BONUS: TradWives, Pop Culture, and Feminism with Caro Burke

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While we’re technically in a bye week, we’re releasing a bonus episode with an unreleased portion of my conversation from last week with Caroline Burke. We cover a lot of ground, but mostly, we discuss her thoughts on the tradwife phenomenon, pop culture, and consumerism’s influence on modern motherhood.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Previous episode with Caro Burke: The Cognitive Dissonance of “Getting Rich” and Imagining a Better American Dream

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Katie:

Hi, it’s Katie. You may not have expected to see us in your feeds this week, considering it is a bye week for the show, but we wanted to drop a little bonus episode today with some material we ended up saving from the conversation that I had with Caroline Burke for last week’s show about the American dream. Toward the end of our conversation, we meandered into the tradwife discourse, which is Caroline’s bread and butter on TikTok. So enjoy.

You did mention tradwives and I feel like I’d be remiss to not open the tradwives can of worms.

Caro:

I love a hard write into tradwives.

Katie:

Hard right. That’s exactly it. To open the can a little further on the can of worms because you kind of mentioned that the way in which people seemed more receptive to having these types of conversations through the lens of pop culture that kind of initially sucked you in, but what was it about the tradwives specifically that sucked you in and why did that become such an area of fascination for you?

Caro:

Yeah, it’s so funny. It’s never something, it was not on my bingo card for my life to become a tradwife expert, but the short and the long of it is that I spent probably a decade creating and honing my beliefs about feminism and about politics, and I didn’t share it online to a certain extent, and I essentially stumbled into the tradwife conversation.

I started sharing a few TikToks online, just about more satirical, just saying, why am I suddenly obsessed with finding a beehive oven in a house? It’s so weird the way that I’m obsessed with these accounts when I am in every way kind of in opposition, I exist in opposition to them. And so what happened was people started commenting and I realized that I had something to say specifically, I had something to say about media literacy, about understanding the distinction between people and brands, and I had something to say from the feminist lens of how tradwives are really a lightning rod for everything to do with modern womanhood.

I think so many women our age and younger and maybe a little bit older are feeling very disillusioned with what they understand to be how they should exist. The idea that you want to have a job and you want to have children and you can have it all, but I think that we’re past the cultural moment of lean in, and so the idea that we now have this cultural backlash where for the first time in a very long time, our pop culture is moving, right? Which has not happened in a very long time. We’ve had, obviously the conservative faction has been growing for a long time, but it hasn’t pierced through culture, the zeitgeist until this moment really.

And so the idea that we are now debating whether or not the traditional lifestyle is beneficial or not is of astounding when you think about it, when you think about the idea that a-listers, I noticed that Hilary Duff loves Ballerina Farm and comments on all of her stuff, which is something that I think about before I go to sleep at night. But all jokes aside, people live online and they live on social media, and whether you want to joke about it or not, these accounts are deeply, deeply impacting what we consume, what our thought leaders consume, and they are the first example of a very, very nostalgic vision of conservative womanhood has really, really broken the bubble in terms of how young people think and talk and engage. And so that to me is worth endless conversation.

Katie:

And it’s pretty inseparable too from, I was thinking about this over the weekend, just the fact that it really shouldn’t be surprising that this is coming on the heels of a pandemic where work and home collapsed into one another again, and it became so unavoidably clear that the status quo wasn’t really working for women, but rather than going, oh, it’s not working for us because we’ve basically been told, yeah, you can be in the workforce, sure, we will tolerate your presence there, but just so you know, the expectations when you’re home are completely the same. Do not explicitly expect your male spouse or partner to be changing his approach or his involvement in the private sphere.

And the pandemic really laid a lot of that bare, but yet rather than going in that direction of like, wait a second, maybe we should question why that gender division of labor is here to begin with, there was a subsect of culture that went the other direction that said, oh, you’re right. This is really hard. This is really untenable. What would fix this if we just went backwards, if we just did it and buy backwards? Of course, we’re not referring to any real section of history in a meaningful way. We’re referring to a blip in the mid 20th century for one upper class stratum of white women that this was kind of applicable for, and even then it was…

Caro:

A Mad Men episode more than it was anything else.

Katie:

I think that that’s kind of the broader gotcha of the whole trend, which is there was a reason why when in the sixties and seventies women started pushing back against this. It took hold because that was not an enjoyable or desirable way of life, but in the context of wage stagnation and the unaffordable housing crisis and the fact that the gig economy has replaced in a pretty meaningful way, stable jobs and the expectations are so high now, it does not surprise me at all that there are some people and particularly some women that look at that and go, well, fuck that. I don’t want to have to do that. That sounds terrible. Yeah. It’s also interesting Ballerina Farm in general too. I will note that I used a clip of her, I didn’t even call her by name, but I just used a clip of her in front of that $30,000 oven in my tradwife video.

People who were like, love this, but she’s actually different people will go to bat defending her. Oh yeah. And I think it’s really interesting kind of the loyalty that she in particular inspires in this kind of homestead because I think she can, I don’t want to say co-opt the homestead thing, but it’s like there is a weird blurring of the lines between living off the land homesteading an appreciation for nature and taking care of the earth. That kind of rubs up against that faction of tradwives that then you get this weird morphing of political beliefs.

Caro:

Yes, completely. And I’ve said this on TikTok, but it’s worth noting now something that I say all the time because she has profoundly devout followers. The same with Nara Smith, the same with all of these influencers online is I don’t know her and neither do you. And so nothing I am saying is a personal attack on her. I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know if she’s funny. I don’t know if she’s nice. I don’t know if she’s mean. I have no relationship to her personally, and when I talk about this, I’m talking about the account, and I encourage you, even if you love it to say you love the account, you don’t love her, you don’t love her, and it’s the same way you and I are both Swifties. We don’t love Taylor Swift. We love her music, and I think that that’s a painful thing for people to hear because it really chafes at the parasocial relationship you’ve created, which is real, creating these relationships with people online at a time when people have fewer and fewer in-person relationships.

You don’t want to be told that it’s not real or that it’s illegitimate or that you are in any way delusional, but I think it is very real. And so people become, they see these beautifully put together reels and videos and they also see what you’re talking about, which is an escape a way out of male run corporations, which were designed to benefit men where women are working now and basically just not enjoying it and instead of trying to face up the unsexy work of collective action and essentially sacrificing yourself, when you stay in one of these companies, you are essentially trying to make it better for the woman who comes after you. And that’s hard. It’s hard to swallow the idea that you’ll endure a lot of unpleasant experiences in the hopes that it makes something better for someone down the line. But that is what has to happen in order for women to enter and stay in the workforce.

And instead, we have people who continue to want to leave it for totally understandable reasons. And so they look at this tradwife lifestyle and they’re like, that’s much better for me. And it is, if you have the money, sure, it totally is be an influencer online. What I do know about Ballerina Farm is that they travel all the time, and so they’re not the ones taking care of the cows all the time. Cows need daily milking and they leave all the time. So if you have the money to manage that, then by all means, that’s going to lead to probably a more pleasant lifestyle for you. The question is how are we creating better lifestyles for everyone? And unfortunately, I think until a lot of women stick around in the workforce and have a lot of unpleasant experiences, but basically gut it out to force change, we’re just going to have more women leaving the workforce and just being like, this sucks for me.

Katie:

Yeah. I was texting you this morning because last night on my For You page, I got this video of this woman making Greek yogurt, and initially, I mean, I don’t really get cooking videos on TikTok on my For You page, so at first I was like, oh God, is this a tradwife video that the algorithm has misfired here? But I noticed immediately that the tenor of the video felt different. The woman was middle aged. She wasn’t in her twenties. She wasn’t. I know.

Caro:

Whoa. They exist.

Katie:

I know women above the age of 40 on the internet, God gasp, but she wasn’t made up. She was a normal looking person in a brown dated kitchen. And immediately despite the fact that she was making food from scratch, I go, not a tribe wife. This is different because this is not a performance of traditional femininity. She’s doing the same thing in this video. She’s making food from scratch that a Nara Smith does in her videos, but it felt so different. I sat there, I watched the whole thing. I now know how to make Greek yogurt, which is great.

But I think that your point about, I guess the affluence aspect here, I saw the other day you were talking about how you have to be rich to have an account like this, you have to be rich, or that being very rich is almost like a prerequisite absolutely for being a tradwife influencer and for performing your domesticity in this way, but it wasn’t in the way that you’d expect because I think typically when we hear like, oh, influencers are rich, it’s like, well, yes, it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because they have money to start with.

That’s how they’re able to live an aspirational life that looks good online and accumulates a following, but then that following makes them wealthier. But you were pointing out that if you are very wealthy and you’re a stay at home girlfriend, you have endless free time that now needs to be filled with something. And so what are they choosing to fill it with a performance of femininity and labor that they might actually not be doing? To your point about the cows,

Caro:

And this is something I’ve been thinking about, I have a hot take I haven’t shared on TikTok yet, so this is…

Katie:

Ooh. We’re getting a fresh one. Yeah, there you go.

Caro:

Let’s go. So what I’ve been thinking about lately is about the utter disillusionment that so many women experience when they become mothers, because how we talk about motherhood is so different than how motherhood functions for most working mothers now that when you grow up, you imagine cooking for your children and you imagine spending time with them and you imagine a clean kitchen because that’s what you’ve seen online and in television, and you just have this vision. And I think that women are so disoriented by how different the experience of motherhood is right now from how it was sold to us, that when we look online, that version actually feels more correct to us than the version that we’re living in.

And I think that it is such a subconscious thing, but even if you are a mother of four at this very moment with a dirty kitchen and a boss emailing you and a husband who hasn’t gotten home yet because he’s overworked too, even if that is your reality, you still have a little part of your brain, the brain that was taught growing up that’s like, that’s real and my life isn’t real.

And how do you break that down? Because it’s like you’re talking about, of growing up Catholic and growing up with the American dream. We have such a false nostalgia for a type of America that never existed, and it was embedded into us at such a young age that we can know something is not real and it can still feel more real to us than our own lives. And so how do you break that apart that is so powerful.

Katie:

That needs to be on TikTok that can make them, oh, yesterday that needed to be on TikTok. Yeah, man. Well, it even surprises me now. I mean, I’ve had conversations with relatively guys that I thought were pretty progressive who still very much harbor this quiet part out loud sentiment of like, well, yeah, I think more women just tend to, it’s just more natural for them to want to stay home and be a caretaker. I never know what to say. I’m like, I don’t even know where to start with fundamentally picking this apart.

But to your point, it’s we are indoctrinated with that mentality and with that knowledge of the past or that imagined history from such a young age that I guess the question then is like, okay, if we’re talking about what’s most natural, how far back are we going are going back to infanticide, are we going back to the warrior women who would kill the men in their community if they act? I mean, it’s like how far back do you want to go? Why are we stopping at this three year period in the 1950s?

Caro:

It’s also so interesting because when you talk about that natural caretaker part, the thing that I think about too is yeah, sure, I will buy the idea that women have a natural urge to be with their children, but how does that into women having a natural urge to keep up the appearances of a 4,000 square foot home? Because most of homemaking has nothing to do with children. It has to do with maintaining a bigger and a bigger and a bigger house. That’s what we’re taught. It’s like we don’t have an instinct for consumerism that is taught to us.

So the idea that a lot of mothers just spend so much time just trying to keep their house in order whether they’re working or stay at home, and what that means by and large is keeping all of your stuff in order, all of the things that you have been told that you have to consume and to have in order to be a respectable family and a good mom, you need the huge fridge and the pantry, and then you need the laundry room and you need all the Stanley cups, you need all this crap.

And that’s what women are spending their time doing is managing basically mini castles. That’s what we’re taught to do, and there’s nothing instinctual about that. I think that’s what’s so funny, the false idea that women ever wanted to be homemakers in this way. I also find it a little bit offensive too, to take something which is very sacred, which is that women bring life into this world and to not give any help for that, but to be like, well, we want women are caretakers and so we should let them be in the home. And it’s like, well, then why don’t you give them some paid leave? There are so many things that you could do to help women be close with their babies. The problem isn’t like them wiping down their countertop for the 50th time. That’s an advertisement. That’s not maternal instinct.

Katie:

I guess I just still struggle with, I am not convinced that there is any biological proof that conclusively supports the idea that women are more interested in becoming parents than men. Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think that that is something on which a lot of this rests. It’s like, well, women are more interested in motherhood than men are in fatherhood. Because I did. I looked into it. I was like, is this real? You hear this all the time, and there is evidence that goes both ways. There actually isn’t as far as I’ve been able to find true conclusive evidence that is the way it is. And so I completely agree on the kind of consumption aspect or the performance of I am maintaining this stuff and I’m keeping a clean home, and how relatively new that is, even just from a square footage perspective and how big people’s houses have gotten and how much stuff they own.

I mean, the explosion of the storage industry is proof of that in some ways, but I still just bristle at this idea that one gender is more naturally inclined to parenthood than the other. And I think that ultimately I hear that and I go, that’s just a cop out that is patently a cop out, particularly because I hear it oftentimes from other women who were like, my husband tries, he just doesn’t get it. I’m like, your husband is his VP at a Fortune 500 company. I promise you he can do it. I promise you, he is just as competent and capable. The fact that he doesn’t remember to schedule the doctor’s appointments is not because he has a part of his prefrontal cortex that does not work when you’re talking about anything that he’s not being paid to do. It’s a matter of prioritization. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but that is something that I feel like often gets, it’s kind of like a thought terminating or a conversation terminating point.

And I do like though that you’re bringing up this element of like yes, and bringing new life into the world is sacred and should be thought of as such. I think that those are kind of, again, it’s like a part of the conversation where you go down that rabbit hole and it can be easy to almost sound like you’re saying something that you’re not saying, and it’s not as though I want to be dismissive of that. But I think that even the statistics and the data that we have about how gender dynamics influence negotiation outcomes and how, yes, women have worse negotiation outcomes when they ask for more money, but men have worse negotiation outcomes when they ask for paid family leave or time off for their kids, or if they’re pursuing anything that is perceived as like, hey, I want to work so I want to stay home with my kid, or I want a more flexible work schedule. We are far more likely to punish men for asking for that than women and for what?

Caro:

I agree with everything you’re saying, and I think it speaks to a very, very unique phenomenon of how we engage with femininity and masculinity and however much you even want to believe in those concepts and how they connect to children and giving birth because we have so few rights in that regard that I think that’s why you jumped that the idea of the sacred act of giving birth, being connected to women raising children, and it doesn’t have to be like that. I think when we talk about Scandinavian countries and how men and women have leave, and you’ve seen men and women walking around both taking care of children, and I think that because we have so little, we end up in the situation where anyone who cares about it, basically you end up almost fighting for scraps with one another of being like, what is the top priority?

Is it how we communicate? Is it one tiny policy? We’re trying to get to? What is the one tiny thing we’re going to fight over? Because everything else, it feels like it’s so hard to deconstruct because everything, our finances, everything from how many daycare facilities we have to how many women are in the workforce, all of it is embedded in this notion of women not being equal to men and women should be in the house not being moms. We don’t want women to be moms. We want them to be homemakers. And there’s such a distinction between those two things. And I think that’s what I’m always pushing at is like, no, you’re use the idea of women being connected to children as your argument for women doing unpaid domestic labor. Cleaning a toilet has nothing to do with taking care of a child. And something that I think about in terms of like, well, my husband can’t just do it, is that my husband and I talk all the time about divvying up domestic labor and he does not want to do it less than I want to do it, and he does not care more or less than I do about a clean house.

But what happens is that I often end up doing more work because I have an itch and it is an itch in my brain that was put in me at a very early age. I don’t know from who my parents wanted me to be a Supreme Court justice. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s one person. I don’t think it’s one ideology. It’s when you’re in this system, women are more likely to get that itch in their brains that makes them uncomfortable with the idea of a messy house or uncomfortable with the idea of a child not going to the doctor immediately to what you’re saying, I don’t think that’s a maternal instinct. That’s that I have been taught to associate that with whatever failure or lack of value, and he wasn’t. And so if he looks at the dishes, he can have a response in his head that’s rational, that’s like, we should clean those at some point. But there’s no anxiety and I am not a hyper homemaker, and I still feel that anxiety sometimes. So I guess that’s the question is where does that anxiety come from? I feel like that’s at the heart of a lot of this.

Katie:

Did you grow up in a house with two parents, like a mom and a dad, heterosexual parents? Did you witness your mom doing a lot of this?

Caro:

Yeah, of course I did. And my dad was a doctor and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. And what’s really interesting is that I grew up in a relatively conservative household, but they were deeply feminist in the sense that they always told my sister and I, we never talked about marriage, we only talked about us working. My mom never once was like, you should stay home and take care of your kids. My mom genuinely was like, I think you should be a Supreme Court judge. I obviously failed her dreams. I really disappointed her, and they stopped saying that around 22. And so that’s another conversation with my therapist. But it is really interesting to me that there are so many things that in some ways I grew up in a fairly traditional household, but in many other ways my education was prioritized over everything. It was just me and my sister. We were loud, we were controlled, the conversation. But it is that thing that just gets into you and you can’t let it go.

Katie:

The itch is a great way to describe it. I think it gets at this idea of we can consciously want to achieve equality in our homes. My husband and I also frequently talk about this. How are we going to divide this labor fairly? This is our home. It is not my responsibility to make it a pleasant place to be any more than it is your responsibility to make it a pleasant place to be. But to your point, sometimes the pushback that I hear is, I’m sorry, Katie, I just don’t even see it. I don’t see it. When you look into a room and see a mess, it does not register that way to me. And again, at first I always like, that’s a cop out. Now I’m like, I actually kind of know maybe what you’re referring to. I think that you’re being genuine in your assessment that you don’t see it the same way that I do.

And I think back on my childhood and watching my mom constantly tidying flurry of tidying all over the house all the time. I remember specifically watching or I always thought it was strange. It’s like she would notice these tiny crumbs on the ground and lick her finger and pick it up and throw it away. Or if she saw the cat tough, defer, fall off the cat, she would beeline over, pick it up, throw it away. And so I would be curious to hear from a woman who maybe grew up in a home with only a father or with two fathers and what was that like? Or maybe a mother who did not have those tendencies, and do you two feel the itch? Is it something in culture and media?

I’m sure it’s reinforced there, but how much of this is inertia from we’re not really that many generations out from leave it to beaver, idealized womanhood, June cleaver, idealized womanhood. And so I do wonder how much of it can be attributable to household inertia of what we’ve seen. But I do think the biggest step forward to me in the conversation about womanhood and women’s rights and equal pay and all of that is the fact that we have now turned to the household to go. A lot of the discrepancies that we are experiencing in the workplace all lead us back here. And so we should actually be focusing on what’s happening in the home because that’s where all of it starts.

Caro:

Completely. I completely agree, and I think something that just enrages me, I try not to really scroll on TikTok. I have such an addictive behavior, so I just post my videos and get off as soon as possible. But something that I have seen is it is wild to me. The extent to which any video that I watch across any number of topics is one that is telling me to buy something. And when I think about the fact that the number one thing that empowers women is access to capital and the amount of spidey signals we are getting at all times to just flush any money that we have down the drain is baffling to me. And it is the hardest thing. It took me so long to move past my own addictions to that kind of stuff, and now I feel like a pretty healthy relationship to products.

But it’s only because I now feel like I’m so certain that I want to spend my life doing things that matter to me, and that in order to do that based off of the things I care about, I have to be hypervigilant. And I think about that now where I’m like, I refuse to get a divorce over children, over childcare, and I refuse to be a full-time stay-at-home mom, which means that I have to be vigilant about making sure that we have money for childcare. And I think about that all the time. When I think about the idea of buying a bag or buying the 10th Stanley Cup, and I see the ways in which women are just hit with a barrage of reasons to buy stuff, and I have so much empathy because all of it is packaged and delivered in this idea of you are not a worthy human if you don’t have this stuff, this stuff will make your kitchen organized and this stuff will make your husband love you, and this stuff will make your children eat more.

If you buy these supplements, they’ll eat all their dinner, and if you buy this outfit, it’ll hide your pregnancy tummy. And when I think about that, my sister has three children, when I look at her Instagram feed compared to mine, I’m like, this is insane and criminal. The extent to which the algorithm is telling her to buy stuff and telling her body isn’t okay and telling her it’s so different from mine and I don’t have children yet. It is like I think about it and talk about it all the time with my friends just to be like, Hey, if you’re getting these ads, let’s talk. Because before you spend all of your money and get stressed out and then put yourself in a position of disadvantage and your mental health is in the gutter, like pause and let’s talk about it because this is where the system’s thinking gets into place. And you remember it’s an algorithm and you remember that everything wants you to buy something and that it’s not about you because it’s so easy for you to think it’s all about you.

Katie:

I think that that is the perfect place to close out.

Caro:

Just my passion monolgue.

Katie:

Mic has been dropped. That’s the new Money with Katie mission statement. Hold on, let me take a note so I can go put that in my book. Thank you so much for being here.

Caro:

Thank you. It’s so fun knowing you, and it’s such a pleasure to engage with the Rich Girl audience.

Katie:

Thanks for listening to this bonus cut. We will see you next week to talk about the Great Salary Reset where we’ll be hearing from a lot of you.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.