One of my working theories for the emergence of the "Trad wife" aesthetic is that it depends a lot on disconnection from women who were actually adults in the 1950s and 60s. I grew up in a lot of highly intergenerational spaces and the idea that we'd lost some sort of golden age
was just never available to me. Everyone was aware of women who had been homemakers and then dealt with spousal alcoholism, abuse, incestuous abuse of the children, infidelity, abandonment, etc. And when I look at statistics from that ear it seems like this wasn't unusual.
But if you grow up far from your grandparents and aren't in intergenerational spaces at church it's easy to grow up thinking that ads for Maytag washing machines depicted real life and don't realize that that's not how it worked.
To add to this a little more: You can’t explain any social movement with “all of a sudden, people who were happy decided they didn’t want to be happy anymore.” That’s not how things work. Second wave feminism was not a result of lots of happy women who had it all deciding
they couldn’t take another minute of things being so rosy. Second wave feminism came from widespread female misery. So, in light of that, I do want to appreciate the fact that women who are reacting against the way things are now are also unhappy. They don’t want to work as
hard as they have to for so little, they don’t want to be pulled apart between parenting and work, they don’t want to have such a hard time finding someone they want to marry, etc. And I appreciate that. I think people are reacting against a real feeling that the way we live
sucks and isn’t working. But you’re not going to get that by making the mistakes we have already made. Feminism didn’t cause this. Women before you fought to protect you from living their hell. Now you have to do something scarier:
Fight to stop ours. Not by rolling back the clock, not by fantasy, but with real policy changes that will make a flourishing life possible for more of us. Because that’s not behind us.
@LauraRbnsn The way we live sucks and isn’t working for SOME PEOPLE. I think an important part of this is leaving room for the idea that many people feel fulfilled by their work and have a decent balance between that and family. Like forcing one pole or the other is the problem.