The "traditional family" financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z [View all]

The “traditional family” financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z
Younger men want to return to older times — but we shouldn't forget why we left those behind

By Katie Gatti Tassin
Podcaster and author
Published June 10, 2025 5:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Two seemingly disparate topics dominated media during the 2024 presidential election: gender roles (the male loneliness epidemic; tradwives) and the economy (the cost of living or, its shorthand, eggs). But these threads might have been weaving a single narrative all along: The renewed fixation on traditional gender roles was a canary in the late capitalist coal mine, warning that the neoliberal era’s social contract was leaking noxious gas.

As of 2024, almost half of Republican men and one-third of Republican women believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” a cultural prescription that’s doubled in popularity since just 2022, in part due to the grim outlooks of disillusioned young people. This vision was particularly seductive for young men, who voted for Trump in record numbers: Gen Z men report regressive gender views (like “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”) at more than twice the rate of their baby boomer counterparts. This context makes otherwise unobjectionable family-friendly proposals — like that of a $5,000 baby bonus — seem more sinister, meager attempts at restoring the single-earner, single-caregiver family structure associated with a bygone era of American prosperity and dominance.

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The last time gender’s cold war erupted into a battle fought on such explicit terms was around 50 years ago. Two years after Silvia Federici published her seminal work "Wages Against Housework," a woman named Terry Martin Hekker took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to bemoan the state of homemaking — not because she wasn’t being compensated for her time and labor, as second-wave feminists like Federici suggested she ought to be, but because she felt too few women were choosing to do it anyway. Examining household income trends, she muses, “I calculate I am less than eight years away from being the last housewife in the country.” Betty Friedan, avert your eyes.

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This conflation of gender orthodoxy with American prosperity is popular for a frustratingly simple reason: A politics which refuses to engage with a rigorous economic analysis in the face of parabolic wealth and income inequality has no choice but to attribute the creeping void of American precarity to cultural explanations instead. In other words: Do the gender roles again, a growing contingent of Americans seems to believe, and the prosperity will return! In this accounting, feminism made women selfish and undesirable, men no longer exhibit sufficient “masculine energy,” and the result is .. wage stagnation? ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/10/the-traditional-family-financial-structure-is-back-thanks-to-gen-z/