"I'm a Trad Wife"

A man is not a plan. 

Traditional gender roles for women, the trad wives trend, and the vaginal speculum. 

-o-
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to Death by Doctrine. I'm MJ. I'm Elizabeth. This is your first time on the podcast, Elizabeth. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Today's doctrine is a big one. Something that is, yeah, I'll say it unfortunately constantly simmering in the background of everything that we do. We're gonna talk about traditional gender roles today. This will be a two-parter, one for men and one for women. And we are starting with the more familiar term because this term went viral on all the social platforms a few years ago. The trad wife.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Ladies first, as is tradition.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Now, when someone says that to you, do you respond with, Oh, that's nice, what a gentleman?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Or are you like, ugh, I guess it depends who's doing it. If they're creepy, ew.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

That's true. Yeah, it's very person dependent. Before we start, uh, because the patriarchy and gender ideology permeate every aspect of our lives, we have to limit the scope of our discussion. When we discuss traditional gender roles for women, aka the triad wife, we're mainly looking at this in the context of like interpersonal relationship, the family unit, the domestic setting. Otherwise, we truly could be here all day. You could major in women's studies or gender politics. Like it's truly ubiquitous.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

And even focusing on just this one manifestation of traditional gender ideology, we will still have a lot to cover.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, the script is looking at 10 pages. So we'll see uh how long this takes. So let's start by defining what this doctrine is. When we say trad wife, traditional gender ideal that it represents, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Okay, so at the surface level, the modern trad wife is fairly self-explanatory. It's short for traditional wife. So the trad wife is a feminine ideal that is nostalgic for a time when traditional gender roles predominated. So this is harking back to the happy housewife of the 1950s, and trad wives stay at home, fulfilling roles such as cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. In fact, trad wives often dress in vintage style gowns with full hair and makeup reminiscent of the 1950s to add to the aesthetic. But I think it's really important to note one critical new role that exists for many of the trad wives that we see today, and that is the role of being a social media influencer. And this added qualification is important because it implies that there's a part of being an ideal trad wife that is holding influence, which adds an illusion of power and independence, which is arguably lacking from traditional housewife predecessors. And furthermore, it requires a certain level of performance that leads us to question if trad wives actually subscribe to their own ideology.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

There's a lot of people posting about them being a trad wife, and the modern trad wife's existence has always been very hypocritical to me. Like, surely, if you want to walk the walk, you would be silent and not try to broadcast your life. But it's also important to point out that, and this is true for social media in general, the vast majority of trad wife influencers do not have thousands of followers. What you see on TikToks and YouTube are the few exceptions that got to that stage. Because of the algorithm, we only see the outliers with millions of views and not the mode or the median. But essentially, a trad wife is describing traditional gender roles for women. Before we get into the origin of this doctrine and its details, we must discuss the difference between gender and sex. This is something that I think a lot of people either unintentionally or intentionally confuse.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Absolutely. And it's impossible to describe any gender-related ideology without first clarifying who it applies to. So there is a critical distinction between sex, which is biologically determined, and gender, which is a societal construct. So sex is determined by physical traits of the body, such as reproductive organs, genitalia, and DNA. And depending on these characteristics, people are most often assigned to either male or female. But sex is not so simple. There are those with a combination of typically male and female physical traits who are intersex, and still others may have mutations that generate different secondary sex characteristics than their chromosomes would suggest. And I encourage listeners to look up the syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Relatively rare, but definitely a thing.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

Yes. Very interesting. And despite widespread confusion on this point, a person's sex does not definitively predict how they will identify with regard to their gender. Gender, unlike sex, is an ideology in itself, and it's a creation of human cultures. So in Western culture, gender tends to fall into the categories such as man and woman. But just as with sex, gender doesn't fit neatly into a binary system. And there are many people who are transgender, gender queer, or non-binary.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

And I think a good example of showing why gender is a social construct is as simple as dress. For example, like why don't men wear dresses, even though we are the ones with external genitalia? Like in theory, we should enjoy a skirt or a dress because there's less fabric there, but we don't.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

The other thing too is that the gender dress has changed over history too, because way a long time ago, men would wear high heels, or the color pink was associated with boys and blue is associated with girls. So things can change with time.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So many examples of why gender is a social construct that we can very clearly see. But the important thing is both sex and gender exist on a spectrum. And while most people fall on the ends, it doesn't mean that the spectrum doesn't exist. It's just rare, just like any distribution that you see in stats. But also, when we're talking about trad wife, we're being specific to our culture because that's the culture that we're dissecting today.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Yeah. And the trad wife, as an ideology rooted in Western culture, tends to apply to cisgendered women, meaning women whose sex assigned at birth was female and who identify their gender as women. By definition, they are also married to a cisgender man who is the breadwinner of the family. They're usually mothers, and also an important note due to historical context, trad wives tend to be white, upper middle class, and often of Christian uh faith.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

The fact that being married is like built into this ideology says a lot because a woman can't just be a woman.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

You have to be a wife. You have to be married with kids, something we will return to. So that's what trad wives are as we know them today. I feel like by this point, people are well aware of this trend. It's been a few years since Nara Smith and who's the other woman?

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Ballerina Farms.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

It's been a few years since they went viral. Chances are you've seen those TikToks, Instagram reels, and its satirical counterparts as well. Many think pieces, podcasts, and video essays were produced critiquing this movement. I'm always late to these things. Before we get into the doctrines deleterious health effects, let's talk about where this doctrine came from. What is the historical progression of the trad wife?

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Okay, so I looked into this, and trad wife ideology is a successor to the ideal of feminine domesticity, which surprisingly we don't have to go that far back to find the origin of. Back in the 19th century was the start of the quote cult of domesticity, unquote, which originated in the United States in the context of the market revolution. So the market revolution was a shift in the American economy from an agrarian model of independent farming to industrialized production and sale of goods. And this is important because it moved the means of economic production outside of the home and away from women who existed in the domestic sphere. So men left the home to drive production, and women stayed at home to provide unpaid household labor and emotional support. And it's also important to note that this was most true for upper and middle class women, as many lower class women were still forced into very low-paying work, such as that found in factories and some of the very few paid positions that were available to them.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, even in its origin state, you can see the class association with the Tradwife ideology, even in this stage. Because if you were poor, you had to take whatever job you could get. You couldn't really choose to stay at home. To add to this, during this period and later into the Industrial Revolution, the worst of the worst jobs often prefer to hire women and children because they could be paid much lower wages than men. Sometimes a third of one men were getting paid for the same thing. So the trad wife doctrine, as much as it is oppressive to women in general, it's also intertwined with class. And if you were poor, you played by very different rules. It's almost as if if you were poor, your gender is like not even that important.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

Yeah, and I think it's also really important that we note this historical context because the omissions of white feminism have become more recognized in mainstream and is often criticized for leaving out women of color, poor women, queer women, and trans women who often suffer different oppressive ideologies, further complicated by the intersectionality of their identities. But this does not diminish the fact that intersectional women have made important contributions to all feminist movements throughout history, as domesticity is far from the only oppressive ideology women face.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so back to the 19th century.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

So, like we alluded to before, the cult of domesticity, which was also known as the cult of true womanhood.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

I know.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

That's a horrifying phrase.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

So this horrifying phrase was coined by the historian Barbara Welter, and it was used to describe the system of values that applied to American women during the 19th century. So the ideal woman in that time period held four main virtues, and that was piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These virtues were reinforced on several platforms, anywhere from religious sermons to women's magazines. And women seeking to live up to these virtues were submissive to their husbands. They served as wives and homemakers. They supported the place of their breadwinner husbands in society, which often curtailed their own.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Yeah, a sharp division of where women can be versus men. You start to see the gender really start to pull apart after this market revolution and when jobs were moved outside of the home, that division got like even starker. Also, a lot of Christian influences can be seen here. So that plays a huge role. When you said piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, I just can't help but think about like some of the more Christian influences of oh no, no, don't have sex until you're married. You know what I mean? Like it's starting to solidify into this idea.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Yeah, like chastity and that idea really being integrated in with Christianity. And I think that it's a perfect example of how gender ideology influences and is influenced by many other forms of ideology within cultures.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Definitely. Again, we're focusing on the Western culture. Yes. But other cultures have different struggles that we have to recognize.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Exactly. And for women in Western culture of 19th century, as long as they were relegated to the home, they remained economically dependent on men. And just as with many oppressive ideologies, the cult of domesticity supported its second-class view of women with supposed evidence that women were inherently suited to this domesticity. So women were often portrayed as the delicate sex and that they required the protection of men and shielding from the rough realities of the public sphere, and that roles such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and child rearing were somehow fundamentally feminine. And an additional assault to prevent women from questioning their subordination, women had little opportunity for education. And when they did, it was focused on what they would need to be good wives and mothers.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, this circular logic is a common feature in a lot of the doctrines that we will talk about in this series. Generate the condition that justifies your views, use that as evidence for those views, and you rinse and repeat the process. As time progressed, it became increasingly impossible for women to be employed. And gradually we had this divergence of men as breadwinners who go to work and women as housewives who stayed at home. So that was the root of the idea. But the trad wife, at least the one that we know from the recent explosion on TikTok that we know today is a more recent concept, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Yeah, a lot more recent. And actually, feminine domesticity had to undergo one more additional metamorphosis before we got there. So in the 1940s to 1950s, World War II happened. Men went off to war, and then those job vacancies had to be filled somehow. And so women were often called upon to fill those roles. And so during this time period, for the first time, women were encouraged to be outside the domestic sphere. But by the time the war was over, they had to reverse course.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

This to me is one of the most classic examples of why gender is a social construct because all that talk about how, oh no, no, no, women are so delicate. We gotta protect them. They can't do hard labor. As soon as there's a labor shortage, it's like, no, no, no. Actually, no, yeah, come in. We need we need women in the factory. Rosie Deriveder, you know?

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Yeah. You literally have a woman showing her bicep and showing that women are strong. So the narrative can definitely change depending on society's goals.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

On a dime.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Yeah, on a dime.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

And equally on the dime, uh, I don't know if you know this Rosie Derivator story, but obviously Rosie Derivator is now an iconic image of the wartime American uh I'll say propaganda. And when the war was over, they ran a bunch of ads that had Rosie the Riveter in an apron. They try to like 180 reverse course as soon as the war was over. And I struggle to find pictures of this, but I've been told that these ads existed where the Rosie the Riveter image sort of vanished overnight and woman in apron image immediately filled that space in the 50s, which again goes to show that their logic of women are delicate is completely made up. It's all manufactured because as soon as you need a woman to work, apparently it was okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Yeah, it's whatever story people want to tell.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah. Ugh.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

So the idea of the traditional housewife was repopularized during that time, and it was a direct response to women's increased presence in the workforce during World War II. But also during this time period, it was noted that being forced to conform to this ideal did not suit everyone. This is the usual archetype that modern trad wifes model themselves after, though. So the stylish housewife with the coft hair and the flouncy dresses, cooking dinner for husbands and kids.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Wait, what hair?

SPEAKER_02 14:51

The coft hair.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

What word is that?

SPEAKER_02 14:53

Quaff. It's like a blowout.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Like it's like That's a real word.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

Yes, quaft.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Okay, I've never heard of that word continue, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Um, but back in the mid-20th century, we then had second wave feminism, and that was the direct counter response to this. And ever since the 1950s, American women of today enjoy much more diverse roles in society. And since it's been a constant push and pull throughout history, this most recent version of traditional gender ideology comes with the emergence of trad wife influencers.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Yeah, all of history is a series of class struggle, as Karl Marx said, and that applies to gender as well. Like you have Rosie DeRiveter, the war is over, and they said that's put Rosie back into the kitchen. And then a lot of women are like, but I like my job.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

They'd had a taste of what they were missing out on.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

They had a taste of freedom and actual independence, and then obviously second wave feminism. So, in a lot of ways, that the current trad wife movement is a response to something, and we'll get into that towards the end of the episode. So that's the basic breakdown of what the doctrine of the trad wife is and where it all came from. Let's get into the public health portion of this episode. What are the negative health effects of believing in this trad wife doctrine? Why does believing in this ideology kill you slowly? So let's break this out on two levels the individual level and the societal level. Let's start with the individual level. Mental health. On the individual level, this doctrine is asking people, women in this case, to fit a particular gender ideal. And it's certainly not asking in an aspirational sense. Like the trad wife's doctrine is not saying, oh, it will be great if you can do this. It's asking in an absolute sense. It's saying that if you don't believe in this ideology, there is something wrong with you. You're a bad woman. And we can see this in their content. They're not subtle about this at all. They're not simply saying, I like being a traditional housewives. They're saying women should be traditional housewives. And that I think is a very big distinction that we need to draw. It's not aspirational, it's like absolute.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Yeah, and this perceived lack of choice and the ties of value to this ideology are fundamental to a lot of the detrimental effects that we see on health.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Yeah. If you subscribe to this doctrine, you by definition will be negative towards women who can achieve this ideal, including yourself. Many studies have highlighted the negative effects of adhering to external rigid gender rules on people's self-esteem and mental health, a lot of shame and guilt, which is not healthy. Let's look at this doctrine closely to sort of illustrate that. If you subscribe to the Tradwife doctrine, you must be married as soon as possible, otherwise, you are a failure. I can't say whether getting married young has any negative health effects, but I do know that this doctrine certainly doesn't encourage women to pursue higher education or a career or be selective in who they choose to marry. And that is not great.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Yeah, and it can be very hard to give focus to both professional and personal aspirations simultaneously, especially for women juggling. The two can be unsustainable, and they are often forced to choose which takes priority.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah, a problem that men don't have to deal with. When a men say, I want to focus on my career, people are like, Oh my God, what a future CEO we have on our hands. But society doesn't treat women the same way when they choose career over other things, especially not under this doctrine. And another thing, under this doctrine, the trad wife is completely dependent on the husband. If he decides to have an affair or divorce you, what are you going to do? And if you say something like, I'm committed to my husband and he is to me, and we will never get divorced, hello, your husband can die too, right? It doesn't have to be like a breakup. In that case, of either divorce or death of the husband, being a trad wife means little to no financial ability to recover. What are you gonna do now? You just lost your health insurance for starters. You have no career experience or very few career experience. So the only thing you can probably get is an entry-level job, maybe, which likely doesn't pay much. I'm gonna quote a YouTube essayist. I'm forgetting where I heard this from, but I love this quote. A man is not a plan. Have some financial independence. It is good for your health and the health of your children.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Yeah, I think in general, no matter who you are, it's good to have some level of financial independence. Because if you let yourself become completely dependent on another person, you will not be able to fall on your own feet if that person's no longer in the picture.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

It's not just divorce, it's also death. And unfortunately, it could happen to anyone. Another aspect of this doctrine, the trad wife is supposed to be subordinate to the husband. And some of them deny this, but it's clear. I don't have data on whether trad wives are more likely to be victims of abuse. But what we do know is that trad wives are more likely to have fewer options available to them if they are abused. Divorce is stigmatized in this doctrine because trad wives believe a woman's value is being married and having a family. Also, you may not be financially independent enough to leave, even if you wanted to. So you may be trapped in a very bad situation, which is obviously bad for your health and the health of your child. And also, we know that people trapped in abusive relationships are more likely to experience self-harm or suicide, which is also bad.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Yeah, and escaping from abusive relationships is notoriously difficult just as it is. But for women who are completely dependent on their partners and have no financial independence, then they're even more vulnerable to this abuse because it makes it that much harder to escape.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Another aspect of this doctrine, you have to have children and you need to have them early and often. You can't just have one. Bellerina Farms lady has, I want to say, seven.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

She has eight, and there's a rumor she's pregnant with her ninth.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Oh, geez. I think after some point is too many. I don't know where that line is, but I she's past it. Nothing particularly unhealthy about wanting children, but I would like to cite a previous point. This doctrine has a mental health cost when someone fails to adhere to these rigid gender expectations, including yourself. Not every woman can have children, even if they wanted to. Infertility is a serious concern for anyone involved. And not only that, sometimes unfortunately, you get unlucky and you have some complications at birth, and then you need to remove a fallopian tube, which I believe if you get an atopic pregnancy, that is the option for you. You have to remove one of your fallopian tubes. Yes. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

Have they improved their surgery to remove just a pregnancy or typically the whole tube, I believe, but I am not an obstetric gynecologist.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

So if you are an OB, please email us and correct us. But I believe you remove the tube, which means you essentially lose half of your eggs, uh, unless you do like artificial insemination, which I guess is possible. But my point is, not everyone can have children, even if they wanted to, whether it is due to nature or nurture or whatever. And under this ideology, if you can't have children, that's your fault. You did not fulfill your duty as a trad wife. Your family is incomplete. There's already a lot of stigma for childless women. This doctrine turbocharges that.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

Yeah. And not to mention all the more physical health effects and long term effects of women who do bear children. Childbirth has long been a leading cause of women's morbidity and mortality for centuries. And even with today's modern medicine, there are still many risks involved.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah. Modern medicine, we have made it pretty safe, but it is a risk. The next point: the life of a trad wife is to stay at home, right? You are a stay-at-home housewife. You can't have a job. We already went over this already. What is the health effect of being confined to the domestic sphere? Uh, Lizbeth, you are a medical professional. I'm not sure if you have heard of this. This is not an official diagnosis, but you know how something it becomes common enough that it gets a name even before it becomes like an official diagnosis.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Yes. So I can think of a couple phenomenon which we have come up with names for, and like an imposter syndrome, which is not a medical diagnosis, but describes the feeling of being unqualified for one's role, or even white coat hypertension when patients have elevated blood pressure in the medical setting, but it's normal otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah, a lot of these things that are very much real things, but there's no official diagnosis. Here's something I found out there's something called the stay-at-home mom depression. This is a real phenomenon. Non-working women parents are, somewhat counterintuitively, 2.4 times more likely to experience depression than working women parents. And you're like, but working women parents, they have to work. They're so much busier. Like, how come women who stay at home are more likely to experience depression? And you know what? There's something about engaging your brain and working that actually is like it gives you fulfillment. Yeah, it gives you fulfillment. Not everyone has good jobs, but assuming your job is decent, there's a there's a feeling of fulfillment with that, you know?

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Yeah, I think it's really great that we now have a name for what Betty Frieden referred to in the feminine mystique as the problem that has no name, which describes the discontent. So she came up with that term to describe the discontent and boredom which was experienced by women who conformed to housewife ideals.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

I don't know, actually, I know you don't. You've been busy your entire life because you're a physician. But I don't know if you've ever talked to people who stay at home, they're as stay-at-home moms or otherwise, but it's not that great. A lot of people think it's free time, but it's not really free time. There are several potential negatives to being a stay-at-home wife. The idea that it's easy because you don't do anything is flat out wrong. There's so much to do at home. However, unlike normal labor, domestic labor has a long history of being ignored. In other words, there's no satisfying payoff at the end, like doing an art project or going to work and like doing a surgery. There's no payoff at the end. You're doing things that constantly need to be done and often getting little to no recognition and rest. Like there's always laundry, there's always dishes, there's no final products that you can be proud of. Therefore, unless you have an understanding and empathetic husband, it's possible to feel like you're laboring for nothing. Like you're just spinning on that hamster wheel. It's the, well, yeah, this is your duty. You need to do this. If you don't do this, then you're a bad mom, right? It's that built-in expectation. And that's the problem. The assumption that it is your immutable role, being a stay-at-home mom wouldn't be problematic, except this doctrine thinks all women should do this. If you can find fulfillment as a housewife, great, good for you. But not every woman is like that. And insisting that every woman should find fulfillment in being a housewife is what's problematic about this doctrine.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Yeah, and it's never sat well with me that self-sacrifice has become so inextricable with motherhood. Of course, being a mother and experiencing that level of love would inspire self-sacrifice, but why does it always have to extend to everyday scenarios? Like, why must women work so hard every day and receive so little recognition for the millions of little sacrifices that they've made over the years? And then if a man does one thing like washing the dishes or feeding the kids dinner, he gets applause. We've allowed such an innate level of expectation that women will fulfill this pivotal and life-defining role that we actually have started to take it for granted. And speaking of that, I think it's also important to address one of the biggest points of defense held by anti-feminist women. Tradwives, trad wives. And that is that it's anti-woman to put down the roles of homemakers and mothers. So we should mention that the work people do in these roles is critical and it should not be diminished. But it's a fallacy to think that women and domestic roles are synonymous. There is no reason that men cannot take these roles on to, and that if an individual woman finds happiness living solely in these roles and wants to choose them, she can, but it can be hard to know for sure how much of that desire is from her or from internalized ideologies.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Yeah, it's all about choice. Some people do find fulfillment in being a stay-at-home wife, and if that's what fits for you, great. Have fun, knock yourselves out. But it's the expectation that it is a woman's role that's the problem. A slightly minor point. It can be incredibly isolating to be a stay-at-home mom. If you subscribe to the Tradwife doctrine, you are limited to the domestic sphere. That means you're always performing, and that can be kind of exhausting. Um, also, humans are social creature, but you're kind of trapped somewhat physically in the house, but also metaphorically by your gender role. There's not a lot of allowance for self-care or socializing with someone who isn't also a mom under this ideology. The idea of this is less common now, but the idea of like, oh, I I need to have like a mom day. You see this in sitcoms. Like the husband is always like, Oh my god, mom's having a mom day. Oh, the house is a mess. You know that trope. And it's like, yeah, like you don't have an off day because your world is your home and you're always at home.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Yeah, your literal job is your entire identity and you have nothing outside of that. And to think that you spend all day at home, and like you said, some of the only other adults that you talk to are also moms, or they're your husband, or they're your toddler. If you spend all day at home with a toddler, like you're just not gonna get the same interpersonal feedback that you're gonna get from up here.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:55

And so I think that also lends a lot to the feelings of isolation.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

It probably leads to the stay-at-home mom depression, too.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

Mm-hmm. Um, and another thing that I think leads to the isolation is how we view each family unit being by itself a separate economic entity rather than as a component of a larger society. So much of domestic labor could easily be crowdsourced by way of communal childcare, communal kitchens and laundries by making these individuals solely responsible for these tasks for their own families, we degrade our sense of communal responsibility.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Yeah. And I do have to add here that, you know, the Tradwife doctrine is associated with conservatives, and conservatives are always about like going back to their good old days. And I would say if you go back even further, you would get the it takes a village to raise a child era where yeah, like childcare is like a communal thing. Like you take care of my kid, I take care of your kid, like everyone gathers together, pull their resources together, but for some reason that's too far back. They don't want to go that far back. They want to go to a very specific era.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

The specific era that suits their goals.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Yeah, that suits their goals instead of like all the way back to when childcare really was like a communal thing before the nuclear family, which by the way, very recent invention. The nuclear family is, I want to say 20th century. Yeah. Even before industrialization, there were communities because you kind of have to live in a community. It's really hard to do everything by yourself. So, anyway, so those are all the ways that the Triadwife doctrine can be harmful to your individual health. But what about on a societal level? How is this harmful for public health? I don't think I need to mention this, but for thoroughness, here we go. This ideology is inherently homophobic and transphobic. It's traditional gender roles. This is expected. This is not good for public health because public health is for everyone, and any ideology that inherently denies the human right or indeed the existence of an entire group of people is bad.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Yeah, and like we've discussed, the trad wife ideology is quite narrow and it has specific standards that are impossible for most people to live up to. And therefore, it leaves no room for people who exist outside of that. So this makes societies where traditional gender ideology is prevalent less safe for people with gender identities outside of that. And we are seeing this now with many hospitals starting to deny gender-affirming care and lawmakers allowing healthcare providers to deny care to trans and non-binary patients.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Just the denial of an entire group of people and public all this for everyone, and that is not good. This ideology is inherently pro-birth. They are explicitly anti-abortion because trad wives, the value of a woman is in her fertility. In this post-Dobbs era, we're witnessing live the dangerous effects of the anti-abortion lobby. And Trad wives very openly are part of this. Honestly, not even trying to hide it. So, some stats, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, which is the Dobbs decision, the discrepancy of abortion access between states exploded. States with abortion bans saw a dramatic rise in maternal mortality. For example, Texas saw a 56% increase compared to the national increase of 11%. So there's already a national increase because of this. And Texas and some of the states with even harsher abortion bans saw even a more dramatic rise. And we've said this in other episodes, but abortion is healthcare. Abortion is just a medical procedure. I don't know why it's been politicized. Similarly, there's an increased rate of infant death in states with abortion bans. So it hurts not just the mother, but also the potential child. Anti-abortion laws are literally killing women and children. Abortion access is healthcare. I need not read all the harrowing headlines of all the women who suffered unnecessarily because they have a complication and couldn't get a medically necessary abortion because they live in the wrong state. This is not counting the other horrifying cases of not being able to terminate a pregnancy as a result of rape or incest. There is a demonstrable negative health impact on both the mother and a child when the mother slash parent are not prepared to have a child. And I think this is a wider reason why the anti-abortion doctrine is so bad. If you're not ready to have a child, it's bad to have one. Like it's bad for the child and you because it's very expensive to feed a child. And this is why reproductive autonomy is so crucial. At minimum, for health reasons. You should not have a child unless you're ready to have one. But also for financial reasons and for emotional reasons and for economic reasons, all the reasons you should not have a child unless you're ready to have one.

SPEAKER_02 32:22

Innumerable reasons. And these effects can have many downstream impacts when there are children born with serious congenital health problems, and women can sustain permanent health effects from high-risk pregnancies.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Sometimes unnecessarily high-risk pregnancies.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

If enough people believe in this ideology, women will have less rights. And I can prove it because it happened once already. The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment that would explicitly ban discrimination based on sex. Phyllis Shaffley, a trad wife, hardcore conservative woman, was one of the biggest reasons why it failed to ratify because she was able to convince many women in America that traditional gender roles are good and equal rights is bad. And therefore, we don't have constitutional protection for sex discrimination because of this. And what is the public health impact of women having less rights? There's so many ways, but one example is concerning your health. If women are not part of the policy making process, their concerns will not be voiced, the making of those policies. The Tradwife ideology restricts women to the domestic sphere, which means under this ideology, women are discouraged from participating in the political process like voting. This is not an inference. The conservatives have, in 2025, floated the idea that women should not be able to vote. This is bad for public health. If women are barred from the political process, they will have less control over policies that directly affect them. This is how we get, and this is true, a room full of all male politicians proposing legislation that will remove maternity leave and gut reproductive health care. This happened during Trump's first term and is continuing to happen during Trump's second term.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

Yes. And more recently, this reminds me of the SAVE Act with its provision requiring voters to show documents like birth certificates and passports to register to vote. So for many married women who change their last names according to tradition, this can be a major hurdle to being able to vote.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

And under the Tradwife Doctrine, you would be like, oh, that's okay. I just need to take care of the kids, right? But there are wider implications for this. Regarding the health of our actual society, this ideology is highly damaging because under the Tradwife Doctrine, their version of traditional gender roles, women are not supposed to have a career. Meaning our society loses roughly half of its labor and intellectual potential. No women scientists, no women engineers, no women designers, no women workers, no women legislators. Society used to function like this and it sucked. This means a systematic lack of input in how we organize our society from half of the population. An example that I just thought about actually is a medical example. When you get a pap smear or any type of like pelvic exam, the OB will use something called a speculum, which is uh, it looks like a duck, right? I'm just gonna say it. It looks like a duck. Yeah, duckbill. And it's made of metal. And any woman who has had a speculum used on them would be like, it's not exactly comfortable, as far as I can tell from the woman that I've spoken to. And only recently has a group of women physicians said we should probably redesign this.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

This thing that was obviously designed by a man.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Obviously designed by a man. Have you heard about this? The newly designed speculum.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

I think I saw an article about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

It's so simple, it blows my mind why we haven't done this. But instead of made of metal, it's made with silicone. Already, just so much better. The fact that it's made of silicone.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

Such a revolutionary concept.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

And instead of two petals or instead of two duckbills. Yeah, duckbills, it's three, which distributes the force a lot evenly than two, right? Such a simple concept. But unless we have women physicians, that probably would not happen if physicians were all men.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

Absolutely not. And it's thanks to female minds that we have things like Wi-Fi, we know the structure of DNA, we discovered the element radium, and that chimpanzees can use tools which permanently altered our definition of what it means to be human. These are accomplishments for women like Hetty Lamar and Rosmond Franklin, Marie Curie and Jane Goodall. So think of a world without any of these contributions and what that would look like.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Not a good world.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

So yeah, but with the modern popularity of trad wife ideology, things are trying to swing back into that direction. So there are attempts to ban women from the military, ban women from voting, like we talked about, attempts to remove their bodily autonomy, and swings like this have happened before, as we've mentioned. So during the market revolution, it was to prevent women's economic freedom. In the 1950s, it was to roll back the economic freedom attained by women during World War II. And they say that hindsight is 2020, but it can be a challenge to identify the context for the current popularity of trad wife ideology.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Yeah, and this is one of the things we sort of want to end on. Like, why is this doctrine popular again?

SPEAKER_02 37:08

So I've I have a couple of theories. It's hard to really pinpoint one specific trigger. It could be the backlash against the Me Too movement for challenging the status quo of sexual harassment of women in the workforce. It could be a reflex to seek comfort in the seemingly stability of age-old traditions after the tumultuousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. Potentially it's an attempt to repopularize traditional gender roles by the recent right-wing conservative politics. Or it could just be that women in the workforce are feeling burnt out due to the fact that men have not seen a comparable increase in their involvement with domestic labor.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

Yeah. I don't know either. I think it's probably a combination of all those things. But I think one of the biggest factors, it always comes back to capitalism. Modern life is very difficult, especially for working women. However, yes, life sucks, but the response to the fact that life sucks should not be, oh, let's just return to our traditional gender roles. It should be make life better for people, especially women. You can be a stay-at-home mom and have rights. There are stay-at-home feminists, right? Being a homemaker is a very valid way to spend your time. The problem is when you tie the gender ideal so that it makes it this is all that a woman can do because that's what the doctrine calls for. But yeah, I get it. Life's tough.

SPEAKER_02 38:27

Yeah, we have so many sources of stress to worry about these days when it comes to trad wife ideology and all the detrimental effects we've just discussed. We should take pause in thinking that this could ever be a healthy solution.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

So that's the trad wife doctrine. Hopefully, after this, we were able to be convincing that uh we shouldn't believe this. It's bad for the women, it's bad for the child, it's bad for the entire society if enough people believe this. And in the next episode, we will talk about the flip side of this ideology. The male version of this. The Trad husband. But we came up with a snappier term. So uh look forward to that. But thank you so much for listening to Death by Doctrine, and we'll see you in the next episode.

SPEAKER_02 39:15

See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

Thank you so much for listening to Death by Doctrine. If you like the show, please tell everyone you know about the show. That is the best thing that you can do to help us. I have other podcasts as well, including Everything is Public Health, and public health is for everyone. For more information and all updates, please visit everything ispublichealth.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.