What Are Females For?

According to JD Vance, "females" are for reproduction, childcare, and not much else.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance really does love to run his mouth on podcasts. The latest unearthed audio has him agreeing with a conservative podcast host on what women are for once we hit menopause: Helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” The whole purpose.

Vance has opinions about many different kinds of women. Those who don’t have kids are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too” and lack “a direct stake in the future of the country.” Women who care about their work and plan their families are suckers: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Step mothers (and step parents generally), he has suggested, are not real parents. We have not yet heard his views on the purpose of pre-pubescent girls, but he has said that he believes even raped and impregnated children should be forced to give birth, even though their circumstances are “inconvenient” — and Ohio, the state he represents as a US senator, has done just that, notoriously refusing to allow a ten-year-old rape victim to end her pregnancy (she had to travel out of state, at which point Republicans targeted the doctor who helped her).

The things Vance has prioritized in his own life include escaping a tough upbringing through going into the military and then pursuing higher education; working for (a lot of) pay in what sound like pretty demanding jobs; writing a memoir that catapulted him to national fame; running for political office; and eventually, once he was ready — which wasn’t until he was in his 30s — having children. He very much demeans women who make similar choices.

It’s worth listening to the full Vance clip, because he also gets into the childcare decisions his own family made. In the context of discussing the birth of his first child, he criticizes what he characterizes as a neoliberal model in which working for pay is prioritized over other good ways of contributing to a society. Caring for children, he seems to be suggesting, is valuable work, even if it doesn’t contribute to GDP. And this all sounds great, right? Except… he doesn’t then say that he cared for his own child. Instead, he talks about how his mother-in-law took a year-long sabbatical from her job as a biology professor to come raise his child. His wife, he said, was due to start a clerkship seven weeks after birth, despite “still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval” (was Vance sleeping?) when his mother-in-law came out. The podcast host, Eric Weinstein, adds approvingly: “a biology professor, PhD, drops what they’re doing to immediately tend to the need of a new mother with her infant?” (only the new mother, apparently, needs help with “her” infant). And Vance says, “Right,” and then goes onto say that liberal economics would want the mother-in-law to give them the funds to pay someone else (ostensibly another woman) to help raise their kids. But! The good and right thing happened, which is that a female family member took a year off of her paid work when the natural caregiver (mom) couldn’t be there.

The concept of a male caregiver doesn’t come into the picture at all.

What was Vance doing around the time of his son’s birth and earliest months? Running a useless nonprofit and then joining an investment banking firm. His wife was clerking on the Supreme Court, the kind of rare career-making opportunity few law school graduates are ever going to turn down. According to Vance, the norm of “of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it’s actually consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself.” But at no point in his career, at least as far as I can tell, has Vance prioritized care work over paid labor. At no point in his career, at least as far as I can tell, has Vance so much as argued that men are making a mistake by prioritizing paid wage labor. It’s only working women who have, in his words, “been had.”

Was what Vance doing when his son was born all that important? No. But it was paid, and he’s a man. And in Vance’s view, care work is women’s work. The idea that he might take a year-long sabbatical to raise his own son doesn’t come up. His mother-in-law, on the other hand, is purposed to do just that.

To add insult to injury, Vance characterizes his mother-in-law’s help as “the most transgressive thing I’ve ever done against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family.” Except that, of course, he didn’t do anything. The women did all of it.

A grandparent coming to help out with a new baby isn’t unusual; it’s also a huge gift, and something too many American families have to rely on because we have no other safety net. A normal person might express gratitude to their mother-in-law for such overwhelming generosity. JD Vance used the story as an example of a post-menopausal woman’s purpose, and has used his political influence to force women into motherhood and further shred the safety net for women, mothers, and families. Yes, his way of speaking is extremely weird. But his views on women and work are much worse than weird: They’re dangerous.

xx Jill