The whole tradwife “i don’t want to work women aren’t supposed to work, feminism ruined our leisure 😩” nonsense is utterly baffling to me. Historically unless you were lucky enough to be a member of the wealthy upper class, women have always always always worked. Throughout the entirety of human history. Often backbreaking labor, often unpaid. Idiots cosplaying a farm wife like that didn’t entail working from sunup to sundown every day without fail because cows don’t care if you’re sick while simultaneously having baby after baby after baby and the invisible labor of housework, until you very likely died young. The TV housewives of the fifties, like they didn’t all explicitly have hired help (AKA A WOMAN WHO WORKS). Even in their vision of the future, the fricken Jetsons have female-coded robot Rosie as their domestic servant!
Women have always worked, with the very rare exception of the wealthy, who employed them. Washerwomen and laundresses and seamstresses and maids and ladies maids and cooks and nurses and governesses and teachers and farm laborers and spinsters and weavers and and and and. Sex work literally is the oldest profession. Women who had the good fortune to marry well were also supposed to be able to manage the household workforce and keep the budget (omg 🤪 girl math). Brenda in Accounting has some very marriageable skills!
And none of these women, the laborer or the housewife, had much recourse at all if their husband or employer abused them or their kids. They had no security in their future if the men running the show squandered the (his.) money or they could not depend on their children to care for them in old age, should they even reach it.
It’s a horrifying mix of calculated evil from conservatives who want to be able to freely beat their wives again and ignorant twaddle from women who are so ill-educated or just so eager for male attention that they cosplay that shit fully confident that they’d be the exception, it would be okay for them because they’re different and Good enough that they wouldn’t be harmed.
Yeah, work sucks, we all know it. But women have never been able to escape it and in every case I’ll take a steady paycheck, my own bank account, and a 401k match over what was most likely to be my lot in every other period of human history. Yeah being idle rich would probably be nicer, but chances of that are vanishingly slim so you gotta make the best of what you do have, yaknow?
