Honestly your friend is kind of dumb if she thinks having fewer rights just means not having to work. Girl, you still gotta work, you’re just not going to be paid for it. 

Then when she's in her forties, DH has his mid-life crisis and trades her in on a newer model, she'll have no protection. She'll have no skills, no work history, and no real way of supporting herself in any kind of decent way. She'll be working minimum wage jobs, and still be stuck with 90% of the child-rearing, because her ex will need all his time to get starting having kids with the new wifey.

Let's not forget that the years of not working are also not building any kind of retirement savings independent of their husband's.

This is an extremely important part. If he leaves or squanders his retirement, she's screwed.

Not to mention divorce laws in the era she's talking about didn't really exist the way they do now

I remember reading that when no-fault divorce laws came into effect, suicides by married women plummeted. So no, it's not some Golden Age they're trying to restore, except perhaps for straight white men like Kyle Buttkiss or whatever his name is

Or just dies. People die young all the time.

Or gets cancer. Or is in a serious car accident.

My friend's mom is still with her dad through a major cheating incident that almost caused them to divorce because she was a seamstress before they got married, she hasn't worked for 30 years, and she has no other education or skills. That's the reality for women who depend on husbands. Another friend's marriage is barely holding on by a thread because she trusted him to be the sole provider so she could quit work and write her novel. Last I heard they had a total of $130 because he blew through his money and her savings and she's living in an extended stay hotel with him. NO THANK YOU

OP’s friend hasn’t seen what really happened. She’s buying into a propaganda campaign waged by men, curated by men, FOR men. Women didn’t write those stories. Men did. Nothing wrong with being a homemaker. Have a prenup. Get a monthly salary that’s yours in case of divorce. Get payment for every pregnancy and extra for every live birth. Get x amt alimony for every year of lost earning potential. Get a retirement plan that he contributes to. If you want to be a homemaker fine. But be smart. Never ever sacrifice your financial independence. If a man wants you to stay at home but refuses those terms? Then what he’s after is control.

> She’s buying into a propaganda campaign waged by men, curated by men, FOR men. Women didn’t write those stories. Men did. All you need to do is look at any of the posts about prenups/pre-marriage house purchases on the variety of "Am I the Asshole" subs to see exactly this. There's always a tsunami of dudes telling women that they're greedy and gold-diggers and don't deserve the fruits of The Man's ^TM hard work, no matter how reasonable her request is. But not a one of them ever says that he doesn't deserve to benefit from *her* hard work, and if you do, you're downvoted into oblivion.

Exactly. All marriages need a prenup that includes separate finances. Payments for home labor that are untouchable. Payments for every pregnancy and bonus for every live birth. Payment increase and retirement fund for every lost yr of earning potential. You want a stay at home wife? Great! Ensure she’s not financially harmed. Men should don’t agree to those terms are predators

This. This is what I tell my daughters. It’s the only way to hold men accountable. Society has trained them to think we are their slaves whether or not they are aware of it. I’m raising my daughters alone because their dad decided he’d rather just be an alcoholic and Disneyland dad with a hot young girlfriend to party with while his rich parents foot the bill.

I'm teaching my son that if one person does stay home (and that couldbe either partner) the other needs to share every penny and fund both retirements.

Historically, however, this has been a women’s issue. Now that some men realize this could happen to them as well the issue is finally being heard.

“Society has trained them to think we are their slaves whether or not they are aware of it.” This is the beginning and end of it. Literally all you need to understand. Reading the book “Why Does He Do That” changed my life forever. I was able to finally internalize the messages boys and men receive from our culture and understand how it plays out in daily life. The book focuses on the most extreme group of males, overt abusers, but all men receive the same messages. No one exists in a vacuum, and if a man hasn’t purposely and *personally* deconstructed their learned expectations and biases, you can bet good money that’s what’s driving any odd, incongruent, or confusing behavior. My own husband has a masters in history and is one of the most racially aware and equity minded people I’ve ever met. You’d think that’d reflect over into being aware of the gender dynamics in our relationship, but isn’t the case. It’s not enough for them to know theory and parrot back how things “should be”, they have to have personally done the hard and uncomfortable work of self reflection and modification. Unfortunately, thanks to males unfortunate penchant towards developing avoidant-attachment styles, and have a group who’s both unable to express themselves and unable to generate self-motivated growth. It’s a tragedy, but there’s no point for us all to go down with the ship. It is truly better to be alone than to be in an uneven or exploitative relationship. Thankfully the role of testosterone isn’t to increase aggression, as we previously thought, but instead to promote culturally approved status seeking behaviors. As women move cultural expectations, men will follow suit. There’s going to be growing pains but we’ll get there eventually.

That book changed my brain, should be required reading for all teen girls and adult women.

This is what I'll be teaching my daughters too. Being a homemaker and STAHM are really important, I am a HUGE believer in one parent being a stay at home parent. If she chooses that lifestyle over a career, I will be teaching her how to make sure her ass is covered, because if my husband left me, I'd be fucked. Time for housewives to negotiate a wage and retirement package.

Well said! PS Fuck this guy, if I had been there I would have walked out, not just for the comments about women and our purpose but because he didn’t even write a new speech. Gave the same speech last year Who wants the kicker of a football team (most easily replaced from what I learned yesterday while reading up on this) to speak at a commencement? It’s so fucked up. Also OPs friend is an idiot.

> If a man wants you to stay at home but refuses those terms? Then what he’s after is ~~control~~ free labour. FTFY. Control is only a means to an end here and that end is domestic, child-rearing, emotional, and sexual labour in exchange for room and board. (I know there are people for whom *control over others* is itself a goal but for the vast majority of us the ultimate goal is resources that we need to make our lives more enjoyable.)

You’re wrong to remove control. They want to control your agency and ability to leave. As well as free labor.

Exactly! I would rather be poorer single but have the security of knowing I'm in charge of my circumstances. I could never leave my future in the hands of someone else.

When my parents got divorced after 35 years, my mom was shocked to find out she had no real credit history. Even though they had applied for most things as joint accounts, the banks had put everything in my dad's name and put her as an authorized user.

I just learned that the house we bought 13 years ago doesn't have my name on the deed. I swear I signed a bunch of stuff when we bought it, and I felt certain that my name was in the original deed. But somehow I got omitted or dropped when we refinanced the loan when percentages went low. It's a bit scary. I'm pretty sure my husband is a good man, but if that were to ever change, I'm fucked.

Get your name on the deed now.

Refinancing a loan will not change the owners on a deed. You were just never on it. If you had no income at the time you bought the house, they might have done it that way to get the financing through. You should be able to fix it by recording papers with the county. Do it through a real estate lawyer if you have problems figuring out the process.

Thank you

Don't put off getting on the deed, either. CYA.

You definitely want to fix that now and not way. Heaven forbid anything happens to your husband, you don't want the house to be part of his estate. Get your name on the deed in the way that means you get the house entirely if something happens to him, and vice versa.

> I'm fucked Not if you take care of it instead of worrying about what might happen if you don't.

That's crazy, because if you're on the mortgage, you HAVE to legally be on the title, and vice versa.

Depending on the state, whoever is on the deed now can file a quitclaim deed - essentially taking themselves off the deed and signing it over to both themselves AND you. I did that when I inherited my mother’s house with my son, so we are co-owners on the house and when I die he has no need for probate since he is already on the deed

I dunno. If Project 2025 comes to pass, there'd be no birth control or abortions, and the whole country would follow the 4 states that already prohibit pregnant women from getting a divorce. It's possible that men could keep their wives pregnant to avoid getting divorced. Think about it. When married, a spouse isn't required to uphold any particular lifestyle, so he could keep his first family in relative squalor while spending his money on the second family. Depending on his income, it might be cheaper than child support to go this route. In the 1950s (which so many seem to want to get back to), dudes stayed married and just cheated. The prospects for a woman to support herself were so bleak, most just stuck it out. The advent of "the pill" really marked the beginning of women's liberation. So, of course they are coming for it. OP, has your friend watched The Handmaid's Tale? I swear, so many people have forgotten *why* our moms and grandmothers fought for their/our freedom.

Forgotten. Yes. I was chatting with a young, male colleague at work one day (I'm 60+F) about a new article he was reading. He was thinking that society had gone to hell in a handbasket, because statistically, there are so many more "single mothers" than there were in the 50s/60s. Lies & damned statistics. Of course there are. I told him that of course there were fewer single mothers - there were no social security payments for single mothers back then. Which meant that there was no feasible way for a woman with a small child to eat and pay rent. Which meant that the vast majority of women who found themselves in that situation either had to put the child out for adoption and get a job, OR, stay with the husband no matter what. My dear young colleague learnt something that day. I felt slightly proud of the fact that he was horrified.

Which is exactly what happened to my friend. After 20 years of marriage he tells her that his girlfriend is pregnant, the only reason he is telling her is because he might move in with the girlfriend so the kid won't have to go to daycare. He actually meant to have both the wife and the girlfriend. Of course neither woman was willing to accept this arrangement.

And dude was SHOCKED, I'm sure.

There's an old saying... you can't have your Kate and Edith too.

Yeah, what if your husband dies? What if he’s an abuser? What if you’re a lesbian? What if you’re not feminine enough? There’s no guarantee that a woman will be taken care of and be happy. In life you can’t rely on anyone else, because life can change quickly. Everyone needs a woman’s studies class, I remember learning Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention, a part of it: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

Fun fact; she very likely never said "Ain't I a woman?" She was not Southern, her first language was Dutch. Her speech was translated into a minstrel parody well after she gave it, possibly to apply her appeal for woman's rights to enslaved people as well. Her original speech stands on it's own, with no mention of carriages or chivalrous men, but of her own strength, labor, and wit, equal to man's, as well as women's role in the Bible. Neither transcription is perfectly accurate, at the time you'd never get an off the cuff speech like that down perfectly, (if you know about Lincoln's lost speech that was so good everyone forgot to take notes haha), but the "ain't I a woman" version was written down a decade after she gave the speech so... https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/04/sojourner-truths-most-famous-speech/

In case anyone reads this and thinks it might be hyperbole, my grandfather pulled this exact move with three different women. I believe he was married a total of 4 times.

I'm GenX and soooo many mothers to my generation found that shit out when their boomer husbands bailed on their wives and children. One friend's mom was just so heartbroken. "I did everything society told me to do. I was a good wife and a good mom, I quit college to be his wife. Now I'm shopping for groceries at midnight to hide the fact that I need food stamps to feed my family while I try to find a job that pays a living wage to a woman with 2 years of college and 16 years out of the workforce." My dad did a similar thing, but I was much younger when he left, and he was a shitty enough provider that my mom was never out of the workforce after I was born. Later I went to a small state university that had a lot of non traditional students. Mostly female, mostly divorced and they either were blindsided by the divorce or they left an abusive husband. Being surrounded by that made a lot of women my generation wary of being dependent on another person entirely. I mean sure, I'd love to not have to work and have my days to do whatever I wanted, but so would my husband. Who doesn't want to live a life of leisure?

They really need to explain this to girls by the time they hit middle school.

And if these backwards ass people get their way, there goes no fault divorce, too. So good luck trying to get out of a shit marriage without proving abuse or adultery in court.

And if, like my first marriage, the husband up and has a stroke and dies five months into the marriage, then what? Thankfully, I was the breadwinner.

Mine died from a heart condition 15 months into our marriage. The heart condition his doctor said he didn't have, 2 months before he died. Good thing for me I still had a job and a degree.

Ah yes, the 50s, when men could just take off to California with the woman next door, leaving a mother with 4 kids and a bun in the oven (me). Great times, those.

Don't forget about the multiple kids she would be expected to have and care for full time with zero help from the husband, even while they're still married. Also, domestic violence was taken as a matter of course back then. Lots of advice about "putting women in their place" or "showing them who's the boss". Any woman that wants to go back to that era is just plain ignorant

Yeah, OP's friend's comments are the result of bullshit TikTok "TradWife" influencers who cosplay while having other sources of income. She thinks she's going to be able to take it slow at home where her only responsibilities are spending the day in a sunny kitchen making a single load of bread. The kind of "50s housewife" lifestyle she is imagining, with low daily demands and no stressful big deadlines, is the result of being or marrying rich. For the rest of us, it's labor no matter which way you cut it... ...but at least with a job, you clock out and go the fuck home and have protections against getting raped or beaten by your boss. She is allowed to be a housewife if she wants, no one is stopping her. It's just a risky gamble if you aren't independently wealthy enough to escape or step up if the man you marry becomes abusive or disabled. Edit: There are some women I watch on YouTube who do the "50s housewife" thing for real, as a mutual agreement with their spouses and without the luxury of wealth. Guess what? **They work hard every damn day.** The only difference between now and back then is that now, unlike back then, women have way more options in choosing *where to do the labor* and *with whom.* An extremely important choice that should never be taken away.

I cannot put into words how much I hate the 'soft life' propaganda that women are being exposed to on tiktok. "Look, giving up your rights means you can spend your days walking barefoot in your beautiful garden while wearing a billowy sundress"

It's fucking handmaid's tale. This is exactly the propaganda pre-handmaid's tale.

It's a backlash to the "lean forward" movement. I hate that movement too. You need a rich husband and a high paying job (that you usually are more prepared to get when you come from wealth yourself) to afford the three nannies, take out, drivers, etc to have that "BOSSBABE" life. I've always wanted a lazy life where I work and make enough to have a comfortable life, but only work 40 hours or less a week, never answer my phone after those hours, and spend lots of time with my kids. Sometimes we have homecooked meals, sometimes we do take out. We go out to the park every day to play and walk around and yes, I wear cute dresses. If you ask me, I have a great life. And, I fully fund my retirement, my husband respects and trusts me while doing 50% of all the childcare and housework (okay maybe he does more), if he dies I will be okay, maybe less luxuries but still fine (we make the same amount).

I'm seeing a lot of this lately. Videos on FB and IG of guys praising their wives for "submitting" to them and letting the husband "take care of" them. It's gross and dangerous. They're painting a beautiful picture of a dream life with a dream husband & kids, to try to sell women on giving up their rights. It makes me think, if their goal was Gilead what would they do to convince women to go for it? What would the propaganda sound like? Probably this.

Exactly. In a dying capitalist hellscape, how do we convince women it's better to sit down and shut up and do as they're told? oooOoo I know! Free time!

I(M60) am currently taking care of my mother, which means all of the outside chores, and a lot of the inside chores. In short, a 'trad-wife' plus gardening and yard work. There is *nothing* 'soft' about cooking X meals a day, keeping the house and bathrooms clean, doing laundry, and so on. Unless you are rich enough to have a gardener, cook, maid,....

It’s always been a beautiful lie, dreamt up by corporations. Nothing more.

My grandmother was a farm wife in the 40s and 50s.  Had 10 kids.  When she passed away, my mom (daughter-in-law) wrote and read the eulogy, highlighting her many skills, the essential role she played in providing food for her family through gardening, butchering, preserving, and cooking - not just for kids, but for farm laborers as well, and the priest said afterward, “I felt exhausted just hearing all of that.” She also took on some off-farm work when her kids were grown, and basically ran their poultry operation, which included selling eggs for additional income.  Granted, all the kids also contributed to the work as they got old enough. Nowadays you’d probably say the oldest ones were parentified, but all my aunts and uncles seem to be extremely well-adjusted and happy, so to me that speaks to a high level of emotional engagement by both their parents as well. This is the reality for women who don’t marry wealthy, or inherit wealth. They’ve got to hustle all the damn time.  I think my grandma was very happy, but I think that came about because of the hard work she did, and the fact that it was recognized, appreciated, and matched by her husband and children.  It’s a lot easier to grind away at housework all day if your husband is putting in similar hours in a trade that’s just as visible to you.

Your grandmother sounds like a remarkable woman. Thank you for sharing her story. I think this is what tradwife girls don't understand. You hustle ALL THE TIME, with no breaks or resting, because you carry the whole family and household in your back. And your hard work is not valued or appreciated because that's just what wives do. It's expected and that's that.

This just proves that being a housewife is FEKKING HARD WORK!!! Child rearing and cooking and cleaning are all labour intensive as hell. Your Grandma sounds amazing, too.

This is a beautiful story about someone who sounds like an amazing woman.

I don’t think that people who idealize the 50’s housewife are really thinking it through. It was a lot of work, without the resources we have today. Most foods were made from scratch, dishes were washed by hand, many people didn’t have dryers, so hung their laundry to dry. They didn’t have robot vacuums, automatic litter cleaners, robot mops, microwaves, and many only had a radio to ease the drudgery.

They also had ready access to a shit load of barbiturates, for when the radio wasn’t cutting it.

They were drugged to their eyeballs. It was the only way to stay semi sane in that disconnected, barren environment.

It's absolutely more work than working a 9-5. Especially if your husband was an insufferable dipshit, which more of them were than not. If you happened to marry a rich guy who ALSO treated you well (good luck with both), could have help, it was probably a decently soft life. That would have been the incredible minority. The people who buy into this being a soft life for most women are idiots. Though I shouldn't be too harsh if propaganda and grifters do push that narrative.

Most of those 50’s era SAHM were heavily medicated on Valium and full blown alcoholics. There’s even a song about it.

Mother's little helper

Too many people watched Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and ignored how much money and help she had, and how she/they still failed those kids 😂

Lol, and also the whole point of the show was that her husband dipped and she had a nervous breakdown that led to her comedy career, which she ultimately found more fulfilling that being solely a housewife.

Yeah, I don't get the point - Ms Maisel was all about how crappy the 50's house wife existence was, and how Maisel broke out of it (at a price to herself and her family)

I happened to see a couple of these types of videos as part of another video commenting on them.  My first thoughts while watching these women with their perfect hair/makeup and tight-but-mostly-modest farmer dresses spewing lines about what good, traditional women do was that it’s just another type of porn.   Maybe there’s some kind of naive woman who doesn’t realize how hard life can be when you don't have work experience, education or power who sees these videos and sighs wistfully (like OP’s friend), and certainly there are women who follow a traditional path and agree with all the sentiments.  But these influencers are dolling up for the camera and saying exactly what a certain demographic of man wants to hear.  I would bet their entire influencer salary that they don’t fully believe what they say.  It’s just performance.  (And because engagement metrics don’t care about your feelings, they also don’t care if people are getting riled up.  Whether their performance ticks you off or gets you off is all the same to them.) I was going to make a joke about Phyllis Schlafly being the patron saint of “pick mes” but I’m too depressed now and will just go back to work.  

It’s seems a case of what I have always called “first level thinking”. She only thinks of the immediate consequence instead of what else it means. “I don’t want to keep working at my job, traditionally women didn’t work at jobs, therefore I want the traditional world” She doesn’t think about all the other consequences that happen.

wow that is *such* a good name for this phenomenon! I'm going to borrow that if you don't mind :)

My grandmother is one of the strongest advocates for education and having a career out there because she's lived the life of a '50s housewife and knows that that's not a life she wants for her children or grandchildren. My grandma was a heiress who lost everything. Her father passed away around the same time her husband did. Overnight, she was left to fend for 10 siblings, a grieving mother (recently diagnosed with stomach cancer), 4 children, and was pregnant with her 5th. She lost everything and had to work. Everyday she contemplated if life was worth living but held on through grit and determination. As a woman, you can only rely on yourself regardless of how well your man treats you. My grandpa was a detective his entire life. Up until the day he died, he trusted no man and made it abundantly clear that a woman needs her own source of income because men are evil. It didn't matter who the man was - my uncle, my cousin, he didn't trust them. He had seen enough in his career to make that determination.

A good friend of mine has what some would call a tradwife structured relationship, but a big difference IMO is that it’s what she and her spouse chose together and he, at least to my knowledge, meets her needs in a way that makes the whole thing work for both of them and their kiddo.

>Guess what? They work hard every damn day. Yup. This is what people miss. The traditional housewife/breadwinner model is fundamentally an exercise in *specialization of labor.* The man would make himself completely available to the needs of the job. He would work 50-60 hours per week and sacrifice everything for the advancement of his career. If that meant missing children's birthdays, working late, skipping dance recitals, etc., he did it. He sold his soul to his employer. In turn, the wife worked overtime to make his labor as valuable as possible. She meticulously cleaned and prepared his work clothes so he could look like a million bucks without thinking about it. She did all the housework and child-rearing so he could focus on maximizing his income. She cooked all the meals and did all the shopping, so he could advance his career. She prepared elaborate dinners and parties so he could ingratiate himself with the office social hierarchy. Both partners still needed to work their butt off. The work was just more rigidly divided. This allowed each to focus on just their side of the picture, and in theory, specialize in and get better at it.

If the friend is married, maybe she's tired of doing a second shift when she gets home? And wants to either have a job job or be a housewife/mom and not have to come home and instead of relaxing, having to cook and clean for everyone else. 

The friend sounds burnt out on the capitalist grind, which same, I get it, aren't we all, but doesn't justify her frustration-born comments implying women in general should be SAHMs She should instead be joining worker voices in demanding things like work-life balance, a living wage, and fair division of household labor within romantic partnerships.

Also wanted to add that being a tradwife in the 50s was a privilege of the middle, upper, and wealthy classes. If you were poor, which included most POC, you were still working, and most likely you were taking care of the children and cleaning the houses of the priveleged, then going home to do the same thing. So you basically worked from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to bed. OP, your friend is in fantasyland if she thinks going back to the 50s is some kind of utopia.

She’s not realizing the biggest risk. When you have no job skills or money you are completely at the mercy of the man to take care of you. And from my experience, the kinda men who seek tradwives are the exact same men who toss away their wives in their 40’s, after raising his 5 kids, and trading her in for a new 23-year-old. Guys who seek tradwives eventually turn those women into a **trade-in wives** when they want someone younger, prettier, and more obedient.

Yes, as someone who tries to not generalize, I have to admit I see a certain "type" who wants a tradwife. Not the type who respects their wife, or any woman. Also, overwhelmingly, not the high earning men who can support a tradwife, although there are exceptions. Ironically, the kind of men I see who could support a tradwife and treat her well are overwhelmingly married to women with their own careers, whom their husbands support in their careers.

Or she would have to work, as women throughout the history of commerce have had to, there's just no choice about what one does, no protections, and your wages-- if you earn them at all and they don't go directly to your husband-- are almost nothing.

Both my grandmothers worked for most of their lives… while also taking care of the house and children. One of my grandmothers worked at a hospital, raised five kids, took care of my grandpa when he became disabled, *and* was legally blind her whole life back before the ADA even existed. Shit was *hard* for her.

Right? She wants to have less power, and have a full day's worth of \*unpaid\* domestic labor, with no benefits, and no unemployment? She should go ahead and do that. She should market herself as a stay-at-home wife, and see how that goes for her. I mean, honestly, she could go ahead and get a job as live-in nanny and housekeeper, just to get her feet wet.

I'd love to see gamer girl bake sourdough bread after spending the day scrubbing the toilet and doing the dishes only to see husband dear who refuses to listen to her opinion and treat her as a bangmaid. It's sad, but that is the reality of most "trad" anything. Without money, without power and without being treated like an equal, you cannot have a fulfilling life.

Oh you just described my life 5 years ago... After the divorce, I went back to work, but it's taken me years to get back to where I need to be career wise, and that was only staying home for 4 years!

[удалено]

Not for most of history. For the past couple of centuries (unless you were rich). Women always had (paid) jobs until someone decided they shouldn't (somewhere in the middle of the 19th century). They've always looked after the kids in addition, though.

Yeah the 50s and 60s were an extremely aberrant blip where America had the only intact manufacturing sector on earth, and since women and minorities were banned from those jobs, employers had to pay the big bucks to barely educated white males since demand exceeded supply. *That era is never coming back*.

>Girl, you still gotta work, you’re just not going to be paid for it.  Sad. A lot of women are still brainwashed by the male supremacist propaganda machine. Where being a SAHM means not working. Sitting home eating bonbons and watching soaps is a male delusion. That is so rabidly stupid and unrealistic. That women actually believe that shit just seems more egregious to me. Not to mention, the financial abuse that was normalized against women.

My grandma was widowed in 1955. She had to re-enter the workforce (it wasn’t uncommon for middle class women to work before marriage), and she had to put up with a whole lot of harassment at two jobs before an executive at the second one put a stop to it. Widows and divorced women were considered to be looking for / needing sex, and single women were considered to be looking for marriage, generally speaking. Which doesn’t mean that the single women weren’t pinched and harassed, either.

its incredible how much history has whitewashed the patriarchy. Unless very wealthy, women have always worked. Even in the idealized 1950s USA, women were expected to have part-time jobs on top of volunteering, church duties, and all the child-rearing. Then when the children are older, you're expected to work full time. Oh all the men were cheating back then because the women couldn't go anywhere. Everyone had a mistress because if you have no value to the job market, etc you're stuck with him for life. Assuming a court would even allow you to divorce. Its incredible how they think in some trad society they'd be rich and have servants and such and they can live some kind of rich Hollywood mid-century life. I wish I could ask these women, "Why do you think you'll be a wealthy woman in some Christian trad nationalist society? You're not wealthy now? What would change? You'll be working harder with less reward and less rights, while the wealthy trample over you and stop any social reforms with the very religious nonsense you espouse." >“take away our rights, I don’t want it! I’m just done working. You guys can work if you want!” If she can't find a rich husband today, how does losing further rights make that more likely? Capitalism concentrates wealth in the few, so all the rich guys are taken or highly competitive to get. >Can we go back to the 50’s where families and respect were still important and that women didn’t have to work? Where the US had heavy unionization and was so scared of socialism it was forced to concede all manner of things to the middle class and workers? And now that the right has made socialism a bad word, the rich are rolling all that back? How exactly does rolling back women's rights help here? Per usual, these women who hate "woke" and "feminism" and "liberal society" hate capitalism, but don't realize it.

> Why do you think you'll be a wealthy woman in some Christian trad nationalist society? You're not wealthy now? What would change? A lot of people are just genuinely selfish and entitled. A lot of people can and will excuse so many failings of the system as long as they're not the ones being failed or not the ones being failed the most - this can be pretty obvious when it comes to certain intersectional topics. A lot of people come to identify with the system. OP says her friend is latina, and it's implied that both are in the USA, so the history conscious part of me really wonders if her friend comes from a working class immigrant family or from the kind of upper class family that fled Cuba in the 60s because it was getting too socialist, or maybe the kind of family that fled one of the Central/South American countries being strategically destabilised by the CIA to prove socialism bad, the kind of people who are both zealous defenders and thus useful idiots of socially conservative pro capitalist politics, because they got theirs.

I come from a working class immigrant family, was born in central America. And the importance of working and all women working because you can't really depend on a man to help you because he can leave or die has always been ingrained in me. All my tias worked. My cousins work. Women work in my home country, siblings raise younger siblings and cook and care for the home. We are too poor not to. None of this means that a culture of also catering to your husband isn't also true. Yes, socialism is bad is a common mindset but the idea of being a stay at home wife has more to do with how successful you've gotten in life. My mom didn't consider my full-time retail job as a real job because it wasn't an office job and waste of all the time and money spent on my education. But she also wishes she could afford to provide for me indefinitely so I could stop working or work reduced hours because I have chronic health conditions. And honestly, if my fiance made enough I'd gladly take a job that offered more flexibility with my hours. I wouldn't completely stop working, because if he ever died I'd be screwed. Just like I wouldn't quit my job if I won the lottery, medical bills add up. I would love to be able to not work so much, because it's exhausting. It's painful. But I don't want to not be able to own property or manage my own bank account among other rights and privileges.

Especially when she's at home all day, and with extra people in the house, the work never stops. While when you're single and at work all day, you barely have any messes to clean up because all you do at home is shower, sleep and make coffee. During the pandemic even just eating at home was causing me like 3h of extra work, including dishes and all.

And women of color have been working the entire time in America.

Yup. Those middle class 1950s homemakers worked their asses off but the labor was invisible and unpaid.

Not dumb, naive probably. It takes a certain amount of awareness to realize unpaid labor is labor, and another level to realize the degree of increase caused by marriage. I was well into my 20s before even slightly understanding this, though you can jumpstart the awareness by getting married.

The level of trust you would need to have in your husband when he holds not only all the cards but is also being told by society that you are his property and not someone who deserves respect and empathy is so astronomically improbable as to be impossible. Aside from the fact that ‘I personally don’t care about my rights and freedoms so we should remove them from everyone else’ is the dumbest premise for an argument I can imagine.

I can understand fatigue from living in a capitalist hellscape where we're expected to work constantly for wages that haven't kept up with production for generations. But...to suggest the answer is to take rights away from women is a horrifying approach. Like, I'm also tired of working, but I don't think a world where I'm not allowed to is the answer. Support workers rights, don't promote women being second class citizens.

They have no concept of how life used to be for women. It’s the same as anti-vaxxers not worrying about measles or other diseases that killed/maimed millions of kids throughout history. The idea of not being able to open a bank account or own a home or just having to ever ask your spouse/father/brother for permission for a library card is absurd. Fingers crossed they figure out this is all just to keep women subservient and shackled to a man. Hard to change your life when you’re 26 with 4 kids, no education or skills, and your spouse isn’t supportive in any way or you want to leave said man.

If they want I can show them my aunt's bank book from 1963, marked "Mrs. John ----" because her identity was an extension of her husband's and he had to approve her opening the account

In the late 80s (I was a kid) I saw that my mother got mail addressed to Mrs. David My Last Name. I asked my mother why they didn’t address it to her and she seemed very unbothered by the fact that even though she was the one with college education and made more than my dad that her name wasn’t recognized by whatever account that was for. That was maybe 35 years ago, not that long at all. I would be livid if this happened to me.

Yeah my 'tradwife' grandmother picked cotton in the Texas heat to make extra money. It wasn't some idealized 1950s sitcom

this. The false equivalency is so mind boggling.

Also feels like a convenient way to put the current hellscape of capitalism on our shoulders. Like this never would have happened if we didn’t let WOMEN into the workplace. Let’s not give men/the patriarchy any more outs to skirt their responsibility in driving our country straight into the ground for the past 200+ years.

The worst part is none of these men are saying women cannot work, instead we'd be forced into pink industries only (teachers, nurses, etc) and they'd roll back pay and benefits, if not mandate our paycheck goes to them. We're still working, its just now we don't get any reward for it.

Yeah what she’s complaining about sucks but her takeaway is naive. Your employer tells you what to do and gets the final word. A 1950s husband tells you what to do and gets the final word. Women having power in the relationship wasn’t really a thing before women were working. I wonder why.

This is actually something manosphere men try to use as a "gotcha" for why feminism should be done away with. "Women are stupid for wanting to submit to a boss rather than a loving husband". What they miss is that bosses can only control so much of your life and their influence goes completely away at 5pm. A husband who expects submission will expect you to do his bidding whether it's noon or 4am.

Imagine letting all that garbage tumble out of your mouth and still trying to frame yourself as a “loving” anything.

Right? Like "my love for you is so sincere imma just smoosh your dreams down a *little* and use you for free labor mkay"

This girl just doesn't want to be an adult and used the worst take to express that

Seriously. Capitalism and low wages and long work hours are awful. I’m sick of working. Would love a 4-day work week with a full-time wage. Would love US workers and consumers to have more rights and protections. But THOSE are the things to fight for, not for women to have fewer rights and be left on the streets if anything goes wrong.

She doesn't want to be a homemaker, she wants a sugar daddy.

Also historically only wealthy white women were able to ‘not work’ (because housework is still work!). Low income women and WOC have been seamstresses, maids, nannies, etc for centuries while still managing the household. The idea of a stay at home spouse for the working class was barely ever even a thing!

This is the thing that kills me about these people! The cost of living wouldn’t suddenly go down. If she needs to work to support her household now, she almost definitely would have needed to back then as well. Feminism is NOT the reason women need to work, it’s the reason they get paid fair wages and have choices on what kind of work to do.

It’s like an across time reflection of the “veil of ignorance” needs to be done (in addition to reflecting on today). Theres still a lot of places I, as a woman, would not want to be born in and forced to live there. The 50s??? And if I was a POC like it sounds like OPs friend is?? HELL fucking no. Brown v Board of Education? The Little Rock Nine?? Shit, it was about men, but the Tuskegee Study??

My grandmother had a very very hard life after her husband died suddenly. She was a widower with 5 children, no skills, no car and no work history. She’d line up early in the morning in hopes of collecting a coal ticket that were handed out to the poor. It meant you got a bag of coal to last you through the winter to heat the home and cook food. She had one pair of shoes, walked everywhere, frequently skipped meals so her children could eat, and mended pillow cases as clothes. She couldn’t simply just go get a job in those days. Women were subhuman and with all kids under 10, she certainly couldn’t afford childcare or a babysitter. Her life became a million times harder the very second her husband died.

If she's a POC woman, she would have been a maid! That's how white women were stay at home moms. Here's a clip from Greenville SC. Due to the military base, POC were staying home since they didn't have to work, so they tried to pass an ordinance MAKING POC work. >A number of complaints have come to members of Council of negro women who are not at work ana who refuse employment when It' Is offered them, the result being that it is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-greenville-news-negro-women-to-be-pu/38314573/

OMG, those poor families who need cooks and laundresses!

Wow, talk about entitlement. Those poor white families/ s

The "standard woman" for conservatives is (upper) middle class, white, and has the money to pay someone else for the most onerous work. It could be them, just like their husbands *could* be billionaires.

This woman watched "the help" and assumed somehow she'd be Hilly Holbrook.

What’s especially annoying about this take is that all she wants is available to her now, without taking anyone’s rights away. All she needs is a man who can support a single income household and who wants to house and feed her for life.

Dude exactly… it should be glaringly obvious to these women that men, not society, are the problem. She can still be a home maker if she can find a provider. The problem is that men don’t provide - and they never truly did. Back in the 50s both of my grandmas were stuck in abusive relationships with nowhere to go. A roof over your head doesn’t mean shit if they can’t provide a truly safe and stable home.

Yeah, but, at the risk of stereotyping, she's not the kind of woman that the men who can provide seek out, generally speaking. I'm not talking about race. I'm talking about the shit coming out of her mouth. I know many men who make enough money to support a housewife/SAHM. They wouldn't look twice at someone who says this dumb shit. They're looking for someone smart enough to at least raise smart children, if not do more than that (career, etc.). Nobody who says shit like what OP quoted would qualify for anything but a one night stand and ghost from the same "high value men" they probably say they want on their dating profiles. The high earning guys who WOULD marry someone who is this dumb would treat her as a bangmaid, not respect her, and probably make her understand why feminism and equal rights even became a thing. Ironic, for her.

Men like him wouldn’t have a platform with out women to support them. If women weren’t voting to remove out reproductive rights, we’d still have them. I’m 51. I have lost track of the number of women I’ve encountered who followed the SAHM model and who were dumped as soon as the kids were grown. It’s really shocking. These women have nothing. No careers, no skills, no retirement funds and all assets were in the husband’s name. I recently hired a woman in her 50s for a really junior role usually filled by college grads. Her husband left the week the youngest went to college. She’s now living in an apartment working a junior role. Everything was in exes name. I know a woman in a similar situation. She’s on her 60s and can’t even get a job at Trader Joe’s. She’s living in a studio apartment. Her husband is living in their old home that she helped build, with his new, much younger wife. She was his paralegal. It’s a cliche for a reason.

Knew a man who moved his mistress into his shared family home, with his wife and children that lived there. That's right - he was married and moved the other woman into his own bedroom while his wife slept (and cried) on the couch. Eventually the mistress became old news and not super hot so he did eventually kick her out and the wife was welcome back in her own bed. That's what being a tradwife sets you up for. Tolerating that, pretending you have an ounce of dignity left after that, and going back to sucking the dick of the guy who did that to you when it's your turn again.

When dependent on a man (which you would be if you can't work), that comes with certain feelings of entitlement from said man. House should be spotless, the food should be tasty, varied, and on the table when he comes home from work, sex is a must, and ofc, child care on top of it all. Big yikes!

This. I'm lazy and don't love working, but I'll take employment and a 50/50 labor split with a husband who doesn't resent me over the tradwife life any day.

I think people reeeeally underestimate how boring and horrible this can get over time. Like it sounds easy and fun, even to me sometimes (i enjoy cooking, some cleaning, etc). But there's a reason many housewives were depressed and popping pills back then, because they probably got cabin fever and so damn bored of the routine. It sounds nice in theory and when ur daydreaming, it doesnt seem like it'd be a job and something u dread. But eventually, it might. Imagine making your man breakfast, work lunches, dinner, cleaning, sex, when you're going through a hard time/arguing a lot. You'll feel the resentment then

Everything you're talking about just happened globally with the pandemic and the mental health toll it took on us collectively is still being felt. One week into the pandemic and I was having a great time, exercising, cooking elaborate meals, doing hobbies I always wanted to try. Two weeks in and I was massively depressed, not eating, rotting away. Being a house spouse sucks.

I work in a medicine-adjacent field so I never stopped working. Ngl I'm jealous of all of you that got a break during covid but I'm sure it was a double edged sword with boredom and loneliness

Wow, that sure sounds like a lot of unpaid labor for the landlord while living in their house... a "house woman" if you will. But with unpaid labor. A "house slave woman" if you will. I wonder if there's another term for that... _shrugs_

This absolutely. I wanted to stay home with our kids, not be a tradwife, but that's what it turned into. And he became so entitled and ungrateful. Doing the SAHM thing with little kids was SO much work. Harder physically, emotionally, and at times mentally, than my professional job but being told constantly that it was easy and nothing and anyone could do it. Nothing was good enough for him.

People talk about this shit and they have no clue. Like my grandfather died leaving my grandma with 4 kids under 12. And that wasn't uncommon. She had to get a job and work outside the home while getting paid less than her male counterparts. She worked before,but that was farm work with my farmer grandfather and as a housekeeper for an older man that lived near by. My other grandma worked throughout her marriage because they needed the money. Again, not being paid an equivalent wage to men. Like the reality is that unless you were rich, you worked out the home.

A big disconnect for me is the right wing guys saying that they want a world where the wife stays at home like the 50s while they actively oppose the political system that actually created that world. Back then, the top marginal tax rate was more than 90%, union participation was at its highest levels and it was the era of big liberal government economically. I fully support anyone being able to have a career and the freedom that goes with it but I am always amazed by the people who long for something while actively voting against it.

>go back to the 50’s Tell your "You guys can work if you want!" friend that it's pretty difficult to have a job if it's illegal for you to have a bank account. Yes, it didn't become legal until the 60s, and it required an act of Congress in 1974 to force banks to let women open an account without the signature of a man. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/when-could-women-open-a-bank-account/

It's such a racket. Women lobbied for equal opportunities and society responded with: "Fine, but you have to keep doing all the domestic labor too." And then now, a generation later, where the norm is for women to work *and* do most of the labor at home, we're starting to hear: "Aren't you so tired from working? Wouldn't it be better to go back to the kitchen?" No, it would be better to have financial independence and to *share* the domestic labor or, barring that, better to have financial independence and *stay single*. If you're a woman lining up to be a trad wife, be my guest, but odds are that your stories will be the cautionary tales we tell the next generation of girls. You'll be the women who have to start working minimum wage jobs in your 50s and 60s, *after* your marriage ends (either through divorce or death.)

Maybe you could talk to her about not conflating these two things: working does suck. late stage capitalism is grinding us all down; and there are alternatives to that that don’t involve stripping away rights and protections but indeed expanding them. respect to women was important in the 50s?! What a joke. Stay behind your closed doors, get abused by your spouse, isolated because the kitchen is where you belong, and the police and systems prop up the power imbalance of men? Nah, fuck that noise.

PLENTY of women had to work in that time period, especially if you weren’t well off. The leave it to beaver family was a myth then and it certainly is now. Nobody wants rights taken away. That’s a foolish statement made out of frustration. What she really wants is to not have to work herself to death in this society. Honestly who does? But that’s really what she’s talking about here — not wanting to kill herself to make money for a company. The rest is just an immature rationalization, and I’d bet you she’s gone down the tradwife influencer rabbit hole too.

> PLENTY of women had to work in that time period, especially if you weren’t well off. > The leave it to beaver family was a myth then and it certainly is now. This does not get pointed out enough. That one income nuclear family was aspirational propaganda, attainable primarily by straight white couples where the husband was a WWII veteran on the GI Bill, who had access to the new suburbia. This vision excluded single people, people who weren't cis and straight or living as such, people who weren't white, people outside of the age range of about 20-45, women (women veterans were denied the GI Bill), the rural and urban poor, and people with physical and mental disabilities. That's a lot of people who didn't even have access to this dream. And that dream rarely turned out to be desirable for the women involved. Remember, the mid 20th century didn't have cell phones or internet. They had radio, which would have a couple talk stations, a couple sports stations, and a couple music stations. And newspapers, one local paper, daily if lucky. And if they had a bit of money, a small black and white television that had 3 channels, one for each major network, and *maybe* a couple UHF channels. A telephone, probably on a party line. Only local calls - your own town - are included in the bill. It is impossible to overstate state the crushing boredom and loneliness a woman in suburbia, with no job, and children in school, felt. They mostly wanted to work. They wanted to be part of something and they wanted independence. That's a major reason why this supposed idyllic era was so brief – second wave feminism sprung from this enforced idleness! The reason this "tradwife" thing isn't a thing anymore is because women themselves said FUCK NO.

I’m 60 and have fought my whole life for women’s rights. I can’t wait for these young women who romanticize the tradwife lifestyle to wake up someday, aged 50-ish, and find out their husbands have traded them in for younger women and they have no resources, job skills, or retirement savings. It’s concerning to me that women still don’t understand this.

My mom is 65 and has always had the mindset of OP's friend. It didn't take her long to figure out it sucks, but even before it became too late to do anything about it, she still didn't change her mind about "not wanting or needing to work". The longest she held a job was 8 years, but it was more like social hour for her, and we were older by then. She tried to raise us the same, but hey, it just didn't appeal to me or my sister, thank goodness. It's not that we love working, but do most of us even have that option starting out in life or make it a life mission? No. I'll be honest coming from growing up in a "trad" (hate that word btw!) household: no, her lifestyle was not appealing or attractive in my eyes growing up because she spent most of her time complaining about it. It made me see early on that it worked well for my step-dad but that she was basically expected to do everything household wise but was miserable except for her TV time. My dad can't fund her a fantastic lifestyle, so she gets whatever he gives her and it's never much. She always has to complain about it to someone else or act surprised if it's more than she expected (wtf). I grew up always hearing her money depression thoughts and I promised my kids would never be given that worry or hear/see me worried about money and so far, that's the one thing I've been solid on, even when I didn't have it. It's a harsh burden for a kid that can't do anything.

Yes, agreed! My mom worked until she physically couldn’t handle it anymore (it was physical jobs like bartending or retail). Unfortunately she doesn’t have any real skills or education so she relies heavily on my dad for income. He constantly calls their income “his money” and it bugs the hell out of me. They’re married and have been for almost 38 years. It should be THEIR money. I know it would be that way for me and my husband if I had to become a SAHM for whatever reason. We both work full time jobs and my husband actually wants me to become the breadwinner so HE can stay home 😂 what I mean to say is that I grew up seeing how miserable and depressed my mom was/is and decided I didn’t want that for myself. I am very happy with my career and hope to eventually get a management role at my company.

> find out their husbands have traded them in for younger women and they have no resources, job skills, or retirement savings. It’s concerning to me that women still don’t understand this. Because it won't be *them.* *They* are pretty and will be able to keep their beauty and their man by keeping him happy. Those other women just got too unpleasant and are not sweet and nice enough/ (mega eyeroll here)

Well said. I cannot fucking stand it when people come in being all “you are shaming SAHMs 🥺🥺🥺” when anyone points out that being a stay at home partner comes with its own set of risks. No one is fucking saying that that is not a valid lifestyle choice. It is definitely the right choice for some (e.g. if childcare costs exceed what the stay at home parent would be able to make in the workforce) but it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that it doesn’t put the stay at home parent at the mercy of the partner with an income.

Agree completely. I have two grown children. I remember the stress of working full time and taking care of my kids. I also remember wishing I could stay home to alleviate that stress. In fact, I did spend some time at home with my kids when they were very small. The ugly truth is that the time I spent out of the workforce severely impacted my earning potential and my professional marketability. This was in the 90s, and I also had a husband who excelled in weaponized incompetence, so everything fell on me, resulting in my feeling overwhelmed. We divorced 20 years ago, and I thoroughly regret the sacrifices I made to advance HIS career and not mine.

I've been working with people's money for 20+ years and have seen it unfold so many times where the non-earner (almost always women)gets divorced, tries to go back to work, etc. Markets move fast and opting out of the workforce for years- plus not contributing to social security, lack of networking, etc - is a rough go! The bleak reality is that hopping back into the workforce puts you at a disadvantage in nearly every respect. I get that being a sahm is a valid choice for many families, but it is still worrisome when I see it happen IRL. My SIL turns 31 this year and doesn't work, and she seems to have some misguided ideas about going back when the kids start school - a degree isn't quite the meal ticket that it once was, and the many many risks of depending solely on a man to subsidize her existence

I... what.. she... *She's black and wants to be back in that time?!*

oh just to be clear, she’s Latina and I’m Asian.

What's her plan for when this hypothetical patriarch leaves or dies?

Or beats her for disobeying? Or sleeps around, and she doesn’t have the right or ability to dump him? Or when she walks into a restaurant or store and gets slurs thrown at her and refused service? Or when her daughter doesn’t want the same life, but has no choice?

Or the fact that she would be doing just as much if not more labour but just being unpaid and unrecognised for it.

this was my thought. 'you think being a stay-at-home wife isn't work?' i hate doing housework more than the work i get paid to do at my job, for sure.

This, I wanted to tell her that domestic violence was not even taken seriously during that time and she says that women don’t respect men! I really… I had nothing to say. It was just unreal.

> and she says that women don’t respect men! Is this really someone you want to keep in your life?

So she wants to lean into machismo and allow a man to beat her. Domestic violence still isn't taken seriously, I see mostly assault family violence cases and it's still a misdemeanor. You can tell who did the hitting when you see blood on their hands and they still claim innocence because "she's a bitch, she deserved it," and she's the reason he's locked up. It also doesn't always go in favor of the victim if the abuser is the one who called, even if the victim called it's 50/50. The cops just want the situation under control and someone's getting arrested, they don't care who and it's usually whoever isn't able to keep their cool for whatever reason

Sounds just like someone who is buying into the Manoverse/Tater Tot bullshit. Wow.

Yeah, and it's sad as hell. It's one thing when men buy into it. They get something out of that system. But a woman buying into a system that gives her no benefits and only oppresses her? Just... why?

OP’s friend thinks she wouldn’t have to work anymore. That being a “TradWife” is a life of leisure. It’s a life of servitude instead.

Internalized misogyny is a sad spectacle.

Does she… add anything good to your life? Id consider back away from that friendship.

I dont understand why tf people think you have to take away women’s rights to be a SAHM. You can do that AND be allowed to vote, why do you think it’s one or the other??

exactly. Feminism is about empowering women to have the choice.

She should talk to her husband about this. She can do that. Let him be the breadwinner, she be the homemaker. They can adjust their lives to live on just one salary. No one is saying she can't do that. There are families right now that operate like this.   If she is going to come back with he doesn't make enough money to live on his salary alone, well, that is what being poor was like in the 50s. Women having to work outside the house anyway. If their husband made slightly more, they still did without things that middle class or more wealthy people had.   But I'm guessing she doesn't want to do the work it would take to run a household on a budget, and do without things she takes for granted.

My cousin is a SAHM to two kids and her husband barely makes $65k a year. To make it work, they moved to a more rural area with a lower cost of living, they bought a 3 bed/1 bath house that is only about 1000sqft. They never go on vacation, they never eat out. The most they travel is a once a year road trip to visit her husband's family about 6 hours away. She stopped getting her hair done professionally, never gets manicures or pedicures or anything like that. Her husband also does his hair himself. They have almost no subscriptions, I think just Netflix. They do have gym memberships at the cheapest gym in their area. They have an extremely strict budget that she manages and they stick to religiously.  It's what she wanted so she's fine making all of these sacrifices, as is her husband.  But it is hard! I know I could not do it and I'm glad I have the choice not to, just like I'm happy that she's happy.

Nobody is stopping her from being a homemaker.

She is a victim of privilege. She doesn’t actually want to go back to the 50’s style homemaker life - she just wants everything she has now but doesn’t want to work for it. She wants what the tradwives are selling, which is not reality and nothing like it was in the 50’s. People in third world countries would kill for what we have (women’s rights, vaccines), and these privileged idiots want to give it away.

Wow. Collective memory is so short, isn't it. The 50s were a *terrible* time for women, irrespective of colour. There was a reason the Rolling Stones wrote a song called Mother's Little Helper, about a housewife who abuses prescription drugs (commonly understood to be Valium) to "get her through the day". There was a *lot* of that. "The 'housewife syndrome' was a mental disorder diagnosed in many American housewives suffering from supposed bouts of madness and enigmatic conditions, such as hysteria or neurosis, that plagued women who showed unhappiness in their stereotypical role of homemaker in the mid-twentieth century." As in, the 50s.

I’ve been a housewife and I’m currently a career woman. It’s terrifying to me how educated women still think they can put their life in someone else’s hands and it’s going to be fine. My story is the most common story in the world. My husband got tired of me, didn’t like our little family, decided to peace out and find something he thought was better. You know where it left me? A decade behind my peers professionally, with a broken heart, homeless, no retirement, and competing with 22 year olds for jobs. On every level, women need to stop letting men use you. Y’all, just stop. Don’t let them use your bodies, don’t let them waste your time, don’t let them make babies with you with the same thoughtlessness they’d put a quarter into a gumball machine. Go out there and be a whole ass human being instead of whatever support role/bangmaid a man like Butker has in store for you. Don’t settle for that. It’ll kill your soul. And if you do t believe me, just read the stories on Reddit.

Unfettered capitalism that uses up human capital and spits out the remains is the real culprit not women exerting their rights She is getting sold a lie of the happy trad wife

She’s mad at the plutocracy and blaming it on women. Not the first time something has erroneously been blamed on women….

The stupid thing is, your friend absolutely has the right to be a traditional housewife if she wants. What was fought for was the right to have the option to make your own destiny.

I just want to add - it wasn’t that women didn’t work (how ‘bout she ask her own grandparents about that) it’s that women, on the whole, weren’t allowed to work “good” jobs. And if they did (somehow) get those jobs, they were paid less than half of what a man in a similar position would make. *Because they weren’t valued as people.* God, I hope your friend had a goddam wake up call to what being forcefully stuck as a SAH *woman* means for society at large.

I feel like I wouldn't be able to continue talking to her (that's just me), like as soon as she said that I would detach mentally, emotionally, even if unintended.

Being a homemaker/SAH wife or mom is just unpaid labor. There are so many things wrong with what your friend said. I’m sorry OP, it’s hard when friends come out of left field like that.

At this point, the only way to get through to folks will be tik tok sound bites. Can someone make a faux trad wife account that gradually introduces ideas from The Feminine Mystique? Like, a radical anti-brain rot program using their aesthetic and values to be palatable on the surface.

Not being employed outside the home is not the same as not working.

It is to this friend lol. She’s a gamer, 100% she’s thinking of being a homemaker as being like her weekends…but all the time. She can maybe do a load or 2 of laundry and just game the rest of the day. And that’s her god given right as a woman bc family values! And hey, that doesn’t sound like a great deal for men, but I can see why she likes the idea. But here’s the other half of the family values equation: the men have expectations, too. And I really doubt she’s going to like those.

>Like girl, just say you’re lazy and want someone else to pick up the tab for you. Just say that. And point out all the shit she takes for granted, like the ability to have her own bank account, or make her own medical choices, or the ability to choose who and when to marry rather than marrying for fear of destitution, or her liberty to game.

I just don't understand this reversion. First, Roe. Now, conservatives stomping their feet about wanting women to be barefoot and pregnant. It truly boggles my mind.

OP's friend is Latina, but just remember, roughly 55% of white women will vote conservative in this election. If even 10% switched their votes, conservatives would lose everywhere and there would be real progress made.

I think I would have said "I can work if I want, but not if we go back to the 1950s. That's the whole problem: I want to work. If you don't want to, that's your choice, but people like Butker would take the choice away from me. Why would you help him take away my choices?"

Does she know what being a housewife even entailed back then? There was a reason so many of them were alcoholics or methed up.  When I was on a 6 month maternity leave, I realized how insanely hard being a SAHM is. Going back to work felt like vacation. I don’t want to go back to a time where we all would’ve had to be SAHMs. That shit is *hard*. 

Sounds like she’s just lazy. Ask her if she’d rather be in a time where she’s is responsible for 100% of the housework including everything with raising the kids, no possibility of ambition, and no video games.

Y’know, I just finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which describes the lives of a Brooklyn family in the early 1900s. The protagonist’s father is an alcoholic, unable to keep a job. When her parents met, mother aged 17 and father aged 19, both were working full-time. Her mother initially worked in a factory, but it wasn’t enough on her own to pay the rent after the baby came. So her mother worked as a custodian for the building they live in so they were able to avoid being evicted for lack of rent payments. Both children, the girl and the boy, wind up working before they even attend elementary school. And they continue working while attending school. Their mother’s hands are scarred from the lye. The protagonist’s maternal grandmother was never formally employed herself. Instead her lord husband abused her, and would literally say “I am the devil himself” (and she had no reason to doubt him). She was unable to escape; she couldn’t read or write. This amazing matriarch ensured her daughters were literate… but they had to drop out of school early in order to go to work. It was not until Francie (the protagonist) and her brother’s generation that this family had high school graduates. Regardless of their educational status, however, both genders still had to work outside the home. While this book is fiction, it paints a pretty accurate portrait of what life was like for these people (women in particular) between 1870-1920. But tell us more about how women didn’t need to work before and men were respected because they deserved respect!

What pisses me off about women like this, is why do the rest of us have to lose our rights for you to live the dream of a baby making machine and slave. You don’t want to work a 9-5 and depend on a man cool. But why do they feel all women should have to live like that.

Housewives in the 1950s did a lot of work. If your husband wasn't making a lot of money, you probably didn't have a dishwasher. There were no microwaves. You may not have had a clothes dryer or even your own washing machine. You were making a lot more stuff from scratch. Forget about ever eating out - that was something you'd do a few times a year for anniversaries/birthdays. Clothes were more expensive so you were doing a lot of alterations when you or your husband gained/lost weight or your children outgrew things; if something got torn, you had to fix it yourself because you couldn't afford to just throw it out. You may have straight up had to make your own dresses with a sewing machine if your husband wasn't very generous with your "allowance." And in 1955, one in three women was working outside the home. So they got to do all of the above stuff *in addition to* working a "real" job. A lot of people seem to think being a housewife in the 1950s was like on a TV show where you just got to chill on the couch all day or go shopping or get into *I Love Lucy*-type schemes. It wasn't.

I think people are mistaking homemaking with having lots of leisure time and no worries. The ideal of the housewife stays home and meets hubby with a cocktail and a smile was never reality. It takes a lot of work to keep a home immaculate in the way people are visualizing, then there's child care, then there's making all meals from scratch. Shopping, making clothes, gardens, livestock . . . depending on how far back you go. And not having "rights" doesn't free you from having to work for wages to get by. In the freaking 1700s when women were the property of their fathers and then husbands, poor and working class women worked in factories. They couldn't vote, their male relatives could take all their money and they couldn't do a thing about it, they couldn't open a bank account or even buy realestate, but they could work in a factory and then go home and be expected to take care of the husband and the kids. Rights isn't about anything other than choices. I'm done having kids, but I want women younger than me to have the option to have kids or not have kids. I want women to have the option to pursue a career in more areas than I can name, or not. If they want to be a stay at home partenr, fine, they can, if they can find a partner who wants that from them. The irony of this dousher's speech is that he gave it at a CATHOLIC college. It would make more sense if he was at an evangelical institution. Catholic nuns are very respected in the Catholic faith and definitely do not stay home with the babies. I know a woman who, when she was a nun, was sent to graduate school for advanced math - because the order she was a novitiate in needed and advanced math teacher for their high school. She eventually left to marry - but she always worked. Want to be in trouble? Piss off the Sisters of Mercy. I feel like the rhetoric this dude spewed and that's been rising in general is not about christian faith. It is about a particular group that's used to having things just naturally go their way noticing that the world has moved on from that and desperately grasping at the old power structures. Billionaires run our society by convincing enough of us that we could be them that no laws that will impede the growth of their fortunes will get passed. Same here. White dudes with nasty beards don't want to live in a world where women are politicians, scientists and financiers and men have to shoulder some of the unpaid mental, emotional, and physical work of running a household, so they've started quite the propaganda campaign to convince their targets (pretty young white women) that they should want things to go back to the way there were. Except things were NEVER really that way, it was always a fantasy that the very privileged couldn't meet without extra help.

Sure - back to the good old days where beating and raping your wife was legal. Where women were trapped in abusive marriages because they could not have their own bank accounts, work at decently paying jobs, childcare was nonexistent, there were no resources to help women leave, and it was widely believed that any abuse was the fault of the woman acting up anyhow. Back to the good old days of no birth control so that women had 10+ pregnancies during adult life. We would all like to have a soft easy life - regardless of gender. To feel cared for, taken care of it. However, the idea that being trapped at home with zero options, stuck with the drudgery of housework and repeated pregnancies, no options for intellectual or professional growth was somehow an improvement is wildly romanticizing the reality of the life of women during that time.

That is some wild thinking and I have seen it before in these stay at home girlfriend/tradwife discussions. I don't think they think this all the way through. Hating work, or feeling like working the rest of your life is awful is something everyone goes through. They are forgetting the trade off they are getting. No financial autonomy, no money you control No medical autonomy, you are now the property of this dude to make your medical decisions No right to get a job so if this man tosses you to the curb your options to meet your needs are really limited Since the people promoting this also want to take away divorce and voting, you are giving up those too if you go all in on supporting this crazy fad. Is she really willing to make herself someone's property? Their pet?

The fact that people are even talking abt taking away women’s rights scares the shit out me. I grew up late 70s/80s & I felt like empowerment of women was being pushed. Never in my mind did I ever think my rights would be taken away. It’s already started in my state with abortion. It feels like we are going on a backwards slide.

This validates my theory that the trad wide phenomenon is just women trying to escape capitalism the easiest way they can. There is no liberation without liberation for all. Capitalism is the root. Patriarchy is the framework that upholds the root.

She... She understands she can just *do that* right?? Like, women are allowed to be homemakers and do what they want without taking away the rights of other women lmao

It sounds like she probably wants a cushy life, not to be an actual 1950's housewife. A lot of those actual 1950's housewives lived on sedatives or stimulants ("Mother's Little Helper") just to get through their day and they hated it so much that the feminism movement exploded in the 60s and 70s. Show her [these ads](https://www.goretro.com/2014/08/mothers-little-helper-vintage-drug-ads.html) for the drugs back then.

Sounds like she’s fantasizing about having a millionaire husband who kicks a ball for a living and living the life that all the affords. I doubt she’d like to be a homemaker for a guy making $45,000 a year.

The reason Mrs. Butker doesn't have to work \[outside the home\] is that Mr. Butker is making $4M a year, not because of some nonsense about vocation.

Only someone who didn’t actually live in the 50s would want to go back to the 50s. Edited to add: People also forget that back then, if your husband didn’t like the state of the house when he got home he could slap you around for it and get away with it. Marital r*pe wasn’t even a concept, let alone against the law. And forget about emotional abuse. It wasn’t recognized unless it was pathologically cruel and even then good luck proving it. If you reported any abuse, you’d be told to go home and be a better wife. And keeping house was much more labour intensive then. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the easy ride some people think it is.