You're Wrong About - The Tradwife Rises with Sarah Archer

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Sarah Archer came by to make an episode from scratch. What's the real history of the American housewife? Where did the tradwife come from, and why? Is she okay? Will we be okay? And who is she churning all that butter for? Sarah Archer's accompanying Substack post https://open.substack.com/pub/saraharcher/p/going-to-businessSarah Archer's bibliographyClips:Mrs. Modern versus Mrs. Drudge from The Middleton Family at the 1939 New York World's Fair (produced by Westinghouse) https://youtu.be/vH2Lpl-UB64?si=vtVFAWhAvkDq-EOEDesign for Dreaming from General Motors 1956 Motorama featuring the Frigidaire “Kitchen of the Future” display https://youtu.be/4_ccAf82RQ8?si=mzVREYgY-d2yWcCl “Total Electric Home,” Westinghouse, 1959 https://youtu.be/IRrMLaiiAGY?si=aoc-7PQfSQIEZW5r The Frankfurt Kitchen at MoMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T3EM872x-AArticles Books and Pods:Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262580557/the-grand-domestic-revolution/ Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674286078 “Wife Sentences,” Moira Donegan https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lisa-selin-davis-s-confused-history-of-homemakers-25336“Trad Wives,” In Bed with the Right https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-bed-with-the-right/id1696774612?i=1000651855063Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show: You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show: Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

When I was a kid, I thought everybody's dad was constantly getting melanomas cut off. Welcome to your wrong about. I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are talking about the trad wife with Sarah Archer. Sarah Archer is our home economics correspondent. We had her on a while ago to talk about Martha Stewart, her rise in fall, and her rise again. And I loved making that episode. And I loved making this episode too. Today we are talking about the trad wife that social media figure sometimes with a nice frilly dress, sometimes doing aesthetic barnyard chores, maybe sewing by candlelight, talking about how much better it is to take care of a husband and children than to be hustling for a paycheck. This is a tradwife that I know from recent social media.

And of course, she is just another chapter in a story that's been going on for many centuries. If you haven't heard of her, you have heard of her ancestors. And I hope you're as ready to dig in as I was today. That's about it as far as this episode goes. If you like this one, if you like what we do generally, we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus, including currently our saga about Britney Spears. We're talking about her memoir with Eve Lindley

and our concluding section chapter four will be out very soon, and we cannot wait to share it with you. Let's go talk about some tradwives. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Here's your episode. Welcome to your wrong about where with me today is the very woman with whom I was supposed to spend a weekend in Cleveland at the adult figure skating championships before we both got too busy. Alas! Alas! But next year. I know. But next year. Next year. But with me today is Sarah Archer, and you were talking about, I think, the topic that most fascinates me in the world right now. So it's going to be a good one.

It's pretty darn fascinating. And it seems to be enjoying a surge of interest. So our episode today, and you asked me how I was right before we started recording, And my answer is that this morning I drank some of the last of the G fuel that I bought in 2020, which is a energy drink formulated especially for gamers. And I feel like I'm about to have a panic attack, which is the perfect state of mind in which to do an episode that I am calling the Tradwife Rises. Yes. We're talking about the Tradwife.

We're talking about... She's coming. Why I can't go on social media and start looking at gardening or housekeeping or cleaning type videos without the algorithm, inching toward white supremacy. And so how do we get from here to the scrub daddy? Well, I can tell you when I first discovered Tradwives. Yeah.

Which was only a few years ago. I was kind of late to the party on it, which is strange because it was just a few years after I was researching the mid-century kitchen. So I had been steeped in ephemera and print ads and industrial shorts and commercials about how this or that appliance will make you more sexually attractive to your husband or what have you, you know, all the usual claims. And I read a post on Medium by Maya Kossoff that was about her sort of trad wife rabbit hole. It turns out a college classmate of hers is Kelly Havens of open flame,

long hair, fame. Yes. Kelly Havens is a fixture on a subreddit called I think Fundy Snark. I don't, you follow her, right? You're, you kind of pop in now and then? I used to. Yeah, I remember we talked about this a couple years ago because I, you know, I think that some of the best cultural criticism being written today and sort of, you know, discussions of politics and feminism and gender in America is being done by ex-fangelicals a lot of the time because the sort of the view inside the machine is so fascinating. And I, Kelly Havens was so fascinating to me as sort of someone who you just encounter on a subreddit about, you know, so many different people kind of making beautiful

aesthetic images about submitting to the patriarchy because she was doing it in a way that I, as a girl who had like envied the Kirsten doll for being able to wear like a crown of open flames for St. Lucia's Day or whatever. Oh. It's like she's living the Anne of Green Gables life. Absolutely. And that was maybe when I started thinking about it was this, we're all sort of in our own different algorithms, but I think the last few years there's been so much about

cottage core and the aesthetic of like, you know, there's this Tumblr post I think about once a day that's like, let's stop glamorizing hustle culture, let's start glamourizing being a little mouse who has nothing to do all day but collect dew drops and slice a strawberry into like a giant ham. Yeah. And that's, I think, this weird point of intersection where by wanting to live a simpler life where you aren't being bombarded by screens all day, you can end up in the, let me live so simply that I go back to before I had rights or what I imagined that time was like kind of a thing. And it's the topic crops up in so many areas. But my kind of question about and baggage for the trad wife, I think, is that the trad wife has emerged in the past few years.

It feels like for people who don't know, we're going to start with a taxonomy of who are, what is the trad wife and why is she rising. But to me, it feels like this insidious point of potential radicalization to sort of live in a social media world where we are able to present so many aesthetic images of homemaking and wellness that sort of promise it as the answer. And yet it feels like a piece of bait being put under a box trap that's going to get you. And my question is, how do we get what we want from this? Like, we know we see something. want in there. So how do we get the good part? And what is it that we want? In looking at the aesthetics, this is kind of the time period during which cores have come into full flour. Right. We used to

have only a couple of cores, and now we have thousands. And like the pandemic definitely, I mean, all the cliches are true, that the pandemic basically, while we were all being driven mad, people were kind of experimenting with baking and gardening and doing things from scratch and sourdough. I managed to actually kill our sourdough starter finally, but for a while, we had a good, robust starter. That's fantastic. We also had this feeling of kind of not wanting to throw anything away and sort of being nervous about groceries, which I think felt very vintage.

You know, it was this very kind of like depression era. You know, we're saving every scrap because you never know. Yes. I also started to notice that there was this kind of, sort of to paraphrase the title of an old Caitlin Flanagan article, sort of to hell with all that B.S.B. Hustle culture and a renewed desire to embrace rest as kind of a tool of resistance and to not be exhausted and not be exploited and people kind of the scales were falling from people's eyes vis-a-vis hustle culture. And it was also a terrible time in media. So I think people like you and me and all our friends who

write, people were being laid off left and right. I would start writing for a new publication and find out the person was gone and that it was just this like blood bath of several years. And so I think because that was happening in the media sphere, it rattled a group of people that are not accustomed to being rattled in that way. The thing that distinguishes kitchen design and kitchen aspiration and sort of kitchen reverie in the middle decades of the 20th century, really starting around World War I, is that it's all framed around the splendors of the future. Like sort of looking at the historicism that certain tradwives try to sort of,

they'll do a throwback to what they perceive as Victoria. or mid-century. And the mid-century trad-wife kind of pin-up style that is one of the genres of the trad-wife milieu is deliberately retro. The futuristic designs

of that era were coupled with a very retrograde gender politic. Like, this is the kitchen of tomorrow. It's going to rocket you into space. And, like, rocketing you into space actually means, like, helping you save time so you can do more

volunteer work or take up tennis or, you know, it doesn't mean like be on the Supreme Court. It means, you know, continue being at home. Well, and it's such an interesting moment for gender politics, too, it seems to me, because we have World War II is a driver of so many technological advances that are motivated by war, but then end up in the household. And we have women leaving the home in order to work famously. And then somewhat less famously being told, all right, it's now your patriotic duty to go back home and let your husbands have your jobs. You can't have them anymore. And so this weird, yeah, yeah, this moment of we have come so far technologically and women have stepped so far out of the

household. Not that women weren't working before, but you know, that this was to say we're keeping the technology and we're losing the gender politics that we've gained. Well, do you want to do a little bit backward in time review of kitchen, kitchen design and politics? All I think about, is kitchen design. Because that's what I have to deal with every day. Every single day. The work triangle. One of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this initially is that

a standalone kitchen as a room with all your kitchen leave things in it, as we know it, as kind of like a designed forward, nice place to be and kind of do what you need to do in there. Where people end up at the party. Exactly. It's a very new idea. It emerges in the early 1920s at the earliest, but it doesn't really come into sort of full flower until after the war. Because before that, for the most part, you either had people who had household stuff and their kitchen probably looked like maybe a modest version of the kitchen on Downton Abbey. Emily Gilmores.

Exactly. You have the sort of the basement workspace, right? And it's like the broom closet. It's a workspace in the household. or you're on a farm in a tenement in a flat and there's maybe two rooms and one of those rooms has a stove and that's it. So there isn't a kitchen per se, which is actually one of the reasons why a lot of New York City apartments have such odd configurations of like showers and toilets and kitchenettes that don't really kind of seem like somebody purpose built it to begin with because they didn't. Right. When I was 13, it was my dream to someday be like a New York City downtown artist living an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen, I just felt that like, if you have a bathtub

on your kitchen, you are an artist. You're on your way. Like for sure. People, important people are coming to your gallery opening. Yeah. It's, um. To not buy your art. Exactly to it, to admire, but not by your art. And the way in which modern kitchen design came about was actually sort of an outgrowth of home economics. And please tell us about the story of home economics, because I feel like that term does not mean what it used to. So home economics was really, it used to be called domestic science, and it was a very serious undertaking for this sort of small handful of women like Ellen Swallow Richards who got a PhD in chemistry, I believe, at the end of the 19th century and was, you know, very concerned with things like hygiene and sort of, you know, maintaining a healthy home. There's a huge emphasis in the Victorian era on cleanliness, partially as a response to immigration and this perception real or ginned up that cities are dirty and milk sterilization is really

important. And of course it is. That will come up later when we talk about tradwives. Right. Weirdly, one of the most pressing issues of our time, despite Louis Pasteur having lived and died for our sins anyway. Exactly. I know. You. You know. You'd think that people would stick with this. So there's a woman named Christine Frederick who studies scientific management. And scientific management is, it's sometimes referred to as Taylorism because it was devised by this guy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, no relation to Christian Friedrich. And he worked for these big companies like Bethlehem Steel in different places. And he would sort of look at, you know, how many steps from here to there, you know, where are the supplies vis-a-vis the tools, vis-a-vis the machinery and factories and say, you know, how can you save steps?

save time, how can you save money? I have a question. Oh, yeah. Is this the dad from cheaper by the dozen? It's connected to the dad. Okay. The mom and the dad from cheaper by the dozen studied Taylorism and used Taylorism like Christine Frederick to try to sort of apply the lessons of the factory floor to the home because the home is a factory that makes little Americans, right? It's important to also mention Margaret Schutla Hoski, who I'm probably not pronouncing that because I'm not a native German speaker, but she was one of the first women architects to qualify in Austria. She designed the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926 and designed a sort of U-shaped kitchen with wiped clean surfaces that were very hygienic and it was colorful and there were lots of little drawers

and sort of places to store your rice and your flour. And her idea was, despite being an architect herself, she believed that housework was a profession that deserved a proper setting. and the right tools for the job. So you have on the one hand this very forward-thinking design. I mean, the Frankfurt Kitchen is fabulous. Like you'd be delighted to have a Frankfurt kitchen now.

And there's this kind of idea that this is where women belong. We're going to advance the technology and advance the design, but it hadn't occurred to anyone that there might be people who don't want to do this full-time. You know, there might be women or wives or moms who don't want to do this full-time. So the kitchen design of that era is then, it becomes a kind of vehicle for class mobility because it hadn't occurred to anybody that it would be sort of like, you know, get your man to wash all your dishes.

It was more like you're an up and coming person. Maybe you're working at a department store. You have money. You're newlyweds. You want to entertain because you're kind of climbing up the social ladder. And you have appliances. And sometimes they would use phrases like Westinghouse famously has this beautiful ad from the 20s where a group of ladies are sitting around having tea and they're wearing, you know, gorgeous, you know, kind of bohemian clothes. And it says, I have an invisible servant, and the invisible servant is the stove. The appliances are appealing to consumers who probably never had household staff, but it's kind of enabling them to become a new kind of person. So it's not so much in that early period, I have an invisible servant, and now I can go beyond the Supreme Court. It's more like I can be a stay-at-home lady of the house, rather than a housewife. Technology is always about what we dare to imagine. So it's like you can imagine having an invisible servant but not a husband who helps you.

Exactly. Which I imagine is why like my kitchen was built in I think, you know, 1949. And I love it. But the counters are much too short for me, as you would imagine. I'm like 6'2. I would imagine that. It's a constant struggle. And it's very small and it's a small house.

But I also wonder if kitchens were built like that for so long based on the understanding of no one will help you and no one can hear you scream. Oh, yeah. What happens in the post-war era is now there's a big emphasis on anti-communism. Of course. But what's super interesting is that the 50s is an era when there's a strong connection between the aesthetics of office work and all these different spaces. So if you look at like the kitchen of the future and the kitchen of tomorrow, a lot of them have,

the Miracle Kitchen has a command center. So you would see women like sitting at a desk and going through their recipes and there were filing, you know, drawers and the telephone and sort of the whole. It feels like they're trying to legitimize housework by making it look more like office work. And it's like, no, no. Yeah. Housework is the real work. Your thing is made up. Your thing is invented. But there was this real, it was appealing to a desire. Yeah. And it kind of had the effect of making it seem again like, well, now you're a professional. Because keep in mind, in the late 50s, there are people around who remember shoveling coal into a stove, right? Like, there are people who remember when the kitchen was like, you would physically were dirty because of the kind of work you were doing.

In America, I mean, because that's still true in other parts of the world. Because if you remember not having running water, not having electricity, not having gas, every time somebody wants to take a shower or a bath, you're like shoveling coal. You know, laundry is like an all-day project. You know, so it really was like a full-time, like you could not live without doing all of this work pretty much all day long, even if you had help. So the idea that you can, you know, keep food warm and put a wash in and turn the TV on to entertain the kids, like suddenly you have all of these techniques to help you be your most fabulous self at home. Yeah. I have to give a shout out to the scholar Dolores Hayden, who is not. a household name in the way that I personally insist that she would be. She wrote a book in 1981

called The Domestic Revolution that's all about the early social reformers, one of whom was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote the yellow wallpaper, advocating for things like collective child care and group house cleaning and sort of women helping each other with all of their household necessities. And they critiqued architecture by saying essentially the single family home cuts women off from all the shared resources of being able to have, you know, play groups and kind of all the, this is over a hundred years ago. And boy did nobody listen. No, boy did nobody listen.

Like, man. Right. And that's the other thing that, I mean, I think it's not an accident that the Tradwife landscape is largely that because essentially all of the selling Mrs. Consumer was designed for the white middle class woman, right? It's not people at the very top because they don't give a shit. It's not people at the very bottom because they can't afford it. But the people in the middle, especially the lower half of the middle who want to be in the upper half of the middle, like, ooh, new appliances, like new decor, you know, better neighborhood, lawn.

Well, and not to jump ahead too much, but I feel like that is, you know, this is not an original thought of mine. I've watched some great commentators talking about, especially the, you know, the restock aesthetic where it's, you know, watching people restock their refrigerators, the clean talk thing where you're using so many products that, you know, watching influencers. getting a Stanley Cup to go with every outfit they have. I love Stanley Cups. I have three of them. I think they're great. I do not drink enough water. It's one of the only ways to get me to do it. And I like feeling like a Utah mom. So we all we all like stuff to one extent or another. And none of us are invulnerable to this. But you know, showing influencers going to Target and buying new betting like every month or something like that. And this, you know, this kind of spiral of overconsumption that we've created feels intrinsically related to the best possible demographic to market these aspirational

trappings of what we are saying financial stability and bounty is, is people who are, who feel like they're almost there. Yes. And I feel like so many people, and I'm not saying I have a valid alternative for them, but so many people get into content creation and figure out they're good at it and, like, get some brand deals and do some videos that do numbers of them like cleaning grapes or whatever and then they have the ability to buy or to at least buy in return or to be sent as a gift by a brand they're working with like all of this stuff and whether you're paying for it or not

I think like there is a basic American hunger that we are taught from birth to like get the most stuff because if you have the most stuff then you won't die well and that's consumer engineering And the quote, my favorite, is goods fall into two classes. Those that we use, such as motor cars or safety razors, and those that we use up, such as toothpaste or soda biscuits. Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods that we now merely use. Wearing things out does not produce prosperity. Buying things does. No. I know. It's like this is really kind of like seeing the guy with the knife come into the house. This is like, yes. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I can't go back. I don't know how it works. Exactly. He's not trying to get you to buy stuff. It's fine. Yeah. You'll notice that one of the ways that you can date a house, especially if you follow like sort of real estate porn accounts, as we all do, is by the colors of the appliances. Yeah. And this was actually something that, of all people, Alfred P. Sloan of foundation fame. So Alfred P. Sloan was the CEO of General Motors.

And the thing that he's most known for other than Spons brought to you by is. is the advent of annual styling, which was to use different colors. Because Henry Ford famously didn't do this, right? So it was sort of to use like, now you can get this car in emerald green. And next year you can get it in Burgundy. Oh, so he invented Stan Lee's, really. Exactly, exactly. And then appliances started doing it because, again, there's this connection, GM, Frigdair,

that appliances can start to look dated. So if it's pink or blue, then it's 1970, you're wanting. harvest goals. God damn you, man. We could have done without that. Yeah, and it works. It works so well. And to this day, we're caught in a cycle where the only thing you can do is just kind of continually buy like white enamel, so it looks like it hasn't changed since 1920. Sarah, I am so sick of it. And I went to an estate sale recently at a house in Southwest Portland that had original appliances from probably 1962 when I could have wept.

Oh, my God. And they probably work. Yes, I'm sure they did because the person who lived there, you know, had, I think, been using that kitchen until the day they died pretty recently. And the number of beautiful appliances

that were made in a time when I think they would have worked for much longer than what we're building now that have been ripped out. Yep. Yeah, it's terrific. I can't handle it. All the golden rods.

It's the avocados, the harvest orange. The avocados, the harvest gold. I know the burnt sienna. Yeah, it's just... The brunt sienna. It's fine. But I think it's crucial to just know that this habit that we have isn't an accident. And it's also not something that people just didn't have as much stuff.

I mean, we have a storage industry now. And 100 years ago, we didn't. One of the grand tricks is to get consumers trapped in a phase where we are so busy acquiring and shedding stuff at the whim of the marketplace that we never get to develop taste of our own. That's absolutely true. That's a bummer. Yeah.

No, definitely. There are so many examples in print ads from the 1930s all the way probably through the 90s and even probably after that about how you look and how not bedraggled you'll be for your husband if you're... Oh, my God. Yeah, it's just so gross. There's one that's like a woman who's very busty and it's, and the headline is like stacked. And it's like stacked with technology and there's a man kind of staring out. It's just, it's so gross. So it's kind of like the consumer in a way is the man.

Right. Because he's probably ultimately paying for the dishwasher. Because he gets to have a better woman. Because he throws in a dishwasher and now she, and now you have no excuse to not look great because God forbid you use your extra time to read a a book. Never. Never. Or, you know, or even to just to do nothing. Yeah. Right? Like, that's my political plank. Women being allowed to do nothing to just fritter away in afternoon. Well, and it's not an accident that we feel that way when the modern kitchen was designed around principles that modernized factories, right? Like, this obsession that Americans have with always getting things done and being productive, it doesn't come from nowhere. Like, we're all, even if we're

consciously. Yeah. Right. We didn't invent hustle culture. Did you listen to the episode of In Bed with the Right? No. So In Bed with the Right, which is a wonderful podcast hosted by Adrian Daube and the great Moira Donigan who writes for The Guardian and a number of other places. One of the best writers of our time, I think. Oh my God. Yeah. Like incredible. And she wrote a really interesting review of a new book about housewives for book forum that's called Wife Sentences, which I highly recommend. So essentially, Moira has a grand unified theory of trad wifedom, which I think is brilliant. And part of it is that in the era of like sort of Obama plus or minus five years, kind of the aughts and teens, the long Obama administration. The long Obama administration was that sort of the rise of

what we could be termed the girl boss. And she mentions like Nasty Gal and Audrey Gelman and the wing. I remember the first time I saw the word girl boss, like the first time it entered my brain and it was when I saw it's not my favorite yeah no it's run its course like a bad fever but like that moment was in 2016 and it's amazing that the girl boss era was so short in the end it was but what moira is arguing is that the tradwife movement is a response to girl boston and here's why because essentially capitalism there was a phase when everybody was kind of celebrating hustle culture, like it was cool, and you could be sort of counterculture, and it was... Oh, I was one of them. I was 24, so I was the right age to be duped by that, yeah.

Right? Hustle hard. Everybody was hustling, and there was, you know, billionaire biographies. Yeah. And everybody has soured on that, very understandably so. And that as a result of that, feminism in kind of the era of Hillary Clinton, sort of the ultimate, quote unquote, girl boss, got lumped in. Those two things kind of got connected in people. people's minds. That feminism means, you know, hypercapitalism or late capitalism, as the kids call it. And that as a result of that, there's a kind of far-left man that hates both of those things. And the trad wife is perfectly calibrated to appeal to him. So it's somebody who hates neoliberalism and hates hustle culture and feels put upon and is sort of likes the idea of a woman accepting an assigned,

role. And then the irony, of course, is that the ones who are really good at it make money. But you can't see it and they don't talk about it. Right. And this is, I feel like, where we get into Act 2, because you and I started talking about this. We have been in a general way for a long time because I love to talk about kitchen design with you and home economics and sort of... Stepford Wives. Yeah. Stepford Wives, this whole area. But we both, as did the rest of America, as far as I can tell, became utterly bewitched by Nara Smith and her performative chirio making. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Can you tell us about that? So I, for the life of me, I'm not totally sure. I think you mentioned the idea that some of this could be fetish content.

And I feel ill-equipped to come down on one side or the other of this. I feel like it might be totally sincere. It might be tongue-in-cheek. It may be some combination of all the above. You know, I think that like everything is everything on the internet. And there are some creators who are doing kind of Tradwife parody and section archway that still some people think is sincere. Like Naras Smith deserves her own description because she kind of got by the time this episode comes out, this will have completely run its course. But there was a moment when everybody realized at the same time that what Naras Smith was doing was very funny. Right. And I still don't know what her perspective is or where she's making these videos from.

But art is more than intent. But the basic template for a Narasmith video is something like, This morning my toddler came into my bedroom asking for hot chocolate. And so I took some cacao fruit and fermented the beans and made chocolate in about four to six weeks. And so it's just like, she has a lovely voice. And so it's this very pleasing sort of whispery. It's kind of hypnotic. Yeah. Yeah, a little bit stepfutty. People have mentioned that a lot too. Description of the sort of almost like a poetic form where your small child asks for a snack and you...

That's your prompt. Invent the wheel. Yeah. To make something from scratch that takes hours to days. And it's such a great way to drive engagement because of course people are going to be like, your baby is starving. But it's like delightful to watch if you're for it. And it's like, delightfully crazy making to watch if you're confused about where this is going. It's just no one cannot watch it. It's a perfect illustration of the aphorism that I stumbled into when I first started freelancing, which is that money is time. Yes. When you're in charge of your own time, you start to become acutely aware of like, do I actually want to have this meeting? Like, does this make sense? Is this just like, meh? Could this be handled at an email? Yeah. Or just ignored? How about we ignore it? That's also fun. And what I think is so fascinating about looking at somebody like Nara Smith is that it's almost as though she's taken, rejecting technology or using technology like Instagram when it suits, which is every day.

Yes. You can use technology as long as it's not in the picture, as long as it's only taking the picture. It's invisible. The invisible servant. Yeah. And this is a super interesting connection to high-end kitchens nowadays, which are like in companies like plain English kitchens, which do like top, top of the lines. gorgeous kitchen installations, you don't see a blinking clock or a flashing light anywhere. It's wood, it's painted, it's Faroan Ball, colors, it's brass, it's marble.

It looks like 1910 and you have help. That's what the kitchen looks like. It doesn't look high-tech at all. So there's something going on in the Tradwife universe that is deliberately low-tech in a way that seems sort of theatrically homespun, right? And kind of like we're taking the long way to do everything that feels kind of like a financial flex. Oh yeah. Because if you have time to do that stuff, then you're better off than most of us. Right. Well, and Ball are in a farm again, for people who have actual children who bother spending time as opposed to watching videos of other people's online like I do cats. Cats. But this was like, this was an interesting moment in the last few months where the, I assume they're Mormons, if they're not, they're Mormon

encoded, but this couple that has a farm in Utah, they have 35,000 kids, and they got a following for, you know, the mom posting videos of like making homemade mozzarella and making homemade girl cheese, but it's very narismith. Well, did you know, Moira on in Bed with the Rights said that it's the jet blue fortune. Right. That the husband is a jet blue air. Yeah. And that was what people were shocked by. There was this moment when people kind of realized like, oh, these humble homespun Mormon or jet blue airs, which like, by the way, that's the funniest airline to be an air for. I'm an Uber heiress. It's what mother would call new money.

Boy, is it. Oh, man. I don't know. And this is a moment, too, when you realize kind of the average age of the people in the comments section, which could be 12, where people are like, wait a minute, you're in this rustic farmhouse making mozzarella. You're pretending to not be millionaires. And it's like, only a millionaire. who has eight children could possibly have the time to be making mozzarella for like a couple of

hours in the middle of the day with all of your kids unoccupied because you're probably homeschooling them. Mm-hmm. Has time. What runs through a lot of this, because I knew you brought up white supremacy earlier, and I think that it's important to touch on like that and essential oils and like a number of other things, Q&ON. Yeah.

20 years ago, those first two things wouldn't have gone together so easily, but now we all know. We all know. It's a strange world. They're opting out of consumer culture. So they're opting out of the very thing that created the model housewife in the first place. Huh. Mrs. Modern thinks she can live without her dishwasher, but she can't. But I think that part of what we're seeing with people like, and I do not mean to impugn Ballerina Farm.

I do not know Ballerina Farm personally. But the homeschooling, homesteading, home-made. of all of this is symbolically and literally probably opting out of public goods, public life, shared civic experiences like public

schools, grocery stores. What is so interesting about like the sort of second way of feminist embrace of, there's a wonderful print ad that's like a women's lib rally in favor of dishwasher. So they're like, no more grease. Like it's all these women and like just kind of like Rhoda like sort of, you know,

cheering for because that it did like having those tools made it easier not easy but easier for women to do more things to participate more in public life and the past it feels like women had been kept home long enough to realize that it might be nice to be able to leave right well this is like what i was saying when we were talking in the phone i was saying what is it like vaccines feminism and nato have all been around too long because people are taking them for granted. And that's how we got into this mess. Yeah. So women who were growing up now, who are, let's say, in their 20s, are not really in memory distance of things like women can't have their own credit cards. You know what I mean? Whereas I feel like, I'm 46. So I'm, I don't remember it, but my mom sure did because she lived it. She was out of college and working before Roe and before.

My mom was a college student when women weren't allowed to run marathons. Wow. You know, because they thought that your uterus would fall out. We're not that far from that in time. Yeah. We give boomers a lot of shit very fairly. However, they are also a link to the past, as I've been thinking lately. And I think we have, yeah, you know, when I look at my relationship with my mom, there are so many paradigm shifts in terms of how culture is now versus how she grew up in it that is hard for her to grasp. But it's also hard for me to grasp the world as she used to know it. Oh, I know. Being one generation away from somebody who had a mother who essentially couldn't leave a marriage. Yeah, these freedoms are very easy to forget. Easy to forget and also easy to not see because they're just part of the fact that you can vote, the fact that you can own property, the fact that you can start you own business and have your own line of credit and do, you know, all of that stuff is like 100 years ago, none of it, right, or 110 years ago.

If you grow up with that sort of embedded and then you kind of hear about the evils of feminist, you might think, well, that's, oh, yeah, feminism is terrible because it's, I can do everything I want as a woman. It's like, well, that's, that's for a reason. Right. Well, and getting, I guess, to sort of the central question of act to, I feel like the seductive idea that, you know, you see people expressing on social media, kind of either in a playful way or very seriously, is I don't want to work. I want to stay home. I want to be a stay at home girlfriend. I want to be a stay-at-home girlfriend. I want to be. a stay-at-home wife. I want to be a housewife. Like, I want to have the freedom to take care of my children while a man pays the bills. And obviously, there are so many counter-arguments to that, which we are about to make. But I also feel like, yes, you shouldn't have to work. Like, people should not have to work as hard as they're working. It's because the solution isn't to,

it feels like we are saying, I don't want to submit to capitalism. I just want to submit to a man. And it's like, we need to figure out how to not submit to anybody somehow. But I, unfortunately, do not have the great economic mind that could sort that out for us. My thoughts on this not exactly debate are that this is a quote from, I'm paraphrasing, but by Lisa Ann Walter, who played Chessie in the Parent Trap, everyone's favorite character. And I guess I remember reading a quote from her about family and career, neither works without the other. You know, it was that simple. And there's a lot more to it and the execution is extremely difficult. But if I have kids,

I want to, I think, take care of them a significant amount of time, not all of the time. I will lose my mind. We were not meant to be forced to be around our children without any breaks. I don't think. That seems nuts. Humans of all to have extended families. Also very true. And communities. So like if I have kids, which I don't know if I will, I mean, I know that if I committed to that, then that would be something that I would want to truly commit to, you know, and put my time and energy into and not do halfway. But I love what I do and I wouldn't want to give it up either. And I think this idea that work has to happen in the shape that men and capital invented in the industrial revolution, that feels like one of the big problems here. Yeah. It's bullshit. Because you and I both love what we do and we also love to waste an afternoon. We do. Yeah. And that's the interesting thing is like, does the trad wife exist when there isn't a camera pointed at her? Right.

Right? Because if you are making cereal from scratch for your toddler, your toddler doesn't care. They probably just want the storebought kind that's more familiar to them and more consistent texturally. They want fruit loops. Yeah. As promised. But that's the, yeah, that's the thing. I mean, I think it gets back a little bit to what we talked about in our Martha episode,

that it's sort of like, because the content is domesticity, domestic life, that can kind of lead you to think that this is a reflection of how a person is living. But it's really how a person is producing content. This is entertainment. You know, it's kind of like, I think your point about when the cameras are off, like, how trad are they? I mean, they might be ordering dominoes when the cameras are off. We don't know.

Maybe we get into a broader question where we're all performing our lives for each other to some extent, right? like at least if you're a creator on social media, which not everybody is. I'm not, but I sure do watch a lot of it. And short form video has these various poetic forms at this point, like the sonnet or the villainel, where like we all kind of know what structure we're in and what we're seeing. It gives you sort of a sense of place. For example, it is a convention that we all accept that if someone shows you like what a day in their life is like or get ready with me, it will open with a camera that is already set up and running showing them pretending to wake up. we know that they didn't leave a camera running all night. We know they're pretending to wake up, but we all just agree to pretend that they really are waking up because it's a story. So it's like I don't assume people are taking all of this literally. I think a lot of people are very savvy about what they watch.

And a lot of people are fooled by AI portraits of Jesus on Facebook. So it's hard to know where the mean is and all this. Who even knows anymore? I know. But I think the bigger question there is like, what expectations are we creating for ourselves, whether we know it or not, when we look at our lives and feel like, you know, the aesthetics of what we're doing are maybe more important than they are, right? Women are kind of saddled with expectations and ideas, whether they're very traditional or very modern or very feminist or very churchy or what, about what we should be doing because it sets of, you know, we're role models for whomever. And women are human and human beings are very different from one another.

So there are lots of people like you, like me, who love what we do, who are fortunate enough to have really compelling work. If you need a citation from within academia to support this radical claim, it is one of the, I think, Keystone claims of queer theory, Eve Kossowski-Seggwicks. People are different from each other. So the Academy knows, too. We have no excuse. Yeah. There are people who want to live at work. There are people who hate work. There are people who wish they were in a different line of work, but all of us are different. And some of us are meant to be rocket scientists and lawyers and op-ed columnists for the Times, and some are not. And sometimes I think it would not kill pundits to acknowledge that even those of us who are in this blanket category of women have wildly different dreams and desires and hopes for our lives, right?

You know, pundits and New York Times opinion columnists on some level must know that it's their job to, make a tiny grain of sand into a giant gross pearl. Week after week. Week after week. My God, the week's never stopped coming. But right, that we want different things and we want different things at different times. And, you know, when I think about my life, I really like getting to do the show. I feel like this is an ideal career for me. I love getting to sit here and talk about my thoughts and feelings and that's ideal for me. And I get to do it from home. It would be nice to be forced to be around other people more, but I'm working on that. But that's something that I only know because I have had the extreme grace and good luck and privilege to be able to build this work for myself. Yeah. And

most people can't. No one would have given this to me. Right. You know, no one would have said, why don't you talk about your thoughts and feelings while sitting on your bed a couple times a week, and that'll be what you do. Nobody was asking for that. We needed it, but nobody would have asked. Right. And so this idea that, like, women need to do either what the workplace, as it has always existed, believes they are useful for, or what men believe they are useful for? And I know that we all know, or most of us know, the real question is, what do we know we're useful for? And what do we know about the way that we want to spend our lives, which amounts to how we spend our weeks and our days and our hours. And I think that the awareness deep down in our guts of what feels good to us is there.

Yeah. And getting stuck in a trend, it might be a way of getting closer, but it might also just be another distraction. Yeah. Well, we said we were going to get back to raw milk. Oh, that's right. Yes. So have you seen, this is the other one. that I wanted to ask you about. I forgot about this. But this is a channel called Gubba Homestead. Have you seen this? No, I have somehow not yet seen Guba Homestead in my 17 hours a day on TikTok. So I stumble upon this site, this feed. She's on Twitter. She's on Instagram and YouTube. And she'll do, is there a name for this meme where somebody says like, I'm a brunette? Of course I use this kind of hairbrush. I'm a brunette. Of course I use. Oh, yeah.

What is that? I think of it as we're girls because I think it started off as we're girls. Of course we're going to. Exactly. Yeah. It's one of those. So she does one of those except it's I'm a conspiracy theorist. And she in total seriousness looks at the camera and says, you know, of course I believe that the sun doesn't cause cancer. And then goes through all of these other claims that are. I mean, look, it's fair to say that the sun is not the only thing causing cancer, especially in a world with so many super fun sites. But, me, it still gets a job done. When I was a kid, I thought everybody's dad was constantly getting melanomas cut off. A lot of them are. So then here's the thing. I cannot tell for the life of me whether this is satire or not, because then you go on Twitter and she'll say, do you think this is satire? I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. It's like, why don't you tell us? I know. Just tell us one by the other. She's a flatterther. They're kind of RFK vibes almost. It's kind of like everything's a scam or a conspiracy. Raw milk is better for you.

Pasteurization is a scam. The food system is poisoning us, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so there are kind of like teeny tiny elements of aspects of these that are kind of true. Like the food system is not ideal, let's say, agro business in the U.S. That's certainly fair. Yes. Pasteurization is good. Yeah.

Let's also say. So, and the dairy thing is also, again, this kind of extreme iteration of optics. out of consumer protections. Right. Right. Because like pasteurization, people died from tainted milk a lot. Yeah, like Nixon's brother. Right. And that's why he became such a flaming liberal. That'll do it. Right. I mean, milk sterilization was a huge thing in the progressive era. This was like, I mean, life and death before antibiotics. So I don't know. I think that people are understandably frustrated by how things be. And people's faith in institutions is shaky, understandably so. And that at the extremes, you're getting like the earth is flat, milk is a scam, birds aren't real, you know, blah, blah, blah.

We're going to cite Wikipedia in its article on Poe's Law. Poe's Law is an adage of internet culture which says that without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views, which, you know, easy. But I would also say, and I know many others have said this, that at this point, if you're making satire that it is impossible to tell whether it's satire or not, is it satire? Yeah, I'm not sure that it is. Like, shouldn't there be some indicator, you know, because we're not mind readers. Like, we need some kind of an indication of authorial intent here. Right. Well, and because the other thing is she's obsessed with

I think it's lard like using lard as a skin emollient or something. Yeah, there's something's going on with like lard and the trad wives. I have not even gotten into it but yeah, something is going on with lard. So she's selling it

which makes me think that it's either she's serious about making money on it at a minimum. She's a lardpranour. She's a lardpranour. I mean that's very 19th century. I don't know if we've answered any of the pressing questions for America's homemaking types, but I feel like the concerns that I brought this topic to you with are basically, why are we so obsessed with handmaking cereal at this point in time? And why has the trad wife risen? And I want to know if you think that this is correct,

because my analysis based on what we've been talking about is that the past few years, as you've talked about at the top of this show kind of in a response to the girl boss and the realization correctly that that is unfulfilling. I don't want to be a girl boss. We see now this countervailing trend of the trad wife and this, I would say to some extent, sincere and real and to some extent astro-turfed, conservative at a certain point propaganda showing it feels almost like a classic bait and switch. where it's like come be a trad wife and you can wear pretty dresses and you can build fires in your wood stove and make mozzarella for your adoring children and live like a mom in a picture book and live in this this world that never was and in reality it feels like the more freedom you surrender the more

worldly freedom you surrender I don't think that you get any back at home I think you just I'm not going out on a limb here to say that having less freedom in the world, less access to money, less ability to be a wage earner, less ability to provide for yourself and your children, I can't see an argument where that is better for you in the long run. More specifically, I can't see an argument where it will work out on a large scale as a social movement for women to decide to just trust the man they married to take care of them the way they deserve. Or the men they elected. It has never worked in the past. It's not going to work now. Or them. I like them even less. Yeah, because that has not gone great. I was reassured that law was settled and it turns out that

it was not. And I think, yeah, the key thing is dropping out of public life. And I think that can look like a lot of things. I think if, let's say, you're a content creator and your content is sort of you being a rural ballerina and making cheese and this, that, and the other, if you're making a ton of money and you're savvy about that and you are active in political action and, you know, all sorts of other things, then as an individual choice, I can kind of see where that could work. But I think in general, selling people a fantasy. But then it's the Schlafly thing. It's the Schlafly thing. It's a pyramid scheme where it's like, you're selling people what you have, but you only have it because you're selling it to other people.

And as you rightly point out, it never existed, right? It's like people are selling a version of like 1900 where there's no TB, no cholera. We have antibiotics. We have the internet. You know, we have like all these other. The actual life that you would have led or that your ancestors led 100 years ago, 120 years ago, the privations and danger and medical horror of, you know, all of that is sanitized. And it just basically looks as though you're kind of living in this, you know, kind of almost shaker sort of. modernist present day. We've made too many historical dramas showing people with all of their limbs. I think that was, we shouldn't have done that. Exactly. That was another lie about the best. The more you opt out of civic life, the less power you have. And even if you don't have money, if you're engaged in public discourse, if you're taking part in things, that's power and that you can't give that up. Yeah. I guess two questions. First of all, if the trad wives, as we know and as we are discussing are, you know, people performing tradwifdom on the internet, is the trad wife even a person who exists, you know, or is she always an illusion? Is she a vanishing horizon, as we like

to see in academia? And then also, in terms of, you know, the power of becoming an influencer and having brand deals and having money, like, of the forms of power available to normal people in America today, it's a pretty good one. And I'm not going to tell anyone that it's bad for them, because I think that's patronizing. But it also strikes me that, you know, what we've been talking about throughout this conversation, and especially, you know, whenever a Stepford-Wise reference comes up,

is that some of the true riches that women have had historically and in the present and future, and I think some of our greatest resources are the community that we share with each other. And the ways that we are able to help each other and to talk to each other and to, I think through our friendships and through the people we know get a sense of how do we really feel? How do I feel? How do you feel? Like what do I need? And to confess like that my life may look great,

but like I'm not happy, you know, or aesthetically everything's pleasing, but it hurts inside. Right. And if you're living on an island metaphorically where it's just the husband and kids and you and you're in the mountains, there's no public schools, there's no teachers, there's no town square, there's no community. Essentially, it's exactly what Dolores Hayden was arguing, that like the architecture and the lifestyle boxed women in so that they were alone with people who were depending on a certain kind of labor that they could perform. And I think if you're cut off from other parents at school, whatever it is, whatever that community looks like, you're more vulnerable and you have less power. Yeah. I don't know what it's like to be like a mom-talk influencer.

but I imagine that like if you wake up and you're like, oh my God, what imaginary toddler request do I have to do a video about today? Like you're, you are hustling. Like you are having to think about what kind of content to produce. The people who make it seem easy, I think sometimes are working the hardest. And you're dealing brand deals. You've made a full time job for yourself. You have to keep expanding if you're in that mindset, which most Americans are. And you've also created a situation where, it may seem like you have more access than most people to community, but actually I think you're in kind of a water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink kind of a situation. Yeah, you might have less. Right? Because you have to perform your identity every day outwardly.

And so the connections you make with people, because what you do now is a performance that you have to do for your corporate allies or whoever you're working with, you know, that it becomes impossible to express the authentic self that you need in order to connect with other people. Yeah. And so the loss of community, whether it's because you're disappearing into the home or disappearing into the performance, is one of the things that feels most dangerous.

Yeah, I agree. And I've said this before in this podcast or you are good. I can't keep track. But I live across the street from my best friend. And when I tell people that they get very misty, and I've noticed since high school. And if I were to have this great love story and had this amazing spouse that I had married, then people would like that story too. Or I'd be like, I live with my spouse.

I love them so much. They'd be like, yeah, whatever, everyone does that. You know, or like a lot of people are married. It's whatever. It's normal. But to live very close, like a few steps away from someone who you have another kind of community with, I think, feels so abnormal in American. life, that that's what gets people excited. It's an intentional community. Yeah. It has contributed to my

happiness more than any other individual thing I've done in my life in the past few years and certainly more than anything I've bought. For sure. Well, you know what's interesting. I recently was researching a piece for AD about doomsday design, like sort of design for the end of the world. Oh, God. Which has a very robust history, of course, in the Cold War. Yeah. The monsters are due on Maple Street. The ritual of sort of going to get a go bag or stocking. is the minute you leave the house and you're headed to Home Depot, you're on a very kind of individualistic mission to kind of give yourself supplies and tools.

So, okay, like you run out of food after a year maybe, then what do you do? And essentially the lesson of all of this is that the stuff is a red herring. Like, you do need certain supplies if there's a total calamity, right? But what you really need are friends and neighbors and skills. Yeah. Because if something really terrible happens and agriculture falls apart, You have to start somewhere, right? You need to know who knows how to do what in your community.

You need to know, you know, who's a natural leader, who's good at planting. You know, like we're talking like total apocalypse here, right? I was so kind of inspired by that to think that it's not about buying a thing. It's about investing in these relationships. Ah, I love that. Yeah. And then if you're like burnt out by our monog existence and can't motivate to get off the couch and stop watching the comeback to like go socialize of people, remember, you will die if you don't make friends. That is true. It's the end of the world as you know it if you don't have friends. That's a little too scary. Yeah. But really, you know, I think thinking of the time that you spend with the people you love or, you know, not even the people you love. Because if we lived in a

medieval village, we would not love everyone. But there would be somebody we tolerated. Yeah. Because we got along well, you know, whenever we had to see each other. The person with the good textiles. Yeah. The person who makes beer, you know, the person who knows how to shoe your horse. And we are in too big of a national and international community for the kind of go along to get along philosophy to make sense on the scale we're at. But in terms of the communities that we choose for ourselves and that we build for ourselves and yeah, we have to think about what resources can we acquire that won't become valueless tomorrow, you know, and that's... Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, that's probably not like the latest, greatest tile. Yeah. You know, it's probably not the latest, greatest fridge. You can live happily with a fridge that's 10 years old. But you know what? Your fridge won't save you. That's true.

Even if it wants to. Yeah. No. It can't. Let us close by quoting Moira Donaghan's piece and book forum. Moira writes, women still perform the majority of household chores, child care and elder care, the social maintenance that academics call kinkeeping, i.e. remembering their mother-in-law's birthdays, scheduling, and the management of conflicts, resources, and outside help.

Men today do slightly more of this than their fathers did. They do not do nearly as much as their wives do. Women's domestic labor is relied upon and enjoyed by everyone in their families, but always goes uncompensated and routinely goes unnoticed. Now, I know the reason that women do more of this work than men. There's many reasons. But I think part of it clearly, especially based on the conversation we're having, is this very pervasive historical idea

that women's work, women's interests are lesser than men's, not because of what they are, but because women do them, because of their adjacency to women, because women are stupid and terrible, and so is everything we do. And for us to succeed at something a man does,

is insulting to him, and for a man to have to do something we succeed, succeed at is also insulting to him. It's what I learned from growing up in the world as it's been to this point. And the point I would like to close on is that women don't do these things because they're the only jobs left to us because we're inferior. We do it because we're going to survive and because we're building the structures that are keeping everyone's lives going, not just right now, but in the future. And the apocalypse is not going to look. like a road race through a desert. It's going to look like agriculture. So get your loom.

And small neighborhoods. Yep. Thank you so much for being with us. It's always just, I always have the best time when you come on. Me too. Oh, and people should see you in the Martha Stewart documentary. Oh, that's right. Yes, I'm on TV. Where can people watch that? You can see it, I believe. It's a CNN documentary and I think you can find it now on Hulu. And I think it might be on HBO Max for reasons I don't fully understand, but I gather that this is the case. So hard to keep track of all the things. But that was a super fun experience. And I wore eyeliner, which I never do. And that was pretty fun. So tune in.

Too did. Yeah. Take comfort wherever you can. It doesn't matter what you enjoy for entertainment as long as you remember that your life is enough as long as it makes you happy, no matter how it looks. And for the love of God, don't drink raw milk. Please don't drink raw milk. Please embrace pasteurization. That was beautiful. Yeah.

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Sarah Archer for being an amazing guest as always. We also have a link to a substack piece that Sarah wrote to go along with this episode. We hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for editing help from Taj Easton. And thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for producing.

That's our episode. We'll see you in two weeks.