#Tradwife-ing and the politics of historical amnesia
By Jenny LaFleur, Ph.D.
Over the past decade, a surge of cultural and political messaging has promoted a return to so-called “traditional” gender roles.
From viral #tradwife content to policy proposals and public speeches, these narratives share a common premise: that there once existed a stable, desirable past defined by clear gender and racial hierarchies. But this vision is less a reflection of history than a form of historical fiction. The examples and their prevalence in the daily news cycle are hard to ignore:
A commencement speech given by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, insisting that women should be more excited about the prospect of marriage and homemaking than a career.
Representative Sheri Biggs’ (R‑SC) introduction of the Protecting Motherhood Act, which asks the federal government to adopt language framing motherhood as a biologically defined role, and to “protect women” by eliminating the use of gender‑inclusive language.
Beyond the headlines, these depictions of women’s roles are being both cosplayed and fervently promoted.
#tradwife content, romanticizing a return to full-time domesticity and female submission, and manosphere talking points, advocating for male authority and deriding feminism, are pushing a nostalgic aesthetic and socioeconomic order that misrepresents what is well-documented in archives, historical texts, and in the memories of women.
In reality, the models of idealized housewifery of yore that are being sold were neither as glamorous nor as widely experienced as we are led to believe. In reality, this domestic labor was performed without convenience foods or modern appliances and coupled with carework for children and elders. The historical realities of women’s domestic work bear little resemblance to the images and ideals that have been circulating.
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A page of a 1948 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) |
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The #tradwife image and manosphere demands for a return to an imaginary era of homebound, submissive womanhood fall apart most completely when the historical frame is widened to include Black women, for whom the earliest history of working outside the home begins on arrival in this country, with enslavement.
Even after Emancipation, Black women consistently participated in thelabor force at far greater rates than white women. In 1870, labor force participation among Black women was close to 40 percent. White women’s labor force participation did not reach that rate until nearly a century later, in 1960.
Black women’s poor, immigrant counterparts of numerous ethnic and racial backgrounds also did not experience a life of domestic ease and performative femininity. In 1950, women living in two of Boston’s immigrant-majority neighborhoods, Chinatown and the South End, had some of thehighest labor force participation rates in the city. Since industrialization, many women’s realities have involved working outside the home in order for the family to survive—their domestic obligations amounted to a second shift of unpaid labor.
Life “choices” for most of us—women and men—have never been simple matters of preference. Instead, they reflect our suspension in a web of social forces, most significantly: race, economic status, gender, and geography.
Understanding these forces and how they have shaped our lives requires a grasp of history and an awareness of the narrative arcs that travel through it. We live in a time that philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues is dominated by the exchange of pieces of information. Information, however, is not the same as narrative.
Atomised content comes at us from all directions and coalesces into a warped and fragmented reflection of our world. In reality, the aesthetics and arguments of #tradwife and manosphere content are incompatible with what history tells us.
But why now?
This cultural turn toward the disempowerment and domestication of women is tied to the larger political context of our current moment. Misogyny, pronatalism, and strict gender binarism are powerful “big tent” rhetorical and policy approaches for authoritarian politicians. Calls for “common sense” and a return to traditional gender roles have proven helpful in coalescing support across multiple reactionary constituencies.
As a base-building approach, gendered and racialized resentment politics tap into the economic and existential threats posed to all by late-stage capitalism. Women’s and people of color’s gains with respect to education and employment are cast as the cause of stagnation among white men’s earnings when, in reality, growing economic inequality has limited the gains of all middle and working-class people over the past 40 years.
Both #tradwife and manosphere content are textured by an undercurrent of rage and fear caused by the underlying structures of inequality. But the solutions they offer reflect a distortion of our past that amounts to historical fiction.
These visions of the past endure because they are useful. They redirect frustration away from the extractive nature of our economic system and toward a politics of gendered and racialized resentment. The past being invoked cannot guide us forward because it never truly existed. What remains is a choice: regress toward myth or move toward something better together. |
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