Reject Modernity, Retvrn To Tradition

Online "trads" are big liars

critical support for this based anticlerical dad. no jokes on the alt text because it breaks the image, sadly

My friends used to play a game where

We would pick a decade

We wished we could live in instead of this

I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists

And getting married off for the highest bid

Taylor Swift, “I Hate It Here”

Last week, I wrote a post about the girlboss feminism of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Now let’s move on to the other half of the modern dichotomy for women: the tradwife. What is a tradwife? Well, more or less, a woman who abandons “modern” gender roles, such as “working”, and instead takes a more traditional position: staying at home and doing chores such as cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. One example is Nara Smith, a Mormon woman and Taylor Russell lookalike notorious for her habit of cooking things such as Oreos from scratch. But are these traditional notions real?

Economic #Herstory

Did women use to stay at home? Kinda. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics was (among other things) about this topic: women working is in line with the historical experience, whereas women not working is what’s outside of the norm. Let’s explain

For a long time, most people worked in agriculture, and women had a high level of participation in the workforce since back then most production was done in the household. In fact, for the US, female labor force participation was only higher than in the modern era during the Revolutionary Era (aka the 1700s aka when everyone served in those powdered wigs), which was the most agrarian time in US history. This is true even for urban women, who worked at even higher rates comparatively.

However, industrialization made it so home life and work life were separate, and since men had more bargaining power outside the home (due to factors such as “being able to vote” and “being able to own property”), women’s attachment to the labor force changed. Female labor force participation declined throughout the 19th century, and by the 20th things changed: first, some women either had a career of their own or had a family (which was common in the Great Depression), and later women started working “jobs” (positions such as waitress, secretary, or clerk), which they quit after marriage. By the 50s and 60s, it was common to do the reverse: get married young, have kids, and get a “job” as an adult; women in the following generation developed a professional career and delayed motherhood, and ever since it’s been common to try to strike a balance.

It should be noted that, by the age of 50, women in the first 20 years of the 20th century had really different family lives than one might expect: 53% weren’t married by 30, and 32% were still single by 50, plus 50% bore no children. Additionally, “trad” women were capable of exerting significant influence: the Temperance Movement (i.e., the movement to restrict the sale of alcohol in the US) was powered by women’s social interactions through the telegraph. Even the “tradtastic” 1950s were still ruled by economic incentives: before the 60s and 70s, the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education, and sruveys found that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own.

So what changed? Firstly, the economy changed. Due to a variety of factors, the main employers of labor went from being goods-producing sectors such as manufacturing and construction to the services sector, which tends to demand more educated labor. Urbanization also played a role, since exposure to urban, working women has been shown to reduce sexist prejudices. At the same time, women achieved higher rates of education: first, women were allowed to receive the same (compulsory) schooling as men, and later they started enrolling in higher education institutions; by the 70s, there were more women than men studying in colleges and universities. Simply put, there was relative parity in human capital between the spouses, and it drastically increased the opportunity cost of having someone just as qualified as the breadwinner just siting around at home baking apple pies. Another factor that shifted the cost-benefit structure of labor force participation in favor of women working outside the house was the fact that common household appliances such as refrigerators, vacuums, and microwaves became cheap and accessible, which lowered the actual labor required at home and increased the benefits of higher labor market income.

In addition, there were a variety of social and cultural changes that shifted expectations of what women could and could not do - for instance, World War Two pushed women into the workforce, which raised male support of female employment for the next generation (due to the effect of having had a working mother). And legally, women getting the vote starting in the 1920s¹ marked a massive shift in US politics. But why would men give women the vote at all? Well, firstly, because women demanded that men let them vote; aditionally, while men desire their wives to have fewer rights, they also desire their daughters have more rights, and this is doubly so when these rights can increase the stock of human capital. Relevant, related political changes inclide the repeal of bars on married women working in the 1950s, equal pay legislation in the 1960s, or changes to “biopolitics” (lol) like the legalization of no-fault divorce, abortion, or the birth control pill.

Nara Smith’s Handmaid’s Tale

What are actual trad values, then? Not baking Oreos from scratch, I can tell you that. Is there anywhere on the planet that does, in fact, have these traditional gender roles? Yes, actually: the developing world. Let’s look at Egypt, one of the most patriarchal countries in the world (all statistics from this source): only 16% of women work outside the home, and 59% of Egyptians think men should have the final word on decisions in the home. Meanwhile, 90% of men and 70% of women say that “a woman should tolerate violence to keep the family together”, and 62% say a woman usually deserves such punishment from her family. Lastly, and most shockingly, a third of those surveyed say that honour-killings should go unpunished.

Someone with a good grip on both feminism and trad life is Argentinian writer Tamara Tenembaum: besides being associated with more feminist leaning groups and projects (she has a show about modern love and sex on Amazon Prime, based on a book of the same subject), she’d also grown up in the Orthodox Jewish community of Buenos Aires. Something she mentions quite often is that, having been around “real sexists” and “real trads”, that “trad” men in her circle don’t actually want trad society, and often come from educated and progressive milieus.

Actual trad societies, meanwhile, tend to be extraordinarily tightly knit and repressively conformist, something that the anti-feminist edgelords and provocateurs could never stomach. Tightly knit families and communities built around them, as mentioned above, are the cornerstone of these traditionalist communities - but have substantial drawbacks, both generally, and economically. In terms of money, these social arrangementsactually highly discourage innovation, both cultural, and economic - US states that banned cousin marriage are richer than those who didn’t, for instance. Western culture is largely not like this because of the role of the Catholic Church, which both expanded the scope of trust, and reduced the importance of kin. Additionally, educational attainment affects and warps perception of consangineous marriage: Turkish girls disapproved of the practice at higher rates after reforms that increased their schooling. Similarly, educating Mexican women resulted in higher chances of utilizing contraceptives during their first time. In cultures that have expectations that parents will take care of children, sex-selective abortions are common, in order to favor boys who will be able to provide for the elderly over girls who won’t have the headspace to care for them - but only if there aren’t pensions available. When Indian women received more rights to ownership and inheritance, intra-family marriage rates ballooned, in order to preserve the control of the men in the kin group over the assets.

Of course, the emphasis on marriage is both about securing the family as the nexus of society, and coercing free labor from women - and “trad marriage” overwhelmingly serves the purpose of bolstering men. In one such example, when Saudi women were first allowed to drive, their husbands responded by allowing them to do so, but curtailing their rights elsewhere - thus securing the man’s dominance. Similarly, Indian couples where the woman has higher employment prospects, education, or income than her husband have much higher rates of domestic violence - and even in Western countries, women partnered with men they outearn have higher chances of marrying them, and husbands outearned by their wives have higher chances of divorce and lower marriage satisfaction. Marriage being the main source of sustenance for women can only lead to violence: if Rwandan women are allowed to seek jobs, domestic violence rates decrease, since they leave their partners rather than endure a violent relationship.. Likewise, Swedish women who win the lottery run off to get divorced, but only if the marriage was unhappy or there were financial disparities between partners. On a different note, it’s not really true that women chase high earning men: overall, women in “hypergamous” societies tend to marry within their social stratum.

However, women’s value does play a role: women having more education, and thus higher earnings, also increases their value in cultures where it is common to pay “bride prices” to marry a woman - though female income and employment aren’t really enough to turn things around. Well, now it starts getting really dark. Sexual control over women, and an emphasis on female virginity until marriage are a core trad value. In cultures where men are absent from the home for long stretches, people show outlandishly conservative views, and extremely vicious practices such as female genital mutilation are commonplace - this is done in order to make sex excruciatingly painful, thus discouraging it. Similarly, bride prices are higher for women who’ve had the practice than for women who haven’t, pointing to how valuable female sexual submisison can be - and declines in genital mutilation usually accompany stronger scrutiny and child marriage, not progressive reforms or campaigns.

Why Nations Trad

As I mentioned above, Egypt is an extremely conservative country. But it’s also not always been that way: the Ancient Egyptians had an outsized share of women be part of the elites, and relatively recently, Egypt was a fairly modern society. So what happened? Why did Egypt “go trad”?

Well, plenty, but the long and short of it is a confluence of four factors: economic stagnation discrediting “forward-looking” regimes, the longstanding effects of Islamic culture, Saudi Arabia’s pernicious influence on (male) workers and in Egyptian religious life, and repression of feminist organizing as part of a generalized crackdown on activism. So it seems that there’s three main factors: economic stagnation, long-standing values, and activism. This is, in fact, somewhat similar to the debate over why men have become steadily less progressive (which is a bit mushily defined and not very straightforwardly true) across the world.

Let’s start with the economy. It’s the case, quite simply, that economic resentment breeds sexism: In Europe, there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexism. In European regions where unemployment has increased, men are more in agreement that women’s advancement and opportunities came at their expense. In China (another country with uniquely messy gender relations), men who scored higher on measures of economic deprivation also scored higher on measures of hostile sexism. And British men who grew up in high-deprivation, high-unemployment regions report feeling more hostile to feminist and progressive attitudes. In both the United States and Europe, rising economic inequality and slowing growth are linked to support of far-right parties. In Brazil (good Spanish writeup here), economic liberalization led to higher unemployment, which resulted in higher affiliation with pentecostal churches - which, in turn and coupled with tax policy, led to higher vote shares for far-right candidates. Joblessness, as a whole, is leading to economic resentment and to hostile sexism. Of course, the best known example is Nazi Germany: the NDSAP secured a larger vote share in cities more affected by financial failures, and districts more closely harmed by the Weimar austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in latter years.

Speaking of the Nazis, somewhat interestingly, Protestant regions of Germany showed more antisemitic ideas than Catholic ones, because Protestants directly competed with Jews, while Catholics were barred from doing so. This points to the longstanding effects of culture on behavior: patriarchal cultures systematically assign greater resources, standing, and status to men. One recent article by Tamara Tenembaum (in Spanish) links Beyonce’s Jolene cover to that one The Cut article about dating older men to a social turn against society having losers, of which antifeminist men are many: they reap none of the benefits of patriarchy, but still have to carry the burden of its destruction. When that status is threatened, backlash is born. Feminist marches in Spain, for instance, propped up support for far right parties among men. Roughly speaking, certain cultures allow for bigger changes in the political order than others - and certain religions, such as Islam, or certain forms of Christianity, allow for very little.

This is especially true for cultures that highly value collective harmony: feminist demands for equality might be considered too adversarial, considering status is zero-sum. One example of this phenomenon, of harmony being placed above individuality, are cults: the reason why more hardline religions are able to persist is that they make the strongest demands of their members, making them toe the harshest lines, which makes any attempt of breaking apart extraordinarily costly. Leaving the cult, or even speaking out, involves losing everything in your life - and it is “enforced” by family, by superiors, and by media. And even romantic love, a driver of gender equality of sorts, can be weaponized: both Korean and (religious) Jewish culture prize love that is fated or “meant to be”, and thus less disruptive to the social fabric. For example, Saudi husbands are actually overall fairly supportive of their wives working, but voice opposition in order to secure the approval of other men, while women are overall misinformed about their labor market outlook and the desires and aspirations of other women. Qataris express concern for women working, particularly in close proximity to men, mainly as a product of other people’s opinions of them. And in the US, single and “taken” women answer surveys about ambition similarly in private, but differently (more conservatively) in public, in order to not scare away potential boyfriends - it is social norms, not prejudice, are holding women back.

Lastly, let’s look at activism. Firstly, you have the “Positive” activism of Saudi Arabia, which is funding hardline fundamentalist religious institutions across the Middle East. Nepali migrants to the Persian Gulf, for instance, become more religious and somewhat more conservative upon return to Nepal. So Saudi Arabia’s misogynistic activism is playing the role of Andrew Tate, while nobody pushes back: most countries in Asia are dictatorships which strongly repressed female activism (unlike, for instance, Latin America). To use a counterexample, Kazakhstan is rather progressive on gender, owing partially to Stalin’s deportations of Protestants, which resulted in the locations they were sent to to become more socially liberal, and likewise, deportations of “enemies of the people” leading to more cosmopolitan attitudes. Contrarily, Saudi activism, economic decline, and a surge in interest in religious ideas, as well as tight-knit family groups pushing girls into conformity, has led to an explosion of religiosity and tyrannically misogynistic thought in Uzbekistan.

Conclusion

So, all in all, the paeans to “traditional women” are, unsurprisingly, full of it: women’s exit from the labor force was extremely historically contingent and outside the historical norm, whilst women’s return to it was motivated not by Woke DEI, but rather, by pure economic efficiency. Even if cavewives were maximizing utility subject to the budget constraint by weaving baskets, today’s tradwives are not.

It’s obviously not fair to say that Nara Smith and her ilk are all brainwashed cult members who want to mutilate all women’s vaginas, but also, they kind of are and do, in spirit only. What “trad” gender conservatives want to return to is not the actual past, but an imaginary version thereof, where their preferred (modern) gender and sexual hierarchies and norms are stringently observed.

Also shoutout to

Moira Donegan

’s piece about tradwives in Bookforum

1. Somewhat hilariously, after succeeding in passing the 19th amendment, suffragettes met both President Warren G. Harding… and his dog Laddie Boy