Like many folks I know, Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union Address last Thursday was a car crash that was difficult to look away from.
Britt’s fresh face and pleasant smile, her silky green shirt and diamond cross glittering at her throat, and her seeming earnestness made my heart sink initially—at first glance, she appeared so powerfully normal and thus able to normalize the GOP’s fascism. But it was hard to actually take her seriously since she was sitting in her overwhelmingly, spotlessly beige and bland kitchen. A kitchen. That the woman U.S. Senator from Alabama was seated in. Holy moly.
Obviously she and her handlers were playing on notions of “kitchen table” issues and trying to be relatable to all those anxious suburban moms out there. But the other identity the Republicans were hammering home—with a complicitous Britt—is that a kitchen is also where a woman naturally belongs.
As Amber Wardell points out on Medium, “Her hair, her makeup, the entire aesthetic, was expertly designed to resemble the look of tradwife influencers who show viewers a leisure class lifestyle where women’s work is all about happily caring for their families (while, of course, perfectly polished and coiffed).”
So that kitchen setting contained multitudes, none of which were meant to acknowledge no less celebrate Britt’s power as a Senator, but rather to erase it to emphasize her natural place as being in the home and subordinate to her husband and family. In fact, her youth and attractiveness had to have been intentionally paired with her patriarchal alter ego, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who sat right behind President Biden during the State of the Union and whose smirks and eyerolls were echoed later in Britt’s response.
Importantly, Johnson’s appearance was in the halls of Congress, on the dais behind the President, while Britt’s was in the kitchen. Symbolically, what the GOP content creators were channeling was not necessarily Ward and June Cleaver, but the 19th Century’s Cult of True Womanhood, where, according to Jeanne Boydston:
In their homes, presumably safely guarded from the sullying influences of business and public affairs, women effortlessly directed their households and exerted a serene moral influence over their husbands and children. By both temperament and ability, so custom had it, women were ill-suited to hard labor, to the rough-and-tumble of political life, or to the competitive individualism of the industrial economy.
How to simultaneously profit off Britt’s power and obscure it? Put her in her kitchen, of course, and make it seem like her career as a politician is just a side hustle she does for the good of the country.
Oh, and have her talk in that voice. The kitchen was one thing but that weird ASPCA infomercial weepfest cadence (channeling Sally Strothers!) meets little girl toddler prattle was truly bizarre. That is, until I started reading articles about where that voice actually comes from.
As Jess Piper discusses in her Substack piece “The Fundie Baby Voice”:
I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.
Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.
Piper goes on to talk about how that the “fundie baby voice” is a sweetly disempowered “mask” that often hides not only a world of hurt, but also often deep viciousness and anger.
That voice also obscures abuse and patriarchal oppression, as Tia Levings reveals in her article “Fundie Baby Voice Isn't What We Called It.” Her take on Britt is that her speech was not only “manipulative” but exploitative and triggering for survivors of Christian Fundamentalist abuse. She points out:
Vocal training and forced modulation in Christian fundamentalism is more than “fundie baby voice.” It’s the denial of our voices, the suppression of our natural sound and range of emotion, and the terms used to train us are reflective of the agenda and abusive system we were in. They want us to sound like sexualized children.
This explains Britt’s relentless and creepy focus on a sex trafficking case—which was exposed as being sloppy at best and a lie at worst since she connected it to Biden even though it took place in Mexico while George W. Bush was president.
Just as with the invocation of the Cult of True Womanhood through the beige kitchen, Britt’s GOP content creators were riffing on a tried-and-true moral panic button: that of white slavery. During the early 20th century, wild stories of the sex trafficking of young women circulated, resulting in the passage of the Mann Act, which, according to a PBS article, “made it a crime to transport women across state lines ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.’” However, while it was “designed to combat forced prostitution, the law was so broadly worded that courts held it to criminalize many forms of consensual sexual activity, and it was soon being used as a tool for political persecution of Jack Johnson and others, as well as a tool for blackmail.”
The white slavery hysteria reflected the social and political climate of the Progressive era with fears about immigration, industrialization, urbanization, the loss of social mores, and, importantly, the changing roles of women taking center stage.
In particular, the emerging freedom and power of women, especially young ones, led to efforts to both blunt that power (the white slavery moral panic coincided with the apex of the suffrage movement) and control their sexuality. During this era, as is the case now, politicians capitalized on the white slavery panic to burnish their credentials and grandstand their way to elected office.
When Britt launched into her breathy, whispery account of sex trafficking, I felt whiplashed back to the early 20th century, which was the intended effect. For all her sweetness and domestic virtue signaling, Britt is a politician carrying water for her party (and especially for its corrupt leader who is currently being made to pay for his own history of sexual assault).
It doesn’t matter that the GOP wants to shutter the border on women and girls fleeing sex trafficking in their own countries and seeking asylum in the U.S.; what’s important is to scare the shit out of people that cartels are coming into the U.S. to enslave our white girls—those like Katie Britt’s daughter.
In some ways, I’m grateful for the repugnance so many felt towards Britt’s GOP response. Her ham-handed over-acting was a huge tell for those not on the Christian Nationalist train.
However, what should give us pause is the vast numbers of people for whom this speech was affirmation. We may laugh at the whole “tradwives” social media movement, but as the concerted efforts to push back on it show, this conservative moment has teeth and is everywhere.
And for those of you who just can’t after this, I invite you to check out Scarlett Johansson’s cathartic SNL take on Katie Britt’s kitchen table fascism.