More Gen Z Women Embracing ‘Tradwife’ Influencers

Yes. A basic point below is that the tradwife has to have an economically successful husband. And they are not to be found under every rock.

But what counts as success? It depends on what you want and expect. In the old days most men were economically succesful enough to support a stay-at-home wife. But the lifestyle then was much simpler. I won't try to detail that but I could perhaps mention that in those days eating out and travel were often once in a lifetime affairs.

So a man on average income could to this day support a stay-at-home wife if he he could find a woman willing to accept a much lower standard of living than is now normal -- but it would probably need some sort of religious committment to support that.

So we come back to the fact that a woman accustomed to a modern lifestyle is only going to become a tradwife if she can find a man with either a well-above income or substantial wealth. It is not an option for all.

A way around that is for a woman to hunt rich men and do her best to please one when she finds one. And there have been many reports of such women. One can only hope that they are satisfied with their decisions. Most of us still have some ideals of love and romance however so would question the worth of such relationships.

But, all things considered, being a tradwife can be attractive if part of a good relatonship with a man of above average material resources.

I became economically successful at a relatively early age so by age 40 was able to support a tradwife. And I did. She was not called that in that era but when I met her she was a smart and good-looking woman aged 31 who already had 3 kids. She was a working single mother, which is one of the most difficult situations for a woman to be in.

I like kids so it was an easy choice for me to tell her to stop work and become a full-time wife and mother. She of course jumped at it. It was an instant large upgrade to her lifestyle and she enjoyed it greatly. I even gave her a car so she was not housebound. And we did have lots of good times together. And she even gave me a son.

As it happened, however, the marriage lasted only 10 years but I gave her a house to move into when we split so there are good feelings between us to this day. We still see one-another.

There is of course much more to be told about all that but I just offer it to emphasize again that an economically successful husband is required for a tradwife to be happy today


Hannah Neeleman, a Utah-based cattle farmer and mother of eight, is perhaps the most popular Instagram “tradwife”—a growing category of social media influencers who reject the not-so-traditional 9-to-5 workforce in favor of homeschooling their children, homemaking, or running a family business.

Though her content is entirely wholesome, she (and other tradwife accounts) are not without controversy.

In the case of Ballerina Farm, followers recently uncovered that Daniel Neeleman, Hannah’s husband, is the son of the founder and former CEO of JetBlue, whose estimated net worth is $400 million.

Her kitchen stove, prominently featured in many of Hannah’s videos where she bakes sourdough bread, farm-raised beef, and other dishes, costs a minimum of $20,000. For those who laud their simple lifestyle as cattle farmers, many felt blindsided by the wealth enabling their smooth transition to homesteading. After all, starting a farm requires many high-cost purchases on the front end, from the land, equipment, and animals, forcing many farmers into perpetual debt.

Yet Hannah and other tradwife accounts will easily maintain their prominence going into 2024. For many women, who increasingly report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” and disillusionment with the “girlboss” lifestyle, these influencers offer an idyllic alternative to urban life. They are illuminating a deeper hunger among women, especially among Generation Z.

A quick search on Google Trends shows that the term “tradwife” gained popularity in 2018, but peaked in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated women’s return to the home. Instead of being confined to religious or ultrawealthy women, the tradwife movement entered mainstream discussions. It offered women the chance to reclaim the ingredients of happiness—faith, family, community, and meaningful work—back from the career-focused model they grew up with.

Popular online accounts (explored here and here) tend to show women who don the clothes and lifestyle that they perceive women in a previous era embodied: shirtwaist dresses, aprons, a rejection of formal work outside the home, and a heavy emphasis on homemaking and care for children.

Instead of finding the home stuffy, boring, or trivial, many women found greater purpose and satisfaction than they previously imagined. Initially, the pandemic gave women the ultimate “permission slip” to explore the domestic realm (stay inside to stay alive). Later, popular and aesthetically pleasing tradwife accounts gave women the encouragement they needed to combat the outspoken expectations that all women, even mothers, ought to rejoin the 9-to-5 workforce.

It’s worth considering why Gen Z women, who have the most professional opportunities and fewest barriers to education, work, and politics, would flock in large numbers to tradwife influencers. No doubt the online accounts are more intense in their expressions of femininity, homemaking, or anti-feminist sentiment than the average follower, but then, this is always the case with influencers.

For Gen Z women who have observed the unhappy zero-sum game that is the battle of the sexes, many feel that the modern world, for all its promises, has failed them. They’re looking for an older, and truer, model for how to live a good life. Or, as Carmel Richardson said, “There are too many elders who give bad advice about marriage and family. I am trying to become the matriarch I want to see in the world.”

Similarly, it’s worth asking why this movement provokes many others to mockery or disgust. As one influencer said, “What if their husband leaves them? Then how will they support themselves?” For women who grew up observing the impact of no-fault divorce, family breakdown, the sexual revolution, and the rigid careerism of the 1990s, it seems as though their plan for survival is to depend on no one, especially a man, to provide for them.

The exhaustion and subsequent disenchantment this has produced in Gen Z is enough to spark a counterrevolution.

The harm is not borne equally, either. As both Aaron Renn and Mary Harrington have pointed out, the current workforce has meant that for elite or upper-class women to work, they require other women, who would rather stay home with their own children, to serve as nannies and day care workers just to make ends meet. Many tradwife accounts encourage women, insofar as they can, to return to their own homes and release poorer women from the expectation of handling their child care, cooking, or cleaning.

Notably, a Refinery29 article recognized this appeal for minority women: “Traditional marriage is the key to Black women’s liberation from being overworked, economic insecurity, and the stress of trying to survive in a world hostile to our survival and existence.”

Implicit in the tradwife model, of course, is the financial and ideological support of a husband. It requires husband and wife to work together in distinct roles toward a shared vision—one that ideally allows each the margin to flourish in their given space. In this way, tradwives represent a sort of anti-fragility that, in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is not merely resilient in the face of difficulty, but grows stronger because of it.

At their best, tradwives require more of the men around them. Rather than trying to replace the men in their lives (father, husband, perhaps employer) when they fail, such tradwives hold them accountable to provide, protect, and grow within the family. Few things could sound scarier to a woman who has been failed by a man she thought she could trust through divorce, unfaithfulness, or abandonment. Nonetheless, many women are realizing that the happiness they desire requires reliance upon a husband and other family members to succeed.

Whether it’s a corporate girlie, an academic, or a tradwife, each dreams of and relies upon a wealthy patron to support the lifestyle she wants to live. While some tradwives denounce all work “outside the home,” many run small businesses, write or blog, and contrary to the Luddite stereotype, manage savvy social media influencer accounts. They take the time and flexibility that their lifestyle offers and seek creative uses of their time that bless their family, their community, and the causes they care about.

Certainly, some aspects of the tradwife movement range from alt-right pagan beliefs to unrealistic forms of live-action role-play. At the heart of it, however, is a positive attempt by many women to embrace marriage and motherhood.

Countercultural movements tend to overcorrect to provide the next generation of women with a moderate option between the two ideological extremes of careerism and the rejection of all “paid work.”

For Gen Z, the result may be that women receive the flexibility and support to pursue a family and work amenable to their goals and the demands of each season.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/11/why-gen-z-is-ditching-girlboss-tradwife/

***************************************************

The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. So does the hammer and sickle

But the Left like and forgive Communism because it is the ultimate case of what they want: Control over other people. They want to reform the world and you need control for that. They also despise ordinary people so killing millions of them is no problem

by Jeff Jacoby

THE WEEK that just ended was bracketed by two anniversaries in the history of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Sunday was the centennial of the death of Vladimir Lenin. The architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and first ruler of the Soviet Union was 53 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on Jan. 21, 1924.

Saturday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million victims were murdered by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1945. The United Nations in 2005 designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Why has the UN never dedicated a similar day of remembrance for the victims of communism?

The communist system introduced by Lenin has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other movement in history. For sheer murderous horror, there has never been a force to compare to it. The Nazis didn't come close. Adolf Hitler's regime eradicated 6 million Jews in the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust. The Germans also killed at least 5 million non-Jews, among them ethnic Poles, prisoners of war, Romani people, and the disabled.

But the Nazi toll adds up to barely a tenth of the lives that have been extinguished by communist dictatorships. According to The Black Book of Communism, a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, the fanaticism unleashed by Lenin's revolution has sent at least 100 million men, women, and children to early graves. Beginning in 1917, communist regimes on four continents — from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and North Korea to Cuba and Ethiopia — engineered death on a scale unmatched in human annals.

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. To this day there are those who still insist that communism is admirable and wholesome, or that it has never been properly implemented, or that with all its failings it is better than capitalism. Many people who would find it unthinkable to deck themselves in Nazi regalia — when Britain's Prince Harry wore a swastika armband to a costume party in 2005, a major scandal ensued — view communist-themed fashion as trendy or kitschy.

In Manhattan's East Village, the popular KGB Bar — named after the USSR's terrifying security network of secret police and torture sites — features Soviet propaganda posters and literary readings. Would any New York hipster ever set foot in a pub called Gestapo? Amazon sells scores of shirts with hammer-and-sickle designs or the images of communist dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who were among the greatest mass killers in history. Search for "Nazi T-shirts," on the other hand, and what comes up are shirts showing a swastika in a red circle with a slash ("No Nazis") or proclaiming: "Punch a Nazi."

What accounts for the difference? Both Nazism and communism filled the world with pain, terror, and death. Yet communists are not regarded with the same revulsion that Nazis are. In the public's perception, Hitler and his Nazi Party have no equal as incarnations of supreme evil. Why isn't communist tyranny viewed the same way?

A number of reasons suggest themselves.

First: In the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union ended up fighting alongside the Allies. World War II gave way to the long-drawn-out Cold War, but America's alliance with Moscow left in many minds the belief that when it mattered most, the communists were on our side. After all, the free world had labeled Nazis as the supreme evil. So anyone who helped destroy Nazis must not have been supremely evil themselves.

Second: The Nazis made little effort to disguise the abhorrent malignance on which their movement was based, above all its genocidal antisemitism. They made no secret of their implacable hatred for Jews and other "subhumans" or their belief that an Aryan master race should rule the world. Conversely, communist movements have almost always cloaked their malice and brutality with tempting rhetoric about equality, peace, and an end to exploitation. Partly as a result, the myth persists to this day that communism is really a noble ideology with the potential to liberate mankind.

Third: Nazism was utterly discredited by the fate meted out to Nazi Germany — unconditional surrender, an Allied occupation, war-crimes trials, and the hanging of senior Nazis. By contrast, communist dictatorships in Moscow and elsewhere entrenched their hold on power. The end of the Cold War eventually brought down communist governments in Russia and Europe, but even then, there was no public accounting for the ghastly crimes they had committed.

Fourth: The Holocaust became such a "byword for modern barbarism," as the authors of "The Black Book of Communism" put it, that even mass murders of greater magnitude in the communist world seem to recede in significance. In crucial ways, the Holocaust stands alone: Nazi Germany deployed every resource at its command to construct a vast industry of death with the goal of rounding up and destroying every single Jew in Europe — not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. There is good reason that so much attention has been paid to the Holocaust by scholars, historians, educators, and artists. As a result, however, the far greater level of bloodshed committed by communist regimes has never achieved the same public awareness.

Fifth: There are pictures of what the Nazis did. Filmmakers and photographers entered the death camps in 1945 and recorded what they found, providing images that shocked the world's conscience and became iconic emblems of human savagery. But there were no Allies to liberate the Soviet gulag or to halt the agonies of Mao's Great Leap Forward. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible — and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about.

These are explanations only, not justifications. Nazism was unspeakably evil and only an ignoramus or a monster would deny it. Communism, too, has been unspeakably evil — no "ism" in history has spilled more blood or crushed more lives. From anyone with a conscience or a working moral compass, the response to both should be the same: Never forget, never forgive.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27517/the-swastika-stands-for-evil-and-mass-murder-so

*******************************************

Another Infant Formula Shortage? Blame the FDA

On December 28, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration received information that a sample from a hypoallergenic infant formula called Nutramigen was contaminated with salmonella. Since then, Nutramigen’s producer Reckitt/Mead Johnson Nutrition voluntarily recalled 675,000 cans of formula and began undergoing hygiene and safety inspections conducted by the FDA. The plant is still under inspection.

The recall and ensuing plant shutdown are causing a national shortage of hypoallergenic infant formula. While less common than standard formula, hypoallergenic is vital for an estimated ten percent of infants with severe protein allergies who need it to receive adequate nutrition.

The shortage is quickly getting worse. Infant formula producer websites urge parents to check their real-time inventory updates to see if stores within 200 miles of their zip code have supplies. Facebook groups with over 1,000 members recently formed to support parents struggling to find hypoallergenic formulas for their infants.

Fearing a return to the devastating infant formula shortage of 2022, several politicians are demanding accountability and answers.

Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey Jr. from Pennsylvania wrote Reckitt/Mead Johnson Nutrition to ask whether they anticipate further supply disruptions, if other plants can ramp up production to mitigate the shortage, and whether the FDA’s inspection is preventing Nutramigen from reaching shelves.

Writing directly to the FDA, Florida Senator Rick Scott wants to know what the agency is doing to help other infant formula producers make more hypoallergenic formulas and when the facility where the contaminated formula was found will be operating again.

Both senators and countless parents have the right to be upset and concerned. However, asking the FDA for guidance and remedies for this formula shortage fundamentally misunderstands the source of the problem.

Much like the current shortage, the devastating infant formula shortages in 2022 began with massive recalls after the FDA received information that some infants became sick after using formula produced by a plant in Sturgis, Michigan. The plant started recalls and underwent a full inspection. The plant remained closed for months after the inspection– even when the US infant formula supply shrank by 40 percent.

If anything, the FDA is doing a worse job in detaining plants from reopening safely this time. According to the agency’s report, “The voluntarily recalled Nutramigen product was manufactured between June 6, 2023, and June 29, 2023.” Thus, it’s overwhelmingly likely that any contaminated formula was consumed months ago.

Rather than urging the FDA to work quickly and help producers, the agency could dramatically improve the problem by eliminating barriers to importing formula.

As my co-author and I addressed in an article in Fortune written during the first infant formula shortage, the FDA could quickly increase formula supplies by relaxing their mandatory 90-day waiting period to allow foreign formula to hit markets. The agency also prohibits foreign formulas that do not meet nutritional labeling requirements even when the agency’s nutritional standards are met.

None of these easy-to-implement ideas were considered in 2022 and are less likely to be used now. Instead, European formula producers are more likely to face additional regulatory hurdles as part of the agency’s most recent effort to increase oversight over imported goods.

Sadly, as I noted in a blog for The Beacon last November, despite the FDA claiming they “never want to have this [formula shortages] happen again,” they haven’t addressed any of the reasons for infant formula shortages in the US.

Until they do, we remain vulnerable to more shortages, this being just another predictable example.

https://blog.independent.org/2024/01/22/another-infant-formula-shortage-blame-the-fda/?omhide=true

****************************************************

This Jewish Cancer Counselor Got Fired For Objecting to an Anti-Trump DEI Assignment. Now, She’s Suing

A veteran social worker who says she was fired for expressing concern over racial harassment against her as a Jewish woman and political harassment over her ties to the Trump administration is suing for wrongful termination.

Tammy Weitzman last week sued her former employer, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, now known as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, for racial and political discrimination and for retaliating against her when she spoke up about it.

“I was called a white k–e, and I was harassed over knowing a high-ranking Cabinet member in the Trump administration,” Weitzman told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview, using an offensive term for Jewish individuals.

She had helped care for a daughter of the Trump administration official, Weitzman said.

The leader of the group legally representing Weitzman, Coalition for Liberty President Doug Turpin, recounted how the Seattle cancer center responded when his client expressed concern to her boss about the harassment. Weitzman herself, not those harassing her, ended up in hot water. The cancer center forced her to take “racial equity” training.

When Weitzman later spoke about her experiences facing harassment as a Jewish woman, the “equity” facilitators told her that she was white.

According to the lawsuit, Weitzman’s coworkers often sent her unsolicited emails condemning the Trump administration and blaming her for Trump’s policies. When she reported the harassment, the suit says, the director of the center’s human resources office told her to simply “deal with it” and warned her that she likely would face retaliation if she filed a formal complaint.

Weitzman worked as an oncology social worker, providing counseling and therapy services for cancer patients and their families.

“While other folks on the team were able to ensure that these patients had enough resources, a place to stay, and gas money to get to the clinic, my role was very clinical,” Weitzman told The Daily Signal.

Weitzman said she had wanted to work with cancer patients since her childhood because her father died of cancer when she was 5. Until her firing, she told The Daily Signal, she had been a social worker specializing in cancer patients for “almost 23 years.”

Weitzman worked at the Seattle cancer center from January 2016 to February 2021, receiving a raise and many favorable commendations for her work, but got fired abruptly Feb. 5.

Other employees repeatedly used racial slurs against her, and her supervisors ignored them or “told me [it] was no big deal,” she recalled.

An Anti-Trump Article

Nidhi Berry, who supervised “Race and Allyship” training sessions at the Seattle cancer center, had sent an anti-Trump article as a follow-up to a racial sensitivity training that Jan. 21, the day after Joe Biden became president, according to the lawsuit. That article made generalizations about Jewish people that Weitzman found offensive.

Weitzman told The Daily Signal that the article contained instructions to lecture those around her, including her cancer patients, about Trump. She said Berry asked her to use the article “to talk about racism with patients and families.”

The social worker found that highly unethical, she said, not in the least because such political posturing isn’t remotely of interest to cancer patients:

They’re concerned about their lives. Caring for cancer patients, receiving cancer treatment, working in a cancer hospital, working in any cancer facility or any medical institution should be an apolitical matter. Period. End of story.

I should not be compelled to talk to patients about politics and about President Trump and how evil the Left thinks that he is. This is wrong—and yet this is happening everywhere.

When Weitzman complained about the article to Tiffany Courtnage, her direct boss, Courtnage told her to bring up the issue directly with Berry. Weitzman objected to that approach, but ultimately followed that instruction from her boss and spoke over the phone with Berry on Jan. 21.

Although that phone conversation proved “relatively pleasant,” according to the lawsuit, one week later Berry sent an email berating Weitzman.

The Racist Email

In that email, Berry wrote to Weitzman that she was “flabbergasted that you, a white woman and fellow social worker, would choose to burden me, a woman of color, with your feelings and triggers around this post.”

Berry asserted that “Trump’s administration did inspire hate speech and violence —this is a non-negotiable fact.”

“It is the essence of white privilege to be able to focus on a tree at the expense of seeing the forest,” Berry added in the email to Weitzman. “It is the essence of white fragility to claim victimhood when you are definitely not the victim. I’m disturbed that a white woman on a social work team at a major institution like [Seattle Cancer Care Alliance] would try to play these games, would claim the status of victimhood, in the face of a woman of color, after the years of the era of Trump.”

Berry also wrote: “You’ve mentioned to me previously that you identify as Jewish, which makes this interaction from last Thursday all the more bewildering to me, considering the anti-Semitisim [that] is stoked by the hate speech and violence Trump’s administration inspired.”

Weitzman’s lawsuit argues:

In Ms. Weitzman’s view, it is the essence of racial discrimination to assume that an individual must or should hold certain political or social views, based on his or her race. Moreover, to be lumped in with members of the white race, despite her Jewish heritage, and to be told that her views on the matter of racial discrimination did not matter because being Jewish was equivalent to being white for purposes of racial discussions, was deeply offensive and disconcerting.

Berry copied Courtnage on her email, along with HR. The cancer center’s training supervisor explicitly rejected Weitzman’s request for mutual understanding and tolerance, stating: “I will not privilege you or any other white person’s comfort over the safety of people of color and Black people, and I certainly won’t privilege your comfort over equitable patient outcomes.”

An Abrupt Termination

A little over one week after Berry’s email, Weitzman met with Courtnage and Courtnage’s boss, James Jorgenson, who fired her.

According to the lawsuit, Jorgenson said the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance fired Weitzman because her “ethnicity sensitivity” and her core values did not align with the values of her employer, and Courtnage was unable to discuss the issue with her.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/23/exclusive-jewish-cancer-counselor-sues-former-employer-racial-slurs-white-privilege-claims-retaliation

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************