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u/ferretsRfantastic 3d ago
Exactly. I'm black. Not one single woman in my ancestry (as far as being in the US) was ever able to just sit at home all day. They worked often 2-3 jobs. These men live in Delululand
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u/AngelsLoveDisasters 3d ago
Right. My great grandmother was a caretaker for white children
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u/ferretsRfantastic 3d ago
Between sharecropping, house cleaning, and other various jobs, the hands of my ancestors were hardened through and through.
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u/mecegirl 4d ago
There seriously talk like the women beforenthat time lived the housewife life. And even for women during that time that was a middle...maybe even just uper middle class life. Since some housewives worked part time, gig jobs, or for the family business or farm.
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u/FailurelsData 3d ago
Fr I always see low income women glorifying this and I'm like.... You know poor people existed back then too right. These are presentations have always been about upper glass families.
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u/mecegirl 3d ago
And there came a time where for the middle class some of it was subsidized by the goverment. Things like the GI bill. Or gorvernment house loan programs. Or even the "good" Union jobs pushed companies to give good benefits to workers. Now a lot of that has or is being stripped away.
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u/MsAndrie 1d ago edited 1d ago
Also, the government organized and subsidized massive home-building that white middle class families benefited from after World War II. That was how they got enough housing for the Boomers in their young adulthoods. They aren't doing the same kind of thing now, hence why you often need two incomes (maybe more) to have decent housing.
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u/jphistory 3d ago
I think every aspiring tradwife owes it to herself to read The Bell Jar.
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u/CarlySimonSays 3d ago
Right? Breezy, trouble-free housewife life was mainly a thing of post-WWII advertising and television amidst the Baby Boom. Heck, Donna Reed worked! Harriet Nelson worked!
Also, generally, before 1900, the majority of people were involved in farming, even if they had another occupation as well! In some countries, that majority even lasts until about 1950. My mother will tell you that working from the age of ten on the farm that her father moved them to in the late 1960s was hard work. And she was a child, having to do any and all work that her late mother would have been doing, if she hadn't died when my mother was six years old. Her dumb jerk brothers got to play sports, instruments, and generally had a lot more free time, even with their own farm work.
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u/garaile64 4d ago
A lot of traditions conservatives fight to preserve are from either the aftermath of WW2 or from the XIXth century, not being millenary.
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u/CarlySimonSays 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's so incredibly short-sighted. These people clearly don't care about the longue durée of human history, even though many sure talk a big game about at least knowing American political history. And gender, ethnicity, class, and, shock and horror, the past lived experiences of people not very much like them--these don't register at all.
...
Just to soothe my own soul, I'd like to throw heavy books at a lot of these gleefully anti-intellectual, mean, and weird populist cult followers and conspiracy theorist wackjobs that are American (and other!!!) conservatives in 2026.
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u/ginger_bird 3d ago
Also, Women did have paying jobs! They were just paid less than men and were only allowed to have sucky jobs that lacked prestige, power, or advancement.
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u/TreeLakeRockCloud 3d ago
I could rant about this all day. Women work. Women have always worked, for pay. We were barred from career work and steady, stable income, so women were forced to take on side gigs like being the neighborhood seamstress or bread baker or laundress etc etc. By and large, though men had easier access to careers, many didn’t have them so they needed their wife to bring in income as well.
Then we got unions! People died so that we had workplace safety, weekends and better wages! Yay! And then we saw a middle class emerge, where a man went to work and his wife could tend their modest home. Great!
But then we stopped. We let corporate greed take over again. Instead of keeping our support of unions high and modernizing it as we changed, we saw wages stagnate. We could have revolutionized the world, but we let greedy corporations take advantage of women wanting careers. Instead of fighting to keep families afloat on one income, men chose to stay working alongside women.
Some lazy people blame “feminism” for wage stagnation, but it’s corporate greed.
Right now, as we see automation revolutionize industries, we need to bring back workplace solidarity. If AI can do so many jobs, why is “full time” 40 hours? Why, at a time when productivity is higher than ever, do we not decide “20 hours is full time and deserves a living wage.”
Remember how productive we all were during that Covid lockdown? How many beautiful meals were cooked and quilts were sewn and gardens planted etc etc? Imagine how beautiful we could make the world if we all earned a living or even thriving wage on 20h/week. Imagine how much easier life would be for anyone with caregiving obligations.
Women have always worked. We’ve always fought to get paid - and that a family can’t survive on one income shows that we need to fight back.
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u/Mu17inItOver 3d ago
Men complain about male suicide rate and a loneliness epidemic, then turnaround and ask for the traditional gender roles that make those statistics happen. If only they could see how healthy feminism is for everyone
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u/maybealicemaybenot 3d ago
Real talk. There is something absolutely fucked up that you need to separate with your child mere months (if you're lucky and live in places with parental leave) after their birth. That you don't get to be there with them during the time they're most active. I am a daycare teacher and I absolutely find if fucked up that I will see many of your kid's first milestones before you. This isn't necessarily a gendered thing, though it more often than not is. You want more people to stay at home and raise kids? Easy, implement unlimited basic income so the person who stays at home gets recognized for the labour they do and so they're not completely dependent on the working parent. But to do so would be socialism, you see.
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u/MacintoshEddie 3d ago
A big part of that is the attitudes towards different kinds of jobs, and what is work versus what is "work"
Like how some guys think that "sitting around gossiping" all day isn't "work" even though historically making and mending clothing and feeding people and educating children are all very important jobs. They don't respect it as being a job, they see it as a hobby/lifestyle, because it's not done in a cubicle and most people would choose to gather in groups rather than sit alone each individually mending socks in silence.
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u/Four_beastlings I liked zombies back when they were underground. 3d ago
My husband's former (very well respected and considered elite) job was "sitting around gossiping" with a side of drinking lmao.
Recently he was talking to the building manager of the place where he owns some rental units and they started whispering about the private life of one of his tenants. When I called him out for being a snoop and a gossip he started with "it's not gossip, it's acquiring intelligence, I need to know what my tenants are doing" and watching the slow realisation in his face as we talked that what he was doing was, in fact, being a snoop and a gossip was priceless. He's a smart man, though, so instead of getting pissy because I was attributing "female" traits to him he was like "ohhhhhh I see now, women have been amazing at gathering intelligence all along!"
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u/fiahhawt 2d ago
Now that modern times have down away with feckless lords sitting around and being rich, It's common for the privileged groups in society to hoard positions that don't really require effort but also pay really well.
They gatekeep roles that have less stringent expectations because while sometimes shit needs doing, a lot of the times there's more flexibility about output.
It's a big part of why women are far more capable and increasingly becoming more so. They mostly get gatekept from jobs where coasting is a possibility. Then once a woman gets in these positions, she is under a microscope to prove she's as competent as all these men such that a modicum of effort from her results in double their output.
Like men are being really naive with all this sexism nonsense because women will come along eventually. If they don't chill and let us in the clubhouse and share with us how much "effort" everyone usually does, then we will come cream everyone to fight the sexism and our collective boss will suddenly realize how much he can squeeze out of everyone.
tl;dr sexism is the cause of wage stagnation and increasingly toxic labor relations
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u/MacintoshEddie 2d ago
Absolutely. Ladies having "tea parties" are socializing but men sitting around smoking cigars and drinking whiskey is an important high level business strategy meeting.
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u/letsmakelifealive 3d ago
Faught 🫠
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u/M_Ad 3d ago
Right?? What a bizarre typo.
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u/FailurelsData 2d ago
fr. I was like this person definitely has that last name in their social circle
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u/Arcanegil 3d ago
Women have down more than worked, several women fought in resistance movements against fascism during WWII the Italian women who where as partisans in the resistance were especially cool.
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u/eugeneugene 3d ago
When I was a kid my mother worked in the evening when my dad got home from work and when I started school she went to work full time as a paralegal. Both of my grandmothers were nurses. My great grandmothers and great great grandmothers before them were teachers, seamstresses, factory workers, etc. So what's this "traditional" lifestyle they speak of lol. The vast majority of women have always worked. Not very traditional to be a stay at home mother if you look at my family's history
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u/Sunshroom_Fairy 3d ago
It's really scary how people today are still falling for propaganda made a hundred years ago. It really shows how dangerous it is.
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u/MsAndrie 1d ago
Did you know that the first woman to win the Economics Nobel Prize solo, Claudia Goldwin, demonstrated this in her research work? Took a woman to actually look at the facts...
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u/Kat121 4d ago
Apparently white women didn’t like the trad wife life very much back then, either. Anyone who could afford it paid someone else to raise the kids and handle the cooking, cleaning, and laundry.