Transcript: Elizabeth Grace Matthew

An interview with the American writer and commentator

With the new year now upon us, we are going to continue our conversation about the state of feminism, and how we might begin to think and talk about women’s lives in ways that are more productive. My guest on the program this week is a frequent commentator on modern feminism, and she says the central archetypes of our current moment — the girl boss on the left and the trad wife on the right — are both reductive and untenable in today’s world.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is an American writer, and the author of the Substack newsletter Restoring American Adulthood.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s nice to have you on the show. I’ve been following your writing for some time now. For listeners, you started on a more academic path. You began a doctorate in English, but from what I understand, you found that a tenure-track academic job, in this particular set of circumstances, was not going to be compatible with marriage and motherhood. So, you switched to a doctorate in education. You taught writing. You later became a stay-at-home mom and have been pursuing freelance writing. I’ve seen your writing career really take off in recent years. I find your perspective really unique. You come from mainstream leftist worlds in academia. But you are also Catholic, which is socially conservative in some ways, but also very pro-worker, pro-labour, interested in the welfare of the poor and immigrants and migrants. So, there’s a lot going on with this perspective. I’ve seen you interested in women’s issues and men’s issues. I’ve seen you critique the right and the left, particularly on the topic of feminism. So, lots to talk about today. I want to start with your writing on the pitfalls of two dominant female archetypes right now: the girl boss and the trad wife. Can you start by defining these terms and talking about where they came from?

EGM: Sure, absolutely. It’s so great to be here with you. I love how this is a space where folks can critique things from both the right and the left. So, I really appreciate beginning there. I think the girl boss term means a woman who pursues her career, and may or may not become a mom, but puts her career first. This is the mainstream feminist archetype, the Sheryl Sandberg Lean In idea that women should be 50 percent of CEOs and men should run 50 percent of households. We’ve seen it renewed in a lot of the discourse since then. The trad wife is, in large measure, a reaction to it. It’s an idea that women traditionally should be in the home, focused on domesticity, focused on motherhood, focused on child rearing. It’s men’s job to breadwin and women’s job to be at home. I just find both of these perspectives very reductive and extremely untenable in today’s world.

I think that the girl boss idea — and I’ve written about this — the idea that 50 percent of CEOs would be women, were it not for structural patriarchal limitations on women, is just false. I think that’s a very controversial statement among mainstream feminists. But I think that men and women do have biological differences, and psychological differences that go along with them, that are evolutionary biology, that are not pure social construction, that make more women more interested in people and in caregiving, and more men interested in things. Which tends to mean that when a couple or a family decides who is going to focus more on childcare and domestic work, and who is going to focus more on breadwinning, it still does break down, when people have those options — which not everyone does, which is something that gets left out of this elite conversation quite a bit — but when people have those options at all, they do tend still to choose a model where mom focuses more on the household, the children, and dad focuses more on breadwinning.

That is not, however, an absolute. There is nothing necessary or determinative or essentialist about the idea that women have to do it that way, or that men have to do it that way. There are women — and I have close friends who are practising Catholics, lean socially conservative in all kinds of ways — where mom works full-time and dad does primary caregiving, because that’s what makes sense for their idiosyncratic circumstances. Because mom has a degree in something that means she can get more bang for her hour. Where she can work in a way that better serves their family, and dad can work less or in a different way that serves their family.

So, I really reject the essentialist positions of both of these archetypes, where on the left we have this idea that men and women are exactly the same, and we’re not even sure what those mean. It’s gender, not sex, and there are no differences, et cetera. That just strikes me as completely inaccurate and infantile. It’s an idea that has no basis in reality, historically or presently.

But then on the right, this idea that there is the male breadwinner and the female domestic person, and this is how it must be, and this is the right way for it to be, really is incredibly presentist as well. Because women, throughout history, have mostly worked. Now, women used to work on the farm, in the household, in the agrarian homestead, et cetera. So did men, of course. Men also worked in the home. But women also — most women, most non-elite women — went out into the workforce to earn money for their families long before Second Wave feminism and Betty Friedan.

So, we have this very presentist lens on both sides that really short-circuits a lot of this history and puts ideology driving the cart. It’s got the cart of ideology leading the horse. I think that’s really not helpful to women or men.

There’s so much to talk about here. There’s an issue with marriage and coupling up and people not forming families. And this idea on the right … you know, these are supposed to be the pro-family people, these are supposed to be the people who are pro-forming of families. The idea that women are not going to work at all and men are going to be able to earn the kind of money that will support a family is just not realistic for a lot of people. And so, I think that really disserves their own ends in a lot of ways, not to be more flexible. There are nursing jobs that pay super well and can still leave you four days a week not to be in the hospital. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways people can piece it together. Nursing is still a predominantly female profession, though it doesn’t have to be, right? And so, there’s all kinds of nuances here that I think we lose when we get mired in this ideology.

I’m now a stay-at-home mom. As you mentioned, I am Catholic and I came up in academia. I left before I got my PhD in English because I saw that while the job of English professor might be compatible with children, the culture of the universities where I would have such a job was not. I was going to be marginalized and not able to advance because I wouldn’t leave my hometown where my parents are. I wanted to settle near them and raise my children. I wasn’t going to travel around the country doing one-year postdocs. And that girl boss-dominant idea was going to limit me.

But then on the flip side, I got a job and I made money like most women do because we had to pay our bills and my husband couldn’t make enough at first so that we could do that. Then when he could, I decided to stay home. I’m so fortunate to be able to do that and pursue this writing career. But that flexibility, that nuance, that manoeuvring as circumstances change, I think is a much better model than either of these really rigid ideas.

TH: So much of what you’re saying is so interesting to me. I want to go back to Sheryl Sandberg for a moment. You wrote a great essay about Lean In on its 10th anniversary. One of the things you were talking about is that hustle culture, that always-on culture, is not appealing to men or to women. I wanted to unpack that. Because that book was a really pivotal book for me too. It bothered me so much that I wrote my own book, Lean Out. Because as much as I love my career, I also don’t want to work all the time. And her vision of being in a hospital bed [having just given birth,] on email, is not appealing to a lot of women. Talk to us about that book and your reaction to it.

EGM: I think that the major thing that that book really missed was that most women are not college-educated elites, nor are most men. Most people work in order to provide for their families. Of course, it is also true that most people feel their work serves the wider world in some way. If you are a construction worker, you’d like to feel that you’re doing a good job. If you are a nurse, hopefully you feel like you’re taking care of your patients. Most people who have their heads on straight don’t work only for the money in the sense that they’d be as happy to kill their patients as cure them, right? But they do work for the money to provide for their families.

That book had as its premise the idea that work is fulfilment, work is the only place we get fulfilment. There was one particular line in that book that I remember bothered me. I had just gotten married the year before; I didn’t have children yet. There was a line in there that really struck me that said that when a woman realizes her income is barely covering daycare, if she can just hang on another five, seven years, her income will go up and it will have been worth it. It’s like, but for what? If your income is barely covering daycare and your child is in full-time daycare, why would you? I could see if you have a career that truly is that fulfilling and that truly serves the world to that degree, I could see why you might make that compromise. But then why wouldn’t your husband step back or something else? I mean, the idea that the pinnacle of success is to have a child in someone else’s care 80 hours a week while you both work to the max just doesn’t strike me as most people’s idea of what a fulfilling, happy, productive, and other-serving life looks like.

The elite idea that it does is very popular in feminist circles, where now a lot of women are saying they don’t want to have children at all. But that idea is not most people’s idea.

Lara Bazelon wrote a follow-up to Sheryl Sandberg, this book, Ambitious Like a Mother. I reviewed it for America Magazine. She’s a public defender. I don’t necessarily share her ideas about criminal justice entirely, but let’s put that aside. If you do share her ideas about criminal justice, you would see where she would put her career ahead of her children. She missed her daughter’s 10th birthday for somebody’s trial, and she was lauding that as, “Look how much I put into my career that I was willing to miss my child’s birthday.” I could see that because that job is really a mission. Most people’s jobs, though, are not that kind of mission. And for someone like Sheryl Sandberg, where it’s about self-advancement in large measure, it’s really not appealing to most people.

TH: Then on the flip side of it, the trad wife phenomenon is also so fascinating to me. It reminds me, I did a radio documentary probably more than 10 years ago now on radical homemaking, on that movement. That actually came from the left, as far as I can tell. Radical Homemaking, the book, was written by Shannon Hayes. I believe she’s on the left. It was this idea that it was actually radical to withhold your labour from Corporate America and revert to thrift and old-school skills like gardening and scratch cooking and sewing, and that you had a lot more freedom when you did this. It did seem to reimagine some of these underlying assumptions about feminism. Then for years after, any woman I interviewed, anywhere on the political spectrum, had this secret fantasy of giving up the rat race, moving to the country, and making jam. Yet now, when you look at that trad wife phenomenon, as you said, it does look extreme. And I do hear the men peripheral to that saying that women shouldn’t work at all. I wonder how we got there. Can you dig into that more?

EGM: I think that our understanding of sex and gender really breaks down insofar as we fail to recognize that sex differences are neither everything nor nothing. You really have now these two extremes. The right wants to believe they are everything — that men are men and women are women, and so women do this and men do that. Of course, when you look at pre-industrialized countries, or you look at our history, men and women do more similar work and are less different the less industrialized and less advanced a place is. Because when you take biological sex differences as the reality that they in fact are — when it’s sex, not gender identity — when you take that as a given, then I think people are free to have personalities, and not everything has to be coded masculine and feminine.

So, when that’s the case, I’m a woman who is disagreeable, probably at the far extreme for women, but I’d probably be in the middle of the male bell curve for disagreeability. That doesn’t make me a man. It just makes me a woman who’s fairly disagreeable among women. And when you take for granted that there are men and there are women biologically, then you don’t have to worry as much about who is a man and a woman in terms of personality. I think that the gender identity movement really led us into a corner here, because it becomes about people’s personalities. It can’t be that, well, yes, more women tend to be more agreeable, but there are disagreeable women. Yes, men are physically stronger, but of course there are women who are physically stronger than some men. These are overlapping bell curves. They aren’t gendered absolutes.

Both the right and the left now have this investment in making them gendered absolutes for ideological reasons. The right because they are reacting to what they perceive as the excesses — and I perceive as the excesses — of the left. And the left because they could not take yes for an answer, I think. You ask for equality for women, you essentially get it, but women do not have the same number of CEO jobs as men. Unless you socially construct it, they never will. That reality has to be systemic, it has to be the patriarchy, it has to be somebody doing something bad. It can’t just be that nature does in fact exist and that these overlapping bell curves mean that women do cluster further to one end of the overall curve than men do. I think that is really where we got mired in this polarization. The left got the yes, couldn’t take yes for an answer. Because the fact that there was equality of opportunity did not mean there was equality of outcome. Because the biggest misogynist is mother nature, if you really want to zero in on it.

Women are not going to do the exact same things as men, and they’re not going to do them the exact same way as men if you leave them to their own devices. So you have to socially construct it. Then the right reacted to that social construction.

The other thing that’s going on here is that men are not doing well in a lot of the standard markers of what we perceive as success, right? We have boys falling behind in school. We have males having significantly more health issues, drug issues, suicide attempts. All of these bad markers tend to be male. The elite women who are leading these conversations focus on the pinnacle, the apex of the elite men. Yes, they’re still the CEOs of most companies. But at the very bottom, prisoners, criminals, people who are killed by criminals, people who are homicide victims — these are all men.

Some of that is always going to be the case, in terms of violence. But in terms of things related to dropping out of school, not going to college, not being able to find careers, de-industrialization has hit men really hard. In some of the same ways, I think, that industrialization hit women. Women weren’t able to work in the agrarian homestead anymore, and were polarized between the women who went to work in factories or in someone else’s home and the women who were able to maintain a home of their own. It really polarized them into the haves and the have-nots. That has now happened to men because of de-industrialization. Whereas men were more able to have a middle class, a middle path, to do well and serve themselves and their families when they had those opportunities. Now that the job market no longer favours men, brawn is less valuable, we’re seeing the bottom fall out there. Part of what the right is reacting to is that the left didn’t care about that, right?

When Richard Reeves first wrote Of Boys and Men and started to push that narrative, a lot of people resisted it. Now you see people coming around. But even recently, Jessica Grose in The New York Times wrote that this whole crisis is nonsense. Well, it’s nonsense if you’re looking at it from the position of somebody who writes for The New York Times. It’s not nonsense if you’re looking at it from the perspective of a lower middle class mom raising boys, who she feels are now going to be systemically discriminated against in education that is run by mostly leftist women because they’re male. That’s part of where that reaction comes from. That does not excuse the excesses and the violence and, in many cases, the misogyny of the reaction.

Part of that reaction comes from a place where there’s an understandable cause, which is that the left really overplayed their hand. They wanted not just to eliminate legal and cultural stigmas and barriers. They wanted to eliminate nature itself. That’s not going to happen.

But the other part of it is that you now do have this glorying in bro misogyny where suddenly men who get married are not real men because they are allowing women to control them via the marriage. You have that whole anti-marriage stuff on the right. That stuff is really pernicious and exactly like the anti-racism of the left. You had Thomas Chatterton Williams on [the show] talking about this. Exactly like that. The people it hurts most are the ones it purports to help. It is lower middle class and working class and poor men who are most benefited by marriage. Just like it is lower middle class and middle class and poor non-white people who are most benefited by policing and safe neighbourhoods and the opportunities to live in a safe and productive way and have those opportunities. It’s exactly the same thing you’re seeing on the right now as what you saw on the left then.

TH: On a more personal note, Liz, you have four sons. This issue is not just a theoretical issue for you. This is an on-the-ground, day-to-day issue. How are you feeling about this conversation about men in America?