The “traditional family” financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z

Two seemingly disparate topics dominated media during the 2024 presidential election: gender roles (the male loneliness epidemic; tradwives) and the economy (the cost of living or, its shorthand, eggs). But these threads might have been weaving a single narrative all along: The renewed fixation on traditional gender roles was a canary in the late capitalist coal mine, warning that the neoliberal era’s social contract was leaking noxious gas. 

As of 2024, almost half of Republican men and one-third of Republican women believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” a cultural prescription that’s doubled in popularity since just 2022, in part due to the grim outlooks of disillusioned young people. This vision was particularly seductive for young men, who voted for Trump in record numbers: Gen Z men report regressive gender views (like “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”) at more than twice the rate of their baby boomer counterparts. This context makes otherwise unobjectionable family-friendly proposals — like that of a $5,000 baby bonus — seem more sinister, meager attempts at restoring the single-earner, single-caregiver family structure associated with a bygone era of American prosperity and dominance. 

In the world that Reaganomics built and over which 14 billionaires now run roughshod, it’s certainly an alluring theory. Wouldn’t it be convenient for those struggling in the tightening fingertrap of modern life if embracing the supposedly natural traits downstream of one’s reproductive system was enough to raise wages and make housing affordable? But we shouldn’t forget why we left the so-called “traditional” family structure behind in the first place. 

The last time gender’s cold war erupted into a battle fought on such explicit terms was around 50 years ago. Two years after Silvia Federici published her seminal work "Wages Against Housework," a woman named Terry Martin Hekker took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to bemoan the state of homemaking — not because she wasn’t being compensated for her time and labor, as second-wave feminists like Federici suggested she ought to be, but because she felt too few women were choosing to do it anyway. Examining household income trends, she muses, “I calculate I am less than eight years away from being the last housewife in the country.” Betty Friedan, avert your eyes.

Hekker, the author of the 1980 book "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in ‘an Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing,’" was the ur-tradwife. Her writing adopted the defensive, defiant tone that will be familiar to anyone who’s had the displeasure of viewing the infamous "Ballerina Farm" response to the Times of London article about the modern “queen of the tradwives.” (The more things change..) Of course, Hekker may not have realized at the time that many of her housewife contemporaries were entering the workforce not because they had read a time-machine-faxed advance copy of "Lean In," but because inflation was creeping higher and their families needed another paycheck. In short, for reasons people have always worked: for money.

In the piece, Hekker alternates between playful and indignant. Her argument — that the “do your own thing” mantra of the women’s movement should extend to homemakers, a group she saw as at risk of becoming “extinct” — seems fair enough, though at times it’s plain that Hekker believes being a stay-at-home mother is not only her thing, but the right thing. Putting the ambitions of her peers in scare-quotes in one particularly biting parenthetical, she writes, “[There’s no getting even for] years of fetching other women’s children after they’d thrown up in the lunchroom, because I have nothing better to do, or probably there is nothing I do better, while their mothers have ‘careers.’ (Is clerking in a drug store a bona fide career?).”

Speaking of her foremothers, she writes, “They took pride in a clean, comfortable home and satisfaction in serving a good meal because no one had explained to them that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid.” On this, it’s hard to argue: Care work, the work that makes all other work possible, is invaluable — though it certainly isn’t valued. But the harsh reality of spending decades out of the workforce in our current paradigm — which, as Hekker rightly argued in 1977 and which remains true today, views work only as that for which you can be paid — is zeroes in the Social Security records, little or no retirement savings of one’s own and a slim chance of being able to find meaningful employment later, should one need it. While married women over 65 are about as likely to be poor as married men, divorced women are 56% more likely to live in poverty than their counterparts. (A 2024 Social Security office analysis projects that offering credits to caregivers would increase the monthly benefit of a quarter of the population living in poverty by 14%, a modest but important step in the right direction.)

Hekker wrote this op-ed in 1977, a time when the U.S. economy had stalled. Now — 40 years deep in the great neoliberal experiment, in which wages have long grown stagnant, most federal spending has accumulated in sky-high asset prices and labor protections have become so brittle there’s hardly anything left to weaken — it’s never been more popular to wonder whether the promise of trickle-down, hustle-bustle economics was a trap (it was!). But rather than yearning for the strong unions, high corporate and marginal tax rates and illegal stock buybacks of yesteryear, many cling instead to the ahistorical, rosy image popularized by 1950s nostalgia porn, that which Hekker valorizes in her piece: the superiority of the “traditional,” single-income family, in which a (male) breadwinner works for a family wage, and a (female) caretaker manages life at home. This is the image cosplayed today by many-an-alt-right grifter on social media, propped up by the bounty of Amazon storefronts and AdSense (did their patron saint Betty Draper have affiliate links, too?).

This conflation of gender orthodoxy with American prosperity is popular for a frustratingly simple reason: A politics which refuses to engage with a rigorous economic analysis in the face of parabolic wealth and income inequality has no choice but to attribute the creeping void of American precarity to cultural explanations instead. In other words: Do the gender roles again, a growing contingent of Americans seems to believe, and the prosperity will return! In this accounting, feminism made women selfish and undesirable, men no longer exhibit sufficient “masculine energy,” and the result is .. wage stagnation? 

But gender role orthodoxy as a solution to economic problems confronts the same shortcoming today it’s always faced: Dependence on the long-term, unwavering benevolence of another person is an abjectly risky financial strategy. Even Reagan, who, as governor of California, signed into law the first “no-fault divorce” statute in the country, knew trapping people in marriages was a bad idea. Widespread adoption of such unilateral divorce laws saw a drop in the female suicide rate of 20%. So set aside the fantasy that cultural capitulation to this “traditional” vision would fix the nation’s economic issues (it wouldn’t), and you’re still left with a proposition that balances the heavy burden of long-term security for roughly half the population on the temperamental, one-legged stool of another person’s affection. This is a lesson Terry Martin Hekker learned the hard way. 

In 2006, she returned to the pages of the Gray Lady to write a follow-up called “Paradise Lost (Domestic Division)” in which she provided a somber update. After her original column had experienced the 1970s version of virality, she wrote a book and toured the country “lecturing” to “rapt audiences” about “the rewards of homemaking and housewifery,” enacting a less overtly political but equally ironic interpretation of the Phyllis Schlafly playbook. “So I was predictably stunned and devastated,” she revealed, “when, on our 40th wedding anniversary, my husband presented me with a divorce,” trading her in for a “sleeker model.” She wasn’t alone. “There were many other confused women of my age and circumstance who’d been married just as long, sharing my situation.” But “divorced” wasn’t the right word for how she felt — “canceled” was more fitting, as it described what happened to her credit cards, health insurance and finally her checking account. Her ex-husband took his younger girlfriend to Cancún. She became eligible for SNAP benefits and published a second title: "Disregard First Book."

The collective longing for a sturdier system, currently molting in tradwife TikToks and behind the paywall of Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University, is supported by a scaffolding of legitimate critique. When the U.S. moved to a dual-earner economy, it did virtually nothing to address the question of caregiving, a critical component of any functioning society. In the absence of a robust, systemic approach to care as a public good (save for the dangling carrot of a one-time $5,000 baby bonus), we shouldn’t forget the real, if imperfect, protections available to us. 

For people who want to have children and continue to participate in the labor market, this might look like using a high-yield savings or money market account to begin saving for the climbing expense of child care before a child is born, to defray some of the unmanageable costs. And for those who think they may want to work inside their homes and provide this care themselves, it means building terms around spousal support into a prenuptial agreement that outline what happens if your marriage (and, by extension, source of income) goes away someday — like how much money you’ll receive, and for how long, while you look for employment again. 

These steps — as well as those which can help women earn more money without working harder than they already are — are the focus of my new book, "Rich Girl Nation." But if there’s anything this state of affairs should teach us in the meantime, it’s that the game of inventing cultural explanations for material shortcomings will always assign the shortest sticks to those least able to demand long ones. That is a feature, not a bug, of the far-right’s vision for women’s futures. Forgive us if we don’t want to play along.