Melanie Paradis: #Homesteading and the unfolding feminist revolt

A generation of women is angry. That's showing up in their hobbies, and in their vote intentions.

By: Melanie Paradis

I started baking bread during the first COVID lockdown. Yes, yes: me and a million other people. There is something satisfying about being able to provide for yourself in the shadow of a massive societal disruption. The world could be going to shit, but I can bake a loaf of bread and we’ll be okay.

So, when my social media feed recently started filling up with women who had since become stay-at-home DIYers and backyard homesteaders, I wondered if it was just my algorithm. Did Google and Instagram remember my baking phase? Did they want to serve me up some engageable content? Or is something bigger going on? I started asking others and quickly confirmed they, too, were noticing this trend. And, as a matter of fact, when I emailed Line editor Matt Gurney and asked him if he’d be interested in a piece along these lines, he immediately agreed that his social media feeds had also begun showing very similar content.

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Ericka Ring on Instagram: “Currently taking applications❤️ .
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#homesteadlife #slowliving #farmher #farmstead”

January 17, 2024

So what’s going on? What are these algorithms reacting to and chasing? Social media trends don’t often happen in a vacuum, they are as likely (or more) to reflect a shift as create one. Alongside all these posts I have also been seeing poll after poll demonstrating a significant political shift happening with younger Canadian women. The latest Abacus numbers, for instance, show that female voters, whose enduring support Liberals once counted as a point of pride, have swung, decisively, to the Conservatives: 37 per cent of women now intend to vote CPC.

As much as I’d prefer to just spend this whole article talking about sourdough and canning, we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture: something is happening. And as I did more research, I have come to believe we are gearing up for an existential debate in society and culture about women conforming or not — and to which feminist standard. It’s going to rock our politics. It already is.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time telling you whether or not the shift is good or what it all means; for now, I’m more interested in simply observing that it is happening. It has been for a while: polling data has consistently shown Pierre Poilievre’s lead over the Trudeau Liberals for months.

But look beyond the headlines at the data tables. These aren’t the easiest to find — only a few pollsters make public their gender-by-age tables, so I am relying on the Angus Reid Institute for this analysis. Right before the 2021 election, the Institute polled the vote intention by “supporters and leaners” — indicating those who were certain or pretty sure of how they would vote. Last month, they polled for that again. While Liberal support among women over 55 remains resilient, over the course of about 28 months, the Liberal vote among women aged 18-54 — the largest demographic of Instagram users — has collapsed.

Let’s zoom in a better closer. In 2021, 24 per cent of women 18-34 intended to vote Liberal. Now, just 15 per cent do. In 2021, 40 per cent of women 35-54 intended to vote Liberal. Now just 23 per cent do. That’s a 17-point drop.

While the NDP have been relatively flat, the Conservatives have been gaining with these women, up eight points with women 35-54 and 11 points with women 18-34.

Why might this be happening … and what does it have to do with homesteading?

For the past 50 years, women have been increasingly working outside the home, advancing our rights in the courts, getting paid more, etc. By a lot of metrics, things got better for women. But for decades we were also told feminism meant we were heavily discouraged from staying home, as if it betrayed the sisterhood. Then weird things started to happen. Society told us to further and further delay when we’d have kids so we could spend those all-important years building our careers. But now it’s harder to get pregnant because we’re older. It’s also harder to find a childcare spot, and harder to afford a home. Today, even if you want to have kids before your fertility clock starts ticking, you likely can’t afford it.

Now we’re told you can afford it if you girl boss hard enough. Get a “side hustle” — sell a course online, become an influencer, make “passive” income from affiliate marketing, or join a multi-level marketing scheme (please don’t). Women have been sold this for decades, from Tupperware parties to Avon ladies.

And there’s a reason we’ve been buying it. At its core, the central motivation behind all this side hustling is the dream of being financially free enough to spend more time with the kids, or — gasp — perhaps even have more kids. That dream is evading many Canadian women. Cardus recently did a study with the Angus Reid Institute that found most Canadian women want to have more children than they are actually having. Those women are desperate to find a way to achieve it, even as the left quietly alienates them for wanting more carbon-footprint kids. This has been intensifying since COVID lockdowns opened a window into staying home, baking your own bread, and growing your own food, and is exacerbated by the ongoing affordability crisis.

But side hustle culture was only ever going to work for the few. What do you do if you can’t make more money? You make the money you have stretch further. On your social media feed, this looks like home DIYers, couponers and thrifters. It’s the low-budget meal preppers and the backyard homesteaders. And there is a tremendous amount of overlap among those social media topics and the stay-at-home-moms, a segment of the population society has ruthlessly dismissed for the last 20 years. But thanks to social media, the “#SAHM” community have found one another, and they are sharing what their lives look like, the work and love they put into it, and the ups and downs. This window into the lives of women previously looked down upon by society is causing more women to say “wait, that’s an option?”

So why the shift to the political right? Because these are libertarian values at play. It’s the belief in doing for oneself and the government staying out of your business. It’s the freedom to choose how you live. How you raise your children. And it’s a deep skepticism in the government’s ability or motivation to do things like secure children’s medicine supplies or deliver effective education. Canadian parents learned for the first time exactly what their kids are learning in school during lockdowns when they could hear their virtual classes. Many were seemingly not impressed by what they heard! While homeschooling rates are not consistently tracked across provinces, it is estimated that after homeschooling numbers spiked during COVID, much of that growth was sustained long after schools reopened.

So why now?

The left has been alienating moms for years. There remains immense cultural pressure on parents, specifically mothers and primarily by the left, to get back to work after having a baby by deeming this necessary for economic productivity. In June 2023, the prime minister said in a statement that “our child care plan […] is also growing our economy, with a record percentage of Canadian women currently in the workforce.” It is sad to see this data point celebrated as a victory of feminism when it is more likely born out of necessity due to the affordability crisis and the societal pressures to get the Boss Babes back to work.

But just as COVID lockdowns shut doors, they opened a window. Post-lockdowns, a new generation is realizing that feminism means you can do whatever you damn please, including staying home and raising your kids. Especially in this economy when you’d be working just to pay for childcare anyway.

A political shift is happening among Canada’s women. Up until March 2020, it had become taboo to want to stay home with your kids. But COVID lockdowns changed life for moms and dads in ways we still don’t understand. Post-lockdowns, perspectives on family life and parenting have changed. It will have considerable implications for our politics that we have not yet begun to understand, but urgently need to.

For some parties, this is an existential threat. After all, there’s one thing you can’t do to a backyard homesteader, DIYer, homeschooler, or stay-at-home-mom: tax them for that work. And for another party, it’s an opportunity to make a simple promise: we’ll make it easier, and stay out of your way.

Watch the polls. But watch your social media feeds, too. Something is happening.

Melanie Paradis is the President of Texture Communications and a veteran Conservative campaigner.

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