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Jessica Valenti just sent a cool newsletter called “The Truth About Housewives,” and she begins by picking apart a TikTok video that is part of a growing catalog of videos suggesting feminism has been a bad thing. Here is the video in question.
Valenti then adds this:
The video is easy to pick apart, of course — this idealized version of 1950s housewives never really existed outside of advertisements and television shows. In reality, housewives were trapped. Literally. They had no financial security, no ability to apply for a line of credit or even have a bank account; they were victims of domestic violence, which was illegal in name only; they could be institutionalized by their husbands or fathers if they deviated from the norm, and were often medicated to the gills.
And that’s just the women who had husbands with enough money that they could stay at home. Women like my grandmother, who worked in bars and factories, didn’t have a white picket fence and starched aprons. Women of color didn’t have access to this ‘dream’ of American…
