Evie Magazine Has Company
Candace Owens Launches Sassy For Tradwives
It’s a weird time to write about tradwives and the conservative right’s construction of the ideal mother.
Until very recently, the general stance of mainstream women’s media has been largely critical of hyper-romanticized trad propaganda. Writers have rightly pointed out that glorifying traditional gender roles is part of a larger campaign to disenfranchise women and continue to erode their their rights.
But because everything is horrible, more and more mainstream women’s pubs seem to be arguing that tradwives might be totally fine and great and harmless actually! And that critiques of their ideologies are antifeminist actually! You know, because feminism means supporting all women’s choices no matter what. That’s what feminism means, right?
Glamour, for example, published an unabashedly positive profile of Hannah Neeleman in which they “explained” Neeleman’s decision to collaborate with misinformation-spreading right-wing magazine Evie as follows:
The cover feature—which hasn’t yet been released—seemed to many of her detractors to be proof: Neeleman’s purpose all along was to spread a conservative, Christian agenda to the masses. (A rep for Neeleman tells me that she has done interviews with a wide variety of media. “We believe that the Ballerina Farm message can inspire many and we hope our message and mission resonates with different audiences and readers,” the rep says).
The fact that a PR rep’s canned non-answer is framed as “getting to the bottom” of the rightfully controversial Evie collab is - something! As are the frequent mentions of Neeleman “declining” to answer any questions that might specifically speak to her politics, her agenda, or her conservative influence.
There’s also this New York Times piece, in which the MAHA movement is presented as a free-thinking consortium of crunchy mamas who just want the best for their kids.
Lives here are intertwined. Most families have made sacrifices to live on one income. Women barter fresh-laid eggs for chicken broth, yogurt for sausage and honey for sourdough bread. Men help one another with household repairs and small construction projects.
Sounds great, right?! Does it really matter that politicians are weaponizing the support of vaccine-phobic mothers for political ends that have nothing to do with making these mothers’ (or any mothers’) lives any better? Does it really matter that POLIO might become a concern again as long as people like RFK can wax poetic about clean eating and pure lifestyles?
So yeah, I’m not feeling GREAT about where mainstream media seems to be headed re: women, feminism, and conservatism. But I’m feeling even worse about magazines like Evie continuing to flourish while simultaneously providing a blueprint for new media platforms eager to cater to a growing contingency of women who are trad curious.
Enter Candace Owens’ Club Candace.
