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Episode: Where tradwives and leftists agree
Author: NPR
Duration: 00:16:46
Episode Shownotes
We continue our conversation about the hellscape of modern motherhood, and look into an alternative to the tradwife lifestyle.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_03
Hi, I'm Ramtin Adablouie from ThruLine.
00:00:17 Speaker_10
Electricity, internet, cell service, all the things we rely on every day can be unreliable or inaccessible in an emergency. But through any storm or crisis, radio is a lifeline. Support the resource that's here for you no matter what.
00:00:22 Speaker_10
Give today at donate.npr.org. Hey everyone, this is Code Switch. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Leah Janela.
00:00:32 Speaker_10
And we're here with a bonus episode to continue our conversation about momfluencers, tradwives, and the wild world of modern motherhood.
00:00:46 Speaker_09
Last time we spoke, we talked about the long history of political leaders talking about how much they revere mothers, but not actually enacting laws or policies that are designed to support them. Yep.
00:00:59 Speaker_10
And about how government has left a void and influencers are there to fill it. You know, if you can't have paid family leave, at least you can have a nice silky nursing bra for the low, low cost of $76.99. I mean, I'd say it's worth it.
00:01:12 Speaker_09
But I know from your tone, Leah, you've been experiencing some pretty overwhelming feelings about becoming a parent in the near future. Not all of them good. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong.
00:01:26 Speaker_09
I am excited to have a child. It's something I chose to do. But the deeper I get into some of these parenting worlds, the more terrified I become.
00:01:35 Speaker_09
I spent a lot of time talking to Sarah Peterson, we heard from her last time. She's the author of a recent book about momfluencers and the challenges of being a mom.
00:01:50 Speaker_10
And one of the things she said that really stood out to me was that if someone struggles with motherhood, it's so often seen as a deep, incurable character flaw.
00:01:57 Speaker_08
She said it makes her think of MLMs. You mean like multi-level marketing businesses? Herbalife or Mary Kay. Exactly.
00:02:12 Speaker_08
When 99.9% of people involved in MLMs fail, the blame is always on them. And I think the same is true of mothers often. If we fail, it's not the systems that are failing us. It's something within us that's broken or, you know, not solid enough or not rising to the occasion. So motherhood is a pyramid scheme.
00:02:31 Speaker_10
Totally. Totally. I don't think that's far off. At least as it's been constructed in the U.S. That sounds so rough.
00:02:43 Speaker_09
But the train has left the station for you. So what are you going to do? Just like hope that you can work your way to the top of the MLM?
00:02:59 Speaker_02
I mean, that is one option, but thank goodness, as I was reporting this episode, I came across a couple others, many of which were laid out in a book called After Work. It's about something that's emerged largely in the past decade or so called post-work politics.
00:03:12 Speaker_09
Rather than thinking, let's reassert a gendered division of labor, let's reassert particular gendered spheres, it thinks instead, OK, well, what does a world look like where there is less work for everyone?
00:03:23 Speaker_09
Okay, I'm into that. Who is that we're hearing, by the way? That's Helen Hester, one of the authors of the book.
00:03:29 Speaker_10
She co-wrote After Work with her partner, Nick Cernick.
00:03:33 Speaker_09
They're both professors living in London, and they somehow managed to write this book while raising two toddlers and a baby. Damn, like they are at the tippy top of the parenting pyramid scheme. Oh my gosh, they're rolling in so much Mary Kay and Herbalife money, it's not even funny.
00:03:48 Speaker_09
No, but actually, their book is about imagining a future where work doesn't have a chokehold on our entire lives.
00:04:00 Speaker_09
And one of the things that really floored me was this part of the book where Helen and Nick are talking about the evolution of housework over the past century or so. They reference a study that Ruth Schwartz Cohen did in the 1970s.
00:04:11 Speaker_04
Cohen is a researcher and historian who studies home industrialization.
00:04:17 Speaker_04
And she was observing the introduction of all these new technologies that were supposedly revolutionizing the way you could manage a home.
00:04:26 Speaker_10
Things like, you know, vacuum cleaners, washers and dryers, dishwashers, plumbing, toilets, all this sort of stuff. But what she found when she went and studied the sort of, you know, the amount of work that was being done in the 1900s versus the 1970s, it was effectively the same.
00:04:40 Speaker_09
Wait, so you're saying that pre-indoor plumbing, pre-most households having electricity, housewives were doing the same amount of housework as housewives in the 70s? Yeah, on average.
00:04:53 Speaker_09
There's a difference of about two hours a week in how much housework people did over the course of that time. And today, 50 years later, it still hasn't changed that much. I'm sorry, how is that possible?
00:05:06 Speaker_09
Well, Helen and Nick said one reason is that the standards for what homes should look like have gotten way higher with each new technological development. So now that vacuum cleaners exist, we expect people's floors to be way cleaner. Well, dang.
00:05:19 Speaker_09
Plus, if one person is doing all of their household chores individually, there's only so much you can do to make things more efficient. You know, you can only cook dinner so fast. But here's another depressing reality for you.
00:05:31 Speaker_09
A lot of new, shiny household technologies aren't actually designed to make our lives easier. Then what's the point, Leah?
00:05:36 Speaker_10
Well, the point is to make money. Like, think about washer-dryers, for example.
00:05:46 Speaker_10
Like, people are obsessed with wanting their own washer-dryer in their own home. Yeah, I mean, I'm a New Yorker, but I have a washing machine in my apartment. Okay, so you've been pulled into the individual appliance life.
00:05:54 Speaker_09
You try carrying loads of laundry up and down five flights of stairs. Going to the laundromat was one of the most annoying parts of my week. No, I totally understand. I mean, I can't talk. I have one too. Then what are we doing?
00:06:11 Speaker_09
But think about how individually owning these compares to a laundromat. On average, a single laundromat gets used by about 300 people per day.
00:06:30 Speaker_10
If all 300 of those people were washing their clothes at home instead, that's a lot more money for a company like GE or whatever. So there's a real incentive to make new household products that keep people isolated and confined to their own homes.
00:06:36 Speaker_09
Leah, so far it sounds like this book is just reinforcing the idea of home life being a nightmare. Well, let me make the nightmare even a little more unsettling.
00:06:52 Speaker_04
In their research, Helen and Nick found that not only has housework overall not become more manageable over the years, the gender breakdown of that work is also still very, very unequal.
00:07:08 Speaker_10
So men tend to be focused on work, which tends to be more pleasurable, tends to be more like a hobby, whereas women tend to do work, particularly, for instance, in childcare, which isn't very entertaining.
00:07:15 Speaker_09
They'll be changing the nappies while the fathers will be playing with their children. So they're both doing childcare, but obviously one version is a lot more fun than the other. Yeah.
00:07:31 Speaker_02
I mean, Nick also said there's new research that women are taking on this budding category of digital housework, especially with kids. You have to be a part of all these different WhatsApp groups, you have to be a part of all these different school emails and school platforms.
00:07:43 Speaker_02
We've got three children and they're six, four and two. And the six-year-old and the four-year-old are still relatively new to school. seems to be another platform every day.
00:08:00 Speaker_10
One for paying for their school meals, one for ordering their school meals, one for getting their school uniform, one for registering sickness, one for doing a set of homework tasks.
00:08:03 Speaker_10
It's just instant overwhelm for me, mental breakdown territory. I mean, I'm about to have a mental breakdown just hearing about it. Right.
00:08:18 Speaker_10
So there's a way in which you could hear everything that Helen and Nick are saying and start to feel real sympathetic to the decision to be a trad wife, or at least some version of that.
00:08:29 Speaker_09
Like, how are you supposed to spend all this time doing digital chores and peeling potatoes and folding laundry and go to a nine-to-five job?
00:08:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, I had the same thought. And Helen said, look, that's a totally legitimate choice, again, for people who want it and can afford it.
00:08:51 Speaker_09
You know, in principle, making the decision to spend your life caring for your children and cooking, I don't I don't have any problem with that at all. Like, I feel the tug of that very much, you know, during my periods of maternity leave.
00:09:01 Speaker_02
She said that she makes more money than Nick. Okay, work. So after having each of their kids, it wound up making sense for her to go back to work before he did.
00:09:10 Speaker_09
Amen. But, you know, I didn't like it. Every time I had to get on the tube to, like, leave the kids, I was texting Nick, I miss the baby.
00:09:18 Speaker_02
What's going on with the baby? She said that feeling didn't last that long. And even if it had for her, it's not something that should be imposed on other people.
00:09:30 Speaker_02
When there is a suggestion that society should be entirely reoriented towards one very specific way of life, that's more of a concern.
00:09:40 Speaker_02
And I don't think it makes sense to set up society in a way that penalizes people who do not want to have a homemaker-breadwinner kind of model for their life.
00:09:50 Speaker_02
and actually that's one of the arguments that we make in the book is actually we already live in a society where there are all kinds of artificial scaffolds bolstering the nuclear family.
00:10:03 Speaker_09
There's all kinds of things around power of attorney, around custody laws, around sort of mortgage regulations that
00:10:11 Speaker_10
already implicitly favor certain kinds of reproductive unit.
00:10:20 Speaker_09
Helen and Nick said that beyond all that, the nuclear family gets artificially propped up in politics, religious spaces, media, pop culture. That's definitely true.
00:10:25 Speaker_04
I mean, just about every sitcom I can think of centers around a wealthy family with two parents and a couple kids. Even in the future, they said think of the Jetsons.
00:10:33 Speaker_07
Everybody's got flying cars and domestic robots doing all this work. But of course, it's still a single family unit in a single family home.
00:10:43 Speaker_04
Oh, I shouldn't have upset George.
00:10:48 Speaker_02
But if he only knew how I hate washing, ironing, vacuuming. Now with a nice automated maid to do all the work.
00:10:56 Speaker_02
Here I am, sir. Yeah, I always think about how the Flintstones and the Jetsons are effectively the same program, right?
00:11:06 Speaker_09
From this sort of prehistoric period through to imagined future, the nuclear family is the absolute core for thinking about our world.
00:11:20 Speaker_10
So they both said, if you want to fix things to make society better for everyone, not just the few people with the money and desire to focus single-mindedly on their nuclear families, You have to find ways to support different types of community and networks.
00:11:31 Speaker_09
Already I can hear the conservative fear-mongering, Leah.
00:11:33 Speaker_10
NPR wants to kill families.
00:11:39 Speaker_09
NPR wants to take your kids and break up your marriage. Well, if the shoe fits, Parker. Hey, some of my best friends have families.
00:11:58 Speaker_09
But no, seriously, I think one of the most important takeaways from this conversation is that overworked, overwhelmed mothers are trying to bootstrap their way, essentially, to better lives. And we shouldn't be blaming momfluencers or tradwives or the people who design sleeker washing machines for trying to offer up alternatives.
00:12:17 Speaker_09
We should be placing the blame and the onus for solutions squarely where it belongs, on government policies that could have the actual power to change people's lives at scale. So what does that look like?
00:12:24 Speaker_09
Do Nick and Helen have ideas about how to make a broader array of lifestyles possible? They sure do.
00:12:32 Speaker_10
They talk about a bunch of things that they think could really help people with all different types of lives thrive. So they suggest things like making public spaces more accessible and more beautiful, things like parks, libraries, public pools.
00:12:41 Speaker_09
Which, side note, are things that have historically been shut down or underfunded because of racism and classism. Mm-hmm.
00:13:00 Speaker_04
They also talk about finding ways to make care more of a communal practice so that individual families aren't responsible for doing everything by themselves. So things like subsidized 24-7 childcare centers, which already exist in some places and have been incredibly successful.
00:13:10 Speaker_04
The basic idea is that the individual family home, the single family, is a poor way to provide all the reproductive labor that society needs.
00:13:28 Speaker_09
That it's a massive amount of work which is being put onto the family, it's a massive duplication of effort across society, it's extremely wasteful in terms of time, of energy, of resources, of food, of all these sorts of things that we might be concerned about, and that there's better ways to organize it
00:13:44 Speaker_02
Helen and Nick said that they may not agree with a tradwife solution to the problems of modern life, but they probably do agree with big parts of the diagnosis, that the expectations put on people who take care of households are unreasonable and need to be reimagined.
00:13:53 Speaker_02
What we need is new, fresh thinking rather than trying to go back. We have reams and reams of writing from women explaining why it's a problem.
00:14:13 Speaker_09
So I think we should learn from that and think, OK, well, there needs to be a change in the way that these things are organized, but it's not that change. It doesn't involve me wearing a pinnie and waiting on Nick hand and foot. We need a different approach, basically.
00:14:36 Speaker_09
Parker, last time we spoke, you talked about your mom and how she was, you know, a single mom, but she had this really robust community of other moms and your grandparents and people in your neighborhood who all worked together to make sure that you and the other kids around you were getting what you needed. Yeah, it was definitely the IRL version of it takes a village. I think that is amazing.
00:14:56 Speaker_03
And my takeaway from all the conversations I've been having is that we need to make that structure more accessible for more people, regardless of where they live or what their social circles look like. Because as we've said before, if our country's leaders are going to claim that they care about people having kids,
00:15:08 Speaker_09
The most important way to measure a healthy society is whether a nation, whether the American nation, is having enough children to replace itself.
00:15:17 Speaker_10
Do people look to the future and see a place that's worth having children? Then I think that means fighting for the social structures that could actually make that possible and, dare I say, even desirable. Dare to dream, Leah. And that's our show!
00:15:45 Speaker_10
You can follow us on Instagram at nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch at npr.org.
00:15:52 Speaker_09
And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the Codeswitch newsletter by going to npr.org slash codeswitch newsletter.
00:16:06 Speaker_10
And just a reminder that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and public media. And you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free.
00:16:13 Speaker_09
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Codeswitch. This episode is produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein.
00:16:21 Speaker_10
Our engineer was Josephine Nia Nye.
00:16:28 Speaker_09
And a big shout out to the rest of the Code Switch Massive, Christina Kala, Xavier Lopez, Jasmine Romero, Dolly Mortada, Berylyn Williams, and Jean Denby. I'm Bea Parker. And I'm Leah Dinella. Hydrate.
00:16:37 Speaker_02
I don't have one. I'm OK not to. Your entire time here, you haven't thought about it? I think about it too much. Whenever somebody tells me that they're pregnant, I'm like, it's great.
00:16:50 Speaker_02
People stop telling you that once you're pregnant. It's really good. Before you're pregnant, it's like, oh, look at this.
00:17:01 Speaker_01
Look how beautiful it is to have a wonderful child. And then as soon as you're pregnant, people are like, ha, you're stuck with it now. Babies are a nightmare. Your life is ruined. It's not. It's not. It's the best thing I ever did.
00:17:14 Speaker_01
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00:17:25 Speaker_00
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00:17:42 Speaker_00
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00:17:49 Speaker_06
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00:18:01 Speaker_06
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