Tradwives, the Illusion of Choice, and the Privilege of Opting Out
Is choice truly empowering when the freedom to choose is not equally available to all women? In this episode, Chisom Udeze examines choice feminism, the rise of the tradwife movement, and the economic and social conditions that shape women's decisions. Through three contrasting realities—women choosing to leave paid work, women carrying the burden of paid and unpaid labour, and women denied the right to work—she challenges the idea that every choice is inherently feminist and asks who actually has the freedom to choose.
With Chisom Udeze
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Show Notes
In today’s episode, Chisom turns to a word used to describe almost anything a woman does: choice. And to the lawyer who coined the term Choice Feminism in 2006 specifically as an indictment. Linda Hirshman’s target was the “alleged free choice” of affluent women leaving careers, her argument being that calling a decision feminist simply because a woman chose it makes the conditions producing that choice unquestionable. Twenty years on, the tradwife movement is choice feminism’s most polished production, and Chisom tests the word against three women rather than one.
It opens with the woman the movement is built around: the content creator whose exit from paid work rests on a husband’s or partner’s income and on undisclosed platform earnings funding the fantasy of having left the economy altogether. It turns next to the woman the word cannot reach at all, drawing on the International Labour Organisation’s 64-country time-use analysis: women performing 76.2 per cent of the world’s unpaid care work, 16.4 billion hours a day, 4.1 times the male rate in Asia and the Pacific, a gender gap closing so slowly it would take 210 years to shut at the current pace. Set against Madagascar, Nigeria and Tanzania, where female labour force participation runs above 80 per cent, it names the woman doing paid work and unpaid care everyday, for whom opting out of either was never on offer. It closes on the woman barred from work entirely: Afghanistan’s female labour force participation sitting at roughly 5 per cent against a male rate of close to 70 per cent by the World Bank’s modelled estimate, employment bans stacked across the civil service, NGOs and small businesses, nearly 80 per cent of Afghan women aged 18 to 29 neither employed nor in school, and the United Nations’ own projected rises in child marriage, adolescent childbearing and maternal mortality tied directly to those restrictions.
Chisom names her own position inside the argument: a life built on choices she made and can still remake. She closes where the episode closes: three women, one word, and only one of them was ever free to choose.