This week on the Wheelhouse, Tradwives Theyre so 1950sor ARE THEY?

For Connecticut Public, Im Frankie Graziano.

This is the Wheelhouse, the show that connects politics to the people.

We got your weekly dose of politics in Connecticut and beyond right here!

Tradwifery is all over social media reels of influencers like Nara Smith, Hannah Neeleman, and Estee Williams rejecting a 9 to 5 and returning to historically traditional family roles where women tend to children, the home, and their husbands.

This social media phenomenon has garnered lots of criticism and lots of intrigue.

Today, we'll unpack this lifestyle and what it says about politics today.

Dig into some of that nuance.

Joining me today is Jessica Grose, a New York Times opinion writer who covers family policy and pop culture.

She is the author of “Screaming on The Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood,” and two novels “Soulmates” and “Sad Desk Salad.” Jessica, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So grateful to have you here as well.

Micah English, a PhD candidate in American politics at Yale University.

Her research focuses on the multi racial right movements.

Micah, so great to have you here.

Thanks so much for having me.

Carrie Baker is the Chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College.

She also co-founded and co-directed the Five College Certificate in Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Program.

Contributing editor and regular writer for Ms.

Magazine.

Carrie, thank you for joining The Wheelhouse!

Great to be here.

This is an all star panel.

We really appreciate having you all in here.

As I said, we'd like to dig into nuance today.

Something Jessica has helped us with tremendously over the years.

For listeners who haven't seen this trend on their social media feeds.

How would you describe trad wives.

A trad wife, as someone who lives in a bucolic space?

She is projecting and acting out domesticity and an old fashioned ideal of domesticity.

That perhaps was never true.

But I think my fellow panelists will get to the history of that.

And she's a businesswoman, so she is acting out, cooking, cleaning, taking care of children.

Often the most famous ones already come from wealth.

So it's more of a social media creation and then a mainstream media coverage of this social media creation that I think are real phenomenon.

And I think there that the, the real key there is the significance of followers, the significant amount of followers that they have.

But you've pointed out that viewership does not equate with endorsement.

Can you expand on that?

Absolutely.

So one thing to know is we have no idea how YouTube, how TikTok calculate a view is a one second of viewership.

Is it two seconds?

Is that, you know, the comment engagement?

We don't know if it's human, if it's bot.

We don't know if people watching it are saying, I find this aspirational or it's rubbernecking or it's hate watching.

So just when you hear, oh, this video got 10 million views, what that actually means isn't clear.

And I think the idea that the typical woman in her 20s and 30s in America, wants to live on a farm and have 8 to 9 children.

There is zero data to support that notion.

So for the people watching these child lives perform this domesticity, are doing it for other reasons and necessarily desiring to live that life themselves.

Rubbernecking.

Hate watching.

Oh, that sounds very American to me.

Speaking of American politics and, sort of the American political scene, Micah, where two women who identify as trad wives, according to your research, typically fall in the areas of political leanings and religious affiliation.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So as Jessica's, described, these women are really taking the esthetics of homemaking, and, and making it seem, like it's natural for women to have this order of being at home and cooking and having a strong husband and having well-behaved kids.

It makes this, hierarchy seem very normal.

How I end a lot of these, women have originated in white conservative and, like, white nationalist spaces.

But my research really looks at the multi-racial diffusion of these messages.

And there is actually beyond Nora Smith, a lot of women of color who both participate in the trad wife movement and are also fans of these women and aspire to be like them.

So while we might assume it is a largely white, conservative Christian following, it's actually more diverse than that.

And these appeals can be racialized, and make, very different, and almost invisible, these types of appeals to women of color because we don't have the frameworks, to recognize them as such.

I'd like to dig into some numbers if we can really quickly.

NBC news surveyed Gen Z voters ages 18 to 29.

Something stood out to me in those findings when asked about how they define success.

Gen Z men who voted for Trump at least according to the survey, having children as number one.

Whereas Gen Z women who voted for Trump ranked it sixth.

Their first choice for success was actually financial independence.

Is there something to be said there about how young men are viewing family and this idea of trad wives?

Oh, absolutely.

Part of my research also thinks about, how men of color, are a part of these online appeals.

Because this is all the drag movement is a part of this bigger effort to rehabilitate patriarchy.

As I said, to make these traditional gender hierarchies feel like natural, but, like, immoral and liberating.

So the way that men of color are being invited to this are very different.

It's a politics of grievance and control so that they can reclaim dignity in a society, as you said, that has left many of them economically and socially insecure.

And this also applies to women, to, woman, particularly women of color, often end up in low income, low wage jobs, and have often performed this type of domestic service work that's very unpaid and have a lot of economic exhaustion.

Because of this racialized labor.

So this fantasy of rest and domestic stability and male protection, could really offer a sense of relief and safety that the market and the state have, quite frankly, failed to provide, for decades.

According to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, carry over 200,000 women between January and August of this year have exited the workforce.

What can those numbers tell us?

And what do we know about what these women are doing, if anything?

Yeah.

So actually, the numbers are even higher now.

The current estimate is between 338 and 448,000 women have left the workforce in 2025.

It's the steepest decline for young mothers in 40 years.

You know, the primary driver is soaring childcare costs.

It costs between 13 and $18,000 per child per year.

Infant care is $22,000.

The Trump administration is cutting Head Start, which is a program for low income families, for childcare.

You know, we have to think about the bigger context.

Donald Trump is on a mission to make America great again, to send women back to the 1950s.

I think this cultural phenomenon, you know, coming up on social media is a reflection or a reverberation of that.

The reality is the workplace has never accommodated women, particularly working mothers.

We don't really one of the only countries in the world that fails to provide paid parental leave.

We are one of the few countries in the world that fails to provide a robust network of childcare.

And so, you know, as long as women act like men, they can fully participate in the workplace.

But there are very few supports, either sponsored by employers or the government.

And so women are sick and tired of it and they're leaving the workplace.

And the problem is, is that it's just not feasible for a family of two to live on one income, a normal family of two.

You know, these influencers are all, you know, like Neeleman is married to the son of the founder and, JetBlue.

I mean, these are performances that are happening.

This isn't reality.

And the thing I worry about is that if women are inspired to leave the workplace, it's going to make them financially vulnerable.

It's going to increase the likelihood that they'll end up in poverty and that their children will end up in poverty.

And the fact of the matter is, a large percentage of children are growing up in single parent families where it's not an option to leave the workforce.

We need to do more in this country to support young families, new mothers and children.

Quite frankly, we have one of the highest poverty rates in the developed world, and so we have so far fallen behind and I think this cultural phenomenon that is a reaction to the kind of situation that we put young people and young parents in, in this country.

During the professor's, very impassioned delivery there.

I was I turned into a bobble head.

Because what we're seeing now is such a sharp contrast to what we learned during the pandemic.

And at least experts that we've had on the show have said that, workplaces have understood that they really need to support families and, help pay for childcare because of the high costs of childcare.

But what's happening in 2025 seems to be a departure from that.

And I will depart, just for a second to, Jessica here, we're seeing women frame a return to domestic life as an escape from the pressure cooker of modern work, culture and individualism.

What does that tell us about how women are feeling in America right now?

I find the entire just that framing to be a trap.

Want you to spend time with your children shouldn't be politicized, preferring to spend time with your children than at a job at any point shouldn't be left coded or right coded.

We make choices when we have the ability to make choices, and too many people don't have any choice in whether they're working or they're staying home.

But let's say, all things being equal, you have a choice.

I don't think that the framework of feminist or un feminist or left or right is appropriate because men also like to spend time with their children.

I wrote a piece, several months ago about how millennial men are spending more time with their children since the pandemic, and the fact that we don't have granular enough detail to know this for sure.

But the speculation was they spent more time with their children in that pandemic year, and they liked it.

They preferred spending those extra hours when they could be working, spending time with their families.

So again, I sort of just object to the framework that we're putting these things against each other because they don't necessarily have to be pitted against each other.

And I saw a conservative commentator who was against paying for childcare, saying no one wants to send their kid to daycare at six weeks.

And I was like, yeah, no one does want to send their kid to daycare at six weeks.

And many of them are doing it because they have no other choice.

In most developed countries, women have a year of paid parental leave, and so there's no need for infant care because they've structured society in a way, that allows families to do both and to integrate both into their lives in a holistic way.

So, sorry to turn the question around on you.

I just again, no, I. Think you're getting to the heart of it, which is that there's the there's the framing, there's the framing, and then there's the people that are framing it, I guess.

And and so I think.

That's what I'm trying to focus.

So is the, the people that are politicizing it.

Is there a connection to maybe rehabilitating the patriarchy or project 2025 even?

Yeah, I mean, project 25 has been very, very clear about what they think women's appropriate roles are.

And, you know, as you cited in those statistics, and as my fellow panelists pointed out, there is very little evidence that young women in particular don't want to be financially solvent on their own.

Even women who voted for Trump, as you point out.

I don't think we are going to go back to a time where most women, even if it is a relief to not have to both work and take care of children, want to put all their eggs in the basket of a man?

What is the cliche?

A man is not a plan.

I think we've all learned that the hard way.

I'm lolling at that.

Alex Clark, a wellness podcaster highly influential in the conservative circle, Micah is advocating for more people to consume farm to table organic food and clean natural wellness products.

Sometimes when I hear something like that, as somebody like myself who's overweight, I feel like that's a that's a big, finger pointing in my direction.

Similarly, social media trad wives are shown in videos homeschooling children, producing their own food, maybe making the soap, creating their own cleaning products.

Is there any tie to the Maha movement make America healthy again?

Oh, absolutely.

Part of my research has taken us to a turning point, and a lot of these other conservative events.

The first time I went to Turning Point, there was a room, and there were a ton of young women standing outside the room.

So excited you would think it was a Taylor Swift, signing or something.

And it was like, oh, they were all lined up to see Alex Clarke, and I went in and sat on the panel.

We've also listened to a lot of her work and her podcast, and the lot, although a lot of this content, as we've pointed out, seems apolitical.

In fact, there are huge political stakes for what they're talking about.

And the MAGA movement has made explicit attempts to reach out to these wellness influencers and have really created a thriving online ecosystem that creates this onramp to conservatism.

That, again, doesn't seem political at first, but as we've pointed out throughout this conversation, it really sanitizes the patriarchy.

And it makes male authority seem benevolent or even healing for women.

It shifts accountability.

So it blames women's independence for social breakdown rather than, you know, structural racism or an economic inequality.

And it also really creates effective distance, between like, good woman and bad woman and really preempts feminist solidarity.

So although watching this wellness content and saying, well, I'm going to I'm going to eat healthy, I'm going to stop using toxic pans and whatnot, and like, I'm going to try and create my own sunscreen, even though that is definitely unhealthy and doesn't seem, you know, maybe super political at first, it really lead to a lot of people down these rabbit holes that then leads them to these extreme views.

And really down the line leads them to voting for the right or supporting different figures.

So I think it's really important to pay attention to how these like, subtle, seemingly apolitical trends actually are politicizing.

A lot of folks.

In recent years carry reproductive rights have been rolled back, HIPAA privacy rule amendments were vacated.

Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, are being defunded.

Carrie, where does this fit into the context of the trad wife phenomenon?

Yeah, it's very tightly connected.

Earlier you mentioned project 2025.

This was a Christian nationalist document produced by the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative right wing think tank, and it very much envisions and actually explicitly says that people should be, engaged in biblical marriage, that public policy should support biblical marriage, or what they mean by that is heterosexual marriage that is complementary in which means a male breadwinner and a submissive domestic wife.

And they have numerous policies in there to enforce this vision.

Things like removing protections against sex discrimination in the workplace, reducing access to childcare, reducing access to the social safety net that allows young women who become mothers to support and feed their children.

They want to try to push women into heterosexual marriages and and then keep women at home in those marriages to produce children.

And this is very much tied to white supremacy.

The fact of the matter is, the number of white people in the United States is decreasing, and the kind of great replacement theory MAGA folks are very concerned about that.

They're very concerned that white people are losing political power.

And so they're really leaning into this idea that white women in particular need to go home, produce babies, to create more white voters.

Quite frankly.

And with regard to reproductive rights, they are trying to ban abortion nationwide.

They're trying to ban contraception nationwide.

They just defunded Planned Parenthood, which is the major provider of contraception and reproductive health care for low income women.

They are restricting what Medicaid can cover as far as reproductive health care.

And again, it's all with the goal of I think and I think the scholarship shows this, that they want to push white women to have more babies so that they can maintain white supremacy.

And going back to Maha, what they're they're trying to stigmatize the birth control pill, and they're pushing what's called fertility awareness, which is, you know, we used to call it natural family planning, which it's basically just abstinence.

It's determining when you're fertile and not having sex during fertility.

And this is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control.

But it very much ties into this sort of do it yourself natural.

Movement.

And it's just been interesting to me how the right wing has co-opted the natural food movement and the local food movement to weaponize it for its political agenda.

You're catching me right now on my screen, adding biblical marriage.

And, I think it's complementary.

And.

Or what?

What was the word there to my compliment?

Complimentary and to my, dog whistle buzzword phrases that I've been, And it's a biological male and biological female.

Yes.

That's where they those go from Connecticut public.

This is the Wheelhouse.

I'm Frankie Graziano after the break.

More on how the trad wife phenomenon fits into our politics today.

We're going to be right back with more Wheelhouse.

Stay tuned.

This is the Wheelhouse from Connecticut Public Radio.

I'm Frankie Graziano as the triad wife phenomenon found its way to your social media feed.

This hour, we'll explore what these homesteading and 1950s nostalgic figures say about our politics today.

Maybe I should do that in my Casey Kasem voice.

Still with me Jessica Grose, author and opinion writer at the New York Times.

Mike, an English PhD candidate at Yale University.

And Kerry Baker, chair of the program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College.

Kerry.

You get the first question in this segment in the trad wife trend, there's some nostalgia for a past time period.

Some influencers even dress in vintage clothing.

I'm thinking about S.T.

Williams here as one of the folks.

What time period are they harkening back to?

Why?

You know, it's really a mish mash.

It's a mythical time period.

Some of it's like, you know, early 19th century prairie life, some of it is 1950s, post-World War two, women going back to the home to produce babies to replace the men killed in the war.

It's really anachronistic, you know, when Trump says Make America Great again, you know, it's like the past.

It's a mythical past.

It's not a reality.

You know, the fact of the matter is, we live in a country where women have always had to work to maintain families.

You know, after we shifted out of an agricultural economy, you know, women worked on farms, but after that, women worked in factories.

And today women work in all kinds of workplaces.

And this this idea that, you know, women are have to leave the workforce to be proper women or to be successful women is is not a reality.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, the feasible bility of survival on one income is more of a challenge now than ever before due to rising costs of housing, food, education and childcare.

And, you know, despite this reality, you know, a West Virginia school board member, said that girls should be taught to forgo college for motherhood.

You know, it's an absurd idea.

Families can't live on one income today.

It's really this mythical idea that women can go and you know that they'll find a man who can support them in the current economy, on one economy, on one salary is, you know, it's dangerous for women and it makes women economic vulnerable, and it makes their children economically vulnerable.

And in addition, it makes them more vulnerable to domestic violence.

Since women have been leaving the workforce in 2025, the rates of domestic violence have been going up.

And the fact of the matter is, if women are economically vulnerable, is their dependent on their partner's income, they can't leave abusive marriages.

And that's something that really concerns me.

These outcomes are very important to consider.

And that's what we're doing.

This whole show I just want to do, go back, to asking about, what we've seen in history because I think you hit on something we want to ask you in terms of the origins of what's happening now, you talked about post-World War Two and people dying in the war.

That seems like a very traumatic event.

What sort of the trauma associated with the 2000s, the 20 tens and 2020s?

Any of you can answer this?

Really?

That's kind of causing, folks to maybe consider, a big lifestyle change, I guess.

I mean, I think you can sort of point to any number of things.

Obviously, the pandemic, I think is upstream of so many consequences that we're seeing today and that we have sort of memory of old, in terms of a lot of social issues that are popping up.

And, you know, first and foremost, I think people's inability to to talk to each other, and a lot of sort of outburst and behavior and rancor, so I think that's one thread, another thread is increasing haves and have nots, economic insecurity for, I would say, the bottom 50% top, you know, 10 to 25% doing pretty well has been doing pretty well.

But those gains have not been equally distributed to everybody.

And so I think work has gotten worse, demonstrably worse for a lot of people.

I think technology has a role to play.

I mean, I've written numerous times about the speed technology has moved in the past, you know, 15 to 20 years, first with social media and then with AI.

Has been profoundly destabilizing.

And I think we are going to continue to see the social fabric destabilized as AI becomes even more ubiquitous.

And companies are in this weird paralysis because they don't know exactly how much is it going to, when is it going to be a bubble?

Is it going to destroy us all?

I don't know, and I think that makes people very nervous.

And in moments like this, which again, coming out of the pandemic, major technological changes, some economic instability, people have a familiar idea of what family life ideally is and should be and may cling to that.

Micah has chosen an interesting career path and will be in some of the places where some of this where some of these things are boiling up, as Jessica is kind of alluding to, we talked about, being at a turning point, speaking engagement.

And now as well, you've been to multiple rallies and events for places like moms for Liberty.

Can you talk more about messaging at those events and some of the things that people are saying and what's so effective?

Yeah, absolutely.

So part of the reason that we decided to go to these events, is because, quite frankly, like when I started studying this, I had a lot of assumptions about people of color who would join the right, and I assumed that they were misguided.

I assumed that they, were being lied to, that they wanted to be white, and that they just didn't care about things like racism.

But going to these events and talking to people and actually seeing what has drawn them there has, been both humbling and quite informative.

And I think that progressives who want to counter, the stuff that is happening on need to be on the ground and actually speaking to these people and seeing what's, drawing them to these events.

So I went to the moms for Liberty, annual summit last month in Orlando.

And although racism and sexism and transphobia certainly are elements of this stuff that they're saying, it's actually not a central part of most of the appeals that they are making.

What they are talking about is they're bringing people they're they're saying the same things that we're talking about.

There's all this trauma.

There are all these impacts of neoliberalism that people are feeling in a very real way.

They're naming this and they're saying, but the issue is that, you know, your school board is letting your kids read these books.

So we're going to give you a script, that you can type into I and that you can just send out any time that you think there might be a book, or you can use this AI tool to scan your child's library and see what might be there.

So they are naming very real problems.

They're narrating them in very emotionally effective ways.

And then they're offering solutions that are actually solutions, that there are things that bring people together and offer them a sense of belonging and home.

In their own way.

They're sort of reaching out to these people.

It sounds like, is this idea of retreating to a homestead or this kind of individualistic lifestyle something conservatives are especially drawn to, like, what's the deal with the with the homesteading?

Yeah.

I don't know if it's something that conservatives are especially drawn to, but as my fellow panelists have talked about, we're in this era of increasing social isolation.

And I think this is particularly being felt so young among young people.

But it's also being felt, among across all age groups.

And because of this, I think that some people are drawn more to a politics of solidarity, but that is because of the appeals that are being made to them.

That is because of the groups that are inviting them in.

But if they hear an appeal from a group on the right that is offering them this more individualistic framework, first, and they feel like they're being listened to there and heard more there than I have seen.

Why that would be more appealing than, a group on the left that is saying like, oh, we, we don't necessarily have like a home for you, but we do have like a policy brief or something like that, which is something I feel like I often encounter.

So I think they're really great at creating this idea of like, you can be an individual, but you can also be at home here.

So it's I think it's less what people are drawn to and more the fact that they have figured out to make appeals more effectively in this socially isolated political world that we currently live in.

Jessica, we sort of looked at a survey and took sort of a cursory look at what young men are thinking and, and maybe what some of them are saying about a home making wife.

And when that being compelling, you talked about Jen's, Gen Z era and millennial fathers, I guess, earlier and one thing that stuck to me was, you were talking about, being a millennial dad during Covid life, and that's something that I did.

And I learned at that point that you have to sometimes say no.

And you can actually say no at work and take care of your kids instead of pay attention to your family.

So that was very illuminating for me.

What can you tell me about other millennial dads?

Because they're sort of not parenting the same way that my dad did.

I, you know, look, parenting is one of the most intimate things you can do.

And it is I never want to sort of make blanket assessments.

But when you look at the American time, you survey, millennial men are spending more time with their children than any previous generation has spent.

And those hours keep increasing.

Gen Z is and, most of them are not parents.

Yeah, some of them are.

So it sort of remains to be seen.

And I think that, again, can be it doesn't necessarily have to be left or right wing coded.

I think also when you see a lot of these surveys that suggest that, Gen Z's ideal partnership would be one where their spouse stays home.

I would like to ask them in ten years when they actually have children and they see how much a mortgage costs, there is a lot of, you know, in surveys, we're talking about our fantasies and what comforts us.

And so I think most people I get regard ideas of political background have practicalities that they have to deal with day to day and actually enjoy spending time with their children.

I can't say that enough.

I, I just got so sad when the framework is that work is great, work is ideal.

We should all be working all the time and spending time with your children is only for vulnerable, weak losers.

That's a terrible framework.

And it's anti-women because women tend to do that work.

And it doesn't really respect everybody's reality where, you know, we love our children.

Do we want to spend 24 hours a day with them?

I don't, but, you know, it's it just I, I don't want to get into, a, a rhetoric where we forget that because, of course, women being able to support themselves and earning their own money is really, really important for their safety and for their power in this, in the system that exists.

I'm a realist.

But I think it obscures the fact that we all get one life to live and how we would like to spend every hour of every day, isn't necessarily maximizing our capital.

Kerry, can I have you weigh in here?

Because this is very important.

It is.

It does come down to the framing and how we talk about these things.

I'm coming at this from trying to pay attention to this, because a lot of people are hearing this, particularly on and I'm seeing a lot of this stuff on Facebook.

I just like Mike.

I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

And I like to, look around and try to understand, what's happening out there.

So there are some people that, are engaging in this and believe it or not, there are some already some Gen Z families out there that are, already considering what to do in their life as well.

So help me expand upon what Jessica just talked about too, with people trying to, I guess, spend some more time at home and then what social media offers them and the phone offers them that may distract them from that.

I guess I would just say that I think to pull back and think about the broader context, you know, and I think about the authors of project 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation.

There is an attempt to try to remove the social safety net, to jail more money to the most wealthy, to drop the standard wages.

And that is what is driven the need for two incomes and the need and the sort of hairiness that we've talked about.

The division between having to rush home and take care of your children and then rush back to your job and maybe work 2 or 3 jobs.

I mean, the heart of the matter is that American capitalism has failed us, and that the American government has failed us.

They have not created a sustainable economy that supports all people.

It is the economy.

It's almost like the late 19th century.

The Gilded Age, you know, and Trump is, is is acting this by tearing down the the east wing and creating a ballroom and having a Great Gatsby party at Mar-A-Lago.

I mean, more and more money is funneled up to not even the top 25%, but that not even the top 1%.

It's really the top point, 1%.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the US population, especially children, are, getting poorer and poorer.

And, you know, they're about to gut our medical system with this, you know, with the Democrats now joining the Republicans to pass this reconciliation budget, our health care costs are going to go up.

People are going to lose health care.

You know, I could just go on and on in the ways in which wealth inequality has just shot through the roof, particularly really, since Reagan, but particularly during the Trump era.

And, you know, when and I think that what we're seeing with the travel phenomena is almost like people are trying to escape that reality and get into this alternative reality where life isn't like it really is until we all come together and we demand that our government and our employee employers do better, are fairer.

We're all going to suffer and children the most.

Trump and many Republicans are blamed for this sort of rehabilitating the patriarchy.

And what's happening, with trying to return women to the home and not necessarily to the workplace, but something you hit on there that's very important about the government there, Kerry, is that when I talk to, people that are in the industry, in the child care industry, I talked to Georgia Goldman, who is somebody from the New Haven, Connecticut area.

She has always talked about all lawmakers, particularly men, male lawmakers that just didn't understand the issue, as she has tried for years to lobby them on the importance of child care.

So that is something where men, particularly men in our government, have failed, in that regard, at least from talking to people in the industry from Connecticut Public Radio.

This is the Wheelhouse.

I'm Frankie Graziano.

After the break, the real life effect of the trad wife trend, who's actually affected and has social media blown this trend out of proportion?

Stick with us.

Know.

More.

This is the Wheelhouse from Connecticut Public Radio.

I'm Frankie Graziano.

This hour, we're sort of cracking the code on the trad wife phenomenon.

Still with us?

Jessica Grose, author and opinion writer at the New York Times.

Micah English, a PhD candidate at Yale University.

And Kerry Baker, chair of the program for the Study of Women, gender, and Sexuality at Smith College.

Jessica, we've established that the trad wife phenomenon isn't, really a lifestyle that really is is is certainly common.

It's not necessarily common.

You've also called it an illusion, but what are some of the implications of this type of fad?

Who's most impacted by it?

Well, I think men are most impacted because this is a very appealing fantasy for them particularly.

They get to go off and kind of do whatever they want while someone else is managing, all of the domestic labor and coming home looking beautiful and poised and, you know, it's it's an idea of partnership that I think, is very retro and fantastical.

But, it's something that I think is appealing to some proportion of men and obviously some proportion of women.

You know, there always be people who want to live their lives in a very conservative, traditional way.

And, you know, that's we live in a free country.

And, and that that's always going to be an aspect of any society.

But I think the idea that it is wildly, popular or aspirational to most young people, period, I think is just there's no data to support that.

Most young people want to live in cities.

Again, very well documented.

Most young people, are not rushing to get married or desiring to get married in their early 20s.

I mean, when you look at the statistics, most people say that they still want to get married, they still want to have children.

But when that happening, if you want to have a child, wife, number of children, you got to be getting started really young.

So I think that sort of, old fashioned trajectory, is permanently out of fashion for the majority of America.

It's not 2 or 2 and a half kids.

You said earlier it might be eight, nine.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think the.

Most popular child I have a lot of children and again, is they want to have a ton of children.

That's great for them.

When I have a fantasy of my life, it is not that my alternative fantasy is in Paris, you know, it's just.

It's.

Not on the farm with the cows and the chickens.

So.

Gary, what about you?

Who do you see as most impacted?

Maybe you're saying families might be most impacted by this, particularly, lower socioeconomic, folks.

So I ask my students who are, you know, college age students, what do you think of this travel phenomenon?

And they they actually think a lot of it is satirical, and it's actually making fun of trad wives.

At least people like Nora Smith.

I think it varies depending on the character.

They said that primarily the audience is tweens, like 13, 14, 15 year old girls.

And I kind of parallel it to like back in our day, the obsession with Cinderella or or the life that, you know, remember the life of the rich and famous programs.

I mean, I do think there's there's sort of Robin voyeurism or as somebody said, a rage baiting, this idea that you kind of this voyeuristic looking into this other life that's unachievable and kind of absurd and you kind of you want it, but you also hate it.

And so I again, I think it's more an entertainment phenomenon that a real phenomenon, although I, you know, the fact that it's arisen during, you know, in such a way during Trump's administration, although I think it's connected to social media as well.

I mean, I remember ten years ago, the front of us, I don't know, I think it was like Atlantic magazine with a travel case.

I mean, this comes up about every ten years, whenever there's sort of a retrenchment and a rise of conservativism there.

Historically, there's sort of a rise of, you know, women all need to go back home and have lots of babies.

And so I again, I, I don't take it all that seriously, although I do always worry about the impact on young women and the ways in which and that some of my students expressed this concern, the ways in which it might make them less ambitious, less, willing to work hard because of this dream that they might find a millionaire that will enable them to live on a farm and have eight kids.

And one thing, by the way, I do want to say is having eight kids is really dangerous.

And it's not good for your body.

It really isn't.

The reason fertility has gone down is, in part, is that it's really hard on your body to just have child after child, and you would never know that from looking at like, Hannah Neeleman, who, you know, a week after giving birth is back to her slim figure.

I mean, again, this is all mythical.

As the midterm elections approach, how might we see conservative politicians capitalize off of the intrigue surrounding trad wives and, more broadly, a return to traditional gender roles?

Maybe that's a question for Micah.

Oh, no.

Go ahead.

Jessica.

Sorry.

Oh, yeah, I. Just I don't think they're going to be able to.

I mean, especially because most of their families don't walk that walk.

I mean, I think often about J.D.

Vance, whose wife was, white, she worked at white shoe law firms, was a Supreme Court clerk, obviously an incredibly brilliant and powerful woman in her own right.

And and so they might preach all of this, but most of them, especially who are under 50, I would say, they're they're not living that reality.

And people aren't stupid and they can see that.

So I would I just don't think that it's going to be a real factor.

But Micah, I'm so sorry to step on.

Are you sure that you're not in a different borough?

Because that sounded very queens ask and that I maybe need to put NASA's ether under that.

Under that track on what you just said.

Micah.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

No worries.

Yeah.

So, no, I, I don't think they will be inviting Maurice Smith or Hannah Newman on to a stage of the RNC or anything like that.

But I do think that something important is that this content doesn't need to be factually true to be socially and politically powerful.

And these messages that, assert and like, reinforce the idea that men should have more control than women, really lead to a wider political environment where it seems natural for us to be electing these figures who purport these truths.

So I think that even though, again, they might not be explicitly drawn from it, it does just help support their wider political project, and make these hierarchies seem natural.

Kara, you get the last word here.

You talked about some of these themes.

These tropes could be potentially dangerous for people.

Do you see an end to this?

What's going to sort of maybe trigger its fall?

Or maybe it's resurrection or I guess, arise?

What do you think?

Reality?

I think the fact that, people will run up against the fact that they can't pay their mortgage on one income, that they can't raise children, on one income.

You know, Trump is not doing anything to enable families to pay their rent or feed their children.

And so I think that, you know, this can be the dream, but the reality is what you see when you go to the grocery store and try to buy eggs, or when you go, you know, and try to pay the rent or try to pay the mortgage and all of that, you know, I think will quickly dissipate these plans if in fact, anybody realistically has them.

I got time for one more thought here, Jessica, what do you hope people take away from this conversation?

I hope they take away that people are complicated and that when you see people espousing these really, really hilarious and strange lifestyles and purporting to be mainstream on social media, that there's probably a lot behind them that we're not seeing, as other panelists point out, you know, there's a lot of money in these families, to enable this beautiful imagery that we see.

But I also think, you know, Micah's observations about heart and the power of moms for Liberty and all of these movements is real, and we need to pay attention to that.

And what they're saying and what they're offering, and to provide a positive counter-narrative that isn't just about condemning them and and saying you're silly for wanting these things.

And I think that's really important for everybody to remember.

Micah, what's next for you?

What are you be covering next?

What you be paying attention to regarding this movement, or necessarily, I guess, multiracial, movements to the right.

Yeah.

So part of why we study this is because when you have multiracial messengers for these, policies that are, as the right wing, is moving to more conservative on these gendered and racialized issues, it really does benefit them to have people of color and women of color out there look at having these messages.

So we're going to look at what people are saying, in this next election, I'm really interested in studying like the black manosphere and how they make appeals to men of color in particular.

And this obviously has implications for all of us, and just for our democracy at large.

Because if more people are being recruited into these authoritarian projects, and it looks diverse, then it's even harder for us to counter that.

What a fantastic, dive into the nuance here today with the following.

We really appreciate that you all coming on the show.

Carrie Baker, chair of the program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College.

Carrie, thank you so much for joining The Wheelhouse.

Great to be here.

You've also been listening to Jessica Grose, a New York Times opinion writer and author of the book screaming on the Inside The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.

Jessica, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

And Micah English, a PhD candidate in American politics at Yale University.

Her research again focuses on the multiracial right movements.

Micah, thank you so much for coming here.

Thank you so much for having me.

This was great.

It was so great to have you all on this program.

You're all doing the Lord's work and covering this and the Lord's work and putting this all together was done by these long who produced the show today.

Thank you so much.

The fantastic program you put together, it was edited by Patrick Scahill, also produced and supervised by Chloe Wynn.

Our technical producer is Dylan Reyes.

A special thanks to test terrible Megan Fitzgerald, Connecticut Public Visuals team.

Our operations staff, we want to thank Megan Boone.

A fantastic job she did on this.

Bradley O'Connor.

Download the Wheelhouse anytime on your favorite podcast app.

I'm Frankie Graziano, this is the Wheelhouse.

Thank you for listening.

To.

Great to meet.