My Greek town doesn’t need more tradwives

My recent piece for UnHerd

Pick up a book, ladies

This piece was originally published on UnHerd

I remember the first time I realised I was not like British girls. It was my second day in the UK, and I was at a freshers’ week club night. I was dolled up and trying to femininely, if awkwardly, dance next to some Italian girls who plucked me from my student dorm and adopted me for the night, when, suddenly, a flock of British girls dropped like a glitter bomb in the middle of the dance floor. They wore heavy makeup and clothes my Greek mother would describe as man-repellent, and danced like nobody was watching, limbs flailing around like inflatable tube men. I was mesmerised by their evident disregard or ignorance of what is attractive to a man. I was green with envy.

Wiggling joylessly in my skirt and tights, I craved to be on whatever they’d taken. Luckily I was soon to get my fix. Feminism, I was told at my London university, was what allowed British women to live their lives free of striving to be the embodiment of femininity, a value enshrined in my DNA as a Greek woman.

British feminism was thrilling and contagious and shared generously among students like freshers’ flu. Even international students caught it. At the height of my student council career, I campaigned to ban the song “Blurred Lines” from being played in student-union venues and then followed it up with a zero tolerance to sexual harassment campaign. As a Left-wing immigrant woman, my student politics career unfolded brightly before me. These were simpler times.

My disillusionment began when this brand of feminism started to conflict with my Greek heritage. It was 2013, and the height of Lean In, and I had British friends who saw make-up as optional and being comfortable and authentic as mandatory. But most astonishingly, they were certain they never wanted to get married. I was impressed and intimidated. I had no blueprint for a life without the barebones of the nuclear family.

Some years later, during lockdown when everyone was going a bit mad, reading about the tensions between liberal feminism and wholesome traditional values seemed way more exciting than chasing dust bunnies with my Dyson. I started consuming content that challenged the feminism I had found so delicious in my first year in London. Even in mainstream ideological corners, women started questioning liberal and queer feminism’s excesses. Books, podcasts, and Substacks popped up and did very well: these months were filled with episodes of Red Scare, Areo magazine and rewarmed Camille Paglia. I swiftly was red-pilled on this neo-prude feminism.

Intellectually, feminism was no longer untouchable; culturally, it was no longer cool. Girl Boss was used as a sarcastic snarl, reserved for women with outward success and questionable values, who were preoccupied with themselves and their image. The conversation had moved on; feminism is mainstream now — what’s next?

It wasn’t just the reading matter that gave me pause. I had flown back to be with my family in Greece to avoid being in London during the pandemic. And nothing will make you stop questioning feminism faster than spending six months in your hometown locked in with your mother. I was slapped in the face with a parallel reality I had forgotten about. People back home, including my mother, are not just pro-marriage — they are obsessed with it. Stereotypes are never a fair depiction of reality but can indicate trends, and girls from my hometown, Thessaloniki, have a national reputation. “Thessalonikia” denotes a woman who overdresses, over-grooms herself and is alwaysfeminine. The recurring meme is a girl dressed like a Love Islandcontestant with the tag line: “Thessalonikia going to the library to study.”

I used to find the stereotype charming. But after moving back, it started to make me sad. My city is both one of the most youthful and one of the worst hit by the financial crisis, with high youth unemployment — especially among young women. I began to see the emergence of the Thessalonikia as related to the economic and social position of women in Greece. My hometown girls were not expressing their personal style; they were desperately trying to distinguish themselves to attract a partner — what they perceived as their only ticket to financial security and social status. There was little in terms of civic life and professional opportunities to lift them up. While the phrase may inspire eye-rolls in Britain, in Greece the “male gaze” was still omnipresent. And as a result, more young women spend an increasing portion of their diminishing resources on attracting and keeping the attention and affection of men.

My mother, released from the constraints of having her adult daughter physically removed from her orbit in a foreign land, scrutinised my socialising with a toothcomb. Her dormant maternal instincts were itchy. Raising stray kittens would no longer do; she wanted human grandkids. And I remembered why I left.

My wider social and family circle constantly assessed my appearance, the criteria tightly tethered by banal visions of womanhood. My social life was a means to an end. My career and education a tick-box exercise on the way to the matchmaker. Maybe feminism overreached in some select intellectual progressive spaces in the English-speaking world — but these are cultural elites, not global majorities.

As far as women in need of feminism go, my mother is hardly the worst case. Much as I baulked at her traditional worldview, I also, over time, saw the emotional and practical value in it. She wants what most of us do: a good balance of feminism and family life. She built her own business and planted her office next to our home, feeding me spoonfuls of lentil soup with one hand and shouting at clients on her Nokia flip phone with the other. She stressed the importance of education for women, not for intellectual fulfilment but because she had seen too many women, abused or cheated or otherwise humiliated, locked into marriages they could not afford to leave.

I am not surprised, then, that my sexual reputation and safety was her top concern. My childhood gang in the village on the island of Crete, where my mother was born, would share casual tales of fathers who tied them to bed poles, boyfriends who gave them black eyes, of being locked in wardrobes and spat on by neighbours. It’s comical even to imagine talking to them about our latest metropolitan feminist debates about whether the sexual revolution was a net positive or net negative, or about whether marriage benefits men or women more. It would be the equivalent of telling a child who hasn’t learnt to read yet to steer clear from Harry Potter because its author gets cancelled in the end.

The same problem applies to trad-wife feminism: it’s only considered radical within an elite metropolitan milieu. Everywhere else, it’s just the oppressive norm. Thus there is something distasteful about fashionable neo-prudes — often successful journalists or influencers — telling women to return to the hearth, while millions of women around the world still dream of escaping it. Affluent women may have grown tired of equality, but they shouldn’t give up on the revolution before it’s gone global. If I have to pick between extremes in my Greek hometown, I’d rather see Thessalonikias become Girl Bosses than trad wives.