How the Tradwife Fantasy Delivered Women to Trump
If you have friends who are spiraling, Democracy in Retrograde is a great gift. It’s currently $20 on Amazon and $27 on Bookshop.
One of the things Republicans have known and invested in for a long time is the fact that political persuasion happens via more than just talking about policy.
Political persuasion is as much a science as a vibe, a subtle shift that happens when you aren’t paying attention. It’s pure and simple marketing.
While the Democrats have always tried to accomplish this by having Hollywood firmly in their corner, the Republicans have turned to influencers. And let’s be honest there are more eyeballs on influencers on the small screens that we hold in the palms of our hand than there are on most TV shows these days.
I wrote a Substack in July headlined “The Tradwives will win.” Check it out here.
You might have noticed more and more so-called #tradwives and #homesteading content in your feed in the past year. You may have seen it skyrocket in the past few months. This isn’t by accident. Many of these accounts have been boosted by conservative groups to try to promote the false nostalgia of women checking out of the workforce, checking back into the land and family life, and handing over all of their agency to their husbands.
“These posts are VERY persuasive. And it is easy as hell to fall down the rabbit hole of them,” Jo Piazza wrote in her Over the Influence newsletter this week.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with other millennial women about the pull of conservative wellness commentator Alex Clark - if you start watching her content you get pulled in. She’s a gateway to tradewifedom despite being an unmarried millennial like myself.
There's a strong element of nostalgia and romanticization of a past that never really existed. People imagining a return to a "simpler time," often overlook the historical realities and challenges of those eras. Growing your food so it’s healthier sounds great until you get cancer and can’t plant your crops, or there’s a drought, or you want to have some leisure time.
The lifestyle is presented as a solution to the problems of modern society and gender roles are viewed as a way to find stability and purpose. As Jo said, “ this, of course, is a fantasy.”
A fantasy, but a politically persuasive one. And I think it’s a key component of the GOP’s efforts to build their white woman voter base.
Brett Cooper is a 23 year old conservative commentator who rose to prominence for looking like the ‘girl version’ of the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. She now has a show with the Daily Wire, his conservative media company that has focused on creating online personality-driven content since 2015.
Brett also has a massive audience on socials, as an IG girlie I am one of her 1 million followers there. Her bio reads “professional yapper, aspiring farmer” (no capitals, very cute, very demure.) She recently posted a reel advertising a hair serum while checking on her chicken coop. She posted a thrift haul because “in Biden’s economy we can’t afford to be buying new things.” She posted a video clip of her cooking with audio talking about how “home cooking” has been declining since the 60’s. She wrote “falling in love with a man and wanting to cook for him 24/7” has helped her learn to cook.
Look - these are all things I would do, there’s nothing wrong with having chickens (so cute!!), nothing wrong with loving cooking (I do very much!), nothing wrong with wanting to build a home. The point is that these accounts use these things as persuasive tools to lead you down the primrose path of conservative policy.
Brett was recently on Lila Rose’s podcast (Lila Rose is *THE* anti-choice influencer) and said that women want exceptions to abortion bans because they are selfish and men “hate that.”
“Abortion is not just about the murdering of a life, like the values that have allowed that to be so prevalent I think are also the values that have caused this wedge. It’s the same premises of I am better than men, and I deserve more because I'm a woman and because I've been oppressed. I deserve exceptions. I deserve to have my way regardless of who it hurts because I'm a woman. It’s incredibly selfish. Incredibly narcissistic. Men hate that.”
They expressly connect the values they are trying to push with the political goals they are trying to achieve. On social media the #tradwife lifestyle looks beautiful and easy. (Effective for a medium that prioritizes aesthetics.) You get to give up your soul crushing office job and garden and run barefoot through a field surrounded by beautiful healthy children. It has been made to look so beautiful that the images have helped persuade women to vote against their own rights and well-being in the recent election.
Author of Momfluenced Sara Peterson said on her Substack:
“The proliferation of tradwives on social media is not a silly trend from which we can afford to look away. It’s not solely a marketing strategy to gain eyeballs and sell calico dresses. It’s an ideology steeped in internalized misogyny and repressive political goals. And the women peddling this ideology are very good at dressing subjugation and white male supremacy up in pretty bows to the millions of white women looking for a better way to live.”
Tradwife accounts are essentially commercials for conservative ideology and we would do well to call them out as such and to expose the capitalist intentions behind the majority of them. Because a lot of these women happen to be selling products as well.
This manipulation of women through a fantasy is nothing new. It’s just more prevalent and in our faces (in our hands) than ever before.
Propaganda about idealized visions of motherhood as resistance to the status quo, about the importance of the nuclear family, and surface level support for it has a long history.
In the 1950s, there was a push to get women back into the home after their surge in workforce participation during the war. Both the government and business interests manufactured campaigns to promote marriage and having kids as the key to the "American Dream."
From PBS’s American Experience:
“Embedded in the propaganda of the time was the idea that the nuclear family was what made Americans superior to the Communists. American propaganda showed the horrors of Communism in the lives of Russian women. They were shown dressed in gunnysacks, as they toiled in drab factories while their children were placed in cold, anonymous day care centers. In contrast to the "evils" of Communism, an image was promoted of American women, with their feminine hairdos and delicate dresses, tending to the hearth and home as they enjoyed the fruits of capitalism, democracy, and freedom.”
And while we can go back in history, we can also look at what is happening in Hungary right now..according to Open Democracy:
Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party uses social media to silence and undermine political opponents, especially women, through disinformation campaigns, online harassment and doxxing.
Women leaders and activists who stand up for human rights and champion democracy are also denigrated as “unqualified”, “stupid” and “unfit for office”, the report found. They are also accused of misappropriating public funds for personal gain or acting as “weak puppets” for powerful male leaders on the left.
There’s a fear of and resistance to what’s different from a hetero-normative society,” Hesterman said. “Orbán's party and their supporters want to instil fear in people by using [traditional] media and social media to spread propaganda really as a way to maintain power.”
Another reason it works is because the propaganda the tradwives and their homesteading cousins help to “solve” are real issues that are making American women miserable right now.
It is HARD to be a mother today, as Sara wrote:
“Every time the political establishment disrespects and erases maternal labor, disenfranchises mothers, fails to support mothers with legislation, and denies mothers safe schools and comprehensive maternal healthcare, there’s another side for them to turn to who’s ready to listen. And who believes in their political power.”
They claim to respect motherhood. They claim to help foster community and belonging. They are also the ones blocking paid leave, the child tax credit and more - creating the conditions that drive women into despair. And some of republicans are pushing to end no-fault divorce, which would ensconce women in marriages they can’t get out of.
Corporate America remains hostile to women and mothers. Trying to make a livin in the world right now can often feel like a nightmare. (Food and housing is expensive, wages have not rise along with the billionaire’s portfolios.) Our phones show us a never ending parade of rich people having things we can’t afford. People are miserable. Of course they are pining for an escape.
And the #trads are waiting with open arms. Reject the status quo they say, blow it all up. It doesn’t deserve you. And you know who will help do that? Trump.
The path to persuasion was anything but subtle, but the Democrats missed it completely. It can start as a spectrum. You come for the sourdough but hate the subjugation of women and slowly but surely more of the ideas infect your brain without you even knowing it and then it becomes a slippery slope.
So how are we going to get these women back? That’s a question for another day.
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I am one of your olds (upper end Gen X) and this post made me think of two things: first, there's a post on Tumblr about how to do crunchy/wellness lifestyle stuff while avoiding tradwife/pipeline to the right resources. I feel like maybe that's something useful to a lot of folks in this discussion.
Second, and I don't remember who said or wrote this, but it really stuck with me, as someone born and raised in Texas, but the gist of the comment was: these women don't want to be 1950s housewives, they want to be plantation mistresses. I.e., they don't want to do the hard work; they want to be Marie Antoinette playing at shepherding kinds of things, and look pretty doing it. That means someone else is doing the scutwork and that is part of the fantasy they're selling.
As a liberal millennial who happens to be a stay at home mom, I feel like the tradwife thing really gives me a bad name! I almost feel the need to prove to everyone I’m not one of them 😅