It’s no accident that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt issued the Republican Party’s response to the State of the Union address from her kitchen table, since the kitchen is precisely where the GOP would prefer we women spend most of our lives. Ideally, Britt would have been canning beans or kneading bread with a baby on her hip at the same time, but the related racket would likely have made her strained stage-whispers about murderous immigrants difficult to hear.
This remarkable tableau was punctuated by the family portrait Britt shared on social media afterwards, captioned: “To the American people: Our future starts around kitchen tables just like this. With moms and dads just like you.”
Everything about Britt’s performance was a choice — a carefully crafted domestic diorama.
“Just like this” is a curious way to describe Britt’s kitchen, which is unlike any I’ve ever cooked in. No fridge plastered with kids’ drawings or chore charts. No counters strewn with mail and sunglasses and mugs. No crumb-filled toaster or gunky microwave. Nary a ceramic rooster or a cow-shaped cookie jar in sight. Not even a chalkboard with “live, laugh, love” painted in crisp white script. Just a pristine, greige showroom for conservative conformity.
Perhaps it is unkind to critique a woman’s kitchen — we get enough guff from all sides for anything and everything, from the way we look to the way we live. But the setting of Britt’s speech was as important as its substance. And as long as Britt is presenting herself as the pained face of a GOP committed to ensuring that no woman steps beyond the threshold of her own home, except to carry water for the party’s power-hungry patriarchs, her kitchen is worth talking about.
In a lot of ways, Britt’s kitchen is a trap for anyone who thinks too hard about it. We’re meant to understand the symbolism of speaking from that space, to receive an unsubtle message about a woman’s obligation to perform femininity even as she rails against the most powerful political office in the country. And her kitchen also serves as a shield; if we question it, we are sexists picking apart a woman’s choice to be there.
There’s a reason the “tradwife” — the right-wing Christian ideal of femininity rooted in white supremacy and retrograde politics — is on the rise on social media. Conservatives are scrambling to make the confines of traditional womanhood and obligatory motherhood seem appealing, even soothing, even as they work to ensure that women have fewer choices — about our bodies, about where our children go to school, about what we can afford to feed our families — than ever.
But everything about Britt’s performance was a choice — a carefully crafted domestic diorama in which a young, conventionally attractive white woman hit all the right “mama bear” notes and claimed family values as the exclusive domain of American conservatives. Britt made an explicit plea to her “fellow moms,” saying that “there is no greater blessing in life than our children.” The whole exercise wanted us to forget that her party is defunding public schools, undermining in vitro fertilization treatments, and threatening women’s lives and fertility by banning abortion. That Republicans are the ones endangering kids by making it easier to put them to work in hazardous conditions, and standing by as migrant children drown in the Rio Grande.
Britt is desperate to assure us that there are plenty of roles for women in the GOP’s America.
Under these circumstances, the smart — and cynical — move is absolutely to prop up the youngest, most telegenic woman senator you can find and have her deliver a tirade situating modern America as a bloody battlefield in which every grocery run risks death. It’s what you do when American voters — including Republicans — are turning out to support abortion rights time and time again. It’s what you do when women are being prosecuted for having miscarriages. It’s what you do when your leading presidential candidate has been found liable for sexual abuse and fined in excess of $450 million for committing fraud.
Britt is desperate to assure us that there are plenty of roles for women in the GOP’s America. After all, there’s always lots of work to be done in the kitchen.
