I suppose I’d heard the term “tradwife” floating around, but hadn’t paid much attention to it until recently when I happened to see some content (see sample above) on social media and did a “deep dive,” right to the bottom of the swimming pool, where I broke my neck and died a quick and painless death so I didn’t have to keep reading.
Wikipedia defines a “tradwife” (short for “traditional wife” or “traditional housewife”) as:
“typically denotes a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles and marriages. Some may choose to take a homemaking role within their marriage, or to leave their careers to focus instead on meeting their family's needs in the home…Online searches of the term "tradwife" began to rise in popularity around mid-2018 and reached high levels during the early 2020s. The traditional housewife aesthetic has since spread throughout the Internet in part through social media featuring women extolling the virtues of behaving as the ideal woman.”
I’m not sure where to start here as a first-generation college graduate whose lesbian aunt bought her a subscription to Ms. magazine at 12, when Wikipedia is using phrases like “extolling the virtues of behaving as the ideal woman.”
As feminists, we believe it’s a woman’s choice to do what she wants. Right? If a woman wants to stay home to raise her children, that’s great. It should be noted that this ability is a privilege not available to every woman, so there are some socioeconomic issues with women shaming other women who work.
Jessica Grose for The New York Times writes:
The whole discussion can be a trap because the content itself is meant to be a heightened provocation — some tradwife creators post things that they label as triggering opinions and then say they get so much hate for being stay-at-home moms. But they rely on that dissonance in order to create more engagement (which leads to more clicks and more money).
These posts have a way of painting feminists as haters who resist their true nature and casting career women in opposition to women who don’t work for pay. The reality is that stay-at-home moms and working moms are frequently just the same people at different points in their lives and that content creation is a paying job: My favorite example of this is the tradwife pitching a $5,900 set of courses on how to be a tradwife.
Raised as a Gen Xer in an era where commercials on TV told us, “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never let you forget you’re a man,” I often felt like we were sold a bill of goods by extreme feminists. It seemed like: forget about having a fulltime career or being a fulltime stay-at-home mom, we were somehow supposed to figure out how to do both. I found journalism as a way of working at home as much as possible while raising my four kids, but for 30 years have felt like I never really got either role fully right. The bacon was always under- or overcooked: thanks, bra-burners, and thank goodness for microwave bacon.
Who is the “tradwife” movement for? Is it for exhausted women, tired from trying to have it all, who flee to Pinterest boards, aesthetically pleasing cottage-core barn backgrounds for professional family photos, and countless county fair winning pie recipes? It’s for misogynistic men, silly. It’s as simple as Christian nationalist brainwashing (once again, I recommend the documentary Bad Faith for the history on the cult-like chokehold this fake-religious political regime has on this nation).
In the Times, Grose noted that Mary Harrington recently profiled Lauren Southern, a former right-wing influencer who left her husband and now describes her ultratraditional marriage as abusive. Harrington also spoke to another ex-tradwife, who said that “the men who self-select into these communities are often ‘wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic.’” The GOP, with its stance against bodily autonomy, has become simply known as the “anti-women’s” party with J.D. Vance making countless comments supporting this “tradwife” style.
I have nothing but respect for women who stay at home to raise their children: my four never saw the inside of a day care center, so I’m not judging women who want to perfectly arrange cleaning products and prepare gorgeous homecooked meals. I happened to be pretty terrible at homemaking; nothing that happened inside my house was Tik-Tok worthy. But seeing the “tradwife” content: I call absolute bullshit on breezily well-edited video of overdecorated baby nurseries and gluten-free banana bread, openly shaming women who work. And the Catholic ones are wearing veils to church? Say what now!
The New Yorker article “Rise and Fall of the TradWife” has an interesting perspective on the more innocent beginnings of the “movement” as it started in a less political way, became more political, and that one of its “founders” ultimately became exhausted by its impossible standards and began to reject its very notions.
If you’re happy being home raising your kids, cool. You don’t need to go online and make short films that target other women who don’t make this choice. Do women who work hard in a career they’re proud of (some, perhaps, God help us, childless cat ladies by their own choosing) go around making overproduced music videos of days in their lives, shaming you for trying to make Handmaid’s Tale seem like a fun day at the spa? They don’t. Every day I find new ways to be embarrassed to live in a country where women will believe they have the right to make choices for other women—whether it’s in the bedroom, the kitchen, the uterus. Didn’t the GOP used to place value on government staying out of your personal business, what ever happened to that? Now they want to be in my kitchen?
