Trad Wife Answers TOUGH Questions ｜ Estee Williams
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
177.40398
Summary
Estee Williams is a 25-year-old woman who has gone viral. She's been the subject of nasty articles by the libs in the media, and she's been called a "trad wife." But what exactly is a trad wife? Is it a homemaker who cooks, cleans, and takes care of the home? And what does it mean to be a public Insta celebrity?
Transcript
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You can be a trad wife, like my guest, Estee Williams, a 25-year-old woman who has gone viral.
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I'm sure you've seen her TikToks and Insta stories and MySpace posts and Zanga journals
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and AOL Instant Messenger emojis and anything else.
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She's been the subject of very nasty articles by the libs in the media.
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Hi, Michael, and thank you so much for having me.
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First off, when I first saw your name, I was tempted to pronounce it Estee, as in louder, but it is Estee.
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For those who don't know, Estee, what is a trad wife?
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Well, a trad wife is just short for traditional wife, and it is a homemaker.
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And she cooks, she cleans, she takes care of the home.
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And the children, if there are any, and the online world gave it the term trad wife for short.
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What motivated you to pursue this traditional life?
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I mean, were you raised in this way, or was it a conscious choice to become this thing?
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My mom was a traditional wife until my parents got divorced.
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And then, of course, that threw our family for a spin.
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And I think I felt the need to fit the mold of the world and go get a degree, find a career.
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And then I dropped out because secretly, I always wanted this lifestyle.
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Of course, you need a husband to have this lifestyle.
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So when I met my now husband, everything just came into place.
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So do you think that one of the driving forces behind the traditional movement for men,
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and especially for women who want to be trad wives, do you think it's things like divorce?
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Do you think it's people coming from a culture that is broken, that lived out all of the pathologies of the liberal age of Aquarius, hippy-dippy sexual revolution,
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and realize that the fruits of that revolution were just poison, and so they're rebelling against that?
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And at least for my generation, I grew up being told that you need a career in the boss babe era, right?
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And I think a lot of women are realizing that they want to embrace this natural role as a woman and be a mother, be a wife, and that is enough.
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You don't need a career to feel fulfilled as a woman.
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And in fact, a lot of the women in my family are boss babes,
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but we celebrate each other's differences and what make all of us happy, and they've shown nothing but support.
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I mean, I know, because I have a lot of liberal family and a lot of liberal friends.
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I grew up in New York, and perhaps I consciously, you know, moved away from some of those ideas, too.
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They're kind of nice about it, most of them, but they think I'm pretty crazy.
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Well, they definitely thought I was crazy when I dropped out of college.
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I was studying to be a meteorologist, and when I told them, yeah, I met my husband, I'm dropping out of college.
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You don't need the BS degree, and you don't need the BA degree if what you're going for is the MRS degree,
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Honestly, I think going back to our roots and kind of like doing what our grandmothers, maybe some of our grandmothers did,
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it is really giving women this fulfillment and filling their hearts with joy to take care of their families.
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Now, is there a kind of a contradiction with being a trad wife who is very publicly a trad wife on social media?
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Meaning, you are probably the most identifiable figure of this whole movement,
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but it's a movement that says women should basically be homemakers and running private life.
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So is there, does it undermine the trad life to be a public Insta celebrity trad wife?
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I get those comments all the time, like, how are you a trad wife?
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And it's like, well, I guess 1950s trad wives weren't trad wives if they're using dishwashers and washing machines,
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I think as time goes on, like, life is changing, and we live in an online world,
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and I've been using that to my advantage to really try and inspire younger women who maybe deep down have this desire to be a trad wife,
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but they're being told, no, you need a career, you need to support yourself, and you don't need to depend on a man,
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You know, I don't know if the analogy to the washing machine is totally apt,
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because the washing machine is, it's a technology that allows you to live this private life,
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you know, and run the household more efficiently,
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whereas the public-facing stuff on Instagram doesn't do that.
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I think the better analogy might be maybe Phyllis Schlafly,
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who I think is one of the greatest women of the 20th century.
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And Phyllis Schlafly was, in many ways, a trad wife,
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and also one of the most important political leaders in American history.
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And she was a wife and a mother, and she had six kids,
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and also she single-handedly shot down the Equal Rights Amendment,
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and is truly one of my favorite conservative movement figures.
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you are telling women, in a really public-facing way,
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Your desires that you have to not, like, go work at a widget factory
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for Mr. McGillicuddy, who doesn't care about you,
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your desire to, like, have a family that loves you and work for them,
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And I guess the irony of that is you've got to be a public girl boss,
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either to shut down the ERA or even to tell people on Instagram
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is it laundry and cooking, and is it having lots of babies,
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beyond, you know, a minute or two on Instagram?
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Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the time I'm cooking, I'm cleaning,
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and I do like to know what me and my husband are eating,
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and that's why I cook all of our meals from scratch,
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and instead of going to get fast food after work
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And maybe you want your husband to be out there in public
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working fast, working hard, bringing home the bacon,
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a place to rest, a place to gather your thoughts.
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or were you a little different when you guys met?
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I don't think trad wife was definitely not like the word,
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And he wanted that wife to take care of the children.
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creating a warm home and taking care of the family,
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There's this weird phenomenon in modern culture
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And for a lot of people, they need two incomes.
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It's very difficult these days to raise a family
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where maybe the wife doesn't want to go out there and work,
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But I see a lot of people going and buying a house
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And people get addicted to the nice fancy stuff
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there's going to be a cost to anything in life.
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And in fact, I know it because I talk to people
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who have been inspired by this idea of tradition,