Bitchy History

Today I’m sharing the third and final video essay from my MA Gender Studies project:The Real Reward: How Sitcoms Made Domesticity Feel Like the Prize.Here are parts one and two if you haven’t seen them yet!This video looks at “Margaret Disowns Her Family,” “An Extraordinary Woman” and “The Career Woman” to examine how postwar sitcoms turned motherhood and marriage into women’s ultimate reward.First, the programs show us the work: breakfast demands, missing objects, interruptions, children, household disasters, and the expectation that a mother should maintain perfect serenity while everyone asks where their belongings are.Then comes the reassurance. The exhaustion proves that motherhood is meaningful. The sacrifice proves that a woman is extraordinary. A successful career may be glamorous, but does it provide the incomparable fulfillment of locating Bud’s jacket?The trick is not to deny that domestic life is difficult. It is to present the difficulty itself as the source of women’s happiness. Suffering is not evidence that something is wrong. It is evidence that the role matters.Convenient.Does the praise these women receive compensate for their labour, or does it simply persuade them to continue doing it? Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

Thank you everyone for tuning into The Daily Whatever Show for my episode with Lawrence Winnerman and Dana DuBois!The shirt Dana and I are both wearing is in my merch shop and there might just be a sale going on right now!Also my birthday is tomorrow (September 6th, obviously I’m a Virgo...what like that’s a surprise?)You could maybe do a paid subscription as a gift or buy me a coffee. Yes, I’m shameless. Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “Sometimes I forget Republican Meredith was a person.”I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat.Republican Meredith does sound fake now.Like a cryptid. Grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying saucer in the X-Files.Unfortunately, she was real.The machine that produced her was real, too.I worked in conservative media. I was part of the “new media” wing of the GOP, back when we still pretended “new media” meant we were “democratizing” political conversation and not manufacturing outrage faster with ring lights.Conservatism didn’t sell itself to me as cruelty. That would have been easier to spot. It sold itself as reason.Common sense.Freedom.Limited government.All those polished little phrases that sound sturdy until you press on them and realize they are mostly stage scenery.That’s how the myth factory works.It doesn’t begin by asking you to hate people.It begins by handing you a very flattering story about yourself.You aren’t selfish or hostile to equality. You’re sensible, you understand economics, you believe in small government and personal responsibility.Except I started noticing that the people who talked most about small government didn’t actually want small government.They wanted selective government.Government small enough to stay out of corporate boardrooms and large enough to crawl into classrooms, doctors’ offices, and bedrooms.And history was one of the main tools used to make that contradiction feel natural.I watched the machinery at work from the inside. Culture war narratives pushed to distract while someone else was dismantling social safety nets and consolidating power.I watched history get cherry-picked to justify policies that harmed the most vulnerable.I watched talking heads confidently repeat historical nonsense they either knew was false or didn’t care enough to fact-check.The point was never accuracy, it was repetition.Say it often enough, loud enough, and with enough patriotic wallpaper and eventually the lie sticks.The right doesn’t fight over history because it’s sentimental. They do it because the past is politically useful. The myths we tell about what happened then become the policies we accept now.If you can convince people that feminism destroyed the family or racism ended with a few speeches and a federal holiday, you can make attacks on women’s rights sound like restoration and civil rights enforcement sound like special treatment.Historical erasure isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.That is what I eventually had to face. I hadn’t just been lied to. The lie had been useful to me.It let me feel reasonable. Moderate. Sophisticated. It let me imagine I was standing above the mess, when really I was standing on top of people the system had already pushed down.The myth factory doesn’t ask you to become a monster.It asks you to become comfortable.My breaking point came in 2016, when I watched Trump win the Florida Republican primary and realized this was not an intellectual movement that had been hijacked. It was not a good-faith policy debate that had temporarily gone off the rails.This was the product.The fear. The cruelty. The historical illiteracy. That had been the point the entire time.My mother, sensing either political disaster or impending personal growth, handed me tequila.The next morning, hungover, I changed my party affiliation and took a sledgehammer to load-bearing walls of my career.But leaving wasn’t enough.I had helped carry the myth, so I had to help dismantle it. You don’t get to walk out of the factory covered in soot and pretend you were only sightseeing.I study history because history isn’t safely behind us. It’s alive, badly behaved, and currently being used in campaign emails.I teach it, write about it, and yell about it online because people who understand the past are much harder to control in the present.So when my friend says she forgets Republican Meredith was a person, I get it.Sometimes I forget too.But she was real.She was a person standing in the myth factory, pulling the levers and pretending she wasn’t setting fires.And now I spend my life loudly pulling the fire alarm. Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

Thank you LeftieProf, Kit Thornton, Karma, Annabelle, Maura, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois and Letters from a Feminist! I had so much fun on the show! Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

In this episode of Bitchy History, we take on Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist career woman who built a very successful career telling other women that feminism would ruin their lives.Using Schlafly’s own books, debates, and the modern afterlife of her arguments, we unpack how she helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment by selling women’s legal and economic dependence as “protection.” Schlafly argued that equality would rob women of their “rights and privileges”: exemption from the draft, husbandly support, maternal custody, and the sentimental safety of the traditional family. But what kind of privilege disappears when women become equal?We trace how Schlafly turned equality into a panic machine: draft panic, custody panic, daycare panic, bathroom panic, gay rights panic, abortion panic, and family-collapse panic. Then we follow that same logic into the present, where conservative women are still insisting that public childcare is tyranny, male provision is freedom, and motherhood only counts when it is private, unpaid, and politically useful.This is not an episode attacking mothers, homemakers, religious women, or stay-at-home wives. Feminists are not trying to ban women from choosing domestic life. The issue is whether domesticity should be made compulsory through law, economics, religion, and shame.Phyllis Schlafly called the lock privilege.And we are done admiring the upholstery.Readings Used but Absolutely Not RecommendedPhyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Christian WomanA theological anti-feminist manual in which women are told they have “power,” as long as that power never threatens male authority, legal hierarchy, or the sacred right to smile while structurally dependent.Phyllis Schlafly, Feminist FantasiesA greatest-hits album of anti-feminist panic, complete with claims that feminists are miserable, homemakers are happy, and equality is somehow bad for women. Includes Ann Coulter treating Schlafly like Joan of Arc with a newsletter.Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Venker, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can’t SayA book whose subtitle is basically “what patriarchy wants said in a higher voice.” Useful for understanding how Schlafly’s anti-feminism got repackaged for the twenty-first century.Phyllis Schlafly, Who Will Rock the Cradle?The childcare panic text. Public childcare becomes government takeover, daycare becomes the nanny state, and mothers are once again handed the bill for civilization’s emotional stability.Phyllis Schlafly, Who Killed the American Family?A late-career murder mystery where the victim is the 1950s family and every suspect is feminism, judges, gay people, professors, social workers, childcare, divorce, women’s studies, and probably a woman wearing pants somewhere.Anne Schlafly Cori, “Phyllis Schlafly was right: America must put babies and mothers first,” Fox News, May 2026Proof that Schlafly’s argument did not die. It simply logged into Fox News and started yelling about daycare.“Debate 1980, ERA: Phyllis Schlafly and Peg Anderson”Schlafly’s claims that the ERA had nothing to do with equal pay and would instead strip women of existing protections. Useful. Infuriating. “Phyllis Schlafly Interview on ERA,” Today Show, 1972Used for the “each parent gets one child” custody panic and Schlafly’s claim that ERA would take away women’s “rights and privileges.” A short clip, but spiritually exhausting.“Phyllis Schlafly Explains Why Americans Don’t Support the Equal Rights Amendment”Schlafly’s “women don’t want to be treated just like men” draft panic argument, where she frames equality as women being forced into military service rather than full constitutional citizenship. An hour long, but it contains Ann Scott reading Schlafly to filth, so it’s less annoying than some clips. Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe