Sometimes unrealistic fantasies raise questions that deserve serious answers.
The Washington Post’s “Tradwives, SAHGs and the dream of feminine leisure” is one of those rare articles that is way more interesting than its apparent topic. OK, there’s a “tradwife” trend of sorts: social media influencers who style themselves as classic 1950s housewives, and a parallel group of stay-at-home girlfriends (or what we used to call “kept women”). But this “trend” doesn’t represent all that many women, and you probably don’t need a major newspaper to tell you what to think about them. After all, if women had been happy in these kinds of roles, second-wave feminism would never have caught on.
But Monica Hesse takes a much more interesting approach. She doesn’t analyze tradwifery as a serious option, as in “Were women really happier before feminism?”. Instead, she approaches that vision for what it is: a fantasy. “I dream of feminine leisure”, say many of the tradwives and SAHGs. And then Hesse asks why that dream might be beguiling.
Her down-to-earth answer is simple: Life is hard these days.
The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease.
What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism — specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline? What if instead of 11 paid vacation days, as the average American gets, these women got the full month that is standard in the United Kingdom? What if instead of five (or six or seven) days a week, they worked the four days that countries such as South Africa and Belgium are piloting? Would that allow enough time to do a full skin-care regimen and pack a great suitcase? If college weren’t so ghastly expensive here, maybe that one lady’s daughter wouldn’t be so keen on the patriarchy as a route to leisure that bypasses the long, uphill road to financial independence.
It wasn’t fair when women had no choice to stay home. It’s not fair if women are working but are still doing the work of maintaining a home. It’s not fair if both men and women are trying to juggle it together and are still finding that there aren’t enough hours or dollars in a day.
Who wouldn’t dream of feminine leisure?
To her credit, Hesse also imagines the male side of this fantasy: Who wouldn’t want to return from work each evening to find a home in perfect order, dinner on the table, and a well-rested spouse ready to draw you into the “ease” she has been cultivating all day? (Now you just need a willing partner and a senior-vice-president salary to pay for it all.)
Hesse’s article expresses a point of view that could generalize: Maybe we’re approaching retro conservative fantasies all wrong. At root, most of them aren’t really about then, they’re critiques of now: Why does life have to be so hard? Why is it so hard to pay for college? To get a career started? To find a serious relationship partner and stay together? To afford a home? To fit children into the equation and offer them at least as good a chance as you had?
Maybe people who are trying to wish their way out of this box deserve our empathy rather than our condemnation. The various retro fantasies they indulge may not be fact-based or workable in practice, but at least they address the question: Life wouldn’t be so hard if some sugar daddy would take care of me. Or if immigrants and minorities hadn’t stolen my place in line. Or if everybody went back to Jesus. Or if the government stopped sending our money overseas. Or if we had a strong-man leader who could make our country great again (whatever era “again” is supposed to point to).
Maybe the best liberal response isn’t a screed about the evils of sexism or xenophobia or authoritarianism. Maybe we should skip past the specifics and give our own answer to the underlying question: Why is life so hard these days?
We do have such an answer, one that I believe is far more realistic and supportable than anything conservatives offer: Life is hard because sometime in the late 1970s, the US scrapped the controls that kept the rich from capturing all the growth in the economy.
We scrapped antitrust enforcement, so as a consumer you have to take whatever deal monopolies offer you. (The endless “choices” you face at the mall are often just different tentacles of the same octopus.) We scrapped unions, so as a worker you have no negotiating power. And we changed the tax system so that whatever the rich capture, they keep. The result is this graph, which every American voter should be able to draw on a napkin.
If hourly compensation had kept up, the average Americans would make more than double what they do now. So you could afford a one-income household, if that’s what your family wanted. Or you could save up for year-long sabbaticals and return to the workplace with new vision and energy. Or you could retire at 50 and see the world.
Corporate talking heads may denounce this point of view as “class warfare” or “socialism”, but such name-calling isn’t really a refutation. And it is nostalgic in a manner of speaking, but the point isn’t to recreate some past era; it’s to get back to the trends that held in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, when economic gains were widely shared.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Agree 100%. So our slogan should be, “Make America Really Great Again – restore anti-trust, fix capitalism, rebuild unions, and tax billionaires and private equity out of existence“. Where do I sign up?
How much was 1950s America “great” primarily because World War II had wrecked almost all competing nations, leaving them as virtual captive markets for American products?
The other problem this graph doesn’t directly show is that workers who are doing well are those who have high IQ’s. We live in an economy where the high wage jobs increasingly require brains over brawn, and that means there will be more inequality because more people can do the latter than the former.
The class warfare of the future is brains vs. brawn.
IQ is made up racist garbage and high-status/high-wage employment is still subject to all the things this article describes about modern capitalism, if perhaps less so. The class warfare of the future is the same as the class warfare now: labor vs. capital. Pitting labor against labor is not the way forward.
Workers who “have high IQs” are doing well because somebody structured the economy so that workers who “have high IQs” will do well and others don’t. There is no law of economics or nature that says the economy can’t be structured the other way around.
Even if we grant that people differ in intelligence levels (which I agree is racist nonsense), that is still no justification for an economy that rewards people differently based on abilities. We’re all equal! No human being should be better off in life than another!
You’re not going to get as many people willing to spend a decade learning how to be a doctor if they will make as much as a fast food worker. Not that fast food workers don’t deserve to be paid more, but there has to be some recognition of how much time it takes to learn how to do a particular job.
The idea that races differ in intelligence levels is racist non-sense. The methods used to measure differences in intelligence have racial bias. Individual people do differ in intelligence.
Some humans are always going to be “better off” in life than others. No government will ever be able to fully compensate for inherent individual differences, from how healthy a person is to how intelligent, attractive, or gifted in a particular activity that’s highly valued one may be.
Rather than expecting government to deliver a maximum level that no person may exceed, what government can, and should, do is acquire a sufficient amount of the output of the country’s economic system so that output can be redirected to ensure a basic, compassionate standard of living for all.
Even after that’s been done, Mark Zuckerberg will still be able to afford a yacht and a villa in Monaco to dock it at. And that’s ok, as long as no one in America lacks health care or food or housing.
The returns to high IQ aren’t actually as good now, because most of the high-wage jobs for brainy Americans are concentrated in big coastal cities with sky-high housing costs.
The problem with Blue State America is that the Rent is Too Damn High.
The problem with Red State America is that the Wages are Too Damn Low.
Seems to me, in any civilized society, whatever you call its political system, the most important function of government is the regulation of greed. In effect, that’s what the early post-war tax system did. There is a major racial component to this also: It was the civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s that most disturbed former/closet segregationists and led to the formation the Heritage Foundation and similar “think tanks.” Then came the Reagan era and the decision of the 10 percent that wealth was not to be shared.
Privatize profits.
Socialize losses!
The single greatest lie the Haves tell the Have-Nots is that Capitalism is the natural economic law of our world, existing independently of man like the Law of Gravity, and whatever government effect is brought to Capitalism has a negative, distorting effect. Therefore, government only introduces imperfection, and thus must be limited as much as possible. Otherwise, those who deserve the rewards of Capitalism will not fulfill their just due, and anyone who receives those misdirected rewards doesn’t deserve them nor should have them.
If this were true, a failed state such as Somalia would be Utopia for Capitalists. And to a large extent, Somalia does an excellent job of demonstrating all the various positive, enhancing values strong, law-based government brings to a country’s economic system, from legal protections to long-term stability and reliability.
What’s especially egregious in our country is how thoroughly captured government has become by the Haves to use it to distort for their own benefit the results of our economic system. From massive subsidies to tax shelters to direct but legalized corruption to widespread moral hazard insurance, federal and state governments are used to funnel benefits to the wealthy they would never receive in a truly laissez-faire Capitalist system.
Any economic system that’s more evolved than the simple law of the jungle, where life is just a function of predators, is a construct of choices made by humans attempting to balance the values expressed by those choices. As such, no economic system exists beyond mankind as some sort of natural law, but rather is the product of competing human values and desires. In America, those tend to be, boiled down to the basics, unfettered personal greed vs. “promoting the general welfare”, which was and is a functional purpose of establishing the Constitution of our nation.
A nation’s economic system must serve its political system, and by extension, its body politic. When it fails to do so, it must be modified, even radically, so that its results better serve the whole. History has repeatedly taught us what happens when the body politic concludes its being screwed by the current economic system. The crossroads our country is at today is much in part a function of such a conclusion. Unfortunately, it appears it’s the Plutocracy that’s about to finish its takeover mission launched by Reaganism (and before it, John Bircher-Goldwaterism) instead of moving to a European model of Democratic Socialism that channels a significant portion of economic output to the community instead of a few select (usually by winning the birth lottery) individuals.
My wife and I were born in ’80-’81. We were the first of the generation that broke under the changing realities you highlight. Sadly, almost everyone blamed my generation for being poor, helpless, over-educated, and over-worked. Instead of headlines talking about how so many of us couldn’t make ends meet, stories came out trying to “solve” why we weren’t buying houses and cars, and thus messing up the economy.
We had Suzi Orman blaming us for our “choice” not to save money. I had to almost tether my mother to a table to show her how completely broken all the math was. It wasn’t that I wasn’t saving, it was that I was making so little that my savings that even if they had good returns, they’d never add up to anything useful. That was 2005. It didn’t make things better that roughly the first 10 years of our careers, our investments would be potentially negative, even if we made traditional ones in the correct amounts.
It’s frustrating that even today, the information in the linked charts is still new to people. If we admitted the that life really is getting harder, and it’s not that each generation is lazier than the previous, we might be able to tackle this problem. From my perspective, this was held back at least 30 years due to agism and hubris of otherwise well-educated adults.
Trackbacks
[…] week’s featured posts are “A Different Take on Retro Conservative Fantasy“, “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“, and “Republicans Scramble to Contain their […]