Everyone has a dream for their life that did not pan out. When I was around nine, I had a fight with my mom because I told her that I wanted to be a vaudeville star and, eventually, a Ziegfeld Girl and she told me that I could not have either of those jobs, because of how Vaudeville and Flo Ziegfeld died well before she was born. “Vaudeville will never die!” I yelled as I walked off in a huff, wearing the evening gown (actually a shiny blue nightgown I got from the Caldor), faux fur wrap, and long strands of pearls I traditionally changed into after school, went upstairs, turned on Gypsy and cried my face off. Like you do when your dreams are crushed.
There’s another girl who had her dreams crushed. A girl who participated, recently, in a “Gen Z” debate for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press desperately wants to be a trad wife living on a farm and is angry that this option is not available to her because of how a two-income household is economically necessary.
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She says:
I would love to be a stay at home mom, I would love to be a homemaker and wife, I would love to be able to live on a homestead and go milk my cow and take the eggs out of the chicken coop and have one baby in the belly and on my hip and another Ttoddler behind me, that's like my dream, but I can't fuckin’ do that. Because the way the economy is set up is I'm forced to work.
I'm forced to get an education, a higher education, a college degree in order to make enough money that I can be financially independent and afford my own home or my own rent or my own gas or my own groceries, my own insurance, and it's extremely difficult to do that, and it's very isolating as a woman when you have to do all of that all on your own and you can't find somebody that you can outsource some of those chores and financial responsibilities like you would with a spouse, so no being a single working woman absolutely sucks.
It's the worst thing ever. I hate it, I would go back to the 1950s in a second, just so I wouldn't have to deal with this shit.
Does this woman think that people who lived on farms in the 1950s were living like the Ballerina Farm lady? They were not! Very, very few women who lived on farms in the 1950s were married to the wealthy scions of airline magnates. Possibly zero!
But people who lived on farms, people who “homesteaded,” were not economically well off. That is why you so frequently hear people talk about “poor farmers.” Additionally … the women worked! They worked hard and not just, you know, casually stopping by the chicken coop to grab some fresh eggs for breakfast. Living that way involved absolutely backbreaking work, especially when you factor in the technology of the era.
Does she also think that women in the 1950s didn’t work? Because women in the 1950s worked. They worked before they were married and they frequently worked after they were married, often to help put their husbands through school. Additionally, working class women almost always worked. Hell, on farms their children worked, which is actually part of the reason why farms are not subject to as many labor laws as other entities. (The other part being that the massive corporate farms run by people who actually are rich have an incredibly powerful lobby).
That being said, many, many of the women who did stay home in perfect, Donna Reed-style 1950s homes were deeply unhappy with their lives — which is why people called Miltown, a minor tranquilizer, “Mother’s Little Helper.” They were often lonely, they lacked intellectual stimulation, etc. etc. That is why Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. It wasn’t all of them, but that’s why people need options.
Most of these women did go to college, by the way, because that’s where you went if you wanted to find a husband who would be able to support you on a single income.
Worth noting that the first domestic violence shelter did not exist until 1971, and that it was in England. The United States didn’t get one until 1974. Women couldn’t have credit cards, either.
OOH! You know who else wasn’t too happy? Black people. Yeah, the 1950s were not a great time for them. Also gay people, who could literally be sent to prison for having sex in many states until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. In fact, it really just was not a great time for anyone other than straight white men.
Also, if you want to be mad about the fact that it’s hard to raise a family on a single income, that is something you might want to take up with Republicans. In the 1950s, many (white) couples got their first homes because of the GI bill, tax rates for the wealthy were high, tax rates for businesses were high and high enough to make it “not worth it” for them to become massive conglomerations like we have now, unions were strong, stock buybacks were illegal, and so on.
Another woman participating in the debate noted that the aspiring trad wife (ATW) was single and therefore would have had to have had a job in order to survive no matter what era she lived in.
ATW responded by saying that society more or less pressured women to get married before the age of 21 and that this was better for women:
Yeah, and it was better for women, mental health-wise long-term, to be able to go into that long-term committed relationship and have the established family instead of being forced to slave away for a corporation that doesn't like you, doesn't care about you, makes you sit under fluorescent lights for eight, nine, ten hours. Once a day you get a lunch break, you get health insurance, but do you have somebody who loves you staring at you everyday, like your child? It's horrible.
I’m holding a pretty adorable cat right now as I type this up, so things are going pretty well for me. I’m also super glad that I am not married to anyone I thought was a great idea to date when I was 21 or younger.
But What About Now?
Now, one of the things you will find if you spend a lot of time reading through right-wing social media is that many of these men are desperately obsessed with the idea of women “hitting the wall” at a certain age and becoming incredibly hideous and just entirely worthless as human beings. Frequently, that age is 25 or even 22, though sometimes it’s as generous as 30. This nonsense originated with incels who were hoping to see the women who rejected them get their comeuppance, but has since spread throughout the manosphere and been adopted by Republican men writ large.
Given this, you would have to be the stupidest goddamned woman on earth to want to marry one of these creeps, regardless of their financial situation, without having an education and/or a career to fall back on. I mean, there would have to be something wrong with you to want that to begin with, but aside from that, it would be a financially stupid decision because there would be a very high chance of your Dear Husband trading you in for a younger model and you being completely fucked and ending up like Betty Broderick, with or without the whole murder thing.
All Of That Being Said …
If this broad wants to live this life, I encourage her to do exactly what the Right is always telling people to do — pull herself up by her bootstraps and make it happen. She should properly dedicate herself to finding a rich husband who will take care of her and keep her in whatever lifestyle it is that she would like to become accustomed to.
Perhaps there’s another JetBlue heir waiting in the wings! What? Is that harder to do when you’re not a ridiculously hot ballerina/pageant winner?
Gee, it’s almost as if making all women’s economic futures entirely dependent on our ability to attract a well-off husband — usually requiring a combination of looks and connections — is a really horrifying idea.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Someone on Bluesky said "These women want to be Plantation owner's wives, not farmer's wives. That's why they don't see it as a lot of work." Which is a bullseye.
That aspiring trad wife is never going to amount to anything and apparently doesn't want to. My grandmother, who was an orphan, graduated from college in the 1920s with a degree in home economics, which was one of the maybe three fields women could aspire to. She got married, had a couple of babies and then my grandfather went blind. My grandmother then became a cartographer and had a career with the Corps of Engineers until she reached retirement. Her sister, my great aunt, was married three times then decided that wasn't for her and she made a fortune in the stock market all by herself while working as a secretary. My mom divorced my dad when I was 13. She had always worked because she figured out early on that the guy she had married was never going to be responsible enough to trust as the only one on a salary. The women's movement cemented her career as a technical and speech writer for the Navy. She retired at a relatively young age and took up world travel as her hobby. My family is full of fascinating women who did and do interesting things. They don't whine and complain about having to work. They just get stuff done. I'd like to think I followed in their footsteps.