Nostalgia for a bygone gender regime is more than a weird social media trend. It reflects larger system pressures — on elites facing technological disruption that might generate social unrest, and on ordinary women buckling under the weight of modern work.
Women’s magazines, once replete with arcane rules for female submission, have evolved beyond recognition since the publication of Betty Friedan’s feminist classic The Feminine Mystique. Now twenty-first-century feminists look on with horror as self-styled “tradwives” fill their shoes with advice on marriage (“As traditional wives, we are called to honour and uplift our husbands, not tear them down”) and work (“There’s nothing wrong with getting a little job, maybe doing date-night babysitting”).
Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee sees the tradwife phenomenon as more than just a weird social media trend. Faddish nostalgia for a romanticized bygone gender regime reflects larger system pressures — both on elites, who are staring down major economic changes with the potential to generate mass unrest, and on ordinary women, who are eager to escape the grinding dual expectations of exploitative work and unsupported caregiving.
Kristen Ghodsee is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Everyday Utopia, and many other books, and chairs the Russian and East European studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing on her research on the gendered dimensions of Eastern European socialism and the transition to capitalism, she spoke with Jacobin‘s Meagan Day about how traditional gender roles have been used to manage economic shocks, the social uses of patriarchal authority, and how women’s real dissatisfaction with poor working conditions (paid and unpaid)…
Auteur: Kristen R. Ghodsee
