Let’s all be frilly — and dependent.

By Caitlin Kelly

Like every immigrant, I moved to the U.S., at 30, filled with hope and optimism for my new future in a country that spends a lot of energy telling the world — and its citizens — that it’s a “city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom with “liberty for all.”

As if.

In the decades since I chose the U.S. — and especially since the election of Donald Trump, unleashing a hatred and racism and ignorance that stuns many worldwide — I’ve become less and less enamored of the shiny rhetoric. The current mood towards immigrants (always a recurring theme here), towards women (back to the kitchen!) and, always, towards non-white Amerians, is becoming more hateful and louder every day.

State after state is moving to restrict access to abortion, trying to criminalize every effort a woman — or teenage girl — makes to control her own body. How dare she! How dare we!

Then there are “tradwives”, a wildly popular genre on social media — women, often white, thin, affluent — who pride themselves on having a lot of children and relying solely on their husbands for economic support.

From The Guardian:

Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

I came of age during second-wave feminism, Ms. magazine and Helen Reddy chanting “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers to be ignore!” I grew up in Canada, where abortion has long been readily available legally. I was stunned when I moved to New York and began job hunting in Manhattan in media, what sexist bullshit women were putting up with! I had lunch with a married very senior editor at Newsweek — then a dream job for me — who leaned close and said “I can’t smell your perfume.”

Gross.

I was lucky enough to have parents who never once suggested marriage and motherhood were the only proper uses of my body and intelligence. I was out of the family home at 19, living alone in a tiny apartment, and managing all my own money. As readers here know, I’m ferociously independent in many ways.

I also learned the hard way the real price of deliberate ignorance when my first husband walked out the door for good after barely two years of marriage and quickly married a colleague. I didn’t even know when the mortgage was due — he walked on June 15th…now I know!

Luckily I had a pre-nuptial agreement and he had to pay alimony to get me back on my feet; here’s my recent New York Times story about that.

Which now brings us to fundi babies, a phrase I had gratefully never heard before GOP Senator Katie Britt’s bizarre State of the Union rebuttal.

She sits in a weirdly expensive all-beige kitchen with costly appliances, insisting she’s just a mom like every other decent American, and talks in a breathy little voice — fundi baby — that, apparently, is a powerful dog whistle to any girl or woman raised in an evangelical Christian household — taught to model submission and docility to men.

An explanation, from a Substack by Jess Piper:

I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

It’s hard for me to fathom women who willingly make this choice and keep making it. Call me judgmental and I’m fine with it. Relying solely on a man’s benevolence can leave women abused, homeless and broke. And it does.

No, thanks.

I’m weary of this country’s relentless push to keep women submissive to male power and influence.

This, just as France enshrines abortion in its Constitution.