The Wife Trap

For a little while, American women had more rights than their foremothers. That’s no longer true after Dobbs, which accelerated a much older assault on legal abortion, and the law is only half the story. The day of the girlboss is over, and with her goes the valorization of individual choice. We once heard that our place was in the White House but that if we wanted to stay in the kitchen, that was all right too. Choice feminism was a political fiction; it presumed autonomy, which we had not yet won. Liberalism has no answer for the vengeful anti-feminist backlash that is taking its place. Women are entering a new era of struggle.

Although we still have choices, they are limited and under renewed threat. To Vice-President J.D. Vance, “childless cat ladies” threaten an essential American project; by withholding children, they withhold the most meaningful social contribution they can make. President Trump once proposed a vague “tax credit” for family caregiving, which is largely performed by women, but never released a formal plan and is silent on the matter now. Secular pronatalists say they want to create mothers, not housewives, but in prizing fertility rates above reproductive liberty, they offer women a familiar fate. The most extreme Christian nationalists are so keen to keep us down that they would deny us the vote. If they are correct, and a woman is wired by God or biology to stay in the kitchen, then she deludes herself by desiring anything else. “It’s in our nature,” the influencer Alex Clark said recently. Women who prioritize career over family life are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” Scott Yenor of Boise State University said at the National Conservatism conference in 2021.

The problem with the kitchen is not the kitchen itself but who’s in it and how she got there. If women are so suited to domestic labor, perhaps we’d be happier — but in Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net, the sociologist Jessica Calarco depicts an immiserated generation. To Calarco, policy works alongside social conditioning to keep women in place. Pronatalism did not begin yesterday, or even with Dobbs. Instead, most women hear early in their lives that motherhood is a unique source of personal fulfillment, if not a religious or cultural obligation. But motherhood is not just a biological relationship; it is a social role with political implications, and without a functional safety net, it can also become a weight around a woman’s neck.

Through policymaking and social conditioning, women are still the nation’s caregivers, often at the expense of our own wellbeing. We thus have one leg in a trap the Wages for Housework movement sought to blow open decades ago. As the historian Emily Callaci recounts in her new book, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, a global and multiracial coalition of women in the 1970s demanded recognition for the work they did at home and more. Economic power would be a step toward a new and liberatory world. That world is still possible, decades later, no matter how distant it may appear.

To write Holding It Together, Calarco carried out a series of sweeping research surveys, beginning in 2018, and reached thousands of participants. Her subjects are ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse, an overdue departure from the usual narratives about women and work. Stack up the books and the hot takes about who’s opting out and why, and the principle characters will be white-collar women of means. Calarco takes a broader view, and her analysis is richer for it. The women she interviews offer complex and sometimes unexpected conclusions about the decisions they make and the labor they perform. Their experiences, while distinct, complete a portrait of thwarted ambition and desire. A woman who dreams of children and a large family can still long for autonomy and resent its absence. Unless she has wealth of her own, her choices are often restricted by the decisions of others: her spouse, his employer, and policymakers.

Calacro speaks with Audrey, who wanted her toddler daughter to have a sibling. Then she lost her retail job in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Unemployment was difficult for her. The job “had been the thing that helped most in overcoming” her postpartum depression, Calarco writes, and Audrey wanted to delay her next child. Though she couldn’t tolerate hormonal birth control, her husband, Colby, wouldn’t wear condoms, and one day he didn’t pull out, either. “It’s very clear that it wasn’t something I was okay with,” she tells Calarco later. “It wasn’t something that I consented to.” Although she believes sexual assault is an “appropriate” term for Colby’s abuse, she says that many in her life disagree. She relies on their Evangelical church friends for emotional support and practical help with meals and child care, and they disapprove of abortion and divorce. Audrey fears she can’t afford to leave Colby, either. She’d need paid work again, which means she’d also need to pay for child care on top of her credit-card payments, medical debt, and car loans, “which totaled more than $40,000,” Calarco writes.

Even if a woman’s partner or co-parent tries to be involved and supportive, structural inequalities make it difficult for her to exercise whatever freedom she has on paper. In 2019, Sierra, a young Black woman who lived in Indiana with her toddler son, worked as many hours as her fast-food job would allow. She earned less than $1,000 a month, which qualified her for WIC, welfare, and Medicaid, but the benefits weren’t enough to lift her out of poverty. Her child’s father, Derek, moved to Alabama to work in poultry processing, and Sierra followed him so their son would grow up with both parents nearby. When the pandemic struck, Derek managed to hold on to his job, but they struggled to pay for necessities until the federal government mailed their first stimulus checks. That money gave them breathing room, which paid work had not delivered, and Sierra got to spend more time with her son. “We do finger painting, and we color,” Sierra tells Calarco. What more could any mother want?

As Calarco observes, a woman’s wants matter less to policymakers than the unpaid work she performs. Put another way, America needs women, but it doesn’t need women to be people. A woman is too often defined by what she can do for others and not by her innate dignity and worth. Someone has to change a baby’s diapers. Someone has to supervise a grandparent with dementia. Either Supermom does it herself, or she pays another, more precariously situated woman for her labor. Calarco writes that our “DIY society” depends on “the magic of women.” But it’s not magic — it’s work. There are no miracles here.

Who should a woman blame for her condition? There are many villains in our lives, and sometimes they are male. Although American men do more household work than ever before, a discrepancy persists, and women make up the difference. Still, most of us don’t live in a sitcom, even if we’re heterosexual. If women are human beings, so are men, and we all make decisions within certain constraints. I can count on one hand the number of times my father ever played with me, or cooked dinner, or scrubbed a toilet. When I’m searching for an explanation, I can refer to our Evangelical convictions, or to my father himself, but if that’s where I stop, I’ll never get the full truth. We needed my father’s income, such as it was, and our economic reality bracketed a hoary old hierarchy. My father won the bread, and my mother, naturally, did everything else.

In 1975, the Italian scholar Silvia Federici wrote of a distinct problem with housework. Unlike waged work, housework was not only “imposed on women” but “transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character,” she wrote in Wages Against Housework, perhaps her most famous essay. A wage is a form of recognition, even leverage, that the archetypal housewife lacks. Though a woman might liberate herself in a limited way through wealth or education, she is not free as long as housework remains “a feminine attribute,” Federici wrote. A half-century later, the right is proving her point in the crudest terms possible. “Having children is more important than having a good career,” the late Charlie Kirk told women. America’s “DIY society” is built on similar sentiments, as Calarco writes. It’s capitalism by another name.

To Federici and her comrades in the Wages for Housework movement, the housewife was trapped in the same web as her husband, even if she occupied a different and less advantageous location within it. In Emily Callaci’s new book on the movement, she describes it as a “critique not only of women’s oppression, but of global capitalism in its entirety.” Some members demanded a literal sum for the domestic work of women; others did not. As Callaci observes in her introduction, the movement could be somewhat controversial, even in the world of second-wave feminism, but the basic analysis is difficult to refute. A woman can’t escape capitalism by vanishing into her home. Once she is there, love — for her children and, maybe, their father — becomes one more restriction on her life.

Callaci writes that for Mariarosa Dalla Costa, another prominent Italian scholar, autonomy is a “central” notion. Influenced by operaismo, which considered “work the means to a paycheck” and not “a source of identity,” Dalla Costa does not think of autonomy as a form of isolation but rather the opposite. In Dalla Costa’s postcapitalist vision, a woman is no longer stuck in the kitchen, alone with her children. Once she is free to share the work with others, in communal laundries and nurseries and elder-care homes, her identity becomes hers to define. To campaigners, liberation was a material goal, not a mere slogan. Before Wilmette Brown co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, she joined the Black Panthers in Berkeley, California, during the late 1960s. There, Callaci writes, “she would have participated in discussions about Black self-determination and autonomy,” and she was “drawn” to the work of Frantz Fanon, who sought “reparations, rather than charity, for formerly colonized peoples.” Brown, a lesbian, was not living a traditional life, but as she wrote later, the perspective of Wages for Housework “made it possible” for her “to connect with other Black women in whatever situation, because we are all struggling against housework, against heterosexual discipline, heterosexual work discipline, and for money — to be independent.”

In the most pedantic reading of history, Wages for Housework might seem like a failure. Whether we call it housework or care work, most women around the world still perform it without much recognition, let alone pay. A future without capitalism feels especially distant in the U.S. But Callaci is too skilled a historian to lapse into easy literalism. A radical vision may defy a simple translation into policy and retain all of its value. Ideas can have unpredictable afterlives, as Callaci shows. Although the campaign has faded, Callaci’s subjects apply their energy and their principles to other, linked struggles: the decriminalization of sex work, an end to war, and the preservation of our environment. In the early aughts, the late scholar and activist Andaiye launched a Wages for Housework campaign in her native Guyana, protesting the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on countries like hers. Others, like the writer and activist Selma James, still want cash for caregiving. “Once we have it, it is very hard for them to take it away,” she said at an event that Callaci attended.

Cash helps. A woman can buy some mobility with it, but freedom is more elusive. In Women Talking, the novel by Miriam Toews, a group of Mennonite men have drugged and raped women and girls in their community. (The novel is based on a real crime.) When the women gather in secret to discuss their response, one cautions, “When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.” It is the same question we all face, no matter what’s in our pockets.

No policymaker ordered Calarco’s subjects home, or forced a career woman to do most of the housework, but no one had to. Housework still codes feminine, and so does caregiving itself. We are circling the kitchen, warily, wondering if the door will shut on us and who might lock us in. Everyone is explaining our desires to us, our nature, through polling numbers and white papers and the almighty discourse, and there is no room for women to be people.

Consider The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, a new book by the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant. In Sargeant’s view, autonomy is impossible, and that is especially true for women. Because most of us can give birth, we are “shaped by dependance” in ways that men are not, and we cannot free ourselves by denying our essence. If “the freedom we enjoy is imagined to be the freedom to ‘control … one’s destiny’ rather than to shape it within natural constraints,” she writes, “then the whole outside world becomes women’s enemy because it does not bow to our will.” The Wages for Housework campaign is still relevant, she adds later, if only because it named the value of unwaged domestic labor, but that is where she leaves it. Women “can’t live fully within the lie of autonomy,” she writes. She proposes “caregiver credits” as partial compensation for work that mostly falls on women, and in her role at the right-leaning Niskanen Center, she once called for a one-time “baby bonus” payment to new parents. To some, that’s enough: She spoke at the Abundance Conference this year.

Others concede that women might pursue their interests, if only within those “natural constraints.” Earlier this year, Scott Yenor wrote a piece for the right-wing Institute for Family Studies where he set out a taxonomy of “tradwives.” The “side-hustle wife” is an “ambitious, intelligent woman” who does a bit of “extra work” to help the family finances, he explained. She finds meaning in her paid work, but not too much; she believes her husband should be the provider. To her, motherhood is “worth the sacrifice,” and it is “the most important thing” in her life. Some conservatives are more explicit about what they’re asking women to surrender. In an interview with Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, podcaster and author Allie Beth Stuckey attacks the abortion-rights movement for telling women they have “a desire that needs to be fulfilled, and that is to be autonomous,” a political sensibility that lacks “the constraint of the sacrifice of motherhood.” A woman should give up her body, her time, and even her mind.

If a woman must choose between dependence on a husband and his employer or dependence on her own wage, the latter is preferable to the former. Some choices are indeed better than others. And yet a woman with a salary makes sacrifices too. Whether she likes her job, or tolerates it, or actively loathes it, she surrenders most of her time and cognitive effort to an employer who might not think she’s a person, either. Her wants don’t matter on the job site. “Work has not brought us liberation, freedom, or even much joy,” the journalist Sarah Jaffe wrote in Work Won’t Love You Back. Calarco’s subject, Audrey, needs her own steady income and a more egalitarian church, but more than that, she needs a different sort of world. A baby bonus won’t get us there, and neither will a side hustle. The women of Wages for Housework “wanted to confront collectively the present systems of social production and reproduction rather than merely individually escape them,” explains the scholar Kathi Weeks, who prefers a guaranteed basic income. If that income met our “basic needs,” a person could “refuse waged work entirely,” though most would likely pursue a “supplementary wage,” Weeks adds in The Problem With Work. Autonomy is neither isolation or “interchangeability between the sexes,” as Sargeant put it, but a form of self-determination. It is the freedom to decide, for yourself, who you are and what you want.

I always knew I didn’t want my mother’s life, and as I entered my early 20s, her fate terrified me so deeply that I thought I had to define myself against her or the women around me. Some night, as I neared the end of my time at an Evangelical college, I watched three couples enter the dining hall. The men sat down. The women stayed upright and started walking away to fetch dinner for their boyfriends. Because I was young and righteous and sad, I asked them why they were doing it. They looked shocked at the question. “We want to do this,” one said. “It’s just an act of service.”

Only years later did I realize that I’d gotten it wrong, in my anger. Why did I say something to the women and not their smug men? Why didn’t I shake my fist at the religion we shared, which told us from birth that God made us subservient? I was so pleased with my own choices. I would not become my mother. And I haven’t, and still we’re not so different, my mother and I. Sometimes a woman makes a bad choice because it’s the best of her terrible options. Revolution begins there.