Nostalgia, “Again,” and Who Gets to Count

The slogan: “Make America Great Again” works by inviting us to long for a past that was ordered, stable, and allegedly better than the present, without ever specifying for whom it was great or what made it so. When that nostalgia is cashed out in concrete proposals about women’s lives, a particular picture emerges in which women appear primarily as wives, mothers, and helpmates whose worth is exhausted by domestic and reproductive labor. This picture, I argue, is hostile to women in that it curtails, on an arbitrary basis, those activities women have available to them to make meaning in their lives. The central claim is that by reviving and seeking to mandate traditional gender roles, these movements constrict the range of life projects women can pursue, relegating women to a more extreme Sisyphean existence than they would otherwise experience. The harm is not that some households choose to organize themselves around these roles, but that the choice to do otherwise is increasingly pushed out of reach. The greater danger lies in enforcing traditional roles as the social or moral norm, thereby undermining women’s autonomy and foreclosing access to projects of genuine worth and significance.

Christian Nationalist pastor Doug Wilson makes this vision explicit. In a video amplified by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he insists, while speaking to a female interviewer, that women’s worth lies only in their reproductive capacity; work he dismisses as requiring “no talent.” Elsewhere, he preaches, “Godly women want to feed their men. Godly women are designed to make sandwiches. When women were granted the right to vote, we were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.”

Tradwives, “Choice,” and the Closed Menu

On social media, tradwife and momfluencer aesthetics translate this political theology into a lifestyle brand with immaculate kitchens, vintage dresses, slow living, and a constant stream of homemade bread, jam, and bubblegum. Nara Smith, Tik Tok’s “queen of tradwives,” shares elaborate cooking videos that frame making jam for her husband while dressed in designer clothing as the latest standard of feminine excellence, while other influencers exhort women to wake up energized to “put in the effort to become the best version of yourself and to look the way you and your husband appreciate.”

There is nothing inherently problematic about loving domestic work, parenting, or care, and feminism has long insisted that this labor deserves recognition and respect. What is troubling is the way these roles are elevated as women’s highest calling and increasingly their only legitimate one, where deviation from this life path is met with derision and threats of further controlling mechanisms being placed on women (e.g., the possibility of losing basic rights as citizens (the right to vote), and further reproductive rights). J.D. Vance, for example, claims that “the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids,” and laments that some women believe “the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”

Harrison Butker, in a widely discussed commencement address, urges young women to embrace their “vocation as homemakers,” casting domesticity as a divinely ordained endpoint rather than one life path among many. Nick Fuentes is even more blunt: “Your body, my choice, Forever,” he declares, pairing open praise of Hitler and tirades against Jews, immigrants, and people of color with the view that women are “difficult to be around” and “should not be allowed to vote.”

In this sociopolitical environment, the language of “choice” to be a tradwife rings hollow. A choice is meaningful only against a background of genuine, available alternatives, and when social, economic, and political structures are reshaped so that one script is rewarded, romanticized, and materially supported while others are stigmatized or blocked, autonomy erodes even as the rhetoric of empowerment persists.

Sisyphean Labor and Gendered Absurdity

Albert Camus offers Sisyphus as the archetype of absurd labor, and as a version of the absurd hero. Sisyphus, condemned to rolling a boulder up a mountain only to chase back down after it and do it all again until the heat death of the universe, is a character that we must believe can, while existing in this absurd environment, performing this absurd task for all eternity, be happy. And, if we believe that Sisyphus can be happy, then we, as Sisypheans of a kind ourselves, must imagine Sisyphus happy, in that we must imagine Sisyphus able to find something in his life, his lived experience intrinsically valuable; meaningful. We must imagine that even the gods who have adjudicated Sisyphus in this way cannot control every aspect of Sisyphus’s life; they cannot control the way that Sisyphus thinks about his circumstances. They cannot control his emotions; if anyone has control over them, it would be Sisyphus, as they are inaccessible to others.

Sisyphus’s situation (punishment), thanks to the beauty of myth, is the extreme, but Simone de Beauvoir brings this image into women’s everyday lives. In The Second Sex, she writes, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition, the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time; she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.” For the woman who does not identify with domesticity as her central project, the home becomes a kind of genie lamp; a confined space in which she is expected to become an object and renounce her autonomy and future. The walls in this environment are close, and the confinement of women in virtue of their woman-ness is a fundamental feature of this picture. Regardless of how gilded the walls are, they are walls, and they are effectively working to make women’s lives more closely resemble Sisyphus’s; a punishment justified by appeal to the woman-ness of the recipient.

Susan Wolf’s account of meaning in life clarifies what is lost when politics and theology conspire to create such an environment. For Wolf, a meaningful life is one “actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project or project of positive value.” These projects are not just subjectively satisfying; they are connected to something objectively worthwhile. For Wolf, the alienated housewife does not lack meaning in her life because housework is trivial, but because “her heart, so to speak, isn’t in these activities,” and she does not “embrace her roles as wife, mother, and homemaker as expressive of who she is and wants to be.”

When ideologies work to confine women to domestic roles, they are not just assigning chores and roles; they are engineering Sisyphean lives in which opportunities for meaningful engagement with the world are arbitrarily foreclosed. The absurd is no longer a generalized human condition; it becomes a gendered structure of constraint, imposed and inflicted, rather than merely a feature of the natural world. In this intentionally constructed Sisyphean world, the concept of “choice” has been stripped of all its goods for women.

The rhetoric of Christian Nationalist leaders transforms this existential risk into a political program. Wilson insists wives must be “led with a firm hand,” and in his book Father Hunger links “biblical masculinity, one that does not simper and lisp,” to the cure for “the poison of egalitarianism between genders.” He goes so far as to describe sexual intercourse as a hierarchy of conquest, claiming that “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, and plants, while the woman receives, surrenders, accepts, and true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.” Under this view, even the concept of marital rape is stripped of meaning and subsumed into “wifely submission.”

When these ideas are amplified by figures like Hegseth, who circulate Wilson’s content, invite him to be a keynote speaker in national conventions, and boost media calling for a rollback of women’s right to vote, the result is not just a private theology but a public architecture of constraint. What began as Camus’s abstract absurdity becomes a gendered structure: some people are free to pursue diverse projects of positive value, while others are consigned to pushing someone else’s metaphorical boulder, smiling for the camera as they go.

Losing Concepts, Losing Worlds

In her 1988 paper, “Losing Your Concepts,” Cora Diamond warns that when older, biased vocabularies reassert themselves, “it’s not only words that are lost, but also the essential conceptual resources needed to articulate experience and generate meaning.” Drawing on Berger, she describes people “deprived of the means of translating what they know into thoughts which they can think,” left without examples in which words clarify their own lives. This is the space that women will occupy in this “nostalgic” structure. When concepts like “marital rape” are stripped of meaning and collapsed into “wifely submission” as they are in some Christian Nationalist circles, the effects are not merely linguistic. Women lose crucial conceptual tools for naming harm, seeking safety, demanding recognition, insisting on their status as moral equals, and finding paths to making meaning in their lives.

This is the greater danger of nostalgic movements that promise to restore “natural” or “traditional” gender roles. They do not simply elevate one vision of womanhood among many; they seek to make that vision the organizing norm of law, policy, and culture, while undermining women’s political rights (e.g., through the advocacy to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment) and reinscribing men as the only fully authoritative agents. As Diamond warns, when older, biased vocabularies regain dominance, “it’s not only words that are lost, but also the essential conceptual resources needed to articulate experience and generate meaning.”

The push from “TheoBro” and Christian Nationalist circles to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment crystallizes this danger. In a video discussing their position, one advocate for this view puts it like this: “And just for the record, you know, yeah, I think the Nineteenth Amendment should be repealed. I think that, well, first and foremost, because I’m a Christian. If we had a Christian nation and women could vote, then within 50 years, we would no longer have a Christian nation.” This is not merely an opinion about policy; it is an attempt to recast women’s political agency as fundamentally incompatible with a “Christian nation,” thereby redefining both “woman” and “citizen” in ways that preclude women’s full membership and agency.

For those living in such an environment, the loss is existential as well as civic, and the result is a manufactured Sisyphean existence. When concepts like “autonomy,” “consent,” “career,” or even “calling” are systematically reshaped so that they no longer quite apply to you, past domains of your emotional and intellectual life become hard to name and therefore hard to identify and connect with. As de Beauvoir observes, in such conditions, a woman “has nothing to wish for. She must do with her lot what Sisyphus must do with his boulder.”

Feminist Refusal of Manufactured Absurdity

A familiar objection insists that feminism must celebrate any sincerely chosen life path, including tradwifery. On this view, if a woman freely decides to devote herself to homemaking, then her decision should be affirmed rather than problematized.

Yet meaningful choice requires more than the absence of overt coercion. It depends on a social world in which a plurality of projects, domestic, artistic, professional, political, and spiritual, are genuinely available, respected, and materially supported. When Christian Nationalist and MAGA-aligned movements seek to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, frame women’s childlessness as “deranged,” cast egalitarianism as poisonous, and glorify submission as the only truly feminine posture, they are not expanding women’s options; they are orchestrating a world in which both existing as a woman and deviation from the nostalgic script are punished.

Camus’s Sisyphus has no choice but to keep pushing his boulder, and so his happiness, if it comes, must be wrested from an inescapable punishment. Feminist philosophy refuses to design social worlds on that model. The task is not to teach women to imagine themselves happy in lives engineered to be Sisyphean, but to insist that no one’s meaning be made conditional on accepting endless, cyclical, and involuntary labor as their destiny. The kitchen, when it is truly and agentially chosen, should be one possible site of flourishing among many, not a beautifully curated stage for someone else’s fantasy of what “making America great again” requires.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.