beyond "tradwife," part two

rethinking reactionary narratives on women’s education, work, and family

Guillaume Seignac (1870-1924), Diana the Huntress

Quick note: thank you all for the fantastic response to the first iteration of this series, which, in case you missed, you can read here. For those of you who have chosen a paid subscription, goodness, where do I start? You’re enabling me to dedicate time to research and writing, and for that, I am deeply grateful. I am parting ways with the media company I worked for after a season of lessons learned, and as I begin to pour more of my energy into Substack, I will continue to rely on your support.

I’m thinking of ways that I can acknowledge your sacrifice, and my heart tells me something personal and tangible is in order. Reading group? Snail mail? Whenever we return to the states, I’d like to start hosting in-person events. My friend Katherine Dee, who tends to psychically predict trends ten years before they become mainstream, believes in-person human interaction is about to have a big comeback. I’m open to suggestions!

Here begins part two, in which I will tackle the claim:

“Women’s education and work in the formal remunerative economy is disruptive and unnecessary.”

STEELMAN: 

Women’s presence – in academia and industry – represents, first of all, an artificial invasion, made so through preferential hiring practices, aka affirmative action. Women, since arriving on the scene, have introduced a system of emotional checks and balances, instrumentalized through human resources departments, that stifles creativity, adds to corporate bloat, and reduces overall productivity. On the macroeconomic level, their presence depresses male wages through a simple supply and demand function: a larger labor pool decreases the cost of labor, and the take-home pay of workers by extension. 

Personally, a woman’s high levels of commitment to education and career development in her twenties reduces the lifetime years available for family formation, contributing to low fertility rates, which represent a national existential crisis. It also reduces the quality of her personhood: women who go to college participate in the culture of promiscuity, which permanently renders them unfit for marriage. Additionally, nothing they learn in formal education has any direct bearing on the skills needed to manage a home. Workforce participation takes away from the time and energy women can dedicate to their existing families, where her immediate presence is her primary value-add.

An ideal tradwife, based on the midcentury ideal, would therefore disregard formal education and cease to engage in remunerative labor, which detracts from her sanctioned role by definition.

SED CONTRA:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, initially intended to rectify racial discrimination, laid the groundwork for a powerful regulatory framework that expanded over time, fundamentally changing the American legal and cultural understanding of the relationship between rights and identity. It is precisely that regulatory framework which led to the institutionalization of human resources (HR) departments, which act as a bridge between company and federal regulations to ensure businesses remain legally compliant. People who entertain the line of thought described in the steelman place blame for the HR revolution squarely on the shoulders of women. As always, the history is more complicated.

A Brief History of Civil Rights Law

The Civil Rights Act was envisioned by John F. Kennedy, written by his brother, insisted upon by his successor (Lyndon B Johnson), and passed by a majority male Congress. The term "affirmative action" was first introduced and officially named in Executive Order 10925, where Kennedy directed federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to ensure that applicants are employed and treated fairly without regard to their race. Kennedy recognized that legal protections against discrimination alone were insufficient to change the culture. By holding federal contractors (which had significant social capital) to new standards, Kennedy hoped to influence broader industry practices and encourage similar policies in the private sector. 

In 1965, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which transferred oversight from the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to the Secretary of Labor, giving the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) enforcement authority. This office could enforce compliance through audits, investigations, and sanctions, including contract termination and legal action for noncompliance, effectively making noncompliance punishable through the octopus-like administrative state. This is what began to change private commercial culture in America, making HR (federal compliance) an essential part of business.

Only in 1967 did Johnson amend Executive Order 11246 to include gender as a protected category. While feminist lawyers including Ruth Bader Ginsburg did go on to win cases (in an all-male Supreme Court, by the way) in which they argued, based on this pre-existing legal framework, for sex blindness (Reed v. Reed (1971), Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), Craig v. Boren (1976)), they did not create the legal framework or the federal incentive structure that made the Civil Rights Act into the new foundation of American politics, as argued by Christopher Caldwell in his excellent book, The Age of Entitlement (2020).

However one might feel about these sets of laws and executive orders or their outcomes, women did not unilaterally create them. 

Furthermore, the practice of lowering intellectual standards in order to admit students to universities never officially had anything to do with women. The Supreme Court's Bakke decision in 1978 addressed how race could be used in admissions as one factor in a “holistic” review process, which universities interpreted to mean that an applicant having a non-white racial identity should earn extra “points” toward admission. That said, the Bakke interpretation (that affirmative action programs in higher education could be constitutional if they served a "compelling interest") did set a precedent that could plausibly apply to gender-related cases and affirmative action programs aimed at increasing women's representation in education and employment. But again, women’s inclusion in civil rights law and practice is essentially ex post facto.

Technology and Political Change in the 1970s

One could argue that affirmative action may indeed account for some anti-meritocratic employment of less-than-qualified women, but it does not support the claim that the entirety of women in education and the workforce represents a completely artificial invasion. It ignores probably the most important factors in changes in female labor patterns: technology, centralization, and globalization.

By the 1970s, when most of the sex-blind legal battles were fought, the nature of work had changed. Technology had all but eliminated the clear divisions of labor that had defined men, women, and their relationship to work, for most of human history. On one hand, the kind of physicality-neutral clerical work that emerged in the 20th century was just as well-suited to women as men. On the other hand, many of the functions of the domestic world having to do with health, education, and public service had by then been nationalized under the progressive administrative state. The feminist movement, culturally and legally, would have certainly had something to do with the rise in female employment at the time, but it does not represent a monocausal explanation for the way the labor market fundamentally changed. In other words, women entering the workforce en masse had much less to do with a narrative of “empowerment” and much more to do with a response to regulation and formalization of their traditional work – as well as, of course, true economic need.

The U.S. economy in the 1970s faced a significant downturn due to a combination of domestic and international factors, including stagflation (an unusual combination of high inflation and unemployment), energy shortages (caused in part by the 1973 Oil Embargo, in which the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) imposed an embargo against the United States in response to U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War), the collapse of the gold standard and reinvention of the US dollar as fiat currency, high government spending, and, most importantly, globalization (deindustrialization, immigration, and outsourcing).

Combined with declining wages for men, especially those in blue-collar fields that were hit hardest by globalization, families in the 1970s began to rely on female labor simply to feed their kids. One could argue, based on statistics, that it is better for relationship and family stability for a man to be the breadwinner for his family, but disembodied ideals rarely have any bearing on human behavior when their children’s stomachs are growling. On the whole, women were not even joining those traditionally male industries, which, as I mentioned, had been outsourced or subverted by mass immigration. The zero-sum supply and demand argument about women working and male wages simply does not make sense taken in context.

We are living in the afterglow of midcentury progressive idealism. Individual women are not the appropriate outlet for one’s resentment of the status quo.

The College Question

Promiscuity and the culture of binge drinking on college campuses, I can agree, is utterly detrimental to the health and humanity of those who participate. This is true for men and women. Yet one must accept a deeply anti-Christian, anti-redemptory principle in order to believe that human beings cannot be forgiven and overcome their past sins in order to live a good life at present.

The main problem I have with the argument against women in college is its proponents’ unwillingness to separate the principle of higher education from the fact of the modern college campus. 

The university industry may have very little to do with true education these days. Over time, and much to do with the culture’s abandonment of academic standards and meritocracy, college has become a cheap credentialing system that plunges young people into insurmountable debt while providing precious little in terms of real intellectual rigor – many college students today cannot read a book. But this cultural failure does not indict the principle of higher education or women’s education. In the enclaves where students and leaders are serious about learning, education remains fundamental to human flourishing.

A true education refines the mind, manners, tastes, and forbearance for its students. Thomas Aquinas regarded education as a fundamental component of human development and flourishing, believing it led individuals closer to truth, virtue, and ultimately, to God. Virtue is its own reward: even if an educated woman does not take a formal course on homemaking, the skills and virtues she develops otherwise can only refine her capacities as a human being – as a mother. Maternal education is a gift to children, one that increases their likelihood of success and happiness in life, as well as the stability of the family unit, statistically speaking. It is vitally important for men and women to select for quality when it comes to education; there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As for the apparent tradeoffs between family formation and pursuits like education or career, we must ask ourselves: is this truly an inevitable dichotomy, or has our culture been designed in a way that forces the divide, potentially overlooking alternative approaches that may allow for greater flexibility? Could it be that our cultural norms and institutional structures are more adaptable than we realize, capable of evolving to better support the dual aspirations of education and family life?

To further explore these questions, I encourage you to consider the work of Serena Sigilitto, Ivana Greco, Catherine Pakaluk, and Erika Bachiochi. They argue powerfully that it is possible to create a more flexible, family-oriented social and economic system—one that does not demand a choice between legitimate personal development and family responsibilities but instead integrates them harmoniously. As champions of both women’s education and maternity, they challenge the notion that professional achievement and motherhood are fundamentally at odds.

Their work highlights how policies, cultural values, and workplace structures can be redesigned to accommodate the unique rhythms of family life, allowing both men and women to flourish personally and professionally without sacrificing the legitimate needs of children. By reimagining education and career pathways that support fertility rather than sideline it, they suggest that we can create a society where women—and men—are empowered to pursue fulfilling lives that include both a robust education and community involvement as well as rich family relationships.

Conclusion

In exploring the complexities of women’s roles in education, work, and family, I find that simplistic narratives fail to capture the nuanced realities of human life and political evolution. Arguments against women’s participation in higher education and the workforce often overlook the historical, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped modern society. The rise of women in the workforce and academia is not solely a product of affirmative action or liberal feminist ideological prompting. Again, evolving labor markets, technological advancements, and economic necessity have much more to do with it. Attempts to reduce these shifts to a superfluous disruption miss both the broader context and the genuine benefits that women’s contributions bring to public life.

Ultimately, creating a better balance is not just a matter of policy but of collective will—of reimagining what is possible and challenging our assumptions about the tradeoffs between family and career. It is never helpful, let alone honest, to demonize, diminish, or scapegoat one sex or the other in service of this goal.

A vision of a family-friendly society, while perhaps distant, is within our reach. It is one that honors education and public contribution as vital elements of human flourishing, bringing these into harmony with the timeless joys and responsibilities of family life. I believe a more family-friendly world is in the process of being born, against the odds and despite the pains of labor. And I look forward to it.