A Right-Wing Influencer Tried to Be a Tradwife. It Almost Broke Her.

Lauren Southern, one of the most well-known right-wing influencers during Donald Trump’s first term, first went viral with a 2015 video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” Then 19, beautiful and blond, Southern argued that women are advantaged in many areas of life, including child custody disputes and escaping abusive relationships. “Feminists are unintentionally creating a world of reverse sexism that I don’t want to be a part of,” she said.

But being an antifeminist, it turns out, is no shield against abusive male power. Southern’s new self-published memoir, “This Is Not Real Life,” is the story of conservative ideology colliding with reality. It’s made headlines for her claim that Andrew Tate, an unrepentant online misogynist accused of human trafficking, sexually assaulted her in Romania in 2018. (Tate has denied this.) The book is particularly revealing, though, for its depiction of Southern’s painful attempts to contort herself into an archetypical tradwife, an effort that left her almost suicidal. Her story should be a cautionary tale for the young women who aspire to the domestic life she once evangelized for.

Despite the presence of a few high-profile women in Trump’s administration, the right is increasingly trying to drive women out of public life. Some of this push comes from the unabashed patriarchs atop the Republican Party; last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which leaders of his Christian denomination said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. (“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth.)

But there are also female influencers who present housewifery as the ultimate in wellness, an escape from the soulless grind of the workplace. “Less Prozac, more protein,” the podcast host Alex Clark told thousands of listeners at a conservative women’s conference in June. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (Clark is unmarried and has no children.)

This Instagram-inflected traditionalism is taking hold at a time when the workplace is becoming even less friendly to women. As The Washington Post reported on Monday, large numbers of mothers have left the work force this year. Many have been driven out by return-to-office mandates and a backlash against diversity policies that’s led to hostile working environments. But some, according to The Post, “say they are giving up jobs happily, in line with MAGA culture and the rise of the ‘traditional wife.’”

Southern had more reason than most to want to retreat into the cult of domesticity. As she recounts in her memoir, her antifeminist video helped propel her to international notoriety, and soon she was traveling the world as an avatar of irreverent online reaction. She gave out fliers saying, “Allah is a Gay God” in a Muslim neighborhood in England, popularized the idea that there’s a white genocide in South Africa and interviewed the reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin on a trip to Moscow seemingly arranged by shadowy Russian interests.

It was during this phase of her life that she said she was assaulted by Tate, who was just beginning to build his global brand. Her politics made the trauma particularly hard to process. “It wouldn’t be very helpful to ‘the cause’ (or my career, for that matter) for me to become exactly what I criticized,” wrote Southern. “A victim.”

After her encounter with Tate, she wrote, her life “unraveled.” She yearned to escape her own infamy and the need to keep shoveling more outrageous content into the internet’s insatiable maw. So when she met a man who wanted to settle down, she jumped at the chance to give up her career and become a stay-at-home wife and mother. She posted photos of herself baking, and “selfies in the mirror showing how quickly I had bounced back to fitness and health after pregnancy.”

But in reality, she wrote, her life was “hell.” She’d moved with her husband from Canada, where she’d grown up, to his native Australia, where she lived in near-total isolation. Her husband treated her with growing contempt, which she responded to by trying to be an even better wife. “I threw myself tenfold into trying to be the perfect partner: cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,” she wrote. But it didn’t work; she said her husband berated her, stayed out until late at night and constantly threatened to divorce her if she didn’t obey him.

Eventually, she wrote, when she defied him by traveling to Canada to visit her family, he told her the marriage was over. By then, she said, she’d turned over much of her savings to him. She and her son had to move in with her parents, and then into a small, cheap cabin in the woods. She was destitute, full of shame and intellectually adrift. As she told the conservative journalist Mary Harrington last year, when she first went public about her experience with trad life, “My brain was breaking between two worlds, because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.”

Southern’s book is not an attempt at liberal redemption. Though she claims she’s lost interest in politics, she doesn’t renounce the ugly nativist views that helped her build her audience. She doesn’t apologize for, say, trying to block a boat that rescued drowning migrants in the Mediterranean. But while she’s not a particularly sympathetic figure, that might make her criticism of trad culture more credible, because it’s hard to see a professional motive in a book that’s likely to annoy every political faction.

Every few decades, it seems, America is fated to endure a new spasm of pseudotraditionalism, with women encouraged to seek shelter from a brutal world in homemaking. The lionization of the housewife in the 1950s came after women were pushed out of their World War II-era jobs. During the 1980s, as Susan Faludi wrote in her classic “Backlash,” women were bombarded with media messages telling them true freedom lay in marriage and motherhood. In 2003, The New York Times Magazine heralded “The Opt-Out Revolution,” part of a wave of media about elite women stepping back from hard-charging careers.

I’m sure some women are happy renouncing their ambitions to care for husbands and children. But often, women who give in to gender retrenchment come to regret it. A decade after “The Opt-Out Revolution,” a Times Magazine headline read, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.”

In her 2007 book “The Feminine Mistake,” Leslie Bennetts wrote, “I couldn’t possibly count the number of women I’ve interviewed who thought they could depend on a husband to support them but who ultimately found themselves alone and unprepared to take care of themselves — and their children.” It seems particularly dangerous to tie one’s fate to a man who is part of an internet subculture obsessed with female submission.