Based Camp: Tradwives are a Progressive Conspiracy

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In this engaging dialogue, Malcolm and Simone dissect the concept of "trad wives" and the socio-cultural transformations that led to their rise and eventual decline. They explore the 1950s ideal of the stay-at-home wife, and why this model is often misunderstood as a "traditional" family structure. Delving further back into history, they illuminate the "corporate family" structure that once dominated society - an intricate network of blood relatives and employees functioning together as a unit. Touching on economic and historical contexts, they show how this setup evolved over time and why it is vital to understand these changes. If you're intrigued by the evolution of family dynamics, societal norms, and economic influences, this discussion is a must-watch.

Transcript:

Based Camp - Tradwives are a Progressive Conspiracy

Malcolm: [00:00:00] this PSYOPs campaign around tread wives, it's a fun aesthetic and yes, it was a model that was popular, was in certain classes of American society around the 1950s, but it was in the 1950s. A fairly new and it turns out short-lived social experiment.

Malcolm: And that you're not actually going back to any sort of a traditional model of family when you, whenever you are atomizing the family.

Simone: Yeah. Well, and it's, it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step in the atomization of everyone. Like first you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear family.

Simone: And then you just separate out the man in the living. You pick him off one by one, we've gotten to a point where no one's e even that incentivized to get married

Simone: hello, gorgeous. Hello Simone.

Malcolm: It's wonderful to be here today. What are we

Simone: talking about? Tread wives. How would you define a tread wife?

Malcolm: A tread wife is a woman who attempts to [00:01:00] emulate the 1950s ideal of a wife that we now see in sitcoms where you typically have a family dynamic in which a woman stays at home, takes care of the house in terms of cleaning, in terms of gardening, everything like that, and child rearing, and the husband then leaves the house to go to an office and be a breadwinner for the family.

Malcolm: This. Of course is a progressive scam. And let's talk about what I mean by it being a progressive scam, because I think a lot of people can hear that and they're like, no, this is definitely the way things used to be. And they are right for a specific, very constrained geographic group. It was. A common way of living specifically upper middle class to upper class Americans from the 19, 20 to the 1930s, to the 1970s to [00:02:00] maybe the 1980s. So you're really dealing with a half century period. Where this was common and really only in the Americas at any sort of large level.

Malcolm: And the reason, so first, let's talk about why this was even possible in America. During the economic wealth that came with the War II period in America, specifically, America was just in a uniquely wealthy state vis-a-vis the rest of the world because most of the developed world had just had all their infrastructure basically destroyed and was rebuilding themselves up again.

Malcolm: And America had done. A number of things during that period that put it in a really good economic position, which means you could afford to have families living off of one person's salary, even though this was not the traditional way of doing things the traditional way. So before the 1920s the common marriage style, especially if you go before the 1880s.

Malcolm: Right? So if you expand this time window a little bit. It was something like 80% of Americans were in what is [00:03:00] called the corporate marriage structure which is very corporate family. Yeah, corporate family, which is very different from a nuclear family. So how would you describe a corporate family, Simone?

Malcolm: A corporate

Simone: family is typically a husband, wife, their children, and an extended family and employee network. So in terms of the ARC type of the corporate family in modern, it runs a. Yeah, well, they run some kind of business, like they're all maybe working on a farm or a brewery or a garment manufacturing business.

Simone: Basically a cottage industry business, a from home business that everyone works on collectively, meaning that the kids are helping out probably as soon as they're old enough. There are aunts and uncles that are involved. In fact, the very house from which we are filming this podcast in different rooms was.

Simone: For five generations occupied by what could be described as a corporate family, and we've met the fam like the. The youngest generation of Yeah. Of that family that used to live here. And they described the various types of people who lived here. And it was always multiple generations. There would be [00:04:00] a grandmother and grandfather living in the house or just, one surviving grandmother.

Simone: There would be aunts often made an aunts who would also be watching kids. There would be kids and there would be additional. The occasional additional farmhand that would also live and work in this house and

Malcolm: with the family. So the employees of these types of businesses were incorporated into the family structure to innovate?

Malcolm: Well, there were still

Simone: employees though, so I think a really interesting and unexpected place where you can see this play out is with the Adams family, where lurch is their Butler is an employee of the family, but he's still very much a part of the family. He's not clearly treated like staff in the show, and you can see that very clearly.

Malcolm: Yeah. And I think that the reason why the Anna's family chose to des. To show that is because the family actually, the house, the old Victorian style house that they were in was supposed to be considered like terribly out of fashion at the time and out of

Simone: date.

Simone: Yeah. Just like the corporate family model.

Malcolm: During the time that the cartoon strip had come out, the original cartoon strip, those Victorians, we now see them as Spooky mansions [00:05:00] in part influenced largely by the Adams family, but they were really just supposed to be like terribly out of touch with the current times.

Malcolm: To the extent that what was horrifying about them. Is that they did not bend the knee to current social morays.

Simone: Oh, you don't send your kids out to school? Oh, the husband doesn't go out And get a job. Oh, you're not Suzy Homemaker? No. The

Malcolm: husband works from home and helps raise the kids.

Malcolm: Yeah. And has a loving relationship. Those things within the Adams family were actually supposed to part partially be what made them horrifying. Cause they so deviated from the social norms of the time. And I think that this is one of the disservices that the current Adams family does with the family is what made the monsters an interesting family is they were supposed me, the Adams family.

Malcolm: No monsters. Oh. What made the monsters an interesting family is that they were a family of monsters trying to live like the average American family of the time. What [00:06:00] made the Adams family horrifying is that they were totally normal humans who lived. So devily from traditional social values that it made them monstrous and fit in among monsters.

Malcolm: So what I think that shows you is how much society turned against the model of the corporate family as soon as. In the 1920s, this when really became common, which was wage labor. Wage labor where males could leave their houses. And the ending of the nuclear family happened when female wage labor started.

Malcolm: So really it was a model that was created with the advent of male wage labor with jobs that were prosperous and in a limited geographic region where jobs prosperous to support an entire family on one salary existed, and then it ended with the rise of female. Wage labor. But the reason I say it's a progressive conspiracy is because it was very socially forward thinking in [00:07:00] its time period.

Malcolm: The idea that a man would just abandon his family like that was considered. And if you want to frame this in conservative language the first foot in the door, With the people trying to destroy the traditional American family happened when they got the men out of the house. Hmm. When they got the men out of the house, when they left just the kids and the wife alone trying to handle this whole scenario was without the guy there.

Malcolm: That is when everything began to fall apart. That is when the door was opened. To the corrupting influences that led to the degradation of the family model. It was the nuclear family that led to the

Simone: degradation of the American. Well, I guess it's easier for outside forces, be it academia or the state or some other influencer to start to own people's ideologies and lives when they become atomized.

Simone: Right? Yeah. Well,

Malcolm: They atomized the American Family Unit and this model was pushed by Hollywood, by the [00:08:00] elite. That's when you look and you say, didn't America used to be like this nuclear family? You're, You're pointing to leave it to beaver, right? Mm-hmm. Created by the Hollywood establishment. Wh where do you think these things were coming from?

Malcolm: Right. So even if you say it was in a conservative language Which, we are conservative, so, but I think sometimes our audience might not be as conservative as we are. It is in many ways more nefarious than any sort of like dual earner model, which economically, there's just no realistic way to support a family without, for the vast majority of Americans was out a dual owner model.

Malcolm: These online influencers who are pushing like, oh, your average American can go back to this model of a tread wife where you're surviving off of one income. I don't know where these people are, li you have to be incredibly lucky to have that kind of an income. Mm-hmm. And even, even if you are that lucky, you are severely limiting the number of kids you can have through doing that.

Malcolm: Uh, One of the things that we say that was really [00:09:00] positive about Covid is it really unlocked work from home in a major context. And now you're seeing some CEOs react. Negatively to this. I love it. They never toed out statistics like we've actually run statistics at our companies. It's infinite.

Malcolm: It's two x better to have somebody working from home in terms of their brain, if

Simone: they're an A player, if they are a B or C player. Often they become much worse when,

Malcolm: right. But wiz work from home. We can have this model again to some extent, or we can at least have the proliferation of it within the people who desire it from their family.

Malcolm: Yes, you might be taking a salary cut, but you know, getting to spend all day working together. And on your various hustles. That is one thing about the gig economy. We talk about the gig economy as if it's. This totally new concept, but that's what cottage industries were. They were weird little gig economies.

Malcolm: They were, they might not have been selling your tapestries and cakes on Etsy but you were selling them at the local, market. And now we view these markets as like quaint places but traditionally that, that was the Etsy in the Amazon store of our [00:10:00] society.

Simone: Well, but I think that's what's really encouraging. The pandemic was devastating and really hard for many people. But it also did, I think, start to bring back the corporate family, bring back couples and families who worked together and have become a little bit more sovereign as a result. And depending on how you look at it, like a lot of the way that it's framed in mainstream media is.

Simone: Oh my gosh. These people have to have five jobs to scrape together. But also, oh my God, these people are not dependent on a sole source of income at this point. If one of those shuts them down or something, they have other sources of income, they're more able to raise kids at home. They're more able to have flexible schedules.

Simone: They're more able to begin building things that they actually own. Yes, people may start by like working for Uber or delivering for HelloFresh or whatever it may be. But over time, we're seeing more and more families create their own businesses, their own consultancies, their own design firms, our

Malcolm: social networks we're talking about.

Malcolm: Yeah. And [00:11:00] we do live in sort of small town America, so, yeah. We're not talking at our bus here. This is definitely something we are seeing in our communities. I

Simone: don't know. And this isn't even, so it's both people without with only high school educations.

Simone: And it's also people with MBAs who are literally creating fix-it businesses because they're so lucrative. So I think it's also really interesting in that this is very democratizing, whereas when you look at Breadwinning type careers, that's also one of those things where there's like a lot of elitism, a lot of classism, a lot of like education gatekeeping and, well, because,

Malcolm: because, yeah they have these systems where they would filter people based on their sort of class status, which to an extent was signaled by the university you got your degree from.

Malcolm: And now when you are competing with people, my Stanford MBA doesn't mean a lot if I'm competing with somebody who's just working on a company that they're building out of their home against me. Right? Well,

Simone: because these humpy businesses succeed based on you having product market fit, you providing a business, be it plumbing, fix it, consultancy of some sort, whatever it [00:12:00] might be.

Simone: Dog walking, I don't care that people want and need, and it's a good service. You know that, that does not depend on your credentials. That depends on your ability to deliver and your ability to meet genuine demand. And that's awesome. So I, it's really cool to see that we're moving away from atomization.

Simone: It's interesting that, I think it's also part of what some might argue, or like recessions or civilizational decline. Like all this stability that we thought that we had is disappearing, but I think it's also really. People don't realize how unstable it is to have a stable job when you're your own boss.

Simone: You can tell when things are getting bad, when you might need to tighten your belt, and you can also have more control over how things go, whereas when you're working for a big company, You don't have control over how well or poorly it's run. And when you know you get laid off, you often have no warning, there's no control.

Simone: And all of your income depends on that one business. No, this

Malcolm: is actually a really interesting thing that happened to us. So a lot [00:13:00] of people could say, well, it's really silly that both you and your husband have the same job basically because we've run the same company together. Yeah. It's seen as very risky, going into the pandemic, we were running a chain of travel agencies and we had to cut our own salary to nothing for about a one and a half year period.

Malcolm: And people could think that would be pretty economically devastating to us. And then, It could have been, but I guess we just decided, okay, now we're applying for new jobs. So we continued to run our existing company and people were like, well, we have like hundreds of employees at our company, and the last thing I would do is fire any employee to do an economic downturn before cutting my own salary.

Malcolm: And so, We kept doing what we were doing in terms of running the company for free and then took on side hustles to try to pay for things and to maintain our lifestyle. But that was something that we were able to do because we had already built a cadence around working together so yes, you are more economically vulnerable in a way. In that you're working together and your single source of income can fall off, but it does encourage you to build [00:14:00] multiple income streams in a way that, and it's because you're more efficient.

Malcolm: When you're working with somebody who you really get along with, you can typically squeeze more work out of the two of you with less effort than you can when you're. Like working on a group project with students you don't really like. And that was always my experience of working in a traditional office.

Malcolm: It always felt like working on a group project with people I didn't really like. And so I was incredibly inefficient, but when I was working with people who were family to me and I think that is why in corporate families, employees, Get treated more like family is because that is the way that you sort of see your larger corporate units.

Malcolm: So when you're working with people who are like family to you, you can squeeze more productivity out at the same time, which then leads you to take on additional jobs and working out of the home also allows you to do that. You look at us, we technically won multiple projects, right? Exactly.

Malcolm: But anyway, this is a really long tangent to the point that this PSYOPs campaign around tread wives, it's a [00:15:00] fun aesthetic and yes, it was a model that was popular, was in certain classes of American society around the 1950s, but it was in the 1950s. A fairly new and it turns out short-lived social experiment.

Malcolm: And that you're not actually going back to any sort of a traditional model of family when you, whenever you are atomizing the family.

Simone: Yeah. Well, and it's, it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step in the atomization of everyone. Like first you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear family.

Simone: And then you just separate out the man in the living. You pick him off one by one, we've gotten to a point where no one's e even that incentivized to get married rates of, sex or plummeting. All sorts of things are shifting, and now we're seeing. Probably an unprecedented rate of unpaired people with no kids.

Simone: Well, that's definitely

Malcolm: another podcast, right? Yeah. Why have relation markets failed?

Simone: I wonder, if we do [00:16:00] see like more close to some kind of civilizational collapse where unemployment reaches 80%, do you think that we might actually see, oddly a necessity based return to.

Simone: Corporate family style marriages. I think one of the reasons why people got married a long time ago wasn't because they were seeking sexual or romantic partnership. It was because they needed financial security that they needed someone to, to ha to work on a business with, to have that security to like share resources.

Simone: And I wonder if we're just gonna see more of that if we ever hit as a society, rougher times, like more people. Maybe not even romantically involved in the beginning, but perhaps over time as they sort of grow together and have aligned incentives forming corporate families and ultimately finding a lot of satisfaction there.

Simone: Who knows what we could

Malcolm: expect? I really hope that's the direction we're going. Um, Because I love being in a relationship with [00:17:00] you and you uh, am I thrilled with um, I mean, I, I do want to proselytize this marriage structure because I think it works very effectively for the other families we know.

Malcolm: Who have adopted it and it is increasing. And so I, I think a lot of young people, when we talk to young men, a lot of them feel like they just, they don't have a shot because it is a lot on a young man to say, go out there and earn everything for family. And that's the only way. And it feels

Simone: unfair.

Simone: It would breed resentment. Here's the thing when a couple doesn't work together the man who's busting his ass all day working is going to come home and see that his wife was just home all day. I don't know, like cleaning a little bit. It seems really easy, right? And then the wife is hold on, like I've been.

Simone: Vomited on by an infant, the, like this huge mess was made. I'm bored. I'm not intellectually stimulated. So like she's stressed out, she's not happy, she's actually working pretty hard. And then, she is not appreciating the hard work that her husband doing. He's off an office's off doing fun.[00:18:00]

Simone: No. Yeah, that it creates a lot of resentment on both sides because they don't under the each partner doesn't understand each other, doesn't appreciate the other's work, and also feels underappreciated. And that just is a super toxic

Malcolm: dynamic. Oh, I couldn't agree more. And I appreciate you, Simone.

Malcolm: I appreciate

Simone: you too, Malcolm,

Malcolm: but I appreciate you cuz I know the work you're doing. It's exactly the work I do. Like the only big division of labor we have is you take kids before, like one and a half. I take kids after one and a half. And that's true. We

Simone: actually, so I think and this is not to say that corporate families are these communes where everyone does exactly the same thing at different percentages. We do very gender dimorphic things, right? Yeah. I handle

Malcolm: outside the house.

Simone: You handle when you handle the gardening, you fix everything. I I clean everything inside the house. I typically do most of the group or family cooking, I put away the dishes, et cetera.

Simone: Like

Malcolm: coke. There's time the day where I'm almost always looking after the kids and there's times the day where you're looking after the kids. But always when a kid's before, like one that you're looking after them.

Simone: Yeah I have [00:19:00] the really little ones and you have the bigger ones, they sort of apprentice under you and they sort of, get carried around by me all the time.

Simone: So, yeah, I mean I think that there, that to say that a corporate family is, not trad in many ways is incorrect because there is still tons of gender dimorphism, there are still tons of like tradition, traditional, we can

Malcolm: emphasize. That you shouldn't do a corporate family just because it's trad.

Simone: Oh yeah. Well we shouldn't do anything just because it's

Malcolm: trad. Yeah. Yeah. You can look to traditional things for different social models that at one point worked and that may work again. But doing something just cuz the way you know it used to be done can be a really. Bad model for how to live your life, but also I think broadly we can all agree that like whatever society's doing right now isn't working.

Malcolm: Yeah. I'm just saying it's

Simone: not Star Trek, you know, like,

Malcolm: no, but what I mean is it's just not working. I didn't say it's not working. You can look to the past for some ways to fix it but you likely want to tweak them to fit within a [00:20:00] modern social context. And when it's in your personal,

Malcolm: social and economic context. Yeah, I love you. We do need to get to the next podcast and we're not gonna squeeze it in.

Simone: I love you so much, Malcolm. Looking forward to talking again. All right. Love you.

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