As the expression goes, the conservatives in charge are “saying the quiet part loud.”
This week, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a call to followers to “remember your homeland’s heritage.” Accompanying this brief missive is a 5-year-old painting by conservative artist Morgan Weistling entitled “A Prayer for a New Life” (which the DHS mistitled as “New Life in a New Land,” and used without Weistling’s consent). His work features a small Westward-Expansion-era white family, a mother cradling a newborn child at its heart, all huddled together peacefully in the back of a Conestoga wagon.
There’s no reference in the painting or the post, of course, to the fact that Westward expansion – often called “Manifest Destiny,” which is even depicted as a classically beautiful, angelic white woman in other paintings – led to the displacement and suffering of Native Americans.
The DHS’s post, in fact, makes Weistling’s painting eerily evocative of another work: “The Aryan Family” (circa 1938) by Wolfgang Willrich, whose specialty was Nazi propaganda. Willrich’s print also features a white family as the supposed ideal, complete with a blond mother breastfeeding her blond infant. And like the DHS post, those responsible for disseminating the Nazi message also emphasized the importance of “heritage.”
It’s worth noting that white, Madonna-like motherhood is central to both works – and that either could have also been inspired by the “tradwife” content heavily populating our Instagram and TikTok feeds.
For those who have managed to dodge such posts, “tradwives” are women who embody gender roles of past eras and who frequently post online about their very traditional lifestyles. They are homemakers and stay-at-home moms; they are often devoutly religious. There is nothing inherently wrong with electing to live in these ways – people should be free to exist as they desire. But the tradwife movement takes the matter beyond individual choice, and warps it into a mass Christian nationalist call to, shall we say, “remember our heritage.”
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These influencers are willing representatives of a regressive past. They often espouse views that are anti-LGBTQ rights and anti-abortion. They endorse a mass return to heteronormativity, and fully ignore the damaging nature of confining women to their homes through a mix of family obligations and a lack of social autonomy – not to mention, access to money. And beyond the backwards politics of this phenomenon, there is another equally common, equally insidious theme running throughout: Whiteness.
We white women, as I’ve noted previously, are afforded more social and political sway – not to mention, more safety – than basically everyone besides the white men who occupy the top echelons of power. Yet historically – and currently, in the case of tradwives and others – we often use what clout we’re afforded to play major roles in propping up anti-progressive movements. Or, at the very least, we are and have been complicit in being avatars of hatred.
To focus on the U.S., white women were once, as researchers term it, “symbols of white vulnerability in the face of legal gains by African-American men.” When we got the right to vote in 1920, hundreds of white women chose to use their amplified voices to assist the Ku Klux Klan – as well as to create the Women’s KKK. Not much has changed in the time that’s gone by since – scores of white women now lend their aid to active neo-Nazi groups. (And yes, looking back and abroad, white women were heavily involved in the Third Reich.)
Those of us who believe in equity have a heightened responsibility to fight back against increasingly encroaching racism and fascism – to refuse to represent these causes, and to keep fellow white women, and white men, in check. Yes, even if it comes with consequences – and it surely can, which we’re seeing with unsettling new clarity as the president continues to publicly threaten ordinary citizens who oppose him, including white women who step out of line.
Donald Trump and actress Rosie O’Donnell have been embroiled in a high-profile, combative back-and-forth that spans decades – and he has often derided her lack of conformity to beauty norms (like the pale, slim women in Weistling’s and Willrich’s works). But now, Trump is threatening to use his power as POTUS to revoke O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship.
“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship,” Trump recently posted online. (To be clear, it would be illegal for him to do so, thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment – but his words are chilling all the same.)
Like O’Donnell, we white women must become more engaged, and more vocal, in pushing back against all of it, despite what that may mean for us individually. Because we are more than just modestly attired, somehow-forever-fertile symbols of “tradition” – a term that, in the hands of the hateful, is designed to evoke white supremacy and women’s subjugation.
Exhausted though we may be by gendered oppression, and even in the face of threats of retaliation, we must marshal ourselves to counter the usage of us as exemplars of those in need of protection from alleged “boogeymen” – who are actually just human beings that are darker and more progressive than our white, bigoted, terrified leaders would like.
We simply cannot continue to symbolize a heritage of hatred. ◼️
