Truly Tradly Deeply Episode 1: Introduction — “All I Think About Is Buying Cows”
The first episode of Annie Kelly's 6-part podcast miniseries Truly Tradly Deeply. Cursed Media subscribers have access to the first two episodes right now, plus each new episode as they are released weekly.
https://www.cursedmedia.net/
This series immerses you in the online world of "tradwives" through social media feeds, videos, and podcasts, so we can understand both its genuine appeal and its real‑world consequences.
In our kickoff episode to Truly Tradly Deeply, Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly dive into the glossy, algorithm‑friendly world of “tradwives.” Why has it exploded from fringe subculture to mainstream lifestyle brand? We open with the story of the rise and unmasking of “Patriarchy Hannah,” a Twitter persona built on radical submission, to ask what, exactly, counts as a tradwife and why the aesthetics of “ancestral” femininity are so powerful right now.
What’s inside
* How tradwife content differs from stay‑at‑home‑mom content
* A history tour: from anti‑suffrage campaigns (including the famous Swiss “No to women’s voting rights” poster) to Phyllis Schlafly, and the slogan “feminine, not feminist.”
* Why “girlboss” neoliberal feminism and trad messaging can sound weirdly alike. Both lean on ideas of personal choice while dodging structural inequality.
* Two audiences, two internets: the soothing homemaker feed aimed at women vs. the spiky, sexualized “Red Pill Tradwife” content built for men.
* The political stakes: how hyper‑feminine imagery is being weaponized by the far right, from European “remigration” messaging to U.S. campus politics, and why women are increasingly central to that project.
To listen to the second episode of Truly Tradly Deeply right now plus the rest of the episodes as they are released weekly, follow this link and subscribe to Cursed Media today.
www.cursedmedia.net/
In addition to Truly Tradly Deeply, Cursed Media subscribers also get access to the podcast miniseries Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows, Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly, Trickle Down by Travis View, The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams, and Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar. Plus, Cursed Media subscribers will get access to at least three new exclusive podcast miniseries every year.
In lieu of the usual QAA premium episode this week, you're about to listen to the very first episode of my Cursed Media 6 episode miniseries, Truly Tradley Deeply.
We're living in a moment in which many of the far-right's anxieties around gender hierarchy, fertility and reproduction are becoming increasingly mainstream.
These ideas often don't cross over through overtly political rhetoric, but through the softer language of lifestyle, wellness and self-improvement on social media.
And this series aims to unpack how.
Cursed Media subscribers have access to the second episode of Truly Tradley Deeply right now.
Plus, we'll be releasing a new episode every week for the next four weeks.
Subscribe to Curse Media by following the link in the show notes.
Cursed Media subscribers get access to our back catalogue of podcast miniseries, plus three new exclusive miniseries every year.
Thank you and enjoy.
Truly, Tradley, Deeply.
Episode 1.
In 2021, a new user appeared on the social media platform Twitter and quickly found a home among the relatively small network of religious, socially conservative women who were active there.
This user's handle was at harmonized by grace, but the name she went by was Patriarchy Hannah.
Hannah espoused living a lifestyle of what she called biblical womanhood.
That meant, in a nutshell, women submitting to their husbands' leadership, having lots and lots of children, and embracing their traditional domestic role in the home.
Most of the women Hannah befriended online felt the same way.
She and her closest circle half ironically called themselves the Patriarchal Wives Club.
But even by their standards, Hannah lived biblical womanhood to the extreme.
Hannah had met her husband, Tony, when she was still a teenager, and the pair got married when she was just 19 years old.
They had 14 children together, some biological, some adopted, and Hannah had homeschooled all of them.
As the children grew up, some began to get married and start families themselves.
Tony's construction business was successful enough that they could buy enough land to build each of their adult sons' houses within walking distance of each other, and a project Hannah jokingly called Tony Town.
You might think this lifestyle would have kept Hannah rushed off her feet with little time for anything else, but she was a highly active figure in her little corner of social media.
She offered parenting and relationship advice and group chats, chatted over the phone to many of her online friends in quiet moments while their children slept, and even made a couple of appearances on some of their podcasts.
It wasn't all sisterly support though.
Hannah got in a lot of arguments online too, and some of them got quite vicious, because Hannah believed very strongly that women should be living in total, unwavering submission to their husband's will, and she wasn't afraid to speak out when she saw some of her fellow conservative women straying from that path.
Hannah said that her husband Tony had a desired weight range for her body that she maintained, that she kept her hair long because he had forbidden her from getting it cut, and perhaps most dramatically, that she cheerfully altered her opinions according to his will.
I actually don't understand the concept of having theological differences with your husband.
If my husband tells me that something in the Bible means something different than I thought, I just accept that he's right.
Anything less than this level of deference to male authority, Hannah said, made you nothing more than a crypto-feminist, a wolf in sheep's clothing, who was infiltrating the traditionalist sphere and subtly subverting its norms towards modern, dysfunctional egalitarianism.
One of the problems we run into when we talk about male headship and female submission is that we focused on things like who makes more money or has more life experience as criteria for who gets to lead.
That's all irrelevant.
Men were designed to lead, God made them that way.
As some of you listening might be beginning to suspect by now, Hannah did not actually exist.
She, her husband Tony, and their 14 children were all the invention of someone called Jennifer, an unmarried 37-year-old who lived with her parents.
Interestingly, the exposure of Hannah's true identity came not from feminists, leftists, or anyone else who might be ideologically opposed to her belief system, but the users within her own online community.
It was Hannah's fellow religious conservatives who first began to view her story with skepticism and her lectures on how they weren't living traditionally enough with more than a little annoyance.
The irony is, Hannah, or Jennifer, while she was calling me a girl boss feminist.
She, single and childless, was spending her days stroking the egos of married men online while I was at home breastfeeding my third child and probably making my husband a sandwich out of sourdough bread.
Like, that's the irony in all of this.
So here's a lesson that I have for you.
Focus on your obedience to Christ.
You focus on being a biblical woman based on what the word of God says.
You abide by Ephesians 5.
Abide by the precepts that are set in scripture for you and do not worry about what any of these trad accounts say is the standard for biblical womanhood.
Because most of these people are completely and totally fake.
The story of patriarchy Hannah's rise and fall traveled rapidly out of her own corner of the internet and into communities and platforms where she'd never set foot.
Social media seems to be governed by a bit of a paradox.
We're drawn to people who tell us they've got that one simple trick that will bring us instant contentment and peace, but we love watching them get exposed as frauds too.
Very few of us are totally naive about the reality of lifestyle content on social media.
Intellectually, we know that a lot of the images influencers show us of their beautiful lives are mirages, designed to obscure a messier, more complicated reality.
But there was still something intoxicating about getting to witness the unmasking of an account that marketed herself as the perfectly traditional wife.
My name is Annie Kelly, and my guess is that most of you listening will know me through my work for the QA podcast.
I completed my PhD about the manosphere in the far right in 2020, and since then have been researching and writing about digital reactionary politics, where anti-feminists, white nationalists, and conspiracy theories interact, clash, and merge.
In the time that I've been observing this world, a lot has changed.
I've seen some of the people involved go from being fringe accounts with a few thousand followers to international celebrities.
Concepts and phrases that used to be relegated to the dark corners of 4chan have become buzzwords used by elected officials.
And perhaps, not coincidentally, as what was once the radical online fringe continues to go mainstream, the presence and visibility of women has increased dramatically.
One of the most prominent and long-lasting trends to emerge out of these cultural shifts rightward is the world of traditional wives, or as they came to be known in internet slang, tradwives.
I first wrote about women who called themselves tradwives for the New York Times all the way back in 2018, when they were still a tiny subculture that was mostly an offshoot of the online far-right, sometimes called the alt-right.
Back then, the trad wife accounts I was seeing were usually fairly small channels on YouTube, catering to an audience of white nationalist men, usually by talking about the desire to have lots and lots of babies to save the white race.
Here's a short clip from a now 10-year-old video by Ayla Stewart, one of the most notorious of the early tradwives.
The whole video itself is 30 minutes long and basically just involves her ranting to a static webcam with a completely blank wall behind her.
I feel very emotional about this.
I'm sure you can tell.
I need to calm myself down.
Take your breath.
Okay, where do I want to go with this?
So, what you have is a culture in Western society completely dominated by feminism and feminist ideas.
They're neurological.
They want to nurture the world.
They want to take care of the world.
It can't happen.
Men, in general, and by nature, build structures.
They build structures, they industrialize, and they acquire resources.
This is what they do.
And the white Christian man has done it best.
That's why we have what we have.
Okay, when you take those strengths of men, their logic, their industrialness, their natural abilities to lead and protect and provide, and you try to make them nurturers, you get these, you know, hipsters with man guns walking around talking about their feelings.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work for society.
We need manly men.
We need manly men in society.
We needed them in politics.
So you have something happen where refugees, migrants, invaders, whatever you want to call them, want to come into Europe.
You have this feminized political structure that says, oh, everybody come in and we'll give you lollipops and teddy bears.
And that's why I blame feminism.
Now, the Tradwives sound and look very different.
They have glossy, professional, influencer-style accounts on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, many of which have hundreds of thousands of followers.
The images and videos they share are sleekly curated, edited, and often in sync with wider social media trends.
Some of them are catering to a sexualized male fantasy or trying to court the manosphere, but it's obvious that many of the biggest accounts are talking to a mostly female audience, which is reflected in their brand deals and sponsorships, usually for women's products.
And while some of them do still have a cozy relationship with the far right, that's far from the norm.
Most tradwives these days focus firmly on lifestyle, not politics.
Although it feels like that might be starting to change.
Now's probably a good time to introduce my co-host, Megan Kelly, who is a PhD student.
Her research looks at gender, the far right, and violence, and she's currently writing a dissertation about misogynist incels and gender in the manosphere.
Hi.
Although I'm another Kelly, Annie and I are actually not related.
That's right.
Yeah, we are not sisters.
We are not married.
You're not my Nepo baby.
No, you're not my mom.
And I'm not your mom.
We're not trad wives with each other.
No, although that would be really on brand.
But yeah, no, we do just feel very strongly that the only people who are capable of talking about this important topic are academics who study the manosphere and have the last name Kelly.
Yeah, although Megan Kelly with a Y isn't excluded from that.
Although she doesn't study the manosphere.
Also no relation to her.
That's gonna be our surprise.
Surprise third mic in episode five.
For the last six months, Megan and I have been immersing ourselves in what we call the Tradosphere.
We followed every single Tradwife account we can find, watched all their videos, listened to their podcasts, even read some of their books.
We wanted to analyse Tradwife content not from the perspective of an outsider looking in, but to try and feel as much as possible what it's like to be part of this online world and why it seems to appeal to so many women at this moment in time.
This podcast series, Truly Tradley Deeply, is going to report on what we've found.
If you've listened to my previous cursed media miniseries Man Clan, where my co-host Julian Field and I examine the manosphere, you might think of this series as a bit of a sister project.
The Tradosphere and the Manosphere are closely related after all.
They both revolve around a very similar master narrative about the fundamental nature of men, women, and heterosexual relationships, even if their aesthetics, rhetoric, and style of content ends up looking very different.
But Truly Tradley Deeply will have some differences to Man Clan as well.
While that series looked at different figures from the Manosphere each episode, we want to use these six episodes to unpack different key themes and concepts that are important to the Tradosphere.
We will still talk about individual influences, but we won't dedicate any single episode to them, since our aim is to try and replicate what it feels like to be someone within this space, and very few people scrolling on social media are only following one person.
Similarly, since we're honestly trying to assess what makes Tradwife content so appealing, we don't want to only focus on the ridiculous and objectionable stuff that these influences are saying.
That being said, I don't want to shy away from the more brutal political implications of this kind of material either.
And despite all of our high-minded objectives for this series, as well as being steely, dispassionate professionals, we would ask you to remember that Megan and I are only human.
Sometimes we will just include something because it made us laugh.
So now that we've got all of that out of the way, let's start by exploring an important question.
What actually is a trad wife?
It's not as easy to answer as you might think.
Some people seem to use the term interchangeably with stay-at-home mother, housewife, or homemaker, but that doesn't make much sense to me.
For one thing, we already have those terms and they're pretty useful.
But also, it seems obvious to me that Tradwife is describing something more than a purely economic role.
I have friends that stay at home while their children are young because childcare is so expensive that they'd actually be losing money by going back to work.
Most of them are pretty passionate feminists, and I don't think either them or the trad wives would be happy to be grouped together as the same thing.
In fact, I know that some of them wouldn't because they say so.
Here's Estee Williams, one of the most prominent influences in this space, who's probably best known for her 1950s aesthetic of vintage dresses and blonde Marilyn Monroe style hair.
I want to add that other women in this circle, along with myself, we do interchange the words trad wife, housewife, and homemaker.
There are some differences, but we've all used these terms.
One of the differences with traditional wives is our priorities and our values.
Traditional wives are all over the world.
They come from all sorts of different backgrounds, faiths, ethnicities.
But today I will be talking about Christian traditional wives.
Christian traditional wives believe in biblical submission, so this is a topic that you will see often in the traditional wife community.
That is why we talk about submitting to our husbands, and this does not mean the wife is of less value than the husband, but our husbands do have the most authority in our marriages.
So going back to the difference between housewife, homemaker, trad wife, you can have a wife who stays home, adheres to traditional gender roles, but she might not believe in submitting to her husband.
But Christian traditional wives do believe in this.
So as Este lays out there, there's clearly an extra component to being a trad wife, which is additional to labor.
It's not just staying home and taking care of the children if you have any.
It's about accepting an explicit gendered power dynamic within your relationship.
I'd argue that there's also an important ideological layer to being a trad wife too.
If you watch enough trad wife content, which Megan and I really have, you'll start to see a similar argument emerge that most, if not all, women are better off submitting to this particular arrangement.
This is a bit more subtle because many of them will qualify this by saying they're not being prescriptive and that they don't have a problem with women who really want to have careers.
They just think women in general would be more relaxed and happier living the trad life.
Others, particularly the more openly religious, are much more dogmatic.
We live in a day and age where traditional homemaking has been forgotten about and even looked down on.
Where women are fighting to be in the same positions as men, indoctrinated to focus more on their careers and less on the home.
When God created men and women more than just biologically different, our roles are meant to complement each other, not to compete.
Our husbands are to be the breadwinners as we are to be the bread makers.
Somewhere along the line, feminine has been replaced with feminism with the sole purpose of keeping women out of the home.
Which forces those to rely on the government to teach and raise our children.
Marriage is falling apart because the God who created it is being left out of it.
And an overall disconnect in the home because the one created to nurture it has been empowered to neglect it.
I think that clip is so maybe something that the listeners can't literally can't see is that she is pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen in the video.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good point, actually.
And so maybe this is me portraying my feminist values, but I actually don't know where the turner phrase pregnant and in the kitchen came from.
Do you?
I don't.
I would assume it's like very 70s, though, in some way.
I don't know why.
I don't know why 70s.
Maybe it's like frolicking hippies through the fields or something.
Yeah.
Although I guess that's more 60s, right?
But yeah, I don't know.
It feels like of the 20th century in some way.
Yeah.
But it's like, I guess what I don't know is like, is it a feminist phrase, which, because the Trad Wives love to use it, right?
They love to say, actually, I am barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
And they, you know, is it kind of like, are they reclaiming that in a sense?
Is it like a slur to the woman?
But was it?
I don't know if it was a feminist.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if it was like a feminist critique.
Maybe it was originally like a feminist critique of, yeah, like they only want women barefoot.
I almost said barefoot and naked.
Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
But I think, I mean, what's also kind of crazy about that video to me is that, and I guess a lot of trad wife content overall, is this idea of being forced out of the home that trad wives really never understand the feminist critique of women only being allowed to be or only having the resources to be in the home historically and why and why feminists, especially like second wave and first wave, thought so hard to give women other opportunities or other choices.
And here that force is also seemed to be like kind of co-opted to say, actually, it's feminism that's forced women to leave their home, which is such an interesting spin.
Yeah, there's an anti-feminist book from the 1970s, also funny enough, which is called Let Me Be a Woman, which is kind of an anti-feminist woman.
I think the author was Elizabeth Elliott, and she's like speaking to the feminists of the era.
And I think it's like such an interesting reversal, right, of the feminist argument that they are kind of breaking out of the constraints that feminism is, you know, liberating women where she's kind of, yeah, is sort of turning it back around on them and kind of saying, you're the one who's forcing me out of my role.
Right.
Yeah, it's kind of just, we'll talk about this a lot, I think, in this series.
It's such an interesting reversal of the liberation narrative, I guess.
And I think it's a thorough line that comes from the anti-feminists of the 1970s to the trad wives today.
Yeah, that is still very much present.
At other times, trad wives will point to history when they make this case, saying that this particular domestic role was filled by women for millennia because we are so naturally well suited to it.
In fact, some of them say it's women joining the workforce that is the aberration, historically speaking.
I think it's been really interesting to see how shocked people are by the term trad wife and how they seem to think it's some new way of living.
Like it's some unprecedented new trend.
Like, have you seen these millennial and Gen Z girls?
They just want to be at home with their kids.
They want to have husbands and they want to take care of their husbands.
They want to cook and they want to clean and they want to wear dresses.
It's insane.
When in reality, it's literally like the oldest lifestyle in the book.
Before this, they were just called stay-at-home moms.
And before that, they were just called women.
But now our society has gone so far in the feminist direction that anybody who wants to live like a little bit old school and a little bit like how women used to live is fringe, right?
Like an extremist.
And I just think about how so many of us, since we were little, we were raised in this kind of boss babe feminist society that told us, you can be so much more than just a mom.
You can be so much more than just a wife.
And so many of us listened and we, you know, tried to climb corporate ladders and we boss babed so hard.
Now like we're a little bit boss babe out.
And some of us want to go a little bit more back to our roots, to our ancestors, to the women who came before us and live a little bit more, you know, like they did.
This rhetoric, I'd say, is probably one of the most defining characteristics of Tradwives that I've managed to find.
It's a very particular and unmistakable style of feminine social media content that makes constant reference to tradition, ancestors, and history.
It's actually become one of the quickest ways for me to determine whether an account on Instagram or YouTube that I'm looking at is trad, capital D, or just your more run-of-the-mill parenting influencer.
I tend to always have a look in the bio to see if there's anything there about living ancestrally.
Were there any kind of clues or signs that you started to look out for like that, Megan, when you're looking at an account and you're like, okay, does this belong here?
I mean, I feel like it's a lot of things adding up together more than anything else.
So if it's like sourdough plus pretty dresses plus family values or plus tradition or plus like often a Bible verse.
No, I mean like all those things can be pretty innocuous on their own, but like all together.
And I feel like when we were doing a lot of research, the research for this podcast, that I would occasionally look at some trad accounts just on my own, like not watch anything, but just looked on my own account and would sometimes be surprised to find how many mutuals I had, but they were usually pretty dress companies that I followed because I also just like like a good floral print every now and then.
Yeah.
Like I followed like a couple of like dress shops like way back when they'd like make beautiful linen dresses and like or anything with like modesty too, I feel like in the bio.
Like modesty plus all of these things.
Can be, but it doesn't always have to be.
Because I think, I mean, we'll talk about it later, but there's different audiences, I think, in mind for certain trad accounts.
But the more definite, I guess, them focused trad accounts tend towards more modesty, I would guess, in the byline.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's really it.
It's like a really holistic thing.
It's like not just one thing.
It's a lot of them.
Another thing that is often a bit of a clue for me, funnily enough, is if they like have wife in their bio.
Yes.
Yeah.
Or mother even.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I guess, yeah, mother would be a bit more ambiguous to me because I think, yeah, the ones that really emphasize the fact that they're a mother and a stay-at-home mum or a homeschooling mother, usually that's a bit more of a in.
But you do still genuinely get, you know, stay-at-home mothers or homeschooling mothers that are like pretty liberal politically, do you know?
And those weren't the kind of accounts I was looking for.
But I think, yeah, like they'd have wife in their bio first.
Because I mean, you and I are both married, right?
But like, it wouldn't even really occur to me for me to identify myself as a wife.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, I feel like wife or missus.
I guess with the mother, it was more like wife and mother.
Like it's with the other things.
Because yeah, like you said, there are a lot of mom accounts or like mommy, Instagram, mommy, TikTok that really have nothing to do with this.
Or like the only common variable is people having children.
And not all trads have kids.
Like, I think like Este Williams like only recently had her first child.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's actually a bit of a funny divide when you're in, when you're kind of observing trad wife sort of the tradersphere for long enough, right?
Is that like sometimes you find that the ones with kids actually get a bit mad at the ones who don't, but are doing that thing that I can kind of relate to as someone who has a child myself, where they're kind of talking about how great parents they would be potentially when they do have kids and how everyone else who does have kids is messing it up.
And yeah, I guess it's a phrase like I think, you know, people say stuff like, the most perfect parent is someone who hasn't had children yet.
Do you know?
Yeah.
Because yeah, a lot of your kind of high-minded expectations for you yourself once you are in survival mode do really change.
You move from, I don't know, they'll never ever watch TV to being like, well, maybe I won't let them watch TV for more than half an hour.
Right.
Like, mom needs a break every now and then.
Like, you don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so it's kind of one of the funny, you know, I guess, yeah, conflicts I actually see within that sphere is these trad accounts that have like six or seven kids kind of telling off the newly, freshly, newly minted, aspiring trad mothers, I guess, to just sort of like stay in their lane a little.
Right.
That is fascinating.
Of course, it needs to be said, the idea that there is just one single historical way to be a wife is pretty much nonsense.
Women have always worked outside the home, even in the pre-feminist era.
My grandmother, a working-class Catholic woman from Northern Ireland who had six children, worked as a waitress right up until her retirement.
And in fact, she even sued them when they tried to fire her for getting too old.
To her and countless women in that class over the centuries, having a job wasn't a question of feminist values or being a boss babe.
It was simply how they kept a roof over everyone's heads and food on the table.
Even now, it feels like very few of us are actually living in an economic reality where working is a choice.
That seems like a really important factor in understanding the mass appeal of trad wife content.
For nearly all women, the aspirational aspect isn't just not having a job.
It's not having a job and still being able to live comfortably in a beautiful home.
It's even aspirational to lots of trad wife influencers themselves, some of whom do talk frankly about the fact that they actually earn money.
Here's a clip from a YouTuber called Gwen the Milkmaid, which talked about this whole dynamic pretty honestly and thoughtfully, I thought.
So because I started making content like that, I suppose that made me a trad wife.
Now, truthfully, that is not something I've ever really identified with because my initial understanding of what a trad wife was was a woman who did not work at all other than being a homemaker.
And that's not to make it sound like there's not a lot that goes into that because there is and it's a total art form and really beautiful and incredible.
So I never identified as one, but I thought it was really beautiful.
I don't really want to have to work.
I would much rather 100% of my time and effort went into taking care of the home and my family because that is what brings me the most joy.
I think it's so much fun.
There's so many things to learn, so many recipes to try.
And it feels so good when my husband comes home from a really long day of work to have dinner on the table, to be in my pretty dress, giving him a hug and a kiss.
It's truly joy giving.
And so I have nothing wrong with that life at all.
I think it's beautiful and it's something that I'm personally striving for.
But then on the other hand, some of the more popular trad wives on the internet that we hear about, for instance, Valerina Farm, who is so inspiring to me.
I love her.
She is technically a working wife.
But because she also posts videos wearing a pretty dress, making food from scratch for her, I think, eight children and her husband, that makes her a trad wife.
But then you'll also see articles calling her a fake because she's not actually a trad wife because she does run a business from home as well.
A very successful business.
She's very inspiring.
And so that's where it comes to me is that I will either be called a trad wife or a lying fake trad wife because here I am being a content creator, not really making much money, but at least trying to.
Yeah, so people will pretty much just call me a liar saying here I am pretending to be a trad wife, but I am a content creator.
And I would argue that I never lied.
I'm very open.
If you watch any of my YouTube videos, I never pretend that I don't work.
Like clearly I do.
I am the one who edits and films all my videos.
I run a small business making tallow and linen aprons called the Milkman Supply Co.
that I'm very proud of.
I've never hid that.
So I don't really know how someone can say that I'm lying.
And yeah, so personally, the definition that I prefer as I've thought more about this is one that would more so go under the umbrella of biblical wife.
There's so many things with that clip that I want to talk about.
I mean, tallow.
Tallow and linen aprons for one.
But I also think it's really, we've had multiple trads already filming these videos in their bedroom, which I feel like is such an interesting choice.
I mean, we've had a kitchen before, but I just, I wonder why that, especially as a content creator, that that's the setting.
It's intimate, right?
Yeah.
I guess it's like a really intimate space.
And, you know, we can't really say that this is exclusive to the trad wives.
I think it's something that lots of influencers are kind of promising, which is that they're kind of like a celebrity in some ways, but they're also kind of a bit like a friend.
Right.
It's the parasocial boundary.
That's it.
You've got so much more access to their lives.
And, you know, if you think about like a friend, like, you know, that you go to their house and stuff like that, like it's a really intimate space to meet them in, the bedroom.
Like, you know, much more intimate than the kitchen or the living room or something like that.
So yeah, I think there's something about that.
It's about feeling like you're talking to a very, very close friend, maybe.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think, I mean, the other thing that really struck me in this video is this desire not to work outside the home as being so gender specific in her mind.
I mean, that's like, that's not news if you follow any kind of trad wife content, but I just, I don't know.
I talk with my husband often about like how both of us, like an eventual goal is to be able to work less.
And that's not.
And in order to be able to do the things that we enjoy, that like outside of earning an income, that he always like wishes that he had more time to do the things that he enjoys.
And I wish the same.
And I think it has nothing really to do with gender and more about like everybody's just overworked and burnt out and tired these days.
So which is part of this appeal, I guess.
One critique I think I accept from her talking there and I think it's like a fair enough one is that she's like, you know, on the one hand, you know, these content creators who don't even like call ourselves trad wives, we like have these jobs and then people are like, oh, you're a hypocrite because you're working.
And I can kind of, I do kind of understand that frustration, I think.
Yeah.
Which is why, as I say, I kind of strive for, I think it's silly to try and create a definition of trad wife which relies on not working.
It's why I think it makes much more sense to frame it as an ideological one.
Because almost by the nature of you being a content creator, an influencer, you are working.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
It is a job.
It's a job that takes a lot of time in some regard.
So I think, yeah, I do kind of accept that criticism.
And I think it's interesting coming from someone who clearly identifies with the label as opposed to someone from outside.
Yeah, but I think that she also has a lot more nuance to it than I know.
We'll get to another example later of someone who's talking about working, but it's very dismissive, like who runs a business on the site, but is very dismissive of that being a kind of work.
And it's specifically her comparing it to a nine-to-five that she used to work.
And so I think that there's different levels of it here.
I mean, and I think I know exactly what Gwen is talking about in terms of this criticism because you do often see people online say, well, yeah, if they were actually a trad wife, you would never hear from them because they would have to have their husband's permission to speak.
And so there's also like these different kinds of like gatekeeping mechanisms that are coming from people who are not part of this sphere or don't identify this way or don't easily fit in and kind of deciding who and who doesn't fit in.
And so yeah, I agree.
That's where that ideological underpinning is, I think, so important to understanding what binds people who actually sometimes have very different lives or lifestyles or but still have this kind of core ideological underpinning.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of true that, yeah, you know, traditionally, if you really wanted to be really, really traditional, yes, your, your husband would be, you wouldn't even be literate.
Your husband would be writing every post for you.
That's true.
You wouldn't even, you wouldn't even be on the internet.
You wouldn't have indoor plumbing.
You would be, yeah, you'd be working in a cabbage farm somewhere.
So I guess, you know, it depends how far you want to take that critique, really.
The truth is, yeah, we are living in a media landscape, which means that none of us can really, can really understand, I think, the mindset of someone who lived even 100 years ago, let alone 500.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's one of those things where it's like, on the one hand, it's quite a good critique to just sort of puncture, I think, the way that, you know, that connection to tradition that lots of these trad wives claim, where they're like, well, this is just how it's been done for millions and millions of years.
And modern women of the aberrations be like, well, actually, we're all aberrations compared to what came before us.
You know, speaking to somebody born 150 years ago, you may as well be speaking to an alien on a different planet in terms of how they would recognize you, no matter how conservative you are.
Yeah.
That's why there's all those memes of like, a Victorian child would never understand.
Like, or imagine explaining laboo boost to like a Victorian child with tuberculosis.
Like, I think that those do really show the distance that we have from the past to the traditional past.
Yeah.
Some right-wing trad adjacent women have tried to draw a distinction between this kind of good feminine work, such as running a beef tallow and linen apron business, which can be done from home, and the bad feminist kind of work, which I guess involves leaving the home at some point.
I love this clip of conservative commentator Ali Stuckey, where she seems to act as if earning money is such a dirty, scandalous word when it comes to anti-feminist women like herself that it actually needs to be euphemized as building the family economy.
This black and white binary of stay-at-home mom versus working mom, they're not really real categories.
There are a lot of moms who say that they're stay-at-home moms, and they are because they're at home, but they've got their Etsy shop, or they're making money somehow online or through social media, or maybe they're knitting, or maybe they're selling sourdough bread or something.
So they are industrious and working and bringing in an income in some way, even though they are stay-at-home moms.
You could also say that they are working moms.
Throughout history, there has typically been that kind of combination of, yes, prioritizing the home, prioritizing children while still being industrious and even entrepreneurial.
There's a difference, I think, in like building the family economy and the girl boss culture of handing off your kids and, you know, pursuing some title at a marketing firm.
So this definition to me didn't make sense before COVID, and it makes a hell of a lot less sense now when increasingly lots and lots of middle-class jobs are done remotely.
But I am interested by the fact that working trad wives seem to be uncomfortably aware that, at least on paper, there's not much difference between their lifestyle and the lifestyle of the feminist career women that they disparage.
And so a lot of them will then point to the conditions of modernity as being responsible.
What's the real difference between a feminist girl boss and a good, virtuous, traditional woman?
It seems to be that the traditional woman will complain about her job more.
To be a stay-at-home mom, I would love to be a homemaker and a wife.
I would love to be able to live on a homestead and go milk my cow and take the eggs out of the chicken coop and have one baby in the belly and on my hip and another toddler behind me.
That's like my dream, but I can't fucking do that because the way the economy is set up is I'm forced to work.
I'm forced to get an education, a higher education, a college degree in order to make enough money that I can be financially independent and afford my own home or my own rent or my own gas or my own groceries, my own insurance.
And it's extremely difficult to do that.
And it's very isolating as a woman when you have to do all of that all on your own and you can't find somebody that you can outsource some of those chores and financial responsibilities like you would with a spouse.
So no, being a single working woman absolutely sucks.
It's the worst thing ever.
I hate it.
I would go back to the 1950s in a second just so I wouldn't have to deal with this shit.
You're talking about a traditional nuclear family where the woman doesn't work in a married household with kids.
And statistically a single woman who isn't married with kids yet.
Yeah, so I'm forced because of the way it is.
Most women were married by the age of 21 up until the 1970s.
I think it's a woman's choice.
Before that, it was societally encouraged to marry young.
Yeah, and it was better for women mental health-wise long-term to be able to go into that long-term committed relationship and have the established family instead of being forced to slave away for a corporation that doesn't like you, doesn't care about you, makes you sit under fluorescent lights for eight, nine, 10 hours a day.
You get a lunch break, you get health insurance, but do you have somebody who loves you staring at you every day like your child?
No, it's horrible.
I think that clip is so interesting in particular because she's representing the conservative side of a debate like pre-2024 election.
And usually I feel like, I don't know, having grown up in the US, but especially the conservative side of things is often like a kind of very much pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get going, like you're responsible for your own happiness.
And we'll talk about that later as well, of like being grateful for what you have.
But here that's not, she can't use that.
That's not the case.
Like it's like, well, as the third girl points out, like, well, that's, you could do that.
You could get married and have kids.
Nobody's stopping you.
But that kind of logic of personal, it doesn't apply to this because she needs the argument to be that modernity has ruined this and forced her to work.
I'm like, on one hand, she's not 100% wrong.
Like the economy is really set up at this point to have two, like if you're having kids, especially, like you almost always need to have two incomes of some sort for middle class and lower class people in so many places around the world.
But on the other hand, nobody's stopping her from getting married besides herself.
Yeah, feminism isn't responsible for you not having a boyfriend.
Right.
But yeah, I think you bring up there, I think, what I have begun to see as like the final ideological component, I guess, which is what I use to distinguish trad wife content from maybe the less politicized family and lifestyle stuff.
It's the way which for trad wives, anti-feminist rhetoric on an individual level often expands out into a more general theme of anti-modernity in general.
Trad wives, a lot of the time, aren't just celebrating the decision to embrace a domestic role within society.
They're often rejecting society and modern civilization itself.
A lot of the most successful trad wife content online, for example, often seems to be based on farms or homesteads, somewhere a little bit rural, a little bit apart, essentially signaling that they are as far away from the cosmopolitan, technologized, urban world as possible.
Once you start noticing that theme in the tradosphere, you really start to see how common it is in nearly all conservative content, but especially, I think, the stuff that is aimed at or hosted by women.
That's me right now.
Almost 22, and all I think about is buying cows and running away from literally all of this.
Somebody said, raised to be a trad wife, raised to work at 17, 34 now.
I want to stay home.
Cannot tell you how many videos are out there of all these girls just being like, why did we do this?
Why did we let feminism win?
Somebody else said, I was raised to be a boss babe.
I've literally asked my husband if we could buy a sheep farm.
I love that for you, as you should.
Another girl said, I worked two jobs from 15 to 19, then 19 to 26, working full-time as a nurse.
Please just give me a cottage and a cow.
I yearned for it.
It's almost like we're biologically designed for these things.
Crazy.
I love actually the top comment on, like, from what I can see of the club is, you don't want to be a trad wife.
You just don't want to live under capitalism.
Which women aren't biologically programmed to do any one thing.
You can do whatever you want.
Yeah.
I mean, it is so insidious because in a weird way, yeah, like she's kind of, and this is, it's that, that person there who's talking, I should say, is the conservative commentator, Brett Cooper, who, yeah, I guess our whole thing is that she's very kind of relatable.
She's often like, you know, sat there and kind of her sort of like, you know, she's got this very kind of chatty conversational style.
She kind of feels very like charismatic, I think, from a female perspective.
And just kind of sharing this kind of funny content that like women or comments that women make to, you know, we're just like, God, I hit my job.
God, my job sucks.
Now, you know, the way when you're kind of a bit burned out that, you know, people, friends and female friends will often talk to each other.
And then she kind of just like slips in this like, it's almost as if we're biologically designed to never, never work.
And you're like, wait, what?
Like, can't we just have a little like complain?
Can't we just have a little vent with each other?
Do you know?
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I also think about cows and chickens and sheep.
And like, I think that that, like, I know a lot of friends today, like, have that kind of idealized idea of country living and countryside.
Although I grew up in the countryside, and let me tell you, it was not always, like, I catch myself now going to be like, oh, yes, it would be so nice to like, to be out a little bit more.
And then I'm like, oh, but that means like scooping horse poop.
And like, you actually have to do all this backbreaking labor.
And it can be lovely in many ways, but I don't think it has anything to do with my gender.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's funny you say I'm the opposite, I think.
I've lived in cities all my life.
I'm a very urban creature, I think.
I like going to the countryside for a little weekend away, a little holiday.
But I am very aware that that's my limit, that I feel a bit itchy if I'm not like a few minutes away from the nearest Tesco, if there's not at least five pubs within walking distance.
You know, I need a bus route.
I need, I need like a cinema.
I need some wine bars.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So all of this kind of, oh, I'm just yearning to be on the farm or something like that.
I just really do not get it personally.
I mean, I don't think I now ever yearn to be on a farm realistically.
It's like more of like kind of, yeah, that kind of easiness that's being promised from it, which it's not easy.
It's more, yeah, I grew up in the countryside, moved to some huge cities and said, I'm tired.
Like, I don't know.
I lived in Bangkok for a bit.
And after that, it's just like, it's too gone back to tiny towns.
Not tiny towns.
I also need, I need to have a grocery store and walking distance.
Yeah.
Because I don't like to drive.
Yeah.
So I do, I like a livable, walkable, small city.
Yeah, the 15-minute city, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
So crazy to me that that became like a conspiracy concept.
I was like, that's my ideal.
That's where I want to live.
It sounds lovely.
Sign me up, Klaus Schwab.
So, if modernity is the problem, how far back do we need to go to find the trad wife's ideal moment in history?
A lot of them say the 1950s, but even then, some of the more historically minded do admit that that was the era which essentially created the conditions for the modern feminist movement in the first place.
Putting it in biblical terms, which I think a lot of them would appreciate, it's like asking to go back to the world in the book of Genesis, exactly one day before God sent the flood.
When Megan and I first began researching this together, we agreed it was important to understand exactly where tradwives came from.
And to do that question justice, we'd need to go back a bit further than the social media era.
Where do trad wives fit into the long and rich intellectual history of women who've seen there's some feminism happening and politely, or in many cases not so politely, declined?
Megan decided to travel back into the past to investigate.
So, tradwives of today and the tradosphere overall, as we've already discussed, often make reference to wanting to return to a particular idea of the past.
They romanticize a kind of mythical past that's some strange combination of both Little House on the Prairie and the 1950s housewife.
So, as Annie mentioned, and trying to figure out exactly where the Tratosphere has emerged from, I decided to go back in time.
In starting my search, I wanted to try and find instances of women's participation and anti-feminist movements historically and popular narratives within these movements.
My first stop took me back over 100 years to anti-women's suffrage campaigns and movements in the US.
And I was a little surprised to learn both how many women campaigned against women's right to vote, but also how often their arguments against women's suffrage ended up being weirdly sort of similar to Tradwives of Today, advocating for clearly separated gender roles for men and women.
Now, well, I'm going to focus mainly on the anti-suffrage movement in the US here.
It's worth mentioning that women were also involved in anti-suffrage movements during campaigns for women's voting rights around the world.
For example, in Switzerland, which is a bit notorious for only granting women voting rights federally in 1971, just over 50 years ago, and actually in one canton it wasn't until 1990.
Oh my gosh.
Why can't you tell me about Switzerland in the time that we've been researching this?
I'm like, how is this place real?
It's a wild, wildland.
I also learned recently that it wasn't until like 1988, I think, 88 or 87, that the state said, okay, we are open to other types of family organization besides man legally as the head of household.
Like, wow.
And then, like, I read an article that was put up by Swiss parliament that said that was only possible because women got the right to vote in 1971, because otherwise it was not a popular initiative among men.
But yeah, it's the wilds.
Wild gendered history in Switzerland.
Honestly, if any trad wives are listening to this episode, just moved to Switzerland as the last bastion of the patriarchy, as far as I can tell.
Yes, we're all today.
No, but that's why I have like Kat Tibaldi, who does quite a lot of work on the Tratosphere and Granola Nazis, as she calls them, talks a lot about how Switzerland is like kind of this ultimate innocuous space that claims to be free of politics and neutral, but actually it hides quite a lot of very traditional conservative values, especially around gender.
Great chocolate though, great chocolate, great cheese.
Can't complain about that.
But yeah.
In Switzerland, during this federal campaign to grant women voting rights, there were anti-suffragettes who were very active in the 50s and 60s in the lead up to that vote.
The Swiss anti-suffragettes reasoned that women's true power came from their roles as mothers and wives, and that if there was a vote on issues that impacted women, they could always just influence their husbands.
In many of the anti-suffrage campaigns, women who wanted the right to vote were portrayed as less feminine.
I found one campaign poster particularly striking.
You can see it here, Annie.
Translated into English, it says, Do you want women like that?
No, on women's voting rights.
Annie, can you describe the woman who's portrayed in this campaign poster?
Because she's pretty distinct, I think.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so a bit of background.
I guess if you're studying what Megan and I have studied, which is kind of anti-feminist rhetoric, you always have to, when you're doing your historical analysis, you always have to talk about anti-suffragette posters because a lot of them almost set a template, I would say, for anti-feminist rhetoric, which is still very alive today.
And I would say a lot of them commonly would often focus on a very masculine woman.
She's kind of a bit butch a lot of the time.
And the idea is that she, and there's one great poster where she's like literally bullying her poor, like puny wimp of a husband, like making him do the washing up and stuff like that.
Or they kind of will do the kind of other thing where they're like, oh, they're old spinsters, right?
They're ugly old spinsters who no one wants to marry.
And that's why they're doing this.
But this poster that you were showing me, I would say takes it one step further and is actually quite scary.
This woman is scary.
She kind of looks a bit like Slender Man.
She has these like long spindly fingers that she's kind of like reaching out of the poster.
This kind of quite scary open mouth.
Kind of, it's like sort of just like this black circular like space with just like a couple of teeth sticking out.
It's like almost vampiric, actually, in the taste.
It's vampiric.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of Nosferatu-like, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think I've like really seen an anti-suffragette poster.
And I've seen a few in my time, which have quite, I think, been quite as like horrifying as this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she definitely has like also some features that I think that are often more associated with kind of mask.
Like she has hair coming out.
Maybe she just has PCOS, but like she has hair coming out of, sometimes they do too, out of cheeks.
But it also looks like she almost has an Adam's apple.
So it is kind of of that genre of trying to make her appear more masculine, I think.
But then it's, it is also this witchy nosferatu vampire creature at the same time who doesn't know what to do with her arms, which I've been there.
But yeah, it's, I mean, I'm not so sure if this poster was created by a woman who was an anti-suffragette specifically, but this is coming from the larger campaign, which both men and women in Switzerland were a part of.
But in the US, women's participation in the anti-suffrage movement was common enough that suffragette Susan B. Anthony once commented that women's suffrage laws, quote, probably never would have passed if it had been up to a woman to vote on them, unquote.
And that many men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than many women were.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's wild.
Like, I think that's something I knew that there were a couple, but just to know how many, and then also in the Swiss context, how recent that was in terms of women's participation in anti-suffrage, it was and is really fascinating.
Many anti-suffrage pamphlets at the time of the women's right to vote being up for debate in the U.S., so this is 1910s and 1920s when it was ratified, focused on warning the public that granting women the right to vote would have the power to disturb the order of the home and hurt gender relations between men and women.
For example, giving women the right to vote was demonized in one pamphlet.
Because it means competition of women with men instead of cooperation.
Because 80% of the women eligible to vote are married and can only double or annul their husbands' votes.
Because in some states, more voting women than voting men will place the government under petticoat rule.
So ominous.
What I found really interesting about this quote beyond the image of petticoat rule is this annulling their husband's vote.
Because I don't know if you saw this in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but there was a lot of talk.
There was like also an SNL skit at some point about women.
Or no, it wasn't an Essen, maybe it was Daily Show, but there was some like comedy sketches about this as well.
About women were being told they didn't have to tell their husbands how they voted.
And kind of the implication there was that, especially white women, I think, who were married to white men, that white men tended to already vote for Trump, tend to vote conservative in the U.S., and that white women maybe don't vote as conservative, but have felt pressured to vote with their husbands.
So there was kind of a call that you can vote how you want, which was assumed to be more progressive, and kind of annul your husband's vote.
So that was actually, it's interesting that that was actually used in a campaign more recently, but in the other way around.
It's really true.
I remember seeing that exact thing.
It was a kind of like, you know, he doesn't need to know, right?
You know, your husband doesn't need to know how you vote.
But yeah, I mean, I can't really remember the breakdown of white women voting in 2020 versus 2024, but I'm pretty sure it didn't seem to make much negligible difference, right?
I don't think so.
And I know in 2016, even it was like 53% of white women.
I don't know why that statistic has stuck in my mind, but that it was more than half of white women in the U.S. who voted for Trump in 2016.
And so I imagine that's not super different in 2024 from, yeah, but it's, yeah, but yeah, used unsuccessfully, let's say, maybe if it was a campaign at all.
But that same pamphlet from the anti-women suffrage movement in the U.S. offered also a couple of tips to housewives.
And among these tips, one of them was: You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout.
Control of the temper makes a happier home than control of elections.
Wow.
Oh my God.
Like, honestly, it's like so patronizing.
I feel like even if I was like at the time reading this and I was, even if I was someone who did, a woman who did not want the right to vote, who was reading this pamphlet, nodding along, come on, that that must have made someone, that must have made some of them mad.
Yeah.
Right.
Like just.
Yeah, I think it's really fascinating also because it assumes a very certain socioeconomic class of like who's doing the cleaning in these houses.
And as we'll talk about in a minute, like a lot of these anti-suffragettes were actually quite wealthy.
And so I can assume that they weren't probably the ones cleaning out their sinks in the first time.
It's true.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it is.
I mean, also, I can do both.
I managed to, although I think my husband cleans out the sink more than I do, but that's just how the church charts.
Oh my God, this is exactly what those posters were warning about.
I'm living it.
The anti-suffragettes are right all along.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't need a ballot to clean it up because I don't clean it.
Yeah.
Anywho.
Other pamphlets distributed by anti-suffragists were focused on the disruption of gender roles by giving women the right to vote.
So exactly what's happening in my household.
These pamphlets usually contain images of men going grocery shopping.
Well, check there too.
Doing the washing and pushing baby strollers and women becoming uglier and less feminine and also less desirable as a result of voting.
It's easy to assume that all anti-suffragists were all conservatives who just rejected any and all societal progress.
But some of these women were actually pretty progressive on other issues, at least for their time.
For example, Josephine Jewell Dodge, who was instrumental in setting up daycare facilities for working class and migrant mothers, was also an avid anti-suffragist.
In a newspaper article published in 1913, she wrote, The suffrage disturbance is, in plain words, a sex disturbance.
Just as the impulse of some other women to take up foolish fancies and unnecessary movements is the result of that uneasiness and straining after artificial happiness and unnatural enjoyment, which indicates an unsettled and an unsatisfactory state of mind.
So yeah, something I find really interesting about that quote actually is how similar it feels to, I mean, a lot of the rhetoric we're going to hear in this episode, but I would say probably just through this series in general, which kind of casts feminism and,
you know, caring about women rights, not necessarily as an opposite to anti-feminism or like being politically engaged in that way, but almost like as an opposite to happiness and general well-being itself, right?
Like it's almost, it's almost as if, you know, they're saying like, you know, the opposite of feminism isn't kind of being a really strident anti-feminist.
It's actually just being like, just being content, just happy with my life.
Don't really need to worry about politics at all.
Do you know, which I find really interesting because it's almost as if, yeah, they kind of, because to a certain extent it's correct, right?
Like, I think, you know, if you are an activist, you are saying there is something in society that I find intolerable, that I find intolerable and I want to do something about it.
But that is kind of just the nature of activism in general.
Do you know?
And it's kind of interesting that they, they're not even saying you're wrong necessarily.
They're almost just saying, you'd be so much happier if you weren't thinking about this.
Yeah.
But just kind of put up with it.
Just kind of deal with it.
There's actually not a solution.
And yeah, I'll admit, like, I want to talk about that later too, because I think that comes up quite a lot throughout trad content.
But yeah, it is this kind of preaching of gratitude, but gratitude, not in a like, be thankful, like meditative, I don't know, way that like, which that's also a part of it.
But it's just like, please stop talking.
Like, be grateful.
Yeah.
Please don't rabble rouse.
Please don't disrupt anything.
And I think that's sex disturbance, especially.
I feel like that's such a key word there in that quote.
Because it is.
I mean, like, by women not adhering to this very strict role, it is a disturbance.
It's not an incorrect reading, but it's, yeah, it is, like, in my opinion, more freedom as well, or it is more opportunities.
It's a good disturbance that has to happen because the social order at the time is not working.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think it's, it's one thing I think I have found interesting about looking into the history of this is that I would have thought that the, you know, kind of anti-feminism as a wellness thing, as something that, you know, you need to work on and achieve just for your own personal well-being.
I think I would have thought that that was more of a social media phenomenon.
So much of social media is fixated on wellness and what, you know, that one weird trick that you can do to achieve just contentment and peace and things like that.
But I guess what I'm learning is that actually that has been, that has been a pretty like strong thorough line in anti-feminist rhetoric for forever.
Basically.
You see it in the 80s too in Susan Foula.
Faludi's Susan Faludi's backlash.
She talks about this being a very popular media narrative of the 1980s as kind of like a response to the advances of 1960s and 1970s second wave feminism that there was this a lot of reporting about how unhappy women were in the home.
And so she investigates and kind of dispels that narrative that women kind of leaving the home didn't necessarily mean more than a happiness, but often just meant more responsibilities and that it's a bit more nuanced than that kind of larger narrative portrayed.
But yeah, it's it's a through line through so much of anti-feminist movements.
I think now this wellness, the well, like maybe the word wellness is rather new with it, but it is the same argument.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And well, like some of the opposition was definitely explicitly concerned with this disruption or disturbance of sex or the family unit or of a woman's role as a wife and mother.
Other women who were anti-suffragists were opposed to granting the right to vote because they were worried about political corruption.
The time period in which many suffragettes were advocating for the right to vote was what is often referred to as the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age was not only a time of extreme wealth inequality, but also a time of rampant political corruption, which then helped contribute to that extreme wealth inequality.
Some women anti-suffragists saw women as the moral compass or moral authority of society and were worried that by becoming involved in party politics and trying to change women's status in society, women would be a force to quote adopt men's clumsy political methods, unquote.
And as a result, women would also become corrupt.
Relatedly, a lot of these anti-suffragists thought that women's moral authority allowed them to have a kind of raw power over their male family members, in which they could kind of whisper in their ears and influence political decisions.
Essentially, these women were arguing that the role of wife, mother, and moral authority in the home was a truly powerful and privileged position, and that by being granted voting rights and being brought into the political arena, they weren't gaining rights so much as leaving themselves open to corruption and giving up their special power.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, most of these women who were anti-suffragists were white and upper class, meaning that their husbands and fathers and brothers had political clout and ears that they could actually whisper in and something would get done.
It also meant that they had potentially easier access to lawmakers through their social circles.
The socioeconomic class of these early suffragists is also clear in their fears that most other women, meaning those from less well-educated or lower-class backgrounds, were not well informed about politics.
And I think it's also important to mention that this period of history in the U.S. was a time where both many people were migrating to the U.S. and there was a lot of hostility against these recent migrants to the country, especially among the upper classes at the time.
I think this is an important contextual element to understanding broader opposition to the expansion of voting rights.
The historian Josie Miller, who has written quite a lot about how the fight for an opposition against women's suffrage was not really divided on gender lines, talks about how there was a shift in the upper classes against the idea of extending suffrage between the 1850s and the 1880s.
While the idea of extending voting rights to women had been somewhat popular in elite circles in the 1850s, by the 1880s, it was deeply unpopular, essentially due to rising fears of quote, ignorant, illiterate, and migrant voters, unquote, who the upper classes believed would just sell their votes, which would worsen political corruption.
I mean, and that's so striking, right?
Because when you kind of look at this, yeah, this kind of backlash, I would say, against a lot of the feminist progress or even just like feminist culture of the last 20 years, I mean, it feels like this is also happening at a time where there is a deep amount of anxiety around immigration and borders and citizenship.
Yeah.
Both in the US, but it's happening in my country as well.
You know, there's an increasing gap between rich and poor.
And so it feels like even when this language is very strictly gendered and is not making any claims about race or migrants or citizens explicitly, I think it's like really interesting that it's also, I think, not happening totally separate to those discussions either.
Like it's still trying to essentially narrow the borders of who gets to be a political subject, of who gets to be considered like a legitimate speaker on political topics.
And so I think that context is really important.
Yeah, I mean, I would not be the first to say, I mean, a lot of people have compared to the Gilded Age.
So this is the period from like 1870s, 1880s to basically before World War I to the period that we live in now.
This post-interesting post kind of industrial revolution has happened, in our case, more with technology.
In the 1870s, more with factories and different kinds of industry.
But then also the extreme wealth inequality and political instability at that time is often compared to the time that we're currently living in.
Also, just like talking about this now, it's also reminds me quite a lot of conversations going on in the US around kind of fears around expanding Medicare and Medicaid.
And a lot of conservative fears is that this is going to be expanded to undocumented people.
And so there's a similar kind of through line, I think, there.
Or there was like, I mean, to even like put it more on the nose, like Trump saying that all, well, he would, he wouldn't say undocumented people.
He would, he uses different language for that, but that are all going to have transgender surgery or something like this, or like this is going to be expanded out.
That they're, that this idea that somebody is going to get something that they don't deserve is kind of the underlying belief.
Again, who, as you said, has the right to be having a voice, having resources, having representation.
And I do think it's really hard to disentangle kind of xenophobia and gender expectations in this time, but also increasingly in our own.
Yeah.
And I think, yeah, because it's worth mentioning, you know, when I first was writing about the trad wives, they were a very, very white subculture.
I think, you know, as they've got more popular, they have diversified.
Like there are black trad wives, right?
There are women who are of color who are trad wives.
And I think we've even played some clips from women who aren't white talking about this.
So, you know, I don't want to simplify things by just being like, you know, they're all white supremacists or something like that, because I don't think that's true.
But on the other hand, I think, you know, they are marketing a very, very class-specific lifestyle.
It's often, I think, if not white nationalists, it's often Christian nationalist.
Like, I'm trying to think of all of the trad wife influencers who aren't white and they're all very, very heavily Christian.
Right.
I'm sure there is an example of someone who isn't, but it feels to me like that.
So they are still, I would say, even if there is a lot of blurriness and I would say diversity in this space, I would say they are still very much still, yeah, still shoring up those borders, trying to firm up those borders, trying to shrink down the pool of who gets to be a legitimate political subject.
Yeah.
Even if I don't think that they all agree necessarily on who that political subject should be.
Yeah.
And even if their politics can vary a little bit, I think that that's also, there's a lot of women who are identified as tread wives who don't necessarily want to claim that label.
And that's again where it becomes kind of complicated to figure out who is and who isn't.
Yeah.
But then there's also, I mean, it's also, yeah, I think the Christian nationalist bit is really important to it.
The first video with Esty, where she's talking about it's a biblical submission, like that there are, she's acknowledging there are traditional wives around the world who do not practice Christianity or don't aren't Christian, but that her specific brand, and I think the brand that you find overwhelmingly associated with Trad wives in the US is a very particular kind of Christianity.
But after suffrage was extended to women and practice to white women in the US, many former anti-suffragists, despite all their fears, began to vote.
Many decided to do so in order to promote conservative values, and some even started to run for office themselves.
Now, let's jump ahead in history to the 1960s and 1970s, because no journey through the history of anti-feminism would be complete without a little visit to Phyllis Schlafly.
Schlafly was arguably the anti-feminist of second wave feminism and is probably most infamous for being credited as the primary reason that the Equal Rights Amendment, often referred to as the ERA, is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
If you haven't heard of the ERA, it is an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was first introduced in the 1920s, but didn't pass.
Then in the 1970s, it was reintroduced and passed both the House and the Senate, but was three votes short of being ratified by the state legislatures, which was needed to become a constitutional amendment.
Phyllis Schlafly was fundamental in the campaign against that final step of ratification of the ERA.
There's actually still efforts today to try and pass the ERA, which would explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.
Phyllis was a bundle of contradictions.
An author, attorney, and mother to six children, she developed a glittering career around her anti-feminist activism, which made her a household name in 1970s America.
Simultaneously, she promoted the idea that women submit to their husbands and attacked feminists for seeking careers instead of embracing the virtues of homemaking.
She was one of the first conservative activists to really tap into conservative religious sentiment around family values.
Beyond the ERA, Phyllis was also staunchly against feminist calls for reproductive rights and protections and opposed the Violence Against Women Act on the basis of the idea that women make false accusations of sexual assault and domestic violence and promoted the idea that there was a, quote, war on men, unquote.
The ERA and VAWA were not the only feminist policy initiatives that she opposed.
As we're about to hear in this clip, she also worked to oppose universal daycare and child care.
I'm interested in your characterization of women's liberation people or as a group.
And in November 1972, in your newsletter, you wrote, their motive is totally radical.
They hate men, marriage, and children.
They are out to destroy morality and the family.
Do you still feel that?
Is that quote still an accurate journey?
Yes, I think that it is an anti-family movement.
I think they target men as the enemy.
They teach that women have been kept in a condition of oppression and serfdom for all these years, and that society owes it to them to take care of their children and to find them jobs at the expense of more qualified men or whatever.
It is a negative view of life.
It is a targeting of man as the enemy.
It is a teaching of women that they've been oppressed.
It's a chip on the shoulder attitude.
And they wake up in the morning thinking the cards are stacked against them.
Now, I don't think you get ahead in this world by projecting your problems onto society and saying that it's society's fault.
Everybody has problems, but the positive person who seeks fulfillment and gets it is one who sets about to solve her own problems in her own way.
But you know, the Women's Liberation Movement's current vehicle is the Commission on International Women's Year, which has been having these state conferences all over the country.
Now, it's interesting if you look at those resolutions, they all call for Big Brother in Washington to solve their problems for them.
Take care of your children, find them jobs, give you a shoulder to cry on.
All their resolutions are the federal government should do this and the federal government should provide this type of money and so forth.
And I think it's very interesting that these women who try to tell the world that they're self-reliant and independent and as capable as men look to the federal government to solve all their problems.
So yeah, I guess there's that line again, right?
About the, you know, the opposite to feminism isn't even doing what Shafly's doing.
It's just being a positive person.
It's just being a happy person.
Yeah, I think it's also interesting.
Like, Shlafly is still very much, I would say, I was going to say alive, but I don't mean like literally alive.
I mean, no, she died.
She died like almost 10 years ago.
Yeah.
Or more, yeah.
But she feels very alive as an icon, I guess, in Tradwife spaces.
I've even seen, because there was a TV show about her, right?
Yeah.
Quite recently, Miss America, she was played by Kate Blanchett.
Yeah.
And I've even seen Tradwives sharing clips of that TV show, of clips of Cate Blanchett playing her and, you know, being like, this is, you know, she's so right on, like, you know, that we need it.
We need a shuffley again and stuff like that.
So I think, yeah, she it's funny because a lot of her language, I think, is so, so archaic.
Like, even her accent's a bit archaic.
No one speaks like that anymore.
I kind of miss that old, old-fashioned American accent.
No one speaks like that anymore.
But you know, like, you know, they hate marriage men and children.
Is that what she said?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just so, like, so kind of blunt and aggressive.
And yeah, and yet, I think she very much, I would say she's like the number one kind of theoretical influence, maybe, on a lot of these spaces or historical theoretical influence.
We're going to talk a bit more about the contemporary philosophers later in the series.
Yeah, and I was reading even just today again about Phyllis, I guess, just because, or because I knew we were going to talk about her today.
And yeah, just her legacy that I mean, the ERA is like her, the big, like a flashpoint of her legacy, but how instrumental she was, yeah, in terms of this family values being such a core part of the conservative platform is still really felt today.
And all with a smile on her face.
I think, like, you can hear it at the end of that video.
It's just like, it's so blunt.
But she's always smiling.
She's always very demure and mindful.
And but not really.
But I mean, that she does have like she is, yeah, this bundle of contradictions.
She's quite aggressive in some ways, but is also always very purposefully fempresenting.
She always thanked her husband, Fred, and all of her speeches for letting her have this career.
It was a very storied career.
Like she did a lot for better or worse, like often worse, but mostly worse.
But yeah, it's wild.
Yeah, no, she was, she was kind of a girl boss.
She was.
She was.
And also, just, it's, I guess, yeah, it's a very kind casting to her to be played by Kate Blanchette.
Um, because I guess that's more how she'll be remembered.
I mean, and it's interesting that Trads, I use clips from that too, just because it's not supposed to be a flattering portrayal of her.
Like, she is supposed to be the anti-heroine.
That's probably like the nicest interpretation of her in that show because she's kind of supposed to come, I think, off as quite cruel in many ways.
Yeah.
But we all love a kind of girl boss anti-hero showed, you know, like it's like the lady from Gone Girl or something.
Oh, yeah.
Like, you know, on the one hand, you're like, oh my God, that's so terrible.
On the other hand, you're like, yeah, you go, girl.
Yeah.
But I think with that, we're going to go ahead and play Schlafly too.
And this flows from their rationale, their dogma that it's so unfair that mothers are expected to take care of their babies.
Now, of course, that's not my view at all.
I think it's a great privilege to be able to take care of your baby rather than being compelled to join the workforce.
I think the power to participate in the creation of human life is a great gift that God has given to women.
And it's not an example of oppression.
It's an example of a wonderful gift that women have.
So that just reminded me that kind of phrase of what did she say, like you're compelled to work or something like that.
That just like dinged a part of my brain which just remembers random silly internet posts I've read.
And one that like really sticks in my brain, I think about it all the time, was it was a, I think it was, I think it was a man, it was a trad man, but very much from this world.
And he was speaking scornfully about men whose wives worked instead of doing the proper trad thing of having a stay-at-home mother.
And he said something like, men who send their wives to the email mines.
I just like think about that phrasing all the time because it's so funny.
And I think I even sent it to my husband and I was like, another day you sending me to slave away in the email mines.
It's one version of the minds that I don't yearn for.
Like, that's not it.
Anyway, yeah, that was that was just all I had to say on that.
It just like pinged in my brain when she said compelled to work.
Yeah, compelled to work.
I mean, that's one thing I really want to talk about with this clip because I think there's a couple of through lines between Schlafly and the anti-suffragists that we've already talked about and the Tratosphere today.
And one of those through lines that I see between these different periods of time is the view that women's power and privilege in society stems from their place as mothers and wives and their place within the home.
So with the anti-suffragists, it's their ability to remain morally uncorrupted by just participating in politics by whispering in your husband's ear rather than engaging in ugly, dirty party politics.
Which is also a bit funny because that actually sounds more corrupt to just be whispering in someone's ear than to actually taking visibly and transparently a part of a political system, but I don't know.
But for Phyllis, it's that it's a privilege to get to take care of your baby rather than being compelled to join the workforce or being compelled to work in the email mines.
And as much as there can be an emphasis on duty and the natural role with trad wives today, the selling point of accepting the natural role, quote-unquote, natural role of motherhood and being a wife and staying at home is that there is comfort and ease in not only embracing what they understand is natural, but in being able to avoid the grueling workforce and the stress of having to think about politics and the world.
Instead, they just get to hold cute babies, wear pretty dresses, and make sourdough.
So I have a couple more modern examples from social media here where I think this through line is really visible.
The first is this post from the account, A Homemaker's Manifesto, where she's reposted a tweet and placed it over a black and white picture of a couple kissing against a rural backdrop.
The tweet says, The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince women it's oppressive to be treated differently than men.
This is a hill I will die on.
Mankind was made in one, God's image, and two, male and female.
There are no such things as women's rights if you do not know what a woman is.
I oppose feminism because it preaches women's equality and I believe in upholding women's dignity.
My dignity is rooted in my creation, which is, by definition, female.
I don't want to be treated just like a man.
I want to be treated like a woman.
Not lower than, different.
And what's more perfectly suitable to complete mankind, an interdependent partnership with men and other women.
Men are not the enemy.
How boring our unique feminine design is.
Or rather, it is a lie directly from the enemy.
Yeah, so I think in this post, you can really see the call towards distinct and binary gender roles at play and the echoes of Shalafly.
Core to this post and the distinct roles that a lot of trads advocate for is the idea that women's power and privilege come from their femininity.
And that by embracing feminism, women are not only denying something essential to themselves, but also in effect, giving up their power.
The second example I want to play is a TikTok that I have for us from a self-identified Australian trad wife, Jasmine Denis.
People on this app act like this is the worst thing in the world.
Say home mom.
My husband's at work providing for our family.
I have some sourdough fermenting on the bench.
A baby, an apron, a cute dress.
I'm tiddling around the house, cleaning things, making myself food.
I can go to the beach if I want.
I can go to a cafe if I want.
I can take my kids to the park if I want.
I can go lay out in the sun.
I have this cuteness right here that I get to look at all day that I get to hang out with.
Okay.
I have another kid that's napping right now.
So I'm having, I get some peace and quiet.
I don't understand why this lifestyle is so controversial.
In my opinion, I've been the boss girl.
I have, yes, I do run a business, but I do that on the side.
But I'm talking about I've been out, like have had a nine-to-five.
I've, you know, had the corporate job.
I have made a lot of money outside of the home with no kids.
You know, I live the boss babe lifestyle and I hated it.
It was so exhausting.
I was constantly overwhelmed.
My gut health was in the trash.
My cortisol levels and my stress hormones were like through the roof.
Now I just get to bake bread and hang out with babies all day.
Isn't it the best thing in the world?
It's the best thing in the world.
Gut health and cortisol mention.
I feel like I'm like getting to check off.
Yeah.
Some special checklists.
There's a lot to unpack in this clip because I think this trad wife hints at some other aspects of the trad wife phenomenon that we want to get into in future episodes like cortisol and gut health.
For now though, I want to focus on the through line between Schlafly and the Tradwives of today.
First, I think both of these clips show how the trad wife is a subject that evokes and really depends on a particular socioeconomic class.
With Schlafly, we can hear this in her complaint that feminism results in negative outlooks and women relying on government assistance and her complete dismissal of the women's liberation movement's efforts for universal daycare as simply dogmatic.
Not only is this classic small government conservatism, but in her dismissal of universal daycare, she completely misses the point of how such policies would help low-income women and women in poverty who often have to find a way to balance working and childcare and do not have a choice.
Phyllis's solution is for women to simply be happy homemakers regardless of their socioeconomic status and to pick themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.
With Jasmine, I think we can really hear these assumptions around socioeconomic status and the way she presents her lifestyle as a luxurious life where she can tiddle around, relax, and is ultimately free of financial responsibilities.
A position she is only in because her husband's income and whatever income she earns from her social media account and business, which she kind of downplays is working.
This allows her not to have to have a full-time girl boss office job.
I think, actually, this is often one of the selling points of the trad life for burnt out women in the workforce, as we've talked about before.
To be a trad wife is the promise of leisure and a capitalist system that demands profit and productivity.
But of course, to be able to live that life of leisure, you have to have the financial means to do so.
But for many people and many families, it is increasingly difficult to have single-income households.
Second, both women address a claim that they say other women make that being a mother or a stay-at-home wife is oppressive or terrible.
Both Jasmine and Schlafly argue that actually it's not oppressive.
Motherhood and being in the home is actually a privilege.
And specifically, it is a life of privilege compared to the husband who is compelled to work and provide for the family.
Where Schlafly presents being a wife and a mother more as a privilege gifted by God, where mothers get the chance to look after their kids and not be compelled to work, Jasmine focuses on the trad life as life of choices and freedom for women.
Jasmine really emphasizes how her day and her time is really hers, and she can almost live spontaneously and do whatever she wants, which I think also sells the lifestyle a bit more than Schlafly.
While neither woman give an accurate description of the feminist complaint, I want to focus for a second around the period of time where Phyllis is making these claims.
Feminists who were active during Phyllis's heyday were not saying that being a mother and homemaker is oppressive.
What they were saying was oppressive was that this was often the only option available to women.
Feminists then and now were advocating for women to be given more opportunities because at this time there were not a lot of other options available to women and women often had to depend on their male family members for survival.
I think some additional important context here is that this interview with Schlafly is taking place only three years after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the U.S. passed.
This act made it illegal to discriminate against women when applying for credit, including bank accounts or loans.
Prior to this, married women often had to have a male co-signer and unmarried women were often denied access applying for credit.
So if women were not independently wealthy or did not have husbands like Schlafly did that supported their careers, it was very difficult to have any kind of financial independence.
They were very much dependent on their fathers and their husbands, and not by choice.
Finally, something that both women emphasize is the negative feelings associated with feminism and being in the workforce.
Jasmine claims that her time as a girl boss or boss girl as she says negatively impacted her health.
But now that she quit being a girl boss to stay at home and run her business, she's joyful, fulfilled, and healthier.
For Schlafly, feminism creates an unproductive negativity and a sense of entitlement and almost helplessness, whereas simply having a positive outlook and embracing the traditional role is presented as bringing happiness, fulfillment, and success.
In both cases, this framing that women at home with their children are happier, healthier, fulfilled, and living lives of leisure compared to their husbands also seems to imply that this is a better state for women because that is naturally where they should be.
Or as Schlafly puts it, a great gift that God has given to women.
While neither Jasmine or Schlafly say it, watching these videos, I was really reminded of one of the most popular online slogans of the Tradosphere, feminine, not feminist.
This phrase is often in reels and TikToks from Tradwives, and if it's not said out loud, it's a popular hashtag in Trad Wife content.
You can now buy t-shirts and other apparel with a slogan, and there's even a feminine not-feminist podcast.
Suffice it to say, this phrase is very popular in the Tradosphere and beyond.
While we're going to do a full deep dive into definitions of femininity and what the Tradosphere claims is feminine in the next episode, I would say just briefly here that some defining features of trad femininity are primarily concerned with motherhood, the home, submission, modesty, and demureness.
For trads, femininity is usually understood as something that is both innate to women, but also something that must be learned and practiced.
Importantly, it's always relational and in opposition to masculinity.
It depends upon masculinity and the idea of complementarianism between the genders, where men and women have different roles that complement each other.
And within Jasmine and Schlafly's videos, I think you can see this clear oppositional stance against feminism in favor of what they consider feminine and natural to women, homemaking and motherhood in particular.
Now, given that, and the phrase feminine not feminist, you might think that trad wives are completely anti-feminist.
But actually, trad wives have a much more complicated relationship with feminism than the proliferation of such a phrase might indicate.
While you do have the occasional trad wife saying women should not have the right to vote, a throwback to those anti-suffragists I mentioned earlier, most trad wives are either not commenting on voting rights or are explicitly talking about how they vote and that they do vote.
One of the most common questions I get asked as a trad wife is if I vote.
And the answer is, yes, I do.
I consider it my responsibility as an American citizen and this election especially is one of the most important of my lifetime.
If you've been following my pregnancy, you'll know that I was basically on bed rest for four months, too sick to go anywhere.
I wasn't sure if I would make it to my own baby shower, much less to go vote.
But then I found out I can vote early in person, which means I'm not limited to just election day.
Pregnancy has caused me to have to be super flexible.
And that is just what early voting is.
I can cast my ballot on my schedule and not have to worry about being too sick day of.
No, election day is the deadline, not the start.
So I'm going to vote early and in person and give myself the best chance to make sure my vote is counted and avoid last minute issues by casting my ballot ahead of time in person.
And I feel good that this relieves a little bit of pressure on the poll workers too.
So if you're like me, not sure how easy it will be for you to go vote on election day, maybe this is a good option for you too.
And for the naysayers, no.
My husband doesn't tell me who to vote for.
So something I might just want to comment on that is that that's sponsored content, right?
Somebody sponsored that.
But as far as I can tell from the post, it doesn't say who did.
Yeah.
And I guess I'm like, was there some kind of right-wing campaign to get a like explicit trad wife influencer to get out the vote?
Yeah.
It's almost like the reverse of the Kamala Harris, you don't have to tell your husband who you're voting for.
Was there some kind of equivalent pro-Trump pressure group?
Because this is 2024.
I see what she's talking about.
It was like, we've got to get the trad wives out there voting.
Kind of like Steve Bannon with the incels.
Yeah.
I guess we'll never know if she doesn't disclose who got her to do that.
Yeah.
But it's interesting because I don't know, for me, watching, like watching that clip again, I was really struck.
So many of her things, like giving out early to vote, voting before the election day actually seems like more progressive talking points in U.S. politics.
Yeah, it's kind of like a lib thing, right?
In the States.
Yeah, just because there's been, especially, I think since Trump, since 2016, there has been so much demonization of early voting and especially in 2020 voting remotely.
And so it's really interesting because I think you're probably right.
Like it's like, I don't know, it's probably more likely that someone from a more conservative leaning background is who would be sponsoring an explicitly trad wife account.
But the talking points of getting out early to vote have become so much more associated with more of like a center lib kind of thing.
Yeah.
So it's like, I'm actually not sure who's sponsoring this content at all either, since it's not explicitly being said.
Yeah, but I think it's safe to say that like most trad wives don't want to roll back the clock on everything.
Like she seems very enthusiastic about voting.
And I do, the little bit at the end about to the naysayers, no, my husband doesn't tell me how to vote or who to vote for is very quippy.
So I think it's safe to say that most trad wives do not want to roll back the clock on everything.
However, you do have some trads who claim that feminism is a government conspiracy, such as this post from Lily Kate, a turning point USA ambassador and author of the upcoming book, 50 Ways, Feminism is a Failure.
So the image is, it seems to be two content creators collaborating.
One of them is a black woman wearing red and the other is, I think, Lily Kate herself, who is a white woman with kind of dirty blonde hair.
And they're kind of like looking at each other in a kind of sort of shock, ha, just realize something kind of way.
The text over it says, when you realize the feminist movement is a government scam, so they could get the other half of the population working so they could double their tax intake and raise your children by their standards.
And the caption is, hold on a minute.
Have women been tricked into taxation slavery under the guise of liberation?
Yeah, damn, yeah, imagine scrolling the girly hashtag and popping up.
Yeah, and it's also worth noting that Savannah Craven, so the first woman you mentioned, is an anti-abortion activist as well.
So she's, um, she's also like a not a random person.
She is a political activist and an anti-feminist political activist specifically as well.
Nonetheless, many trad wives do ostensibly support some ideas and freedoms that feminist movements helped women access, such as access to credit cards and bank accounts, running small businesses, education, and sometimes even family and reproductive planning.
Now, not all of these are always acknowledged as being possible thanks to feminism.
However, because a common critique that trad wives face on their social media is that they would not be able to post at all or have public lives or speak out against feminism without feminism, some trad wives do end up commenting at one point or another that they do not oppose all feminism, but modern feminism.
I think a really good example of this more ambivalent relationship with feminism can be seen in this Instagram post and the content in general from E. Katerina Anderson, who is a Danish-Russian trad wife and an ex-feminist.
And Anderson's definition of traditional femininity, she says, Traditional femininity isn't about denying women's education, interesting professions, or general joy outside the home.
It is about insistence on us being different than men and that difference being normal, good, and desirable.
Traditional woman, what it is, I honestly don't know yet, but I'm excited to be in the midst of this zeitgeist and that great escape from the second to fourth wave feminism.
I do have the following thoughts.
We are not going to deny our hormonal sexed bodies and the responsibilities that come with it.
We are not going to choose men who devalue our bodies and despise responsibility.
We are not going to see the enemy in masculinity.
Mature masculinity is beautiful, attractive, and necessary.
Contrary to feminist hatred of defining women as caretakers, we are going to embrace that role.
It takes a lot of skill and preparation to be an excellent caretaker.
We are remarkably good at it, and the world would not stand a day without us taking care of it.
Contrary to feminism's emphasis on bodily autonomy as liberation, we are going to embrace making connections.
And our natural tenderness is going to help us make them.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's very clear that she's pro-voting rights.
That would be first-wave feminism.
Yeah.
And opposed to everything else.
Yeah.
But there's so much to unpack in this short paragraph.
And really the entire post that I've pulled this paragraph from.
But there's a couple of points that I want to touch on in particular.
The first thing is that ambivalence around feminism.
She both specifies that she's specifically opposed to or escaping from second or fourth wave feminism.
So that would be from the 1960s until now.
So like we said, voting rights are important.
But at the same time, she's explicitly defining traditional femininity as not being opposed to women having lives and joy outside the home.
Options which have been greatly enhanced due to those waves of feminism she opposes herself to.
The second thing I want to point out is that here you get a very specific idea of what she understands as feminism through her definition of what the traditional woman is not.
Third, I think we can see the importance of gender essentialism to trad wives generally, but also in defining traditional womanhood, femininity, and what it means to be a woman.
There's so much focus on hormonal sexed bodies and the responsibilities that come with it, which here Anderson identifies as natural tenderness, being remarkably good at caretaking.
These are all attributes that she's attributing to womanhood and femininity.
This is something we'll talk about more throughout the series, but I wanted to point out this aspect now, especially because one of my big takeaways from researching this podcast is that a lot of the fear of feminism seems to be in large part a fear of the blurring of gender and gender roles.
Fourth, I want to draw some attention to this claim, a feminist hatred of defining women as caretakers.
I have to say, I do not know very many feminists who would agree with this.
There's actually quite a lot of great feminist work around how important care work is and how often it is undervalued, underpaid, and unrecognized, because it often becomes coded as feminine and naturalized as the innate role for women.
Because it becomes coded as feminine, it is then often not seen as worthy of payment, value, or recognition.
Just as Anderson is calling for care to be appreciated and a vital part of the definition of traditional womanhood here, many feminists call for recognizing the skill and work it takes to be a caretaker and that the world depends on this care work, work that has long been done by women.
But many feminists are critical of the idea of caretaker being made to be the only option and the natural option for women.
So it's not so much that feminists hate defining women as caretakers, but rather that they fight for women not to be restricted to that role alone.
For trad wives, modern womanhood and feminism is often presented as emphasizing a boss babe or girl boss lifestyle, where women are told they will find happiness and empowerment if they simply climb the corporate ladder.
To become a trad wife, one must, at least partially, reject the girl boss life.
Here, actually, I think it's maybe useful to turn to a couple of academic terms that might help us to untangle trad wife's complicated relationship with feminism and what form of feminism they seem to be at war with.
So the first term I want to define is post-feminism.
Post-feminism is often understood as a framework or a culture where gender equality is understood as already having been achieved.
As the cultural theorist Angela McRabbi describes it, post-feminism both draws on and invokes feminism in order to say that while it was once necessary, it is now no longer needed.
So in other words, in a post-feminist culture, feminism is accepted into the mainstream just as it becomes obsolete.
I think that this simultaneous acknowledgement and erasure of feminism is really helpful to understand how trad wives position themselves.
They often acknowledge that they're not opposed to all feminism and sometimes will even try to reclaim the label for themselves in a slightly distorted way.
But they all claim that modern feminist movement has either gone too far or gone off the rails.
Now, this post-feminist framework is really closely related to neoliberal feminism, which is another term I want to spend some time with.
A classic example of neoliberal feminism, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, would be the former COO of Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg's 2013 book, Lean In, Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, in which she advocates for women to lean in to get what they want in the business world.
The neoliberal feminist equivalent of pulling up the bootstraps.
Here's Sandberg in 2010 giving a TED Talk on why we have too few women leaders.
And I realize he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office.
So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any.
And so I said, so did you just move into this office?
And he said, no, we've been here about a year.
And I said, are you telling me that I'm the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?
And he looked at me and he said, yeah, or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom.
So the question is, how are we going to fix this?
How do we change these numbers at the top?
How do we make this different?
I want to start out by saying I talk about this about keeping women in the workforce because I really think that's the answer.
In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top, Fortune 500 CEO jobs or the equivalent in other industries, the problem I am convinced is that women are dropping out.
Now, people talk about this a lot and they talk about things like flex time and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women.
I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important.
Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals.
What are the messages we need to tell ourselves?
What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us?
What are the messages we tell our daughters?
And I think there are three.
One, sit at the table.
Two, make your partner a real partner.
And three, look at that.
Don't leave before you leave.
So it's kind of interesting, right, that she kind of brings up almost to dismiss basically the idea that, you know, that there are structural changes that need to be made to solve this problem.
She's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, people will talk about flex time.
They'll talk about, you know, in work initiative.
But it's kind of almost a sort of note of irritation where she's like, I'm not talking about that.
Like, you know, it's all important.
Find whatever.
But I'm just talking about what we can do as individuals.
And it's like, you're like, wait, but that's a really important factor, right?
Like, I don't know.
Maybe this is just because I'm a lefty, but like, seems to me that kind of the individual grit will only get you so far.
Right.
And she's in a very different position.
I mean, she's also specifically talking about these, these women at the top.
That's that's her concern.
Yeah.
That it's that's not really applicable, I feel like, to most people's lives.
Or, I mean, definitely not my own.
And it's interesting because even though in this TED Talk, she's talking about this being about women in top positions as kind of the solution to everything.
It's kind of very much like a trickle-down economics approach.
Like, we'll fix things if we fix this at the top.
But that lean-in book was really sold as more of something accessible to all women as kind of as a guidebook of sorts that was going to teach women how to fix their problems through personal responsibility, or at least that's a lot of the coverage of it, I feel like, that came out during that time.
But I think it's interesting because this girl boss or boss babe feminism that trad wives often oppose themselves to, I think is really a kind of shorthand for a kind of feminism that is both neoliberal but has also emerged in a distinctly post-feminist context.
Under neoliberal feminism, women are seen as self-optimizing and entrepreneurial subjects who can overcome anything if they simply put their back into it.
The problem with this emphasis on personal responsibility and choice is that it ignores the structural barriers, as you just mentioned, Annie, around class, ability, gender, and race that do not always make it so easy to simply lean in or pull up those bootstraps.
While neoliberal feminism is a term coined in the 21st century, which is often used to describe the current moment of corporate-friendly, unthreatening pop feminism, I think we can see a similar style of rhetoric in the Schlafly interview we heard earlier, when she basically said that anything can be achieved as long as you have a positive outlook and the right attitude.
Schlafly campaigned fiercely for Reagan, the archetypal neoliberal politician, and was even supposedly considered at one point for a seat in his cabinet.
So in many ways, it's unsurprising that she sounds similar to a neoliberal feminist.
But it is interesting how many modern trad wives idolize her while furiously rejecting the lean-in girl boss model of womanhood.
I think this seeming contradiction where trad wives and girl bosses actually sound kind of similar at times makes sense if we use this framework of post-feminism and neoliberal feminism, because the philosophies actually have a lot more in common than their digital avatars might pretend.
Both rely on the idea that gender inequality and sexism have been more or less solved and instead emphasize individualism, choice, and personal responsibility to address any remaining issues.
And personal choices are then emphasized above taking the place of collective action or political engagement in terms of challenging continued structural gender inequalities and sexism.
Importantly, neoliberal feminism, as it ushers women, especially middle and upper class women, into the workforce, does little to diminish gender disparities in the workplace, other than encouraging women to self-optimize to overcome these disparities.
But it also does little to address unequal expectations around care work and domestic labor in the home.
For example, women in heterosexual relationships still do the majority of the care and domestic labor in the home, even if they're working in the public sphere just as much as their male partners.
No wonder people are burnt out, like, and turning towards solutions.
Neoliberal feminism did not cause unequal labor in the home, but also it does nothing to address the structural and material conditions of many women's lives, nor uproot inequalities in the home or public sphere.
And at times, neoliberal feminist girl-bossed advice ends up sounding kind of similar to DRAD advice, especially when it comes to advice on relationships in the private sphere.
In the clip of Sandberg's TED Talk, her advice for women to keep them in the workforce, and especially in top positions, includes, make your partner a real partner, which ends up sounding a bit similar to Trad advice to just marry a good man.
Neither piece of advice actually addresses systemic inequalities that exist in heterosexual relationships, but rather puts it on individuals to make good choices and fix it themselves.
Both pieces of advice are a kind of acknowledgement of these structural issues, but neither are structural solutions.
One of those other structural issues that is left unaddressed is that not all women are allowed the same access.
Sandberg, for example, is primarily interested in women in business and top positions, but her advice means even less for women, as we've already talked about, who occupy different socioeconomic circumstances.
Some women's participation in the labor market and political sphere has been made possible, but often comes at the cost of outsourcing childcare and household labor to other women.
So while many women have been able to access the labor market and join the workforce, this also means that they have more work to do than ever before.
And that work in the home is not often recognized as work and is often naturalized as women's work.
Like in the workplace, under neoliberal feminism and the post-feminist framework, any remaining inequalities in the home are written off as issues of personal responsibility and poor choices, if they're acknowledged at all.
As Catherine Rotenberg writes in her book, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.
By encouraging individual women to focus on themselves and their own aspirations, feminism can be more easily popularized, circulated, and sold in the marketplace.
This is because it dovetails almost seamlessly with neoliberal capitalism.
This feminism is also an unabashedly exclusionary one, encompassing only so-called aspirational women in its address.
In doing so, it reifies white and class privilege and heteronormativity, lending itself not only to neoliberal, but also neoconservative agendas.
There is nothing about this feminism that threatens the powers that be.
This idea that feminism is simply about choice, individualism, and giving women options is the form of feminism that is really present in the mainstream.
And this is a feminism that I think a lot of trad wives are responding to, but are also implicated in.
This very individualizing form of feminism where feminism is just about supporting women making choices, whatever that choice might be, and nothing beyond that.
Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, we also like having choices.
Choices are great.
But it doesn't mean that like, and this is something I often get frustrated with, this kind of very shallow pop feminism discourse where it's just like, well, why are you critiquing me?
This is my choice.
This is my choice.
And it's just like, well, not every single choice that a woman made by virtue of a woman making it is beyond criticism.
Right.
You know, and that was never, that was never the promise.
That was never the promise that you would be beyond criticism as an individual.
Like, I support women's rights and wrongs, but they're obviously limits.
But yeah, I think an example of this particular understanding of feminism, assembly about choice and respecting women's choices, can really be heard in this clip from Tradwife Ivy West.
Okay, here is why more and more young women are rejecting feminism and just like, do not want to be associated with it at all.
I think these younger generations have really, really good BS detectors.
So on its face, feminism sounds great, right?
Equality for all and girls supporting girls.
That sounds so beautiful.
But the second you kind of test that out, you very quickly find that it has just become a total facade.
If I'm putting on makeup for my husband to come home from work or if I'm cooking for him, they get upset.
They don't like that.
Like whoever the head of PR is for feminism needs to be fired.
They are doing a horrible job because almost all of their representatives who are outspoken, they just seem so miserable, so hateful, so bitter.
It doesn't look fun at all.
Nothing about that sounds appealing.
I think that's why we're starting to see the like trad wife stuff on TikTok is because people are so sick of the other side.
Like so done with the angry, man-hating, like putting women down.
Ugh, it's boring.
It's old.
We're done with it.
You don't have to like me.
You don't have to like other women on social media.
You can call everybody names and be upset, but just don't pretend that you support other women because you don't.
And a lot of people are seeing right through it.
Yeah, this is a really good clip, actually, because it brings up something that I want to address here because this is a common pose, I think, that, and it comes to this blurriness that we all have between our own identity and how we perform on social media.
And the Tradwives aren't the only one who are doing this.
I think this is just, this is just a slight result of our digital society, right?
But I want to be absolutely clear.
If you put on makeup for your husband to the woman listening to this, I don't care.
I don't care.
I really couldn't care less.
But Ivy is an influencer.
So she's not simply putting on makeup for her husband, is she?
What she's doing is she's performing a role as, I think, what the academic who does some really good work about this fear, Alan Finlason, would call an ideological entrepreneur.
And I think that's a really useful term for understanding what we're dealing with here.
So this is a common pose that lots of, all these women are so angry at me just because I want to stay at home and look after my children.
These feminists are so angry at me just because I'm a stay-at-home mother.
And that's, that's nothing, that's not what we're critiquing at all.
We're not critiquing you as a private individual.
We are critiquing you as an ideological entrepreneur, right?
Like critiquing the content that you put out there, the ideal and the ideology that is behind that content, not your individual lifestyle choice, which I really have to emphasize again, I couldn't care less about.
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah, and it's everywhere.
I think this, it's kind of also that she's using feminism as though she's like setting herself against it, but she's like, I went, I tried it out.
Like, I did it.
Like, you know, but it was like, as soon as you try to do something a little bit different.
And I mean, and it's something that's, I think, not just with trad wives, but part of the larger, like a larger internet cultural phenomenon of that ideological entrepreneur.
I mean, it's like a lot of straw men that she's arguing against in this case, right?
She's like, I tried this out.
It wasn't what it was promised to be, but she's picking out like a very specific complaint within it.
And then she's then associating feminism with negativity and hypocrisy of feminists not respecting her choices, but then misrepresenting what those choices they're not respecting are.
That it's not her as an individual, but it is her, the larger political project that she's kind of a part of here.
She's also really kind of relying on this idea of choice feminism in terms of her choice of being a trad wife as a choice that she undertook that she finds personally empowering fulfilling.
So she's still kind of like working within those lines of choice feminism, of kind of what is often actually associated with girl boss feminism, I think, in a lot of ways is like you should be in the corporate world because it's empowering, it's fulfilling for you.
And she's doing that same model.
She's using that same model and just applying it here.
And so I think that's also with this clip when I first found it.
I think that's where it's like, okay, it's actually kind of the same thing that it's not so different.
The rhetoric is actually not so different.
It's just kind of flipped.
I think, I mean, girl boss feminists, I think, spend less time talking about feminists being hypocritical because they're often using a very certain kind of feminism themselves, right?
But this idea of like, it's my choice.
It's personally fulfilling and empowering is something that I think is a through line between both.
And so yeah, though trad wives position themselves as against feminism and specifically girl boss feminism and positioning trad wifery as their decision and an empowering choice, they're still relying on that language of this choice or neoliberal feminism and on the possibility to have those choices because of feminism.
What I find really interesting is that the framing of choice is not just something that trad wives use as a kind of gotcha to point out what they believe are feminist hypocrisies, but something that trad wives also employ themselves.
I think that this is something that will come up again and again throughout the rest of this series.
How trads employ their happiness, success, and lifestyle to make the right choices.
Choosing the right man, to homeschool, the right choices about what to eat and where to live.
In the end, they often are also focused just as much on personal responsibility and self-optimization as the girl boss they criticize.
It's just their form of personal responsibility and self-optimization tends to make sourdough and wear floral print milkmaid dresses.
So Megan, what kind of reaction have you had from people when you say that you're researching trad wives?
So I think the most common reaction is, oh, are you covering this one?
Like, is it going to talk about Ballerina Farms?
Are we going to talk about Nara Smith?
Or like there's like very particular people in mind, or there's very particular moments of those people in mind.
But I think it is kind of an influence on sometimes specific influencers that people are already somewhat familiar with that are more mainstream, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nara Smith, I think, is definitely the one that most people have brought up for me, which is almost a bit unfair because I feel like her and Ballerina Farm are like the biggest.
Yeah.
And they are, don't get me wrong.
They're very associated with that subculture in a way that I don't think is totally, I think it's totally coincidental, right?
But at least Nara Smith, I think, has like kind of disavowed the political side of that a bit.
So it's kind of interesting that those are the ones that everyone thinks of.
Yeah, I just think they've had the numbers.
I think they're just the most viral.
And they both each have like a very particular look, which I think kind of helps as well.
Yeah, Nara Smith is just hilarious.
I can't wait for us to talk to her.
It's like performance art.
Yeah.
We can get to her later.
Yeah.
But one thing that I think I find is that when you research the corners of the internet that we do, it's really easy to lose perspective on what ordinary people who aren't online every waking hour of every day do and don't know about.
But I've definitely been surprised by how pretty much everyone our age and even much older.
Like I was even speaking to a friend of mine.
It was his kid's birthday party.
And so his dad, the kid's granddad, was talking to me about what I did.
And I said, have you heard of trad wives?
And he's like, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like, do you know, everyone is familiar with the subculture, it seems, even the not very online people.
One of my mom's friends who is from Mississippi, I was telling her a little bit about the podcast when she visited a couple, I guess a couple months ago.
And she was like, I've been one.
It's called being a wife in Mississippi because she grew up on a very good service.
She's like, it was bad.
But I just think, I mean, so I wasn't necessarily expecting her to know because I don't think she's the most online person.
But it was, she's, she knew and had opinions, had a lot of thoughts on it.
Right.
Like basically nobody, I think, has said to me, what's a trad wife?
Yeah.
Even if they're not particularly clued into the online right.
Yeah.
So I think, like it or not, since I had the dubious honor of being the very first writer to ever publish the word trad wife in the New York Times, I think they've really gone mainstream.
Another interesting thing I've noticed is how I get a really different response from men and women.
And this time I think I'm talking more about people our age.
Most women will bring up some of the biggest influences, exactly like you mentioned, Megan Ballerina Sfarm, Nara Smith.
With men, I've had more than a few say something like, isn't that stuff just fetish content?
So I think this different in reactions might speak to the fact that, thanks to social media algorithms, we seem to think that we're all on the same internet when in fact our experience is much more personal.
And although it might seem like an obvious thing to say, I actually haven't seen this written about much in the many, many think pieces that I've read about this subculture.
But I think there are two different kinds of trad wife content out there.
And it mostly depends on whether it's geared towards a female or male audience.
The stuff that's aimed at men, even though it will often pretend to be talking to women, is actually kind of easy to spot.
I'm going to give you an example.
Here is right-wing commentator Isabella Riley-Moody on the Fresh and Fit podcast.
So you were against women as an even going to come.
Always, always.
I always was like, I've always been a woman.
My life's only been easier as a woman.
I don't understand what all these women are crying and bitching about.
And to your point about the women not really getting a legacy, I would say that women need to understand that you don't need a legacy like a man.
Your legacy is your family and your family that you bring, that you raise and your children.
That's the legacy that women need to understand is important.
You don't need to have a legacy like a man.
Women need to stop trying to become men because they can't become men and they're only going to fail at it.
And when they try to become men, they become only fans whores, sell their bodies online.
And guess what?
One day you're going to get old.
You're going to get wrinkly.
You're going to become like an old, miserable hag like Chelsea Handler and be childless, husbandless.
You eventually will want a husband.
You will.
And one day you're not going to be able to have kids and you're going to wish that maybe I didn't spend my whole life trying to be a boss babe and maybe I should have just, you know, done what society tells me not to do and got married and actually found a man.
Like serve your daddy husband and not your corporate boss.
And that's how you'll be happy.
That's your legacy.
Daddy husbands.
I know.
This is a really perfect example because even though it sounds like Isabella is addressing women here, the reality is she's on a Manospheres podcast whose audience is overwhelmingly men.
And what's more, men who, putting it as mildly as I can, really don't like women very much.
A lot of her supposed advice is just her repeating manosphere talking points to an audience who enjoy the idea of women being put in their place by one of their peers.
This is why it's full of obviously derogatory remarks about our gender as a whole.
It's not really meant to persuade the other women on the panel, just insult them for a live audience.
Just to illustrate my point here, here's an example of what I'd consider trad wife content for a female audience.
It's making much the same point as Isabella, that getting married is important and something that women should prioritise, but in an entirely different way.
As humans, we tend to grow a natural desire to love and to be loved.
Sometimes that desire comes with the temptation of getting into a relationship out of emotional desperation, or trying to convince men that we are worthy of being cherished.
The book of Proverbs shows us that the immoral woman stands in the street casting herself upon the men who pass by.
You are not so unworthy that you should make yourself available to any passerby that comes your way.
And you don't need to justify a man or pray a man into being what he should be.
And your standards are not too high.
A good woman knows her value and does not need to compromise herself to earn love.
So yeah, these could not be more different, right?
Another huge tell in Isabella's clip is the sexually explicit language like OnlyFans whores and telling women to serve their daddy husband, which is not rhetoric I've seen any of the more female-focused trad wife content creators using.
In fact, as we're going to explore in later episodes, those creators often tell their audience the opposite, that getting married is a path out of being sexualized and degraded in that way.
Isabella is trying to build a career as a commentator in the Red Pill Magasphere, but for some of the influencers making trad wife content for a male audience, this sexually charged language is actually just advertising some form of work in the sex industry.
One such Instagram account goes by TradWife Tori and posts a lot of content lionising the lifestyle of a stay-at-home wife.
Tori also has a link to her OnlyFans and her bio, where she advertises daily posts, boy-girl sex scenes, one-on-one sexting, and the full girlfriend experience.
You might think that this career would disqualify you from the Trad label, but Tori has a pretty robust argument why it doesn't.
So let me get this straight.
You'd rather I be a broke, itter wife who resents her husband than be a traditional wife who coast cleans and takes care of her man while also making money in a silk robe while he's at work.
Like sorry, I make money and I make his meals.
Y'all are acting like you can't be hot and wholesome.
Traditional doesn't mean Amish.
He gets a submissive wife who also happens to pay off their credit card and thigh highs.
Now tell me again how that's the problem.
Now, you might conclude that Tori is just a grifter who's merely performing a trad wife character.
But to me, her explanation doesn't really sound all that different to all the other ones we've heard this episode from right-wing female commentators on why their way of making money is totally different to the bad feminist girl boss kind of careers.
I don't really think it's fair to say that Tori is faking her trad wife persona any more than any of the rest of them.
Ultimately, as with all influencers, we just can't know what their life is like once the cameras are off, and in truth, I'm actually not very interested.
That's why I started off this episode with the story of Patriarchy Hannah, because this series is ultimately about how these creators present themselves on social media, not who they actually are.
But I will concede that content like Tori's and Isabella's is different enough to the trad life material aimed at women that it deserves a different name, so we can be more precise.
Even the way they dress is different, which tends to be a lot less old-fashioned, modest, or fashionable, much less the pretty linen dresses that we were talking about before, and a lot more obviously tight-fitting and sexy.
And I imagine lots of the more religious tradwives who cater to a female audience, and they're constantly quoting Bible verses about the importance of chastity and modesty, would be pretty outraged to discover that we're putting their content in the same category as this.
Listen, men don't want to have to ask.
They want to be asked.
They want to be told.
He doesn't want to guess.
He wants to be guided.
Do you want to finish in my A, B, or C?
Very straightforward, very simple.
It's a great way to set the tone.
Let him know up front.
You're not there to play games.
I'll let you fill in the blank there.
If you want to go the next level up, say, can you please finish in my...
It's polite, it's direct, it's to the point.
Men don't want to have to ask.
They want to be guided.
So something I actually had a thought when I was like watching these clips back just earlier was, um, so, you know, they're kind of all talking about how submissive they are to their husbands.
I'm so submissive.
I, you know, he leads, I follow, blah, blah, blah.
But something I can't help but notice when we play these red pill trad wives is that they're kind of a bit bossy.
Bossy, yeah.
They're a bit sassier.
And it's kind of notable to me that these are the ones who are catering to a male audience, right?
But they're actually a bit like, you know, even when she's just like, they want to be guided.
It doesn't sound very submissive.
Right.
Guided is a very trad wife friendly way of saying, you're telling him what to do.
Yeah.
So, and I know that's in a bedroom context, so I'm sure they would say, well, that's different.
That's sexy.
But I can't help but notice that, you know, they're kind of a little bit bossier.
Yeah.
I think, and it just, as you mentioned before, it's just the language overall that they use is a little bit more coercive.
And that seems to transfer here as well.
So it's not just saying OnlyFans whores, but it's also, yeah, and it's almost like a flipping of the gender roles that you kind of hear often advocated for in the tradosphere, which is really striking.
So I'm going to call these women red pill trad wives from now on and for the rest of the series, because trad wives who cater to a male audience feels quite clunky to keep on saying over and over again.
Red pill trad wives as a label still gets this central difference across, is neater, and also has that pleasing quality of mashing together two online phenomena which nobody had heard of ten years ago, and yet now seem to, depressingly, be the cultural zeitgeist.
But all of this is to say, if people like Tori and Isabella are the kind of trad wives you're seeing, then yes, I can understand why you might think it's just a kind of softcore fetish content.
And of course, depending on how far you want to stretch the definition, you could argue that some of the more innocent-sounding stuff that's aimed at women is too, just more cleverly disguised.
Certainly, when your popular themes of discussion, however oblique, are gender, power, purity and submission, there will always be an element of fetishism involved in both the production and reception of those materials.
But I'd argue that it's a mistake to think that simply because there's a sexual element to trad wife content, it's therefore politically irrelevant, or, as I've seen some people say, just another quirky social media phenomenon with no ramifications outside of the online world.
In fact, I'd argue that the international far-right is becoming increasingly sophisticated with how they weaponise femininity, and the Tratosphere has become something of an online testing ground where they workshop that material.
And given how these politics are becoming increasingly hegemonic in many Western nations, that sadly means it has consequences for us all.
In my country, the United Kingdom, there is a flourishing anti-migrant street movement that protests outside the hotels in which asylum seekers are housed while their application is being processed.
Clearly cognizant of the low public opinion ratings of far-right street movements in this country, organisers of these demonstrations emphasise the presence of women, mothers and children in their ranks in order to obscure the obvious intimidation tactics.
Some of them have even encouraged special women's marches where the attendees wear pink to emphasize the non-threatening feminine nature of their political movement.
In Germany, the self-described independent initiative of young women, Lucretia, takes this marriage of hyper-feminine aesthetics and hard-right politics to a whole new level.
Their Instagram account is full of classic trad wife imagery.
Young, pretty white women in long flowing dresses with braided hair, many of them pregnant or holding babies.
They describe themselves as, quote, advocating for traditional family values and the central role of women as loving mothers, end quote.
These images, however, frequently have dog whistle racist slogans pasted across them.
Slogans like European lives matter and what feels like a barely coded call for violence, remigration brings peace.
Then there are several posts memorializing cases of violence against women and girls by migrant men, or in some cases non-white men who are incorrectly stated to be migrants, such as the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings, Axel Rudip Cabana.
There are no equivalent posts memorializing the many, many women in Europe who've been killed by their partners, despite this being sadly a much more common type of crime.
It strikes me what a distorted view Lucrita presents of gendered violence.
If this was your only information source, you'd never know that most sexual violence is perpetrated by someone the victim knows.
In fact, you'd never know that white men were ever perpetrators at all.
Because fundamentally, Lakrita's goal is not to protect women.
It's to incite and legitimize violence against migrants and people of colour.
I am part of Generation Remigration because I want a secure future for our children.
Germany has changed over the past decade and not for good.
In 2024, our authorities claimed 36 cases of rape and sexual harassment per day.
Women or girls or daughters are no longer safe in public spaces.
We have almost three gang rapes a day and more than half of the predators are foreigners.
Since 10 years, you see how women turn to prey for men who don't respect our cultures and values, who don't respect us.
Only remigration can stop this.
Only remigration can save Europe.
We shouldn't underestimate how far up the ranks of power this gender ideology has traveled either.
Strangely enough, one of the first people who made me aware of this was the American right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, as most of you will know, gained an international spotlight in the most horrific way after he was murdered on camera at a speaking event in Utah State University in September 2025.
But he actually caught my attention a little earlier in the year when his organization, Turning Point USA, held what they called a Young Women's Leadership Summit in Texas in June.
At that summit, when a 14-year-old girl asked Kirk a question about attending college, mentioning that she aspired to a career in political journalism, he gave her this response.
Hi, Charlie, I'm Addie, and I'm 14.
I'm a freshman in high school.
And I was wondering, as someone who has a different opinion on college, what would you say the pros and cons are?
Because I'm interested in political journalism.
And what would your advice be?
Yes, so let me also speak to some of the young ladies here in high school where your top, if you're who's here where your top priority, your top priority is get married and have kids.
Raise your hand.
Okay, interestingly, I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree.
And no, seriously.
And just be clear, that's why you're going to college, right?
And that's a really good reason to go to college, actually.
Especially an SEC school.
Like, you will find a husband if you have the intent to find a husband at Omiss.
Like, it's just going to happen, okay?
Or wherever.
Yeah, there you go, see?
Or at University of Alabama.
And, but, there you go.
But I always laugh because, and by the way, we should bring back the celebration of the MRS degree, which is, no, seriously.
I mean, if you think about it, like, I say college is a scam, but if you're going to find your life partner, like, that's actually a really good reason to go to college.
Imagine going 40,000, like, imagine paying $40,000 a year.
Yeah.
Just cheaper.
Sign up for one of your conservative dating websites or whatever.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I've seen that clip before, but I hadn't seen the part where he talks about where specifically in the U.S. Are you saying SEC, which is the Southeastern Conference?
It's like a football conference or a sport.
It's not just football, but sports conference.
And yeah, there's a very certain also cultural idea of what is considered SEC approved.
Like when you tailgate with an SAC, like an SEC football game, it's expected more that men dress up a little bit more.
Like they're more likely to wear polos and ice blacks and women are supposed to wear like pretty dresses.
So it's kind of interesting that he actually also has that cultural like reference in that way too, specifically if you're going to like University of Alabama or oldness.
See, this is why it's great having you as an American translator on this.
The whisperer.
I wouldn't, that all went right over my head.
Yeah, but yeah, because it's a very certain look associated, I think, with especially like sports culture in those schools.
Anyway, I found this clip really interesting because it actually seemed like something of a change in direction for Kirk.
I actually read one of his books when I was writing a chapter about campus culture wars for my PhD.
That book was published in 2018 and was called Campus Battlefield, How Conservatives Can Win the Battle and Why It Matters.
And what's funny is, although I remembered reading all the usual stuff about how universities were indoctrinating their young charges into socialism, there wasn't any mention of women being distracted from their rightful roles as wives and mothers.
So I decided to read another one of his books, this time published in 2022, called The College Scam, How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing the Future of America's Youth.
Now, here Kirk seemed more preoccupied with BLM and race politics, but there was, once again, very little focus on traditional gender roles.
There was certainly never anything like this.
So we have a liberated Western woman where an average college girl will have, you know, seven to ten sexual partners within four years.
Most Christian parents don't realize that's what they're sending their girls into, right?
Which basically college has become an incredibly destructive enterprise for young women.
That's right.
It is young men too, but for young women especially.
And so how do they cope with that?
They have to start acting like men.
Yep.
And that's what they do.
They start dressing like men.
They start talking like men.
They start trying to run companies.
They fill the gap, often.
And they fill the gap because they start having sexual behaviors like men.
So they have to start becoming men, literally, that's where they get the trans thing.
And then they say, oh, I don't need to have a family.
So they become 32, 34, 36.
The worst is still ahead of them.
And the dating pool shrinks as you get older.
I didn't make the rules, just the way that nature is designed.
So they end up being 36 with no real high probability of finding a long-term partner, and they get extremely bitter.
So usually I try to, you know, I don't want to do a like grain by grain debunking of every clip that we post here, be like, oh, actually, studies show sort of thing, because I find that content quite boring.
I want to get more into the kind of ideological analysis, but I do feel compelled to say here that, you know, the statistics on marriage do actually show the exact opposite to what Kirk's talking about, that if you have a degree, and the more advanced degree you have, in fact, the more likely you are to get married and stay married, I'm pretty sure.
So it's just like, it's not even close to reality here.
But he's trying to explain away, I guess, this kind of thing that the more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to vote for the Democrat Party, right?
And so it has to come again to this old trope of feminism and liberal politics in general being a result of personal romantic dissatisfaction.
But yeah, yeah, I'd never heard in all of his books about how universities are terrible.
I had not heard him say that women will have too many sexual partners when they go there.
That was very new language for him.
So I came to the conclusion that Kirk was perhaps just in tune with the emerging trends in the Republican Party.
And he had assessed that this pushback against women getting an education, having a career, or really being in public life at all was the new zeitgeist.
Looking around, that certainly doesn't seem like it would be a bad bet.
Vice President J.D. Vance has complained on more than one occasion that the US is run by, quote, childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made.
Vance's biggest donor and former mentor, Peter Thiel, complained that extending the franchise to women had, quote, rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.
And another highly influential figure on the tech right, Elon Musk, is notoriously obsessed with birth rates in the West.
So much so he's trying to resolve them single-handedly and has approvingly shared content that suggests that, quote, a republic of high-status males is best for decision-making since women and low-T men are not able to think freely because they can't defend themselves physically.
But in the wake of Charlie Kirk's sudden and very shocking assassination, when his widow Erica Kirk began to take more of the spotlight, I began to reassess.
Now, I really want to be clear here, I'm not criticizing Mrs. Kirk for the way she expresses her grief.
As a mother of a small child about the age of their youngest, I really did feel nothing but horror at her husband's death and deep sympathy for what she and her family must be going through.
But I will admit that I think I underestimated her.
What I had seen of her before was from the TPUSA Women's Conference, where she'd dressed like the embodiment of hyper-femininity, long blonde hair, high heels, an extremely frilly pink dress.
Her speech had been full of peppy morale-boosting lines for conservative young women, and supposedly during the Q ⁇ A with her and her husband, when he had tried a more hard-line statement on how unmarried women after 30 only had a 50% chance of marrying, she gently pushed back.
This was recorded by the journalist Madeline Peltz, who attended the event.
The message did not land well with the audience.
Erica tried to clean up.
For the women who are getting married after 30, that's okay.
I'm trying to bridge the gap here because it's okay, it's not ideal.
It's not probably the best statistically odd position for you, but God is good.
There is nothing wrong with it, right?
Charlie quipped, drawing laughter.
It's good.
This is good.
Erica responded uncomfortably.
Charlie flipped off the amiable switch.
If you just want happy talk, that's fine.
Erica smiled politely to the crowd.
In the first public statement made after Charlie Kirk's death, Erica was different.
She gave a speech where she made clear that she viewed Kirk's political enemies as ultimately responsible for his murder and promised revenge.
The evildoers responsible for my husband's assassination have no idea what they have done.
They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God's merciful love.
They should all know If you thought that my husband's mission was powerful before, you have no idea.
You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country and this world.
You have no idea.
You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife.
The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.
To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die.
It won't.
I refuse to let that happen.
It occurred to me that, despite having a pretty strong body of work behind me talking about white women and the far right, and having warned for nearly a decade now that we shouldn't be fooled by feminine aesthetics, masking the brutality and violence of far-right ideology, I had still done pretty much that.
Because Erica Kirk had played the part of a softly spoken, cheerful, feminine trad wife in a couple of appearances I'd seen her in, I had missed the possibility that she herself was an ideological entrepreneur just as much as her husband, and was entirely capable of having played a role in his political transformation on the topic of gender and feminism.
As it turns out, I saw that the couple had actually joked about exactly that happening on Kirk's podcast.
Who is more conservative and why?
Erica.
Yes.
By far.
Not even close.
I am a moderate compared to Erica.
Andrew always jokes that once you got married to me, you got more base.
That's true.
That is true.
No, Erica is very conservative.
And I was raised well.
Yes, you have a great mom.
Megan and I, when we first started researching this mini-series, talked a lot about how, in the wake of Trump's second election, we were seeing many trad wife influencers slowly and cautiously getting more openly right-wing after years of posting mostly lifestyle content.
And the weeks after Charlie Kirk's death, I think that phenomenon intensified to the point where it felt undeniable.
I was seeing content creators who'd always conspicuously avoided political topics posting clips of Erica's speech.
I actually saw a few apologising to their audience for sticking to safe, bland content for so long and vowing not to keep silent about what they called their more controversial beliefs.
Some even began making veiled threats and allusions to oncoming violence of their own.
After nearly a decade of studying the online far-right, it feels to me like something has shifted very strikingly in terms of the involvement of women.
As the movement gets more explicitly anti-feminist and pro-natalist, women are, paradoxically, becoming an increasingly vital part of its coalition.
Projects which aim to create a better understanding of online radicalization without ever accounting for the role of content, subcultures, and media targeted specifically at women, aren't just incomplete.
To me, they're outright unhelpful to predicting where this movement goes next.
This mini-series is going to try and fill in a little of this gap by treating what we call the girl internet with the same sense of urgency as QAnon and the Manosphere.
That means, I think, showing sympathy and understanding as to why the everyday horrors and indignities of life under modern-day capitalism seem to be leading so many young women into an online fantasy about a less free but cozier past.
But it also means not shying away from the implicit and explicit dangers posed by this project, particularly towards those people who don't fit into this rosy domestic fantasy.
We'll be looking at the influencers and activists, but also the writers and intellectuals that we see underpinning this particular subculture.
And hopefully, if nothing else, by the end of it, Megan and I should be able to make a pretty decent sourdough.
Thanks for listening to the first episode of Truly Tradly Deeply, the podcast series from the Cursed Media Podcast Network that immerses you, the listener, in the online world of ancestral, traditional, and above all, wifely femininity.
In the next episode, Megan and I tried to figure out what the Tratosphere means when it says femininity.
To listen to that episode right now, plus the rest of the episodes as they are released weekly, subscribe to Curse Media by following the link in the show notes.
