#Tradwives Are Authoritarian Shills

Fighting for domestic equality means fighting for peace

I think Karl Marx would be really bummed out about China’s recent #tradwife turn. Marx and Engels were obviously most interested in class oppression, but they did have some great starters on feminism, including their points that the "'modern family contains... in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within society and its state'" (The Marx-Engels Reader, 737). The patriarchal family gives us what Engels argues is the beginning of class oppression: ''The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male" (739).

China’s authoritarian ruler, Xi Jinping, is putting aside these particular Communist ideals and calling for Chinese women to get back in the kitchen and also to get busy making some babies. He joins a long list of contemporary authoritarian rulers who are all in on some hardcore traditional gender norms, including Viktor Orbán in Hungary, our own Mike Johnson and all his evangelical, anti-democratic misogynist buds in our fascist far-right wing, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and, many, many others, including Benjamin Netanyahu. These leaders are using oppression of women and “traditional family values” to rise to power and cement their place as authoritarian, anti-democratic leaders.

Art by an ubertalented student of mine, Kiersten Phillips.

So having #tradwife trending in the U.S. is something I think we absolutely cannot separate from domestic and international politics. In my Intro to WGST class this week we’re doing the chapter on gender and violence, and the textbook authors argue that violence against women and children is the result not just of pathological abuse by men but also comes from the way violence structures societies. Dominator societies perpetuate violence and men’s domination over women as intrinsic and necessary to masculine identities, while partnership societies that value men and women equally do not make violence an innate aspect of social organization. Dominator societies, unsurprisingly, are much more violent.

When these white women are taking to TikTok and hyping their tradwife identities, they are continuing the dominator structure of society, because what else is traditional marriage than the domination of women by men? I’m all for parents staying home if they can afford it, because fuck capitalism, and the unpaid labor we do is really the most important, but putting on pretty dresses and doing your part for authoritarian fuckers like Mike Johnson or Donald Trump all ripples out in the world, and teaches the next generation of white Christofascists that cheering for the murder of Palestinians makes you more of a man, a more electable politician, more dominant. (The horrific attacks on Israelis also coming from a dominator society and committed by men.)

We all know the feminist rallying cry by now that “the personal is the political,” and in the case of these women bragging about their #tradwife status while enjoying the life and personal liberties (for now) that our sisters around the world are losing, or don’t have, seems tone-deaf at best and extremely dangerous at worst. I’m sure all these authoritarians are delighted to see it trending in the U.S. Those of us united in the fights for anti-colonial, partnership societies should call it out for the bullshit it is. Not much of that happening yet, here in South Carolina.

Image by Kiersten Phillips—she really sums up the feeling here!