Sigh, oh for the days this was normal, and not the sh** show the nation's politics are today.
Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, August 18, 1923. Silent Cal goes riding...
Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, August 18, 1923. Silent Cal goes riding...:
Lex Anteinternet: Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get ...
Lex Anteinternet: Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get ...:
Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.
Soviet realisim painting depeciting sorting grain. While hopelessly romanticized, the depiction of women in this work is accurate, and would have been fort the pre Soviet era as well.
A tired, discouraged Tik Toker young woman has gone viral with a post, in which she says in tears;
So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
I am so tired. . . I want to put my feet up. .
She says it, struggling back heavy tears.
A couple of things before we go on to analyze this topic, and people's reaction to her cri de coeur.
First, my initial guess was that this probably would have resulted in a flood of people making fun of the young woman, but in fact, there isn't much of that. Lots of women actually posted back with complete sympathy.
A few men posted, too, in this one instance, stupidly:
Jacob McCoombe
Who thought ANYONE should have to work? We should all be sitting on the beach eating cheese and wine π
6-61453Reply
AtticusMax123
but... there would not be any cheese or wine .. π±
6-9 64Reply
Jacob McCoombe
I’d classify it as a hobby. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t mind at all making homemade cheese and wine
6-950 Reply AtticusMax123
but that's work. it's where we have gone wrong. all worried about money, instead of worrying about actually enjoying and being passionate about
Ahh. . .that age old belief that farming and agriculture is not work. . . from urbanites. Farmers, of course, believe hte same thing about people who have office jobs in town.
But I digress.
Quite a few replies were like this one:
Fr why did they do thatπ€¨ I would have been completely chill running a household cooking, going shopping, cleaning stress free like ugh I hate working
One of the most interesting replies was this one:
π₯πΈππΎπππ₯
we just wanted the option we didn’t want to HAVE to work πππ
So I'll start my comments here.
Secondly, therefore, the question, answered straight, and then I guess through a technological analysis and economic analysis. . . or I suppose I'll look at all of these simultaneously.
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
Well, proto feminist and early feminist did that. The reason that they did it, as understood by them at the time, was that they lived in a world that had been heavily impacted by industrialization which had removed men from home based enterprise, for the most sake, and sent them off to "work places" of various types during their working shifts. This vested economic power in men, and in turn the economic power equated with political power and societal power. Arguably, it was the power aspect of this that most concerned early feminist and proto feminist, as that imbalance of power worked heavily to the detriment of women in all sorts of ways.
At the same time, however, technological advances made women's labor in the homes greatly reduced, as we have described here:
Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two
So, basically, feminism rose up in the 20th Century as part of a long, slow, female emancipation movement that began prior to the Civil War but which really took root in the very late 19th Century and very early 20th Century just as technological changes made it possible for fewer women to be required to be employed in the household, a necessity which had greatly increased, ironically enough, when industrialization mandated men to leave the household.
Put another way, consider this. Once men worked in factories, or town jobs, there was no way that they were really available to lend any kind of hand with domestic matters. This was so much the case, that boarding houses were a staple of men's lives if they were single. Indeed, they were so much a staple that they inspired a long-running cartoon which would now make no sense to most Americans.
Indeed, boarding houses were so common that they were the souse of a folk song noted by Mark Twain, which went:
There is a boarding-house, far far away,
Where they have ham and eggs, 3 times a day.
O, how the boarders yell,
When they hear that dinner bell
They give that landlord –@#$3
Three times a day.
– The American Claimant, Chapter 17*
This brings up another aspect of this, however.
Women have always worked, and some women have worked outside their households for time immemorial. Indeed, as the thread linked in above discussed this:
That's correct. Nearly 20% of women worked outside their households as early as 1900.
Of that remaining 80%, at that time, you have to keep in mind that the farm population was much higher than it is today, its decline as a percentage of the population being one of the sad realities of the barbarity of modern life. Even this is a bit deceptive, however. PBS's American Experience relates the following:
1870 The 1870 census shows that farmers, for the first time, are in the minority. Of all employed persons, only 47.7 percent are farmers. As farming becomes more mechanized, farmers rely more on bank loans for land and equipment.
1880 U.S. population reaches 50,155,783, with farm population estimated at 22,981,000. Forty-nine percent of all employed persons are farmers, and of those, one in four is a tenant, despite the Homestead Acts. With the development of barbed-wire fencing and windmills, plow farming reaches the Great Plains.
1893 U.S. experiences an economic crisis: 642 banks fail and 16,000 businesses close. As produce prices plummet, tens of thousands of small farms go under.
1900 There are 5.7 million farms in the U.S., with an average size of 138 acres.
1920 The number of farms has grown to 6.5 million and is home to roughly 32 million Americans, or 30 percent of the population. This would soon change. Migration, mostly by young people who left for the cities, escalated over the next ten years.
What this shows us, of course, is that farmers as a percentage of the American public peaked in the late 19th Century, dropping to 30% by 1920. 1919 was the last year of economic parity for American farmers. Still, for our discussion here, this is significant. 1920 was the year that the 19th Amendment was ratified in the United States, and women got the right to vote throughout the country. At that time 20% of women were employed outside the household, and approximately 30% of them lived in farm families, and women in farm families most definitely worked. That would mean, therefore, that about 50% of women were actually working in some fashion in addition to maintaining their households, and that's at a bare minimum.
Indeed, if we consider the fact that family run businesses were much more common in the first half of the 20th Century than they are now, that figure increases even more. For families that owned small businesses, whether they be stores, or restaurants, etc., the entire household was employed in them in some fashion. There may have been a division of labor in those households, but it was not as great as might be imagined.
Even for professionals, this was true to some degree. Doctors, for example, frequently had their offices in their homes up into the first quarter of the 20th Century. Medicine was more primitive to be sure, and the practice was not as lucrative as it was to become. Quite frequently, jobs preformed by hired help today, were preformed by a spouse. A person might expect the receptionist, for example, to be married to the physician. "He married his nurse" or "he married his secretary" was a common line for doctors and lawyers, and other professionals. The businesses were much less lucrative, and the family connections, and the natural inclination for couples to work together well expressed.
So, in terms of "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?", well, women didn't have to fight for "jobs". Having a job, one way or another, was a condition of life for most women well before women are regarded as having entered the workplace.
So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.
Well, what's up with it is that as farming as the primary occupation of people declined, and men began to have no choice but to work in other capacities, an unnatural economic division of resources occured. A division of labor, quite frankly, is natural. Men and women really are different, vegan eating emaciated weenies views aside. But men working daily away from their families are not. The economic power, therefore, vested in men, and that created an odd unnatural living condition that still prevails in some quarters. The Rust Belt life of going to work in the factory early, for a good paycheck, getting off work late, hitting the bars with the guys in the Rust Belt Tavern where the workers would get blotto and make wolf whistles at the bar maids, before going home blitzed and demanding dinner from their wives came about.
And while that is clearly an exaggeration, it's not all that unrealistic of a depiction of the height of the American blue collar era. The point isn't to unfairly condemn it, but rather to note that money, the motivator for crawling out of bed every day and heading to the GM plant, vested primarily in the hands of men and not women. That was a problem.
In addition to that, what we've already noted above occured. Domestic machinery came about, which made female household labor surplus.
While we haven't addressed it yet, of the 50% of women not employed on the farm or outside the home, the remainder tended to be actually "employed" in the true sense of the word, in the heavy labor of just keeping a household going. Indeed, the 20% that were employed outside the home tended to be actually employed, as maids and servants, in the houses of those who could afford it. And employing domestic help was surprisingly common.
Americans of a certain age will have watched The Andy Griffith Show, in which, of course, Aunt Bea is a resident of the widowed Sheriff Taylor's household, and acts as the woman of the house. In the very first episode of the show, she's introduced when Taylor's prior live in female servant has left to get married. Sheriffs don't make a vast amount of money, of course, but the audience would not have thought this odd, as it wasn't that unusual. Other television depictions of the same era have similar depictions.
In my own family, my mother's family in Montreal employed several domestic servants. Now, in fairness, they were doing very well at the time, but again this wasn't unusual. With a large number of children, and before our current era in every way, she employed a collection of QuΓ©bΓ©coise who cooked and cleaned in the house. They were not servants, in the English manor house manner, but domestic labor.
And this gets us to the next facet of this discussion. Prior to the 1950s, and even well after that, female labor outside of the household fell into a fairly limited number of occupations, and that is what feminist were struggling against. Women of lower means, including married women, often found employment as servants and maids. By the first quarter of the 20th Century, they were finding employment in offices. Poor women found employment in certain types of factories, often featuring extremely dangerous working conditions. Women of greater means, but not wealth, had teaching and nursing open to them.
Indeed, it is that last fact that demonstrates what really occured, and what the "fight" was actually about. Young middle class women finishing school, and more women than men finished school, who wanted to work could choose to teach or nurse. If they were Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican (Episcopalian) or Lutheran, they might choose to become nuns. We don't tend to think of Protestant denominations having nuns, but they in fact do, and this opens up another aspect of this. Nearly all women married at the time, and nearly all women still do. It's a natural institution. But not all women wish to marry. Just as we've discussed with the topic of male homosexuality, religious institutions offered an acceptable way to avoid marriage and still have a career. That may well mean that not all had deep religious vocations (certainly most did), but that was an honorable path for them.
What was not possible, generally, was to become a physician, lawyer or the like. Professions were closed to women. Most occupations outside of those noted were, which was a legacy byproduct of the early stages of the industrial revolution. Men were forced outside of the home for heavy labor, but some had the option of working outside the home in "desk jobs". While these jobs were in particularly less subject to gender differences than those involving heavy labor, the concept that they were was absent and women were excluded.
Eliminating that exclusion is what feminist were "fighting for".
That fight, we might tell our youthful distressed TikToker, was one worth fighting for. In the end, it's not that the fight was to allow her to work, the fight was to allow her to work at something other than scrubbing floors.
But all battles are always subject o the law of unintended consequences.
Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about. The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force. In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them. Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.
Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss. Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy. Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s. Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family". The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family. Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to. Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.
The problem with it is that it's a lie. Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy. Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.
The additional problem is corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism became so dominant in American society that by the 1970s it had swamped the original purpose of the economy and converted human beings into consumers. Often missed in this is that while corporations need people to have enough money to buy products, it needs labor to be as cheap as possible, or even better nonexistent. In this fashion, capitalism's two driving forces are actually pitted against each other.
Be that as it may, the freeing up of female labor from the household after World War Two was a boon to capitalism. More workers within the same population meant reduced labor costs. Combined with a new societal imperative pushing women into the workplace, the rise of birth control which inhibited one of the primary reasons they were not, and the creation of a child warehousing industry, capitalism, along with socialism, drug women out of the household who didn't want to be in it, and put them into jobs which had little value in terms of the feminist dream of "fulfillment".
Indeed, the ultimate irony of the entire effort was that at the end of the day, corporate interest most benefitted. Feminist never supported a movement that would "allow" women to work, but which actually compelled them to be required to, believing somehow that every woman who worked would find a high paying professional job. In reality, doubling the workforce within the same overall population depressed wages in non-professional categories and ended up forcing all women to work, including in families in which there were children, which ended up being most families. Feminism, ironically enough, had a mostly male view of the world, and a mostly Hefnerescque few of it, and the general assumption was that women wouldn't have children, and wouldn't even get married, but live a variant of the Playboy Philosophy, albeit without the huge boobs and dumb girl next store, but rather with an anorexic career woman in that role.
So in the new, in the dominant Anglo-American Culture, all women must now work and there's really no other easy economic option. While plenty of families opt out of this, at least for at time, many cannot. The big lie of "career fulfillment" has become a cultural norm, and interestingly enough has lead to personal misery on the party of many, who abandon all else for a career that, in the end, is just a job, but one without purpose or meaning. And more than a few women have been left embittered by being forced into a labor/employment lifestyle that they resent and feel is unnatural. Indeed, we've noted that here before:
So what does the TikToker do?
We don't know, but it's apparently physically fatiguing. A quick look at her TikTok page (and it is quick, as TikTok is weird) suggests that she works in something in which she interacts with customers, so perhaps sales.
So is her cri de cΕur misplaced?
Well, at least partially, and probably substantially. Unless she was born into wealth, and there's no reason to believe that, she was not going to escape all work in the first place. The nature and the purpose of it would be different, however. More likely than not, if she was her current age in 1923, she may have worked outside the home a bit, but then would probably find her work, and it is work, would be at home. If it were 1823, on the other hand, or 1723, her work for her entire life would almost certainly be at home, unless she was born into severe poverty or wealth, neither of which seem to be the case.
So is her complaint about nothing?
Well, like a lot of female cries in this area, and there are a lot of them, the answer to that is no.
One thing that the feminists crossed into, at some point, although they've started to cross back due to the unintended results of their success, was a war on women as women. People remain people no matter what. Truth be known, a lot of people don't want to be career people, they just want to live their lives and for a lot of them, those lives are close in their minds to the historic norm. The authors of Cosmopolitan may have imagined all women living lives of professional independence, sterile, and free of any commitments to anything, but sane human beings don't imagine lives like that. So most people end up marrying sooner or later. Truth be known, in people's younger years, they spend a lot of time worrying about this topic and hoping to find somebody.
But the world brought about by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution doesn't really accommodate that very well. So women who would have preferred the more traditional roles are punished as society won't allow for it. Beyond that, the logical conclusion of a sexless society is a gender bending one, and we now see disturbed men trying to cross into female status, as in spite of everything women are allowed societally breaks on the demands that men still remain subject to.
In the end, while things were achieved that needed to be, perhaps in part because of the era during which they were achieved, they were overachieved. Women were allowed ultimately into every role, including some, such as combat soldier, which history and genetics would naturally preclude.
All in all, what we've never figured out is how to deal with the aftershocks and destruction that followed in the wake of massive societal change in the West following World War Two, and more particularly the Revolution of 1968. As societies don't really tend to debate what direction they're headed in, at least cleanly, this creates a titanic mess. But stepping back from one sad girl with sore feet, what we should be seeing is a host of things. One is that feminism combined with Hefnerism, pharmaceuticals and corporate capitalism to the detriment of everyone. The late stages of that contribute to the warp and woof of our times as the left pushes to destroy what remains of evolution and biology and the varying elements on the right grasp to restore it, without really understanding what happened. Society isn't going back to any particular date in the past, and there never was a perfect one, but most likely evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained human nature will recover an awful lot of it, in some new sort of compromise.
Footnotes:
*It seems a little disputed, but the same tune may have been used by, or came from, There Is A Happy Land, which was a religious themed tune.
There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;
Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,
Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.
Come to that happy land, come, come away;
Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.
Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;
Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;
Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;
And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.
There is a Boarding House was adopted for the classic soldier's song Old Soldiers Never Die.
There is an old cookhouse, far far away
Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.
Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea
And we are gradually fading away.
Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.
Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.
Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.
Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will
So we drill and drill until we fade away.
It's worth noting that the Army, prior to World War Two, and indeed for some time thereafter, shared certain common features with boarding room life in that it was largely all male, and the occupataion took care of room and board.
Prior Related Threads:
Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two
The Long Slow Rise. Was Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two.
For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds. Generations: Part Three of Three
Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Harvard Business Review; What So Man...
Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Harvard Business Review; What So Man...:
Blog Mirror: Harvard Business Review; What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
From the Harvard Business Review:
And why its worth reading:
And this:
And here it is for Hillbilly Elegy, which seems to take a darker view, but which is focused, really, on Appalachia, I think (based on an interview I heard of the author):
But that element of struggle, noted immediately above, actually was and still sort of is there. When I was young a huge number of the professionals I knew had parents who were very blue collar or had been farmers and ranchers. And, in terms of outlook, those professionals really basically remained at or near those classes themselves. This even went on to the next generation, and I'd put myself in that category and I'm not the only one I know. It may seem odd, but there are a lot of lawyers my age, 50 and up, who tend to be more naturally comfortable in a social setting with farmers and ranchers rather than people who are in the high dollar business world, even if they work in the high dollar business world themselves (which doesn't mean they are uncomfortable with the latter). And at the same time, more comfortable doesn't mean comfortable, as one thing that any lawyer, and I imagine doctor, finds out is that once you have obtained that status, you will never be looked at the same way again by your blue collar fellows.
Still, it's interesting to think that even now, and particularly for men my age and up, being a professional might still mean that your outlook on many things is defined by that and retains at least one foot there. An odd example of that is in terms of automobiles. My father always drove a pickup truck as his daily driver and I've always driving a four wheel drive. I have two regular vehicles I use myself now, one being an old Jeep, and the other an aging Dodge D3500. That latter vehicle is my best one (I'm not counting the vehicle my wife drives, which I do not usually). It's a 1 ton 4x4 truck. I occasionally have younger lawyers express amazement at my driving it, but I use it for hauling horses and cattle as well, and I've never not had a fairly plain 4x4 truck. And this isn't uncommon for older lawyers here. I've always been amazed by the amazement, but when I look at what they're driving, I see they're driving something rooted in the more urban professional world than I am.
I note all of that as what I think this analysis lacks is that for a lot of people in the middle class the call is truly back to another world. Just because the younger kids had to leave the farm or ranch doesn't mean that mentally they ever did. The likes and dislikes of the sons of machinist and boilermakers often remains exactly what their parents were. I once had a hugely successful Dallas lawyer lament his life and career there, then excuse his choice in the same manner that Arnold Rothstein did in the Godfather, "This is the life we chose". But all of that may mean that the entire culture is looking back more than many suppose.
My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.Worth reading.
And why its worth reading:
For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.Seems like I read that elsewhere. . . oh yeah. Here.
And this:
“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.
Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who’s stupid?This article refers to a couple of books, Limbo and Hillbilly Elegy. I'd only heard of one. But there's something they are on to, even if I'd refine the thesis. Here's the Amazon synopsis for Limbo:
In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. These people often find that the values of the working class are not sufficient guidance to navigate the white-collar world, where unspoken rules reflect primarily upper-class values. Torn between the world they were raised in and the life they aspire too, they hover between worlds, not quite accepted in either. Himself the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo. For millions of Americans, these stories will serve as familiar reminders of the struggles of achieving the American Dream.
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
I don't agree, off hand, with all of the apparent conclusions of these books are, but there's something, well more than something, to the concept of the middle class having roots in a different world than the upper middle class does, and that's significant. Part of it is for this reason, noted in the article:But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.Right on point. But there's another item here, where at least locally, I think she's off point, but it leads to a significant point nonetheless.
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.At least by my observation, blue collar people don't actually resent professionals uniformly, although they sometimes do as a class (particularity in regards to lawyers). They tend to think that professionals in some categories, well lawyers again, don't really work. I had, for example, a really working class client I rarely do work for call up the other day and say, as a half joke, "well get your feet off the desk and get back to work. . . " when he called, a joke he repeats every time he calls. But at the same time law and medicine have long been viewed as the escape hatch from the lower middle class to the upper middle class by lower middle class families.
But that element of struggle, noted immediately above, actually was and still sort of is there. When I was young a huge number of the professionals I knew had parents who were very blue collar or had been farmers and ranchers. And, in terms of outlook, those professionals really basically remained at or near those classes themselves. This even went on to the next generation, and I'd put myself in that category and I'm not the only one I know. It may seem odd, but there are a lot of lawyers my age, 50 and up, who tend to be more naturally comfortable in a social setting with farmers and ranchers rather than people who are in the high dollar business world, even if they work in the high dollar business world themselves (which doesn't mean they are uncomfortable with the latter). And at the same time, more comfortable doesn't mean comfortable, as one thing that any lawyer, and I imagine doctor, finds out is that once you have obtained that status, you will never be looked at the same way again by your blue collar fellows.
Still, it's interesting to think that even now, and particularly for men my age and up, being a professional might still mean that your outlook on many things is defined by that and retains at least one foot there. An odd example of that is in terms of automobiles. My father always drove a pickup truck as his daily driver and I've always driving a four wheel drive. I have two regular vehicles I use myself now, one being an old Jeep, and the other an aging Dodge D3500. That latter vehicle is my best one (I'm not counting the vehicle my wife drives, which I do not usually). It's a 1 ton 4x4 truck. I occasionally have younger lawyers express amazement at my driving it, but I use it for hauling horses and cattle as well, and I've never not had a fairly plain 4x4 truck. And this isn't uncommon for older lawyers here. I've always been amazed by the amazement, but when I look at what they're driving, I see they're driving something rooted in the more urban professional world than I am.
I note all of that as what I think this analysis lacks is that for a lot of people in the middle class the call is truly back to another world. Just because the younger kids had to leave the farm or ranch doesn't mean that mentally they ever did. The likes and dislikes of the sons of machinist and boilermakers often remains exactly what their parents were. I once had a hugely successful Dallas lawyer lament his life and career there, then excuse his choice in the same manner that Arnold Rothstein did in the Godfather, "This is the life we chose". But all of that may mean that the entire culture is looking back more than many suppose.
Lex Anteinternet: The Trads, Rad Trads, and Fellow Travelers.
Lex Anteinternet: The Trads, Rad Trads, and Fellow Travelers.: 
The Trads, Rad Trads, and Fellow Travelers.
Not Trads. . . or are they? Or models for trads? Trad fellow travelers?
As our frequent readers (if there are any) know, I'm Catholic.
I'm a very orthodox Catholic as well, but I don't fit into that group of Catholics which Catholic's call "Trads", let alone "Rad Trads". The "trad" in that moniker stands for "traditionalist" and the "rad", when its applied, stands for "radical".
The photograph above, unfortunately not entirely in focus and in black and white, dates from November 1958. It depicts St. Anthony's of Padua Church in Casper Wyoming on the occasion of my parents wedding. the alter rail is clearly visable in this photograph.
Christianity is the largest religion in the world, and the largest Christian religion is Catholicism, which was also the first Christian religion.1 Nonetheless, in the US, which is such a Protestant country that it doesn't realize it's a Protestant country, probably only Catholics know of the existence of Trads and Rad Trads.2 Lots of people are aware that there's a split in the Catholic Church between liberals and conservatives, and that with the aged in control of the upper reaches of the Church right now there's a seeming push towards liberalism, but few outside the Church are aware of Catholic Traditionalist, who are conservative, and then some.
I should note that by using the term "orthodox", I'm in the conservative camp, which is by far the largest part of the loyal Catholic body in the US, and probably globally. Use of the term "orthodox" here is probably confusing to non-Catholics, and even to some Catholics, as it naturally recalls the Orthodox Churches, by which most Americans mean the Eastern Orthodox. There are also the Oriental Orthodox, being that body of Apostolic Christians who were separated from the rest of the Church and who didn't make it to the later councils. All three larger bodies, the Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, are highly similar in most ways but have endured separations due to various reasons. The schism between Catholics and the Easter Orthodox was the most serious, although but for political reason within Orthodoxy, it'd be over now. It will end at some point, hopefully soon.
Anyhow, when the schism came about, both Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox referred to themselves as being "orthodox", which for the most part, they actually are. Orthodox Catholics hold to the magisterium of the Church, and the Eastern Orthodox hold to the tenants of Eastern Orthodoxy, both of which overlap to an enormous degree. By being "orthodox", members were declaring they did not hold heretical views. The Church was already known as the Universal Church, and in Latin "universal' is catholic, so when the Eastern Orthodox separated, they had to call themselves something, and they came to be called the Orthodox Church as a symbol that they held orthodox theology, although there was somewhat of a split in views on some things between the East and West.
Anyhow, Catholics who call themselves "orthodox" mean that they hold the full magisterium in their beliefs, and do not agree with innovations that some liberal Catholics would interject. True orthodox Catholics make absolutely everyone uncomfortable on the religious left and right, and on the political left and right.
And then there's the Trads.
Orthodox beliefs are one thing, but traditionalism is another. I say that to note it, not to condemn it.
Traditionalist of any kind have a strong attraction to tradition. I know that's kind of a "d'uh" statement, but it's one we have to start with. Chesterton, who admired tradition, defined it as follows, with this quote ironically often being used in part to condemn tradition, failing to note the second part about the "arrogant oligarchy":
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
Chesterton, of course, also gave us Chesterton's Fence, which holds:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
So who and what are Catholic Traditionalists?
That's a really interesting question.
Wikipedia, which frankly isn't the font of knowledge so commonly believed, defines them as follows:
Traditionalist Catholicism is a movement encompassing members of the Catholic Church and offshoot groups of the Catholic Church, which emphasizes beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, liturgical forms, devotions and presentations of teaching associated with the Church before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).Of particular emphasis among Traditionalist Catholics is the Tridentine Mass, a form of the Roman Rite largely replaced in general use by the post-Second Vatican Council Mass of Paul VI.
Wikipedia, footnotes omitted.
I guess that's right, but it's more than that, as I'll eventually get to in this long boring entry.
Born in 1963, like most Catholics alive today, I don't remember the Tridentine Mass. And I'm a very Western Catholic. The Ordinary Form of the Mass is the only one I've ever seen in a Latin Rite Church. I've heard Latin interjected into the Mass, which has become increasingly common in recent years, but I've never heard a Latin Mass.3 Indeed, due to the controversy surrounding the Pope's recent reduction in the allowance of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, as It's now called, I had to look it up and found that it didn't match at all what my expectations were. I frankly thought, naively, that for the most part the Latin Mass was the current Ordinary Form, pretty much, in Latin. No, not at all.
Indeed, the current Ordinary From is not only in the "vernacular", i.e., the language of the culture it is said in, but it reformed the presentation in other very useful and profound ways, greatly expanding liturgical readings in both the Old and New Testaments.4 The improvements were good ones.
This isn't to fault the Tridentine Mass, which was the form of the Mass said between 1570 and 1962. It's interesting to note, as is so often missed, that the Tridentine Mass was not "the original form of the Mass" but rather one that came in after the Reformation was already underway. The Tridentine Mass came in with Pope Pius V's bull Quo Primum which made his revised Roman Missal obligatory throughout the Latin Church, except for those places and congregations whose distinct rites could demonstrate an antiquity of two hundred years or more. Indeed, some of those other Rites still survive, although they are fairly rare. It should additionally be noted, this didn't impact the Eastern Rite at all.
This made a lot of sense, and it explains a lot about the Latin Rite. Prior to Quo Primum there were a lot of local forms of the Mass. This isn't to say that you couldn't go from one place to another and recognize the Mass, but rather that there were a lot of local variations in it. While I don't know it to be the motivator, faced with the Protestant Rebellion, making things more uniform made a lot of sense.
Also making a lot of sense, in an era in which language differences were even more profound than they are today, was having the Latin Rite in Latin. Latin remained the language of the educated well into the Renaissance, when French began to replace it, but even up into the early 20th Century many very well-educated people learned Latin and some Greek. To some extent, it's a shame this didn't continue on, and frankly Latin education's decline was a victim of the Church going to the vernacular after 1962.
Anyhow, what made sense in 1570 didn't by 1962, and the Church was now all over the globe and celebrating the Mass in a lot of places that had no cultural or historical connection to Latin at all. Vietnam, for example, which has a notable Catholic population, wouldn't have a group of people who'd have a historical connection with Latin. That Latin went was not only to be expected, but a good thing.
Latin didn't go because of Vatican II. Indeed, the Tidentine Mass did not fade because of Vatican II either. The Ordinary Form was brought in by the Pope separately. That's commonly misunderstood. But Vatican II brought in a lot of changes, and with the changes Vatican II brought in, came a lot of local changes that were done in it's "spirit".
Alter rails came out, local Priests made all sorts of changes inside churches, and some made some pretty big departures from orthodoxy as things got, frankly a bit out of hand in some places.5 Architecturally, St. Anthony's in Casper Wyoming is a good example of this. St. Anthony's endured a lot of architectural insult as a result of this era. The marble altar rail came out, heavy brass lanterns disappeared, one of the confessionals was moved for a stand for musicians, and the pews were cocked at an odd angle. None of them helped the appearance of the church, and since that time additional violence has been done to it for cooling systems and PA systems. If I were the pastor of the Church, which of course I am not and will never be, I'd reverse them all.
I recall some parishioners expressing discontent about all of this, but then middle-aged Catholics of the 70s and early 80s had grown up in an era in which Priests commanded a lot of respect culturally and by tradition. They might grouse, but just a little, and in muted form. Younger Catholics of the 60s through the 80s were part of the overall culturally destructive Baby Boom generation, so they couldn't be expected to complain, and probably for that matter a lot of them supported what they were seeing, which fit right in with their Weltanschauung. They still, in many instances, but not in all, feel that way. Indeed, some never felt that way.
In our Third Law of History, we observed that "Culture is sticky, but plastic." By this we meant that cultures retain a cultural memory, even if it changes. It's not always accurate, but the degree to which things are retained, particularly things of value, is often stunning, even if a person didn't always experience it, themselves.
Which takes us to Wounded Knee.
Recently we had an entire series of posts on the 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee. If you look that up, you'll find that it ostensibly was about discontent over a trial election, but everyone knows it was about a lot more than that, and that it happened at the same general location where the 1891 "final" battle of the Plains Indians Wars, which is to say the final battle of the Indian Wars in general, occured.
Eh? What's this have to do with Catholic Trads?
We'll get to that.
This may simply seem to be a byproduct of the 1960s, by which we mean that decade that really began in the early 60s and ran roughly to 1973, but it isn't, completely. It is partially. Beyond that, however, what it reflects is a long smoldering recollection by Native Americans of what was lost. There's a reason that the Native resistors at that event appeared the way they did, with clothing of the American West, a style that had been affected to some degree by Natives in the late 19th Century. The protest was over their condition, and what they had lost, and a strong indicator that they knew just what that was.
The shock to Native cultures in what would become the United States had begun in 1607 when the first English settlers attempted to establish a colony, and it continued through, well, to this very day. The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1891 made it plain, however, that their cause was lost with finality. But their days of true sovereignty and independence were not forgotten. They just smoldered. The American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee, and the occupation of Alcatraz all occured when whatever was smoldering burst into flame. The fire didn't create what was hoped, but it's never really gone out.
Cultural reactions are often like that.
The flood of change and modernity that came in post Vatican II worked that way as well.
Parishioners, accustomed to acceptance, by and large accepted what occured reactions ranging from joy to mute acceptance to smoldering discontent. Even from the onset, however, there were some who just wouldn't go along.
By and large, a lot of those people seemed, well, weird. Observing the 1917 Code of Cannon Law on dress, in the case of women, you could tell who they were, if they were not old, by their retention of the wearing of mantilla's, a sort of lace head covering, by the fact that they would not take communion from an extraordinary minister, and by the fact that they kneeled to receive communion and took it on the tongue6 , all of which were very visible symbols that they weren't going along with changes. The 1917 Code of Canon Law had required head coverings for women, based on the writings of St. Paul on that topic, although it had fallen largely out of use by the mid 70s. Communion had been on the tongue for an extremely long time, if not originally, and it had been received kneeling, at the now absent alter rail.7 Most Catholics simply adjusted, but they did not. There were not many of them, however.
In some quarters, resistance went further. In France, Cardinal Lefebvre formed the Society of Saint Pius X, which rejected the changes wholesale and nearly went into schism, although careful actions by the Papacy prevented that from occurring. As the SSPX spread, which is not to say that it became large, Traditionalist, or more appropriately Radical Traditionalist, sometimes now had a place to attend Mass that met their outlook.
Catholic (SSPX) Chapel of the Annunciation, Ft. Collins Colorado.
I've passed by this church many times but this was the first time I stopped. I knew it was a Catholic church of some sort, but I didn't know that it was a Society of St. Pius X Chapel.
The Society of St. Pius X is a controversial Catholic organization that at one time teetered on the brink of being declared irregular. Under the last three Popes a dedicated effort to keep that from occurring was undertaken and now the SSPX has a somewhat more regular status with the Church but it is still somewhat on the outside, rather than fully on the inside. When I last checked, which is awhile back, they had been granted the right to perform sacraments, but a person really ought to check if they're a Catholic and planning on going to a SSPX service.
This church isn't really in Ft. Collins (at least not yet), but on a less and less rural road between Ft. Collins and Windsor Colorado. Technically its a chapel because, I think, canonically the SSPX are outside of the regular diocese for a region and their churches do not, therefore, have full church status in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Again, I'm not an expert on this by any means.
This chapel appears to be an offshoot of St. Isadore the Farmer church in Denver, and served by it.
Chances are good that the Church would have slowly corrected the bigger abuses that came about after Vatican II without much fanfare or notably controversy but for one thing, the Long Lent of 2002. For Catholics in the United States, and to some degree elsewhere in the Western World, that event fanned the smoldering embers, and they burst into flames.
The Long Lent of 2002 was the year that the homosexual priest abuse scandal broke out. This was later studied in depth by the Church, resulting in the well known and heavily debated John Jay Report, which concluded among other things that the majority of offenders had been in seminaries in the 40s and 50s, and the acts had peaked in the 60s and 70s. A lot of things, we'd note, peaked in the 60s and 70s. While heavily criticized, the Church reacted significantly, with one of hte most notable reactions being a struggle to make sure that seminaries were free of abuse and orthodox.
Indeed, the reaction to the crisis has been much different than often publically portrayed. While some Catholics of weak faith left the Church, by and large the Church maintained steady numbers throughout the crisis and into the present day. Departures were offset by entries, as Protestants began to more actively abandon their denominations and enter the Church. Moreover, as the Internet made resources freely available, young Catholics took advantage of them and self-educated in their faith, turning them towards orthodoxy. As time went on, the demographic evolution meant that from Generation Jones on down, average Catholics were increasingly more orthodox, and this was true of new Priests as well. Of course, many rank and file Priest and Parishioners had remained orthodox all along. Having said that, due to the operation of age, changes came slowly as Priests who had come of age or graduated seminary in the 60s and 70s hung on to the changes that been made in that time period. This is still the case, with it additionally being the case that older Bishops are often of that era, although some of them are actually conservative firebrands.
That latter fact perhaps demonstrates that once things caught on fire, they really started burning. Catholics who had more or less put up with things being dissatisfactory to them, suddenly quite begin that way, all the way from issues large to small. Topics ranged from getting rid of the guitar mass (thankfully) to bringing back the Latin Mass. Indeed, the Extraordinary Form of the Mass came back, due to Papal authorization, and spread fairly significantly.
As this occured, the ranks of the Trads increased, jointed by near Trads. Rad Trads increases as well. All of these groups were heavily represented by those in Gen X through Gen Z. Where available, Trad gravitated towards the Latin Mass, and Rad Trads certainly did. That leads to observations such as this:
I do not typically attend the Traditional Latin Mass (I can hardly get the eight of us to the local parish five minutes away on time). But this is where you will find young Catholic families. The younger generation is rebelling against modernity.Views
There's a lot to be said by that observation.
I myself made a Mass attendance change recently, which is what brings this up, sort of.
I was baptized at the downtown parish and basically grew up attending it, although my parents would occasionally go to the nearby, smaller neighborhood parish. It's closer, but not much, so we were equidistant, basically, to downtown. When my son was first born, we went there, but we soon switched to the large across town parish, which had a better cry room. When the kids were older, we started going downtown again. I became really comfortable with that parish, and served as a lector and in other ways. All in all, over about a 20-year span, it really became my home parish.
After our most recent Bishop came in, it became clear that a determination had been made to make that the Hispanic Parish. That's fine, and that evolution has happened all over, but it also meant that there was really no place left for a guy like me. This was particularly so as I always attend early morning Mass. So I went to the big across town parish.
The priest there was an excellent one, whom I first encountered when I lived in Laramie. He as the priest at the Newman Center, and was one of the priests that baptized our children across town (they were both baptized at that parish). My wife, who is not Catholic, really likes him, although she's not a frequent Mass goer. When Masses resumed post COVID, the early morning Mass there was at 7:30 a.m., in order to allow time to clean the Church between Masses. I really liked that.
That Priest has now retired. Indeed, the Priest who was longest at the downtown parish while I was there is soon to retire. The priest who was a the neighborhood church went back to his native India, all in short order.
The new priest downtown is an excellent Wyoming homegrown priest who was born in Puerto Rico, probably prefect for his assignment. At the big across town parish, a solid priest who had the oddity of being in one town for most of his priesthood has come in. He's a good confessor, but not a great homilist by any measure. At the neighborhood church, however, a new, quite young, and highly orthodox Priest, is now there. I've started going there.
That he's quite young is interesting in and of itself. Extremely articulate and with acute observations, I've never encountered a homilist quite like him. Others must have thought the same as, on Sunday mornings, the early morning Mass, I'm seeing a lot of the old orthodox Catholics that I knew from downtown, whom I'd note are not Trads. I'm also seeing, however, a fair number of Trads.
Indeed, I've never encountered so many Trads routinely at Mass before, mostly identifiable, I should note, due to the appearance of the women. They are very conservatively dressed, but not necessarily "plain" dressed, particularly for younger women. They wear the mantilla. At least one of the young women who affects this appearance is with an older couple (not as old as me) who must be her parents, but who are not dressed in that fashion, which raises another point. They may not be Trads, but they're likely conservative orthodox or perhaps near Trads. That would likely describe the young couple who sat in front of me last Sunday, who were dressed in contemporary fashion, but with very nice clothing. The young man was wearing dress slacks, shirt and tie, something that is unusual for young men in this region to wear anywhere. When going to Communion, they crossed lines so that they'd receive from the Priest and not the Deacon, a very Trad thing to do, but they didn't drop to their knees when receiving (and in fairness, the young woman was holding a baby and could hardly do that).
One family of Trads that goes to that Mass I know, and like me, the family has migrated from the downtown Parish, to the across town one, to here. Clearly the conservative and orthodox of all stripes are coming here, packing at least two of the Masses, to hear from the orthodox young Priest.
And his homilies aren't necessarily of the type that would make a person feel all warm and fuzzy. One of the first ones I heard, or perhaps the very first one I heard, was one I've written about earlier, that being the "Uncomfortable Homily":
The Uncomfortable Homily.
The young pastor of one of the church's of the triparish gives homilies that are really hard to ignore. Impossible, in fact. They're very orthodox, but also almost guaranteed, quite frequently, to make every one in the parish squirm. Indeed, so much so that I had decided not to post this at all, and then I started watching legislators who would raise a Christian flag make some, well morally debatable decisions, so I decided to revive it.
The four sins were:
1. Murder.
2. Failing to pay the servant his just wage.
3. Sodomy4. Abusing immigrants.
He had these as the four sins "that really tick God off".
Probably the only one of these that doesn't make somebody upset is the first one. It's pretty obvious that you shouldn't kill other people.
I'm going to dive into these a bit, save for murder, which probably causes people who stop in here to wonder, "when is he every going to get back to the point of this blog?";
That's not something that fits into the Protestant Health and Wealth Gospel at all. It's also not one that fits very well into the world outlook of my Republican Catholic friends either, who would no doubt agree with topics 1 and 3, but who might squirm at 2 and 4. For that matter, Catholic liberals might rejoice at 2 and 4, but balk in a major way at 3.
A homily that makes everyone uncomfortable is probably what everyone needs to hear.
The Trads might need to hear it less than the others, however. They're not killing anyone, most of them probably not only are paying their servants their just wages, they likely don't have any, they're not practicing homosexuality, and they likely aren't abusing immigrants.
Pope Francis seems to think that some of them were acting without due respect for his office, and that is a danger of setting yourself apart. You can get arrogant. That provided his stated basis for clamping down on the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. When the Pope greatly restricted the celebration of the Extraordinary Form in 2021, I thought the controversy it caused would rapidly fade, but it hasn't.
That's in part because Traditionalist have kept it alive, but the Pope, while certainly not intending to, helped keep it alive by convening the Synod on Synodality, which hasn't yet taken place, but which will this Fall. The process of convening and gathering the Synod has made a lot of Western orthodox Catholics uncomfortable, and it certainly has the Trads. While Pope Francis' style may very well contain an element of gathering opposition to things in order to expose it to light, and thereby bring an end to it, the inclusion of people like Fr. James Martin, S.J. can't help but make the orthodox, conservative, and the traditionalist suspicious. The entire process has pushed people who already were opposed to the Pope further in that direction, and made cautious orthodox, such as myself, come over to the "not keen on Pope Francis" camp. So, perhaps not too surprisingly, where the Trads have a Tridentine Mass available, they'll travel some distance to go it. Where they don't, as here, they're gathering where the Priest is clearly orthodox.
But they aren't the only ones.
I see the Mass packed with people that I know went to another Parish. Some went downtown and now feel homeless, something I warned might happen as the focus of that Church was directed towards a specific group. Attendees at the across town Parish who went there, as I did, probably grew weary of the non-challenging homilies that didn't really focus on the crisis of daily living.
And it is a crisis.
That is, living in our times is a crisis. Or our times are in crisis. It's pretty clear.
And modernity brought that crisis about.
The post World War Two evolution of Americans from human beings into "consumers", and the surrendering of economic life of all types to capitalism brought it about. Nothing matters other than corporate profits. Even biology is now bought and sold to serve the corporate masters. The fences were taken down, and the metaphorical bulldozers came in.
Millions are sick of it, but millions don't know where to go. Quite a few have gone into drugs and alcohol, which the corporate masters are only too happy to provide.
Which brings us to this.
Can authentic religious traditionalism truly make it in a non-traditional world? Indeed, can traditionalism at all, in any authentic sense, make it in a non-traditional world which, by its very nature, is set against tradition.
We have to be careful here, of course. Critics would note that the world never really stops moving, and therefore all traditions are subject to change, but that's simply incorrect. Indeed, the very long retention of some traditions in many cultures proves the opposite of that, and the preservation of the existential certainly does. Indeed, Catholicism shows the long retention of things in and of itself, although this falls outside the category of tradition, as writings on the early Mass show it to be, well, the Mass, as Protestants are often shocked to learn. I.e., Christians were celebrating on Sundays a gathering recognizable as the Christian Mass.
But is this true, overall:
The younger generation is rebelling against modernity.
Clearly not all of them all. A trip anywhere there are people of thirty, not traditionally regarded as young" and younger will reveal plenty of heavily tattooed, pink hair, sporting people, gender bending, and any number of things which can not be regarded as traditional. Oddly enough, however, they're lashing out against the real world of modernity as well. But what is deeply authentic traditionalism in this context?
Clearly, some of the Trads have applied it in their family lives. But to really be traditional overall, it'd have to go some distance beyond that, it seems to me. One young woman I was somewhat familiar with, for example, was clearly a Trad from a Trad family, but it was also one in which policing was an occupation. All the children became very Trad, one I somewhat knew being in the seminary briefly, and one that I didn't entered an Eastern Rite seminary. One seems to have entered agriculture, a very traditional occupation, but the young woman entered the Sherriff's Office, not a traditional occupation for a woman at all, although certainly one that women do today.
That's just an illustration, of course, but the larger argument would be here that traditionalism more or less has to be agrarianism to really buck full societal traditionalism in this day and age.
Or so it seems to me.
Footnotes.
1. I know some American Protestants will dispute that, but it's completely counterfactual to maintain otherwise.
2. Indeed, the US is such an English Reformation contrary that to be a knowledgeable Catholic is to constantly be presented with the myths of the English Reformation by people who have only those myths to go by, even if they're non-religious. Even some Catholics believe these myths, in no small part because existing in a sea of Protestantism means that quite a few Catholics are heavily Protestantized.
3. When I was a kid, probably in grade school I remember being at a Mass at Our Lady of Fatima in Casper when I turned around at the Sign of Peace and a friend of my father's, sitting behind me, greeted me with Pax vorbiscum, Latin for "Peace be with you". I had to ask my father
4. Protestants who aren't familiar with the Catholic Church are often shocked to learn that the Church includes a lot of the Old Testament into its liturgy.
5. There are no surviving altar rails that I've seen in Wyoming. Indeed, I can't immediately recall having been in a Catholic Church that had an altar rail in recent years, although I well remember the one that was in St. Anthony's in Casper.
6. Extraordinary minsters are those Catholics appointed within their parish to administer communion. They do not conscecrate the hosts, but merely administer communion.
The practice is really supposed to be limited to situations in which the number of people strain the ability of the Priests and a Deacons to administer communion, but it's unfortunately become routine for Mass and those so appointed will actually step up and volunteer if there do not appear to be any at the Mass. Only very recently have I seen a Priest actually raise a hand to turn one back when not needed, and frankly, they're very rarely ever needed.
Rad Trads, and a lot of Trads, will not receive from an Extraordinary Minister for some reason, perhaps they feel the practice is abused. Some will not receive from a Deacon, and I suspect that some object as many Extraordinary Ministers are women.
7. Unfortunately, people don't accurately remember that people filed up to the altar rail, kneeled, and the Priest went down the rail to the waiting parishoners.
Now, a lot of Trads and Rad Trads drop to kneel in front of the Priest which, as we know file in lines up to the Priests, is a surprise if you are not ready for it. Generally, I've grown used to it so I expect it, but this was not always so, and given the nature of line psychology, I'm amazed that I haven't seen somebody trip over a suddenly kneeling person.
FWIW, Communion was originally in the hand, but many people regard the on the tongue administration of Communion, which was long common in the Latin Rite, to be more reverant. Communion is administered differently in the Eastern Rite. It is on the tongue, but with a host that has been dipped in the Precious Blood.
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