Quote:Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee sees the tradwife phenomenon as more than just a weird social media trend. Faddish nostalgia for a romanticized bygone gender regime reflects larger system pressures — both on elites, who are staring down major economic changes with the potential to generate mass unrest, and on ordinary women, who are eager to escape the grinding dual expectations of exploitative work and unsupported caregiving.

Kristen Ghodsee is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Everyday Utopia, and many other books, and chairs the Russian and East European studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing on her research on the gendered dimensions of Eastern European socialism and the transition to capitalism, she spoke with Jacobin‘s Meagan Day about how traditional gender roles have been used to manage economic shocks, the social uses of patriarchal authority, and how women’s real dissatisfaction with poor working conditions (paid and unpaid) gets redirected from collective action toward individual opt-out fantasies that ultimately undermine their autonomy.