Career homemakers

Chapter 3 continues investigating trad women’s recursive reinvention of the public/private divide with respect to the historically gendered distinction between productive and reproductive labor. The first of two chapters on home-working practices, it considers how trad futurism answers the neoliberal woman question not through a wholesale rejection of the happy balance ideal, but by reworking the notion of work/family balance to suit an explicitly gender traditional context. Building off the concepts of postfeminism and neoliberal feminism, it suggests trad home-working practices repurpose the postfeminist emphasis on choice to correct the neoliberal feminist balance imperative in advocating that women be free to choose either career or family rather than being “forced” to “have it all.” Arguing that such home-working practices reflect the neoliberal disavowal of the persistence of race and gender subordination, it further illustrates the complex entanglement of trad futurism with neoliberal prerogatives by examining how trad women cast homemaking itself as a career and, in many cases, monetize their trad outreach.