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 mon