Helen Lewis
speaker
1,139 appearances
8 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Jun
Helen Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
The idea that you would restore discrimination back into the job market by saying it's okay to preferentially hire men, married men.
It's okay to, you know, to promote them more, to pay them higher salaries.
You know, what we want to do is essentially restore a traditional way of life in which, you know, men are the ones who go out and earn money.
And women's money, if anything, is, you know, it's back to being pin money.
It's kind of secondary.
Yeah, I think that is part of it because another thing that often comes up is the idea that women are on a huge amount of anxiety medication and antidepressants.
So you have this situation in which women having anything that they feel is wrong in their lives is taken as proof that they've picked the wrong course in life.
And if only they would pick this alternative vision of femininity, they would be happy.
and this is part of the exchange that I had with Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor, that this is not a new phenomenon.
It was something that Betty Friedan was writing about in The Feminine Mystique when she was talking about specifically the unhappiness of stay-at-home housewives.
She said, you know, they're taking medication like cough drops.
And the bit that I struggle with as somebody who loves reading historical novels, historical fiction, historical biographies, is that
absolutely sure that women in 1700 were living these incredibly blissful lives.
That's not what you get from the literature of the period.
In my first book, which is A History of Feminism, I wrote about some of the women who wrote to Marie Stopes, who was our kind of version of Margaret Sanger, a contraceptive pioneer.
And they were describing lives of despair, where they had far more children than they can afford.
They didn't know how to stop having any more.
You know, they were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing.
But this is the kind of, you know, that era has now passed into memory long enough that it is susceptible to being, you know, revitalized into this kind of trad wife vision that is sold to people on Instagram because no one can really remember what it was like to live in those conditions anymore.
I do find the kind of battery cage idea of humanity to be quite compelling.
Showing 321–340 of 1,139 · page 17 of 57
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