The Danger of a Kinder, Gentler JD Vance
The Danger of a Kinder, Gentler JD Vance
Donald Trump’s running mate appears increasingly focused on showing women that he “sees” our struggles. His rhetoric represents a new kind of threat to gender equality.
As the final weeks of the election have become a race for women’s votes, we have met a new JD Vance. The once-sarcastic defender against a nation run by “childless cat ladies” has been replaced with a man with a softer side. Recently, Vance has described being a working mom as “extraordinarily difficult,” empathized with “an African-American woman” who caught sidelong glances as she rode the train with her preschoolers, and opened up about how he wishes he had been parented. This new Vance is less aggrieved and more empathic, intent on making it known that he sees just how difficult it is to be a woman today.
Vance’s policy positions, meanwhile, remain unchanged. Clearly, this is no moment to rejoice or declare victory for Taylor Swift. But we should also not dismiss Vance’s compassionate tone as mere dissimulation. The story Vance is now telling represents a new type of threat to gender equality, one whose effects have the potential to reverberate beyond this presidential campaign. Vance is helping rewrite our cultural narrative in a way that presents housework and care work as pleasures feminists have been denying to women. This narrative had, until now, mostly been simmering in the tradwife corners of the internet. But with Vance’s imprimatur, it is going mainstream—and doing so during the first presidential election cycle in recent memory in which childcare has been on the public agenda.
Tradwives, a group of social media influencers who do not work outside the home and frequently argue that wives should be submissive, began trending at a watershed moment for the visibility of women’s labor. The pandemic had shut down schools and daycares. The workers who fill the sector of the economy that includes childcare workers and house cleaners, disproportionately low-income Black and Latina women, lost their jobs at unprecedented rates. Mothers of the middle and upper classes found ourselves longing for the days of the second shift, when we could at least do just one of our jobs at a time.
Into the gap between the craving for greater visibility of women’s labor and the longing for a less exhausting, less chaotic home life entered the tradwife. Though she almost always adopts the aesthetic of a bygone era—be it that of the pioneer homesteader or the 1950s hostess—she is unmistakably of our time, not least because she doesn’t have to be a housewife. Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, whose eight children, regular grinding of her own flour, and husband’s prohibition on nannies and babysitters were the topic of a Sunday Times expose, used to be a Julliard-trained ballerina. Ivy Van Dusen, a momfluencer with more than 100,000 followers, told a reporter, “Obviously, I have a degree.”
In the tradwife telling, rather than buckling to convention, the stay-at-home mom is a rebel, defining herself against the career-focused social tide. As the “classical wife and mother” and former opera singer Abby Roth puts it, no one is going to put “CEO” on your tombstone. Tradwives’ relationships to feminism vary, but many tout their singular ability to see through the #girlboss feminism that dominated the 2010s. Sometimes, they share the tone of Vance’s more resentful persona, arguing that feminism has been telling them to work until their “ovaries dry up.”
More often, however, tradwives describe themselves, if not as feminists, then as supporters of women’s choices. When Vance took the stage last month and lamented “cultural pressure on young families, especially young women,” he painted the stay-at-home mom as the real gender warrior. Women want something that our current childcare “models” will not give them, he insisted. He did not mean that they lacked access to paid parental leave or that they could use relief from the cost of daycare. We know this because he was clear that he was not interested in expanding the range of “federal monies” going to childcare programs.
But we also know this because of his redescription of the causes of women’s lack of choice, or, as he now technocratically puts it, “optionality.” Being “a working mom,” Vance tells us, “is extraordinarily difficult.” The cause of this difficulty, in his telling, is the lack of a “family care model”—and perhaps (in a spin that aligns with the Christian values of many tradwives), insufficient opportunities to receive childcare through churches. Unless Vance really believes his previous remarks that “grandma or grandpa” are going to take care of America’s children, or that other dads will not take on his habit of referring to their children as belonging to their wives, “family care” seems to be code for more women staying home.
It’s a wonder that we don’t hear the word “tradwife,” and immediately joke, “In this economy?” Yet it is unsurprising that the fantasy has taken hold in a world in which millions of working moms are suffering from workplace burnout, most women are concentrated in low-wage occupations, and the average two-earner family today is spending 15 percent of its income on childcare. As I discuss in my recent book, drawing attention away from the economic realities families face has always been the function of tropes that pit working moms and stay-at-home moms against one another. Being a stay-at-home mom was never an option for the majority of American women, yet the “mommy wars” of the 1990s caricatured feminists as the cause of a supposed epidemic of unhappiness among young women who just wanted to be moms. Never mind the persistence of patriarchy; the easy solution was, as Susan Faludi famously described it, to “blame feminism.”
But blaming feminism is no longer as easy as it used to be—and Vance seems to know this, too. Reducing feminism to respect for the choices of stay-at-home moms is unlikely to play well when care burdens are pushing families to a breaking point. The floodgates of concern about women’s work that the pandemic opened up have not closed. If anything, childcare has become a policy priority in a way it never was before the pandemic, its urgency increasing as a sandwich generation now begins to struggle to care for elders as well as children.
The same craving for recognition of women’s labor that catapulted the tradwife to fame has also fed an unprecedented level of interest in what is now called the “caring economy.” Feminists have been organizing since at least the early twentieth century in favor of economic supports for moms and caregivers, and the last 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in support for organizations like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which attempt to bring traditionally women’s work “out of the shadows.” Any effort to drag women’s work back into obscurity has to proceed very creatively.
Cue Vance, who seems increasingly focused on showing parents that he “sees” our struggles. His recent New York Times Magazine interview is peppered with episodes that would fit right in to any grumbling moms’ group chat. Vance notices that onlookers begin “sighing and staring” at mothers when their children “misbehave,” even in relatively minor ways. He knows that they will “huff and puff at you” if you dare to bring your child on an airplane.
Vance’s hand-wringing about a culture that he says has become “pathologically anti-child” seems, in his eyes at least, to be fully compatible with a set of policies that are overtly hostile to children, especially the immigrant children he suggests are straining schools. But as with his previous remarks about “cultural pressures,” the endgame is to drive attention away from material realities—and in this case, toward loftier concerns. Raising children may be financially difficult, and it may make strangers annoyed at you, but its existential rewards are bountiful. “Bringing a child into the world has totally transformed” the way Vance sees himself, and it is a “transformatively and positively good thing for there to be children in the world.” The Vance who tells us this is even vulnerable, owning up to a longing that many have suspected lurks in the background of his psyche—for a “stable” nuclear family, rather than the single mother he derided in Hillbilly Elegy.
Making women’s labor visible, without making it visible as labor, happens also to be the alchemy at the core of tradlife. Tradwives make the tasks involved in housework and care work almost painstakingly visible, showing us how to make the cookies and the filling that ultimately become an oreo, or how to perfectly pack a child’s suitcase so that everything is accessible and nothing forgotten. Whether these tasks are supposed to be leisure or a spiritual discipline is left partly to the viewer’s discretion. But more than one tradwife has insisted that there is Zen in a perfectly folded towel. Others seem keen to impress on us that they are incredibly tired—and that it is all worth it. Neeleman’s clapback video glowed with the halo of the early morning sun as she managed to mist her face, drink a mylk, and deadlift, all before tending to the farm.
The deep danger of Vance’s newfound rhetoric about moms lies in this partial recognition of women’s work, one that acknowledges its presence but paints it as spiritually ennobling. It is insidious partly because of how it harnesses a type of feminist success and attempts to reroute it. Vance is betting that women will look away from the policy solutions we need and instead settle for merely having our labor noticed. If we do, our national conversation on childcare may take another generation to recover.
