From Betty Friedan to Ballerina Farms: Lisa Selin Davis on the conceptual housewife

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis returns for her third visit to The Unspeakable. Lisa is best known to listeners for her thorough and rigorous reporting on the new gender movement and her probing insights into how ideas around gender nonconformity have shifted over time.

But she has a new book out about something completely (or at least mostly) different: the concept of the housewife. In Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead, Lisa traces the social history of the housewife, examines the evolutionary and economic roots of housewifery, and wrestles with why the iconic 50s housewife has such a strong hold on the public consciousness despite not lasting all that long. In this conversation, she discusses what she learned in the course of her reporting, shares her own conflicting feelings about being a wife and mother, and talks about the rise of the “trad wife influencer.” Can Instagramming everything from your home birth to your home school be interpreted through a feminist lens? Lisa says yes!

In the second part of the conversation, for paying subscribers, Lisa returns to form and talks about gender, which is the subject of her next book.

GUEST BIO

Lisa Selin Davis’s new book is Housewife: Why Women Still Do It And What To Do Instead. She is also the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History & Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.

Follow her writing on her Substack, Broadview.

You can pick up a copy of Housewife here.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Megan. Before we get to the episode, I want to tell you the latest about the unspeakeasy
0:04.6	and our retreats for this year. Our retreat in Seattle next month is pretty much full,
0:09.9	but spots are available for several others this year, including our first ever co-ed retreat in
0:15.3	Chicago, June 4th and 5th. That one will feature three guest speakers, legendary free speech champion and
0:22.0	former ACLU president Nadine Strausson, who will be on the podcast very soon. Eric Smith,
0:27.9	a professor of rhetorics and co-founder of free black thought, who will be back on the podcast
0:33.0	very soon, and journalist and author Lisa Selma Davis, who does extraordinary work on the new gender
0:38.9	movement and who is the guest this week. You're about to hear her. For information about the Chicago
0:44.6	retreat, as well as our retreats this fall in Toronto and in upstate New York, go to the unspeakeasy.com.
0:52.2	Space is limited. That's the whole idea. These are small. So get in touch now.
1:00.3	I have a feminist defense of the tradwife movement. And I realize that there are some like
1:07.3	serious conservatives in it. And I realize that there are some actual racists.
1:12.7	And I'm not talking about them.
1:14.3	But I'm talking about the women who were raised in the 90s in the girl power era.
1:21.5	And they were watching Xena Warrior Princess.
1:25.2	And they were like, I don't want that.
1:27.2	I want to be a wife and a mom.
1:29.8	And they were told, that's not enough. And that's not feminist. And that's not, you know, that's not okay.
1:37.7	And I think for some of them, it really makes them happy. And they want other women to know that you can do this.
1:51.6	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom, or Down. I was thinking I would just alternate every other week. Maybe I'll say dumb one week, Dom the next,
2:01.8	or maybe that's just going to perpetuate this confusion. Anyway, all right, moving right along,
2:06.7	my guest is making her third visit to the podcast, I believe. She is author and journalist Lisa
	...

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