(LewRockwell.com)—Have you heard of the Tradwife Movement yet? It’s an acronym for “Traditional Wife.” So far, it resides especially among millennial and Gen Z women. These young women would prefer being stay-at-home wives, keeping house, and raising kids as depicted in ’50s and ’60s movies, TV series — Leave it To Beaver, The Dick van Dyke Show, Dennis the Menace, The Donna Reed Show, I Love Lucy — and so forth.
At hazard of melting a few feminist, LGBTQ — and other currently uncategorized snowflakes — I would suggest that these OG young ladies are embracing their honest, basic, biological genetic nature in the face of a hostile and self-destructive culture.
Now being rather strangely in touch with several of the above, particularly the feminist branch — because I was raised by my mother, grandmother, and their stalwart aid, Helen Kovachik — I can speak with experience and a reasonable amount of credibility.
In particular, my mother, a successful Broadway actress ( “Having Wonderful Time“ etc.), gave up her career, worked as a chef, and then a teacher and finally a college professor in order to raise me.
She was a great mom and so I should have realized the implications when she told me every once in awhile that she would have much prefered to stay at home, keep house and raise a bunch of kids, even in preference to her Broadway career.
I always thought that was interesting but I failed to take it seriously until I got my second datapoint.
For convenience we can call that second datapoint Myra. She was a successful women’s rights attorney and best friends with Steve Goldberg, another quirky gambling legend straight out of the late 20th century. That’s why, along with my last wife Chrissy, we were having a comped lunch at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal before it went bankrupt.
Myra told us she had her dream job but she was unhappy and seriously depressed. Now Myra’s dream job was, as she described it, “suing abusive husbands into the gutter or putting them in jail.” But, she said, feminism had betrayed her.
“How so?” I asked.
“Feminism told me I could only be happy if I had a career. I now realize that was a lie, a big lie. My inner voice is telling me I should have gotten married, and been a home-maker raising children.
“My clock has been ticking for years and I’ve been ignoring it in favor of the feminist ideal. I’m afraid it’s too late for me now. All I can see ahead is a lonely old woman.”
She went on to tell us that a majority of her friends, mostly successful professional women, felt similarly.
So, my mom wasn’t alone. How about you?
And, do you have to have a job to be a feminist?
I suspect a lot of that notion has something to do with what the government-corporate-complex learned from putting Rosie the Riveter to work during WWII, particularly the advantages of being able to tax the female half of the population as well as the male half. That’s a conspiracy theory for another time. But consider Marilyn Waring’s “If Women Counted” — or a TED TALK right from the lady herself.
My grandmother was a militant feminist, marched for the right to vote and never held a job a day in her life.
So where did the part of feminism that goes far beyond “equal pay for equal work” and the right to vote come from?
Chrissy’s daughter got a college scholarship and partied it away but she learned something important anyway. “All my Women’s Studies profs were man-haters. I like men,” she told me.
Now, of course, not all young women feel that way. How many who do feel that way won’t admit to it? After all, they would be betraying today’s pseudo-feminism and a big chunk of everything they’ve been indoctrinated to believe about being a modern woman.
But that’s only the first half of the tragedy.
The second-half is that current American culture, in addition to emasculating men in subtle and not so subtle ways, has made it almost impossible to be a Tradhusband, that is, a bread-winner who can afford to support a stay-at-home Tradwife and family.
It’s the taxes.
Even in the ’90s, my friend and sometimes mentor James Libertarian Burns, wanted to be married rather than “indulge in victimless crimes with his hooker,” as he delicately put it. But although he had a decent casino income, he never felt he could afford the stay-at-home wife and kids he wanted. Sadly, he never married.
In the 50s and 60s, the historical period most Tradgirls (I know, I’m being “un-woke“) favor, it was possible for one breadwinner to support the whole family.
But even 30 years ago according to The Family Research Council, taxes had increased so much that in a two-parent family – – –
One parent worked to support the family, the other to support the government.
So, even before the Turn of the Century, the result of supporting government was that there was rarely a stay-at-home mother and the average teen hadn’t had an uninterrupted ten minute conversation with either parent in the last month. Half the teens had used tobacco, two thirds had used alcohol, and one third “illegal” drugs. -CNN & COMPANY, 19 Oct 1995
In a rather extraordinary effort to overcome this, my son and his wife arranged their working schedules so that one of them could always be home with my granddaughter. The result was that they were rarely home and awake at the same time. They eventually divorced, explaining that, in keeping their daughter safe, they’d become strangers.
So girls, if you want to have babies, thanks to Uncle Sam and his mimics, you have a better than 50/50 chance of ending up raising them on your own. And you won’t be able to be a stay-at-home mom because you’ll need at least one job.
And that’s the true Tradwife Tragedy.
What are you going to do about it?
In this case I’m asking because I don’t have a clue and I’m hoping some of you problem-solvers out there do.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
