The Warrior Mamas Who Elected Trump
Why Tradwife Ideology Continues To Matter
I don’t have much to say about the devastating results of last week’s election that hasn’t already been said. I’m gutted. I’m enraged. I’m scared. I know others are more scared.
I’m also energized and, like
, thinking small.The time to look to your community is now.
This is the time to join your school board. To volunteer as a guardian at your nearest abortion clinic. To fight the shuttering of a community garden. To fight book bans and censorship in libraries. To get to work at your local food pantry. To volunteer at local LGBTQ organizations. To organize donations for migrant families in your nearest city. To read about down-ballot progressive candidates and volunteer for their campaigns. To BECOME a down-ballot progressive candidate.
If enough of us were to commit to thinking small, the change would be seismic.
We have four years. See how small you can get.
And I’m also feeling the terrible sting of having been right about tradwives mattering. Sometimes I told you so isn’t very fun. Sometimes I told you so sits like a cold weight in one’s stomach.
The proliferation of tradwives on social media is not a silly trend from which we can afford to look away. It’s not solely a marketing strategy to gain eyeballs and sell calico dresses. It’s an ideology steeped in internalized misogyny and repressive political goals. And the women peddling this ideology are very good at dressing subjugation and white male supremacy up in pretty bows to the millions of white women looking for a better way to live.
Prior to the elections, tradwives were renouncing Taylor Swift, disseminating racist and transphobic disinformation about unsafe borders and bathrooms, and proclaiming their love of Donald Trump.
Witnessing their explicit plans to outbreed progressives and dominate a world in which every family is an island and every childless cat lady is exterminated, I wanted to feel scorn. But I didn’t. Because white alt right mothers have always been enormously politically influential. They’ve fought against the abolition of slavery. They’ve fought against school desegregation. They’ve fought against sex education. They’ve fought against trans children. They’ve fought against To Kill A Mockingbird.
And this November, they fought FOR Donald Trump.
If you find yourself shocked by the fact that 53% of white women voted against their own freedom and bodily autonomy last week, here’s what tradwives were saying back in July in response to the Trump assassination attempt. When they call themselves warriors, they’re not being hyperbolic. They’ve fought hard for this. And it cost us.