Their Gilded Cages
They are pretty I have to admit.
Whereas some of our cages are so obviously brutal we can’t help but recognise they exist. The restriction we’re facing is clear and has been for a while now. Steel bars and cold floors inspire the desire for freedom, so it’s not surprise that we’ve over time found our way half out the door. Gaining some sense of autonomy and agency lets us walk freely but still from time to time we can’t help but fantasize about an alternative. Young women everywhere share testimonies about their comfort and the softness of their lives, having allowed him to take the reigns. Their cages unlike ours are decorated with a certain delicateness. The bars on their cages made pretty with red roses and their floors lined with classically coloured carpets, and so I imagine it’s easy to forget. But like ours these are cages nonetheless and I think there is far more danger in mistakenly thinking yourself comfortable where you could instead recognise your captivity and campaign for freedom.
“Don’t tell the feminists but I would rather cook and clean” ,
she says.
Hilariously, the ‘feminists’ that people speak of in that particularly mocking tone don’t actually care whether or not you would rather cook and clean. But I guess we have to allow those who see themselves as being transcendent of feminism alone to live their ‘superior’ lifestyles.
The former is a common rhetoric seen on social media these past few years. Now I’m not entirely sure as to why trad wife-ism has made a comeback, but we can clearly and accurately assume why. If we look at the past few years in through acknowledging a recession, we’ll find our answers here.
£££…
The reality in generations gone past saw that should you choose to work, that financial freedom or at the very least financial security would become available to you. The concept of working until you die seemed fairly foreign to those living in the age so-called ‘booming’ economies. It was as simple as holding a 9-5 desk job, saving money and spending within our means that was the key to a kind of life-satisfaction. People weren’t necessarily aspirational though didn’t see the need in being so. For the average male breadwinner for a family of five; this recipe for comfort was satisfactory enough to allow him to fulfil his ‘duty’ and find joy in knowing that he had done so. For the average modern woman, having access to money making opportunities inspired dreams of personal agency where women before weren’t even offered the chance. What many perceived to be the feminist utopia where powerful women would girl-boss their way out of steel cages had been achieved, and so as long as women were able to work their way out of confinement, there was no reason at all to consider that the way that we used to exist, having our lives tied to our husbands or fathers was in any way better.
But now, as women review their options and realise that freedoms are supposedly minimal either way, the idea of working lacks the same appeal. I guess this I can see where this might lead women, and particularly young women in believing that dependence on the men around us is a more preferable life path. In the most idyllic conception of this dream, women (still presented with the ‘choice’ to stay at home or go to work) could rest easily in their houses knowing that this was their decision, and it was the better choice. And these aren’t uneducated ‘useless’ women either. Having likely acquired their degrees in the earlier stages of life, graduation scrolls sat in the back of gilded cages as a kind of hidden escape-hatch, should they need a way out.
For young women around my generation, that 18-25 range, this perception is only exacerbated given how anxious people around my age can see that it’ll only get worse for us (financially), and so stay at home wives have slowly transitioned into being stay at home girlfriends.
I could go into the various ways in which becoming a stay at home girlfriend would place you in an even more precarious and vulnerable position than being a stay at home wife. For example, your lack of legal entitlement to anything the two of you share should terrify you. But there is more to this, because of course there are those who never wish to marry. Mostly I feel that most (incredibly young) stay at home girlfriends are wasting their virality on a lifestyle we’re not even sure we’re cut out for just yet.
But I won’t go into this properly just now. I worry about tiring my readers out before they’ve even had a chance to review the substantially more important information that comes next, where we have to review (and criticise) this newly re-emerged phenomenon.
“But it’s our choice!”
News that shouldn’t by now still shock you; Feminism is about liberation from systems that restrict women’s choice, not about the choice itself.
This summarisation reminds me of some lessons from author and content creator Kc Davis, who shared her thoughts on this particular issue.
It’s never been about choice.
True Feminism has never been about choice.
Maybe it’s arrogant to assume there is only one form of true feminism and so there are different schools of thought for a reason - There are different ideas of what it means to be a ‘feminist’.
But arrogant or otherwise there’s one thing I will say, and I’ve said it before. Liberal feminism, that branch that gives way to ‘choice feminism’ isn’t nor could it ever be true feminism.
Davis highlights that no feminist has ever fought for women to have the choice between going to work and staying home. She argues that choice feminism (aka white woman’s feminism) misconstrues feminist objectives for being about one woman’s self-actualisation than for seeing the movement for it’s true purpose; collective liberation. This is explains why we get so many liberals in the west arguing that women as a collective don’t have it that bad anymore, in the way that they’re using their own experience as a microcosmic representation of the ‘female experience’.
‘Self Actualisation’…
Where we ask those questions ;
‘What do I want?’
‘How can I maximise the freedom for me to be able to do what I want?’
‘How do I want to exist in the world? How can I make that happen?’
These thought processes explain why we get trad-wives centering feminism about the fact that they don’t want to go to work. Hence the prioritisation of ‘choice’ when it comes to making decisions.
These thought processes also explain exactly why liberal feminism has been dubbed white women’s feminism. It is this kind of self-centredness that has historically and contemporarily still works to the exclusion of and the detriment to women of colour, where the most severely affected are of course black women. Given that thin, able-bodied white women hold the most female privilege within our society; a feminist focus that centres their self-actualisation can only benefit women as a collective up until a certain threshold.
“The workforce was taken care of by medicated white women and exploited black women”
On the contrary, other schools of feminist thought namely; Marxist feminism, Radical (trans inclusive) feminism and Womanism have been seen far more inclusive and focused on collective liberation.
Davis highlights an irritation many of us are faced with nowadays, which connotes that any time you criticise choice feminism, you’re accused of being anti-feminist, when in reality it’s never been about “women supporting other women”. She points out the ways in which so many of us have gained privileges thanks to the feminist movement to a point where we forget what the actual point was in the first place. She re-iterates how feminism was never about you getting to choose between going to work and staying home. Truthfully it was more about you having the right not to be seen as property. Where before our existences only bared relevance in context to the nearest man, we could now be recognised as sentient beings with our own thoughts, feelings and rights. In this way we achieved some sense of equality to our male counterparts which in turn allowed women to have these ‘choices’.
- Choice feminism is a by-product of feminism not the point of it.
The relevance of autonomy here is why understanding the intersection between the female role in society and capitalism is incredibly important.
Trailheads to Marxist Feminism
Those ‘choices’ mentioned earlier, which can actually be better understood as a choice between the lesser of two evils doesn’t even indicate that the choice to be a stay at home girlfriend or wife is the better choice at all. Ultimately women are forced between choosing to be indentured servants to capitalism or to be subservient to their husbands under the traditional nuclear family structure. The trad-wife movement theoretically seeks to resist against capitalist oppression, without seeing the ways in which traditional family structures serve capitalist interests by maintaining a stable and exploitable workforce.
I recently read an article by Katie O’ Connor entitled ‘Tradwives : A revolt Against Feminism or Capitalism?’, where she further illustrates this idea. She notes that given how craving security is a natural human instinct, it is unsurprising that so many women seek to find this outside of themselves. However, the seeking of traditional roles fails to serve as any kind of guarantee, and the notion of true security remains elusive.
Why Men love Choice Feminism
Lastly I want to mention how choice feminism fails to account for it’s subversive contribution to patriarchal oppression. This critique highlights the fact that with the utilisation of choice feminism as a protective shield, men who claim to be defendants of feminism themselves often use choice feminism to their advantages, and we can break this down quite linearly.
If patriarchy is defined as a system from which men benefit from female oppression economically, politically and socially, where there are a thousand ways in which women are supposed to give up their personhood, reducing themselves to whatever title it is that ties them to a man, it becomes incredibly hard for men to squeeze their way into the conversation without eroding the notion of collective liberation. When a man is espousing any type of choice feminism phrase, he’s essentially ignoring that there are some inherently regressive tendencies.
“If you allow me to siphon off a woman’s mental, physical, emotional, reproductive, sexual, domestic labour, I would. The only thing stopping me from committing wage theft on a woman’s personhood is her permission”.
Jeilyn (‘By Design’); Content Creator, Author
This notion does nothing in the way of contributing to the conversation of liberation. At best in it’s most harmless form this rhetoric is useless. But in it’s most insidious form, where the only thing preventing female exploitation is the permission, the effects that this attitude has are extremely damaging. We’ve seen this especially when it comes to sex, and instances of CNC1 roleplay and objectification through the porn industry. Personally I don’t see where this same logic doesn’t extend to the notion of trad wife-ism. The male place in the conversation of female autonomy is in many ways detrimental as it is unnecessary, but in adopting choice feminism ourselves we end up leaving the door open for the misunderstanding of more key feminist principles by those who’s understanding of what feminism is, is also crucial.
What you take from today’s opinion piece is up to you as always. But at the very least I’d ask you to challenge yourself enough to look up at the cage that surrounds you with honest intent. And as you weigh up your options, consider the one that at least get’s you halfway out the door.
Asisa
“Feminism is about the opposite of choice. You do not have the choice to treat me as if I’m not human”.
KC Davis
Sources
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGe6HJojw/ (KC Davis’ video)
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGe6u3Pxy/ (Jeilyn’s video)
https://www.therattlecap.com/post/tradwives-a-revolt-against-feminism-or-capitalism ‘A Revolt Against Feminism or Capitalism?’
"CNC" in a sexual context stands for "Consensual Non-Consent." It refers to a type of role-playing scenario in which participants engage in consensual acts that simulate a non-consensual or forced encounter.