
| Do they think that about you? | |
| Well, they definitely thought I was crazy when I dropped out of college. | |
| I was studying to be a meteorologist, and when I told them, yeah, I met my husband, I'm dropping out of college, they're like, you're nuts! | |
| Why not? | |
| I mean, you don't need the BS degree and you don't need the BA degree if what you're going for is the MRS degree and you're able to get that in two years. | |
| That's absolutely right. | |
| Honestly, I think going back to our roots and kind of like doing what our grandmothers, maybe some of our grandmothers did, it is really giving women this fulfillment and filling their hearts with joy to take care of their family. | |
| Now, is there a kind of a Contradiction with being a trad wife who is very publicly a trad wife on social media. | |
| Meaning you are probably the most identifiable figure of this whole movement. | |
| But it's a movement that says women should basically be homemakers and running private life. | |
| So is there, does it undermine the trad life to be a public insta-celebrity trad wife? | |
| That's interesting. | |
| I get those comments all the time, like, how are you a tradwife? | |
| You're online. | |
| And it's like, well, I guess 1950s tradwives weren't tradwives if they're using dishwashers and washing machines, if women in the 1800s weren't using those. | |
| I think as time goes on, like, Life is changing, and we live in an online world, and I've been using that to my advantage to really try and inspire younger women who maybe deep down have this desire to be a tradwife, but they're being told, no, you need a career, you need to support yourself, and you don't need to depend on a man, but that's simply not true. | |
| You know, I don't know if the analogy to the washing machine is totally apt, because the washing machine is, it's a technology that allows you to live this private life, you know, and run the household more efficiently, whereas the public-facing stuff on Instagram doesn't do that. | |
| I think the better analogy might be Maybe Phyllis Schlafly, who I think is one of the greatest women of the 20th century. | |
| And Phyllis Schlafly was, in many ways, a trad wife, and also one of the most important political leaders in American history. | |
| And she was a wife and a mother, and she had six kids, and also she single-handedly shot down the Equal Rights Amendment, and is truly one of my favorite conservative movement figures. | |
| That you are living this life, yes, but the way that we all interact with you is you are Telling women in a really public-facing way. | |
| Hey, it's okay. | |
| Your desires that you have to not, like, go work at a widget factory for Mr. McGillicuddy who doesn't care about you, your desire to, like, have a family that loves you and work for them, it's normal. | |
| It's okay. | |
| You can do that. | |
| And I guess the irony of that is you've got to be a public girl boss, kind of, to do that, to tell people either to shut down the ERA or even to tell people on Instagram to live a normal life. | |
| That's a good point. | |
| So, what goes into the trad wife lifestyle? | |
| You know, beyond what we see on Instagram. | |
| Is it laundry and cooking? | |
| Is it having lots of babies? | |
| Is it going to the PTA? | |
| What's the fully fleshed out life look like beyond a minute or two on Instagram? | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the time I'm cooking, I'm cleaning, and I do like to know what me and my husband are eating. | |
| And that's why I cook all of our meals from scratch. | |
| And instead of going to get fast food after work and living in this fast-paced life, it's a slow way of living. | |
| And we don't have children yet. | |
| We do plan to start a family in 2024. | |
| But for now, I'm just taking care of myself, our home, and my husband. | |
| You know, I love this idea of slowing down, because modern culture, not just on the left, but on the right too, seems totally geared towards speeding up. | |
| I'm from New York, we walk very fast, we talk fairly fast, we, you know, so I feel it too. | |
| And maybe you want your husband to be out there in public working fast, working hard, bringing home the bacon, but you also need a place of peace. | |
| A place to rest, a place to gather your thoughts. | |
| What does your husband think of all this? | |
| Did he consciously marry a trad wife, or were you a little different when you guys met? | |
| Well, he met me when I was in college, and it was funny. | |
| Actually, on our first date, he mentioned that he wanted to provide for a traditional wife, a homemaker. | |
| I don't think trad wife was definitely not the word. | |
| But a homemaker, and he wanted that wife to take care of the children. | |
| He saw the importance and the value of a woman creating a warm home and taking care of the family, raising the children ourselves instead of dropping them off at daycare and having somebody else raise them. | |
| Right, there's this weird phenomenon in modern culture where the woman goes and works for a guy so she can make money so that the husband can pay some other woman to raise their kids and it just seems very inefficient. | |
| Maybe that ticks GDP up a little bit, maybe there are market incentives for that, but it's completely insane and for a lot of people They need two incomes. | |
| It's very difficult these days to raise a family on one income. | |
| So what do you say to those people who find themselves in the situation where maybe the wife doesn't want to go out there and work, but just, you know, the economy is such that her husband isn't making enough money to support both of them? | |
| Or support, you know, lots of kids maybe. | |
| Well, the economy will always be an issue, I feel like, especially for many families in the middle class. | |
| And truthfully, my husband and I have really budgeted extremely, actually. | |
| We write down our budget, and we stick with it, and we live within our means. | |
| And it's possible, but I see a lot of people going and buying a house that requires both incomes. | |
| And if you want to move into that more traditional way of living, you have to learn to depend on your husband and buy a house within means of his income and not two incomes, if that makes sense. | |
| And just really sticking with your budget. | |
| That's a great point. | |
| You're right. | |
| Part of the reason that two incomes seem to be required now is not just because the economy has been rigged in a way that incentivizes it, and not just because political forces have manipulated wages, though that obviously has happened as well. | |
| That's part of the story. | |
| But also because we have all sorts of nice, fancy stuff now. | |
| And people get addicted to the nice, fancy stuff in the big house or the gadgets or whatever. | |
| And so you're saying, look, there's going to be a cost to anything in life. | |
| But you seem to suggest that the value of traditional living is well worth the cost. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That's great. | |
| Well, Estie, I think it's terrific. | |
| I think it's quite inspiring. | |
| And in fact, I know it because I talk to people who have been inspired by this idea of tradition, you know, being a trad wife and living that trad life. | |
| So best of luck. | |
| I think it's really terrific. | |
| And thank you for coming on the show. | |
| Thank you so much for having me, Michael. | |
| Searching for my 1950s woman. |
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