Tradwife Aspirations and Deregulation
The messenger is the strategy
I am going to ask you to do the near-impossible: think back through the countless cycles of political discourse you have endured to the Republican response to the State of the Union in early March.
Senator Katie Britt sits in an ominously lit, empty kitchen. At 42 years old, she is the youngest woman in the United States Senate. She begins her speech by stating that her job as Senator is “not the job that matters most” — she is the “proud wife and mom of two school-age kids” who ran for Senate because she worried for their future, and the future of all children in the United States. She sits at a kitchen table after President Biden's State of the Union to emphasize how terrible life is for American families, to scare you about people you will likely never meet, and to remind you how much you miss an America that never existed.
“I am worried about their future — and the future of children in every corner of our nation. That’s why I invited you into our home tonight.”
Her tone is bright and uncanny. She smiles after asserting that, because of President Biden, “our communities are less safe, and our country is less secure.” She lies about the real horrors of human trafficking. She lies about the police being defunded. She uses stories of sexual and gender-based violence as a threat to underscore her underlying authoritarian message. She is quite literally positioned as a “real” (white, suburban, Christian) mother at a “real” (upper middle class-signaling) kitchen table in juxtaposition to President Biden’s State of the Union, framing him as a career politician at a podium, using both age and gender to enhance the contrast.
Amidst the horror stories, there is a nugget of truth in her response: Americans are struggling to afford housing, child care, medication, and to retire with dignity. What goes unsaid is that, at the height of the pandemic, many of those same Americans got a glimpse at a competent, adequate welfare state for the first time. This brief period exposed that the systems built to address these struggles prior to the pandemic were both grossly inadequate and inherently hostile. Then, early pandemic programs were stripped away and expired one by one just as inflation ramped up. While she accurately lists these struggles, Britt’s response dutifully obscures the fact that Republicans fight to dismantle and defund systems that address “kitchen table” issues at every opportunity.
Not to let a speech go by without evoking an imagined, idyllic past, Britt asserts “the country we know and love seems to be slipping away.” In a previous piece, I explored conservatives’ manipulation of nostalgia as a rhetorical tactic used to shape policy without the support of a majority of voters.
Now, in my first series of this substack, I want to focus on how conservative strategists employ a rhetoric of fear, regulatory rollbacks, and self-sufficient fantasies to maintain political dominance and further their ideological project in the realm of child care and family policy. Specifically, we’ll look at the political role played by the dangerous temptation of the seemingly utopian life of the tradwife — as revered by millions on social media — in concert with the creepy policy apparatus of J.D. Vance and conservative think tanks who work diligently and quietly to implement policies that will hurt children, women, and families.
The messenger is the strategy
While researching this piece, I noticed a nearly imperceptible difference between the Instagram thumbnail and final recording of Britt’s state of the union response. In the thumbnail photo, there are several large books propping up a potted plant on the counter behind her. In the response video itself, the books are replaced with a wooden serving tray. Perhaps this has you rolling your eyes, thinking “of course the former English major sees ‘why are the curtains blue’ symbolism in an almost empty set.” But as I see it, the choice to swap books for a serving tray fulfills the same function as the speech itself. The reality of the accomplished, ambitious woman speaking is stripped away and replaced with the deferent role she has been called on to play in a party that requires untenable contradiction from women in its leadership.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, Britt’s fellow senator from Alabama, stated “she was picked as a housewife, not just a senator.” Yet a cursory glance at Britt’s Wikipedia page is enough to demonstrate that she couldn't be further from a “housewife.” Prior to her election as senator, Britt took on high-powered and unprecedented leadership roles as a woman in Alabama, including as the first woman to lead the Business Council of Alabama. She is as far as one can be from a stay-at-home mother or tradwife, but her curated image and selection as spokesperson speak volumes about the path conservatives see to further political victory in rolling back women's rights with a smile — a path which does not require popular victory, but a deliberate cultivation of the conditions that allow them to seize power, having just enough voters in the right places to enact wildly unpopular aims.
Britt is no exception to what Rebecca Traister describes as the contradictions of being a woman in the party of Trump. She was selected to play a role that she does not fit and it backfired. The speech felt like a man’s idea of what women want to hear, insulting the leadership of the very woman who delivered it, with an underlying menacing threat that went unspoken to all the women who viewed it. Subsequently, the contradictions on full display in this speech alienated the very audience it was intended to inspire: white suburban women who are fleeing the Republican party with every rollback of reproductive rights, in every election. Take these quotes from Republican women in a Washington Post report:
“Women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen,” [conservative commentator Alyssa Farah] Griffin said. “So to put her in a kitchen, not in front of a podium or in the Senate chamber, where she was elected after winning a hard-fought race, I think fell very flat.”
“But the delivery was parody-level terrible, and I promise that didn’t sway any of those suburban moms we’re trying to reach.” — Allie Beth Stuckey, host of the Christian conservative podcast Relatable
“Instead of the relatable look they were going for here — given the rollback of reproductive rights and the IVF fiasco — it sends the message that Republicans are literally trying to send women back to the kitchen.” — Republican pollster Christine Matthews
Despite the overwhelmingly negative reception to this speech, the strategy of selecting a political powerhouse and framing her as a housewife had a certain logic to it when viewed in its pop cultural context. When the speech took place, tradwife content was at the height of its popularity across social media, notably the influencers Hannah Neeleman, or Ballerina Farm, and Nara Smith. By framing Britt in this way, I suspect strategists thought they were riding that wave. Instead, they reminded voters of everything that creeps them out about the current Republican party. They exposed the conservative patriarchal fantasy of reducing women to “leading” only in the domestic sphere. In doing so, they reminded the viewer that their goal is to drag white, middle class women into the home while making the lives of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, queer people, and disabled women both impossible and invisible.
Outside of this speech, Britt is most known for introducing the MOMS Act. This purportedly “pro-mother” legislation would create a governmental pregnancy resource hub that would direct to so-called crisis pregnancy centers that exploit and mislead them, while explicitly forbidding the inclusion of abortion resources. It would also empower the government to collect information from those who visit the website and make personal contact with them — leading to accusations that its true goal is to create a database of pregnant women and ensure they do not get abortions, under threat of legal consequences. The strict abortion ban enacted in Britt’s home state, alongside the Project 2025 “call for a pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” validates this fear. (Sure, Politifact, that’s definitely not sinister and anti-abortion at all, you’re totally right!)
The day before she voted against the child tax credit, Britt joined Senator Tim Kaine to introduce two bipartisan bills on child care. In a vacuum, these bills could be viewed as a unique (albeit piecemeal and inadequate) attempt to address both child care affordability for families and begin to improve conditions for the child care workforce. As such, each of the two bills received support from many national early childhood organizations. It’s a tremendously challenging responsibility to weigh the viability of the best possible policy in a difficult political environment as a single-issue nonpartisan organization. In the context of Britt’s own extreme positions, I do not think the political usefulness of such endorsements for Britt can be ignored. This usefulness was underscored by her office framing these endorsements to the press as an “outpouring of support.” It is crucial to recognize when nonpartisan endorsements may be used to launder the reputation of an extremist. In this case, public endorsements can be wielded to lend credibility to an unearned reputation as pro-women, papering over an extreme position that will result in women losing their bodily autonomy — and dying.
Bodily autonomy and child care are part of the same struggle
As has been demonstrated in the 50 year fight to roll back reproductive rights, the religious right is diligent, focused, opportunistic, and adaptive. While the worst individual actors seem to jump from grievance to grievance, putting no thought into long term strategy, these cranks are backed by billionaires working in concert with conservative thought leaders to drive policy in the direction of their long game. With seemingly bottomless funding to develop infrastructure and cultivate a loyal bench, they work for as long as it takes to create the political and cultural environment that allows them to impose their will on a majority that does not support it.
This year, Republicans in Iowa put a six week abortion ban into effect, Arizona’s Supreme Court tried to reinstate an 1864 law banning abortion, and conservative strategists have attacked IVF and suggested using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion nationwide. Half a century of work went into creating the conditions to restrict the rights of women, endanger them, and achieve this major victory without a popular mandate to do so. The quiet takeover of the federal judiciary and continued dysfunction of Congress empowers and hastens their ability to erode women’s rights.
But Republicans know they have a voter problem. The suburban white women who have been a core of their base, especially in swing districts, are repulsed by their actions on reproductive rights. This issue has lost elections and mobilizes even self-proclaimed “apolitical” women to vote. Republicans face a narrowing path to victory without winning these women back. Enter child care. Right now, white suburban women are overwhelmingly in favor of large-scale systemic action on child care and the funding necessary to make it real. The very serious pressure to moderate on this issue is producing results.
I believe that many Republicans leading on child care from swing Congressional districts and state legislatures are acting in good faith to offer solutions that align with their ideology. Unfortunately, it is increasingly impossible to divorce individual legislators from the extremity of their party’s leaders, the actions of their judicial appointees, and their colleagues’ deregulation efforts that endanger children.
Senator Britt’s position on child care policy deviates from the goals of those working behind the scenes to enact long-term conservative policy change. The Project 2025s, Heritage Foundations, and J.D. Vances of this world have laid out a policy roadmap that seeks to decimate the structures and advancements that have ensured women have full personhood — economically, politically, and socially. Britt’s leadership is at the nexus of a political strategy to erode the rights of women in the years to come, as a pro-women face on anti-women actions. Right now, it makes sense to lean on figures like her to moderate on child care while actors in the background work to destabilize its future. While her State of the Union response speech appears to have failed at what it set out to achieve, I think this is the first of many times we will see the strategy employed in the coming years.
Conservative dystopia and utopia
There is incentive for strategists on the religious right who seek to push women out of the public sphere to bide their time. Yet that does not mean child care is safe. As individual legislators show responsiveness to demands to fund child care, work is occurring behind the scenes to reverse these gains. To do that, they must create the conditions to cause a cultural shift in public opinion against child care.
A sure-fire way to turn popular opinion against child care is to demonize it. In the next piece in this series, we’ll unpack the goals undergirding recent efforts to roll back health and safety regulations in child care. These deregulatory efforts are undertaken under the guise of cutting red tape, being pro-business, and expanding access to care for families. In reality, states have taken measures to allow teenagers to care for large numbers of children without adult supervision and expanded unregulated child care to unsafe group sizes without oversight. These dangerous actions almost guarantee children will get seriously injured, or worse.
When children get hurt due to dangerous deregulation, bad actors pounce to attempt to shape narratives that do not tell the real story. It’s easy to predict the narrative they hope to influence. Child care programs and providers will be attacked as unsafe. Families who rely on care will be made to feel any incidents are their fault for using it at all. Mothers will be shamed for working. Ultimately, these conservative strategists will try to return child care to the realm of a shameful last resort for middle class families, spoken of only in a whisper. By seizing on tragedies of their own making, they will attempt to manifest and reinforce their own rhetoric of fear as a terrifying reality.
In the absence of a unifying call for a thriving, joyful, community-centered vision for the future of child care, young mothers in particular fall prey to false utopias found in the vision of self-reliance represented in popular tradwife content. In the third piece in this series, we’ll examine how the popularized, idealized life of the tradwife is juxtaposed with both the daunting realities of our failed system and the fear that it will get worse. By making “opting out” look more enticing, women who leave work to chase this lifestyle are marginalized and put in danger, while those who cannot afford to do so feel resentful.
These occurrences are not directly linked, but are two manifestations of the same goal: to reverse pressure from suburban white women to address child care with policies and investments that are more aligned with liberal policy.
The conservative project creates both utopia and dystopia by establishing the conditions for a level of hopelessness that allows thriving individualism to feel like an escape. With enough propagandizing, it begins to feel like the only viable path to a positive future. As child care begins to feel less safe due to deregulation, mistrust in one another will drive reliance on the nuclear family. In turn, this will lessen the pressure to invest in child care, narrow the imagination of what is possible, and eliminate harsh criticism on an issue conservatives want to claim — the family.
When we fail to recognize this overarching strategy, we put ourselves on uneven footing. When we fail to offer a visionary alternative, we lose ground without even trying.
Over the next few issues, we’ll explore each component of this strategy: from the dangers of deregulation, to the allure of tradwife content, to the creepy actors behind conservative pro-natalist, antifeminist policymaking, and finally conclude with the positive vision we can chart to expand the imagination of what is possible and offer a hopeful alternative.
Next issue: Deregulation and the dystopia of relying on others.
As I begin to return to a more regular work schedule after taking time off to recover from burnout, my goal is for this blog to feature shorter, more frequent posts.
Launching soon! Child Care Stories is the next step in my professional journey. I hope to work with organizations to move the narrative on child care policy by cultivating trusting relationships with child care educators and rooting my work in simple, positive messaging.
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Listening: In Bed with the Right - Ep 31. Pro-Natalism.
Reading: How Did Republican Women End Up Like This? by Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine
Watching: Neha Chandrachud: It’s time to divest from tradwife content
FTC Takes Action Against Care.com for locking families into predatory subscription services and misleading caregivers about their potential earnings.
Poll: 74% of New Yorkers support public, universal child care and raising child care workers’ wages to parity with entry level salaries for elementary school teachers. Empire State Poll - Cornell University ILR School