The antisociality of the trad wife

Being 'just a housewife' is bad, actually

Last month, Turning Point USA held its Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas. According to The New York Times, thousands of women attended, some wearing buttons that read “My favorite season is the fall of feminism.” Now somewhat famously, Charlie Kirk, co-founder and president of the organization that hosted the conference, explicitly stated the aims of the MAGA right to a room full of those young women: “We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.”

He isn’t alone in this full-throated cry to get women back into the home where they belong. Alex Clark, a Turning Point podcaster and influencer who platforms the MAHA notion that we are living in a “sick” culture, argued at the same conference for “less Prozac, more protein,” and “less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” Clark has no kids and is… a professional podcaster and influencer.

Clark also recently shared a meme on her Instagram account featuring Tucker Carlson saying: “Don’t let other women shame you into thinking working in a bank is better than raising children, because it’s not, and it’s women who enforce in a very fascist way— that lie.”

Feminism is depicted in today’s conservative empowerment rhetoric soup as draining and literally maddening (apparently the reason women are on SSRIs). Meanwhile, motherhood and marriage are understood as resting places; as soft, feminine, even relaxing, an avenue to care more deeply for the self (more time to make sure you get enough protein girls!). LOL, K.

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None of what these people are saying is new, even if it feels like it is. These figures are just offering catchy taglines for the feminist backlash that has been taking shape in trad and MAGA spheres for years. Their claim is not, of course, that late capitalist, corporate distortions of the term “feminism” have misled women into a politics of individualism that was always bound to fail them because it left the systems of oppression untouched, but that women existing in the public sphere is itself a logical impossibility.

After all, how could women ever “have it all” when they must, of course, have babies, and take care of their husbands and homes, because that is the most fulfilling work of all (for women only)?

It’s easy to laugh this all off as ridiculous, especially if you have ever been a mother or a wife, and have a sense of the realities of those roles. But I think there is something deeper at work in women’s embrace of this trad fantasy, specifically in this fantasy that motherhood and marriage offer an escape from late capitalist burnout. And it’s something more deeply connected to the crisis of loneliness and isolation that we are all experiencing in the digital age. These sentimental depictions of trad life, in fact, reveal a deep thread of antisocial thinking at the heart of common conceptions of the American family.

When Hannah Neeleman, for instance, says “we love a good hamburger” as she and her kids make burger buns (and ketchup, and burger patties, and pickles) from scratch, she means “we” as in: her little family, free of the distractions of technology and the impossible grind of trying to make a decent living in this economy. Just peep the comments on that post admiring her “beautiful family” and how happy and fulfilled they look.

But she also means “we” as in: just her little family, a mother and her kids, and occasionally her husband (popping in to eat the burger), doing exactly what they like, what brings them joy, free of the complications of other people.

Here’s the thing: I get this desire to burrow into one’s immediate family. At this point in my life, I don’t love large groups. I love a good retreat from the world. Especially now. Especially now! When the world feels hard, broken, violent, and, frankly, mean.

Now that I no longer live with a man, I have been spending more time with just my two children, taking day trips to the beach, cooking together, and playing board games. It is utterly delightful, let me tell you (it was not as fun when I was married). There is something about being with children that puts everything into perspective. The global violence of an unequal world disappears momentarily when it’s just us, feeding ourselves, chatting about mundane things. The world shrinks. Life feels manageable. My kids, too, are much more agreeable than most adults are, because I am their mother. And being totally alone? Forget it. I love it.

But we have to acknowledge that what I’m describing here is a temporary state, and while it might form the basis of a politics—I want everyone to have this feeling of freedom, and belonging, this human right to feel cared for, loved, connected, at peace—my experience in those moments with my children is not in and of itself a politics, because it does not consider any obligations, or ties, to the wider world.

Even so, while the trad and MAGA content about women rejecting the demands of the girlboss are a cartoonish depiction of the movement’s longer term aims, that feminist caricature now exists, increasingly, across the political spectrum. Sentiments about “feminism failing women” with its alleged promise that women can have a high-powered corporate job and kill it at as a mom and wife clamor underneath seasonal think pieces on women “dreading” motherhood or women giving up their ambition (always written by women who have achieved a certain level of success), but also books that seek to question why some women don’t want to have children (as though that were a problem), and social content about embracing a softer, more feminine life (as though that life has a gender).

Underneath all these arguments is often an earnest desire to see the work of caregiving, parenting, or even just caring for the self, just experiencing joy and pleasure, as valuable pursuits, and as worthy of a politics. And they are!

The trad, MAGA, and choice feminist promise that women should be allowed to choose to just be a mom (always understood as straight married mom), that women can just elect to retreat from public life and should not have to feel at all conflicted or guilty or accountable about this choice, coasts on that desire.

LIvin’ the postfeminist dream

In some ways, this is also a desire to close the gaping contradictions of identity, time, and labor that reveal themselves to women in a society in which there still exists a clear sexual division of labor— that is, in which women are expected to perform like men (or maybe machines) in the public sphere, and like women (circa 18th century) in the private sphere.

It is also, in some ways, an anti-capitalist desire, not just to unplug, but to live a simpler life that is not ruled by the noise of consumerism and the current impossibility of economic stability.

But it’s also a desire to look out only for one’s self, one’s own small “we,” to abandon the collective, and to leave the systems that create the suffering intact.

And at this moment in history, when the American federal government is literally turning its back on most of its citizens, except the uber wealthy male and white, while directly abusing many, to choose to devote one’s life solely to one’s own family if one comes from a historically advantaged group is at best politically neutral, or ambivalent. More often, it’s a reaffirmation of the status quo, a refusal to engage in a more intentional politics that defends the most vulnerable, a complicity, and more simply, a rejection from the more difficult work of being in community with other people.

That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t have moments or even long periods of avoiding the problems of the world by loving and laughing in intimate settings with family— recognizing those experiences as radical forms of survival, as what make us human, as acts of social reproduction, and as what make life worth living. It also doesn’t mean that we need to feel overcome by a politics of purity or guilt when we must retreat from the world to care for family, or just get by, or get our joy and rest wherever and however we can get it.

But we can do that while asking bigger questions about family, communal caregiving, men getting involved in raising children and taking care of the home and the sick and elderly, racial and gender-based violence, and what policies make it so hard for women to participate in meaningful public work outside the home anyway. We don’t each have to tackle it all, either, that’s impossible, but we have to engage, we have to care.

And no, not all public work—such as the kind that involves exploiting other people simply to get rich—is as collectively valuable or personally enriching as caring for children. And yes, a lot of paid work under capitalism is totally demoralizing. You know what, I would rather hang out with my kids than work in a bank! But I might have to work in a bank to pay for my rent, or my healthcare, or my education, or my kids’ food, or my leisure time, because in America, we don’t provide those basic human necessities to citizens unless they have a job or are married to a man with a job.

For women, it’s worth repeating, too: you might not have a boss if you opt out of the workforce and trade what freedom you have for marriage to a man, but you’ll still have a husband, and most of them demand much more of your body and your time.

Of course, these concerns are all pushed to the side in one big postfeminist heave-ho by those on the right who want women to believe that the complications of our present society, and of being alongside other people, are both unanswerable and easily answered by women removing themselves from public life en masse, making their own little worlds, at home, or on their remote farms. That antisociality is also rooted for many in America in deeply xenophobic, white nationalist beliefs.

But I see this postfeminist gesture, too, in liberal white “feminist” appropriations of the Black feminist tradition, which named motherhood as in and of itself radical work. To be sure, white, economically comfortable women funneling all their energy and ambitions into their own nuclear families, their unequal marriages, and their intensive parenting to optimize their children for success in a capitalist marketplace that is fundamentally unequal, often at the expense of broader collective activism and community ties, is not what those feminists had in mind.

For many people, being connected to others, to a diverse community beyond one’s own small family of origin, may appear more challenging and uncomfortable than only answering to one’s children, one’s self, or even one’s husband, especially as we become a society that is more socially strained, polarized, and isolated— but in the end, it is also far less lonely.