A recent shoe advertisement proclaimed: “How Lovely to Be a Woman.” The campaign from shoe brand Stuart Weitzman features five brand ambassadors: Aly Raisman, Christy Turlington, Issa Rae, Lucy Liu, and Ming Xi. Described as “multi-hyphenate,” the celebrities from entertainment and sports were selected to represent the unique “pleasures and pressures of modern womanhood.” The collaborative video and campaign is, according to the brand, “ultimately a celebration of the triumph of simply being a woman today.”
That’s an unexpected message in 2024 when droves of teen girls are deciding they don’t want to be women. As an increasing number of scholars, including Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, and Carrie Gress, have analyzed, “progress” in the name of feminism and the sexual revolution has had mixed results for women. The collateral damage of decades of socially sanctioned promiscuity is young women confused and even repulsed by their own femininity.
As the shoe advertisement hints at, however, not everyone is so confused. Some women are finding joy in embracing soft life, cottagecore, grandma aesthetics, and traditional roles as a wife and mother, the ultimate expression of the feminine genius.
For further evidence of this, see what young adults have to say about themselves. If you ask a Gen Z conservative how she picked a college, you might get a surprising answer: She’s headed to the campus that will optimize her chances of securing a husband. That’s right, the old-fashioned MRS degree is back in style among certain social circles.
This isn’t cause for celebration just yet. Common sense suggests such young women are not good marriage material. Ideally, someone comes to such a partnership with a whole and vibrant life rather than marriage itself being the end goal simpliciter. The limited personal development and lack of wisdom could lead to disastrous criteria for selecting a spouse, among other concerns. It is, however, potentially a good sign.
Traditional Roles
What is good about marriage and traditional gender roles?
First, let’s consider what might not be good: Endless virtual ink has already been spilled about the “tradwife” phenomenon and the limitations it poses. Much criticism has focused on the vulnerability of women who give up paid professional work to devote themselves to their home and family. In the event of divorce or misfortune, many commentators have noted, those women face reentering the workforce at a significant disadvantage.
There is another side to this vulnerability in an unhelpfully rigid relationship structure. Men and women in such an arrangement run the risk of siloing their talents and energy. Instead of collaborating on the strategy for household management, finances, educational choices for children, managing other relationships, etc., the husband and wife can wind up living parallel lives in which they both fundamentally contribute to the family but with the disadvantage of doing so in isolation.
Undeniably, there are pitfalls to an overly narrow understanding of the roles “husband” and “wife” and limitations to trying to reinvent the wheel by reverse-engineering “traditions” we did not grow up in.
However, there are also huge potential gains, especially for women. When women accept the role of wife and mother, keeper of the home, and beautifier of family life, she — and her family — can experience tremendous benefits. When a husband accepts the challenge of becoming the breadwinner in a dual-income economy, his wife can choose to spend her time developing a family culture that nourishes all its members.
With clearly defined roles, you no longer need to negotiate who bails out of work early for daycare pickup or who is responsible on any given day for the dreaded call to collect a sick child. Who does the grocery shopping and who is responsible for cleaning up the dishes at the end of the night? Deciding which promotion to forego and how to manage work travel can be much simpler if you have one parent leading the charge and the other tending the home fire. Many people are drawn to “traditional” roles because they simplify family logistics and support the refinement of innate strengths in fathers and mothers.
Integrated Women
Don’t get distracted by dopamine-hijacked internet junkies shrieking “Team trad!” and assume that Gen Z is doomed. There are calm and collected ordinary women IRL (in real life, in case you didn’t know) who are discovering how to embrace the old-fashioned way of doing things. As integrated women, they can both be the primary caregiver for small children and manage part-time employment. They can oversee the family budget devised jointly with their husbands and practice artisanal breadmaking, floral arrangement, or whatever other flights of fancy they enjoy to bring beauty to ordinary days.
Indeed, it really is lovely to be a woman. You don’t have to buy the shoes advertised. $450 for a pair of kitten heels? That’s a bit expensive if you have a growing family on a single income. And those shoes are not the only style for expressing femininity. But enjoying the cultural moment when it has become acceptable to celebrate womanhood again? Priceless.
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