Trump’s Base Isn’t Housewives, It’s Tradwives – By Sarah Jones (Intelligencer) / Oct 29 2020
Four years into his presidency, Donald Trump has remembered the ladies. He tweets about them, brings them to debates, addresses them at his rallies. But his appeal has little in common with freedom, or equality, or anything else the women’s movement has strived to achieve. Instead, Trump promises pure subdivisions, even jobs, and not just for women. “Because women, suburban or otherwise, they want security. They want safety. They want law and order,” he said at a Michigan rally on Tuesday. “And you know what else? I’m also getting your husbands — they want to get back to work, right? They want to get back to work. We’re getting your husbands back to work, and everybody wants it.”
Trump’s vision of suburban life is more than a little outdated. The president’s fantasies are both more patriarchal and less racially diverse than the suburbs are in truth. Women make up half of the U.S. workforce and over half of all students in college. Before the pandemic hit, the so-called traditional family, with a breadwinner husband and a stay-at-home wife, was on track to become a historical artifact. Most households headed by a married couple are also dual-income. The 1950s are long gone, and good riddance.
But Trump’s comments arrive amidst new threats to women’s economic and political security. The recession cultivated by his administration has been brutally hard on women in particular. In the month of September alone, women were four times as likely as men to drop out of the workforce. The “second shift” no longer begins when working mothers come home in the evenings and begin their domestic labors. Thanks to the pandemic, it lasts all day and demands more of women each week. There’s virtual school to oversee and child care that can no longer be outsourced to other workers. Analysis from the Center for American Progress reports that “Millennial mothers are nearly three times more likely than Millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to a school or child care closure.” Women had hardly achieved utopia. The gains we’d won are fragile, and they are collapsing under the weight of the almighty free market.
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