Because I'm habitually late to the party with social trends, I'm only now catching up to the tradwife phenomenon. According to the NYTimes, the New Yorker, etc., a tradwife performs the traditional gender role of being a housewife, now "new & improved" with a heavy dose of white Christian nationalism.
I say "performs" because they seem to be mostly rich influencers who make a fetish out of tasks that many of us (raises hand) have been doing forever--baking bread, cooking from scratch, taking care of children etc. These performances are apparently for the benefit of people who have the leisure and money and interest to spend time on TikTok and social media sites (lowers hand).
The Reddit posts collected at BoredPanda provide a sobering counternarrative from women who lived this life a generation or two ago, and a lot of them focus on what seems the most obvious downside: without a way to make a living, what happens to the tradwife if the lord and master or whatever he's called loses his job, or is unable to work, or decides to take off with his secretary and abandon the family?
I thought the #1 lesson of feminism--and, oddly, of capitalism--is that without economic power you have no power. In fact, Ira Levin wrote a whole satirical horror novel about this, The Stepford Wives, which poses the question "what if men could have their wife fantasies fulfilled by replacing human women with robots?" The answer is, predictably, that men say "yes, please," and set about creating this utopia (which would include rollbacks in feminism, reproductive freedom, women working, and the rest) for a deeply bleak ending for women. (By the way, the original Katherine Ross movie was reasonably faithful to the book; the Nicole Kidman one was a mess that slapped on a happy ending.)
Levin was talking about what men would do, though. Why would women volunteer to be handmaidens/tradwives? I get why the influencers do it: there is not enough attention in the world, nor enough clicks, nor enough money, ever to fill that gaping void in their souls. But why would women sign up to have their rights curtailed more than they already have been in 2024?
I had a class in political economy in high school (it was part of the social-sciences curriculum), and the concept -- that without economic power you have no power -- blew my mind. Once you start asking the question "Who's owning the means of production here? Who does the money belong to and what do they want?" all political and even most cultural events start to make sense, irrespective of the economic system. In the personal sphere, there is no fucking way a woman should allow her spouse to restrict her ability to work and make a living, even if it's couched in fluffy marhsmellow terms ("It's good for the children if their mother stays at home. He's a good provider.") It also helped that my maternal grandma (who was a force of nature, way more capable than my grandpa, but had minimal education and never worked) drilled into her daughters, then also into me and my sister, that nothing, absolutely nothing, was more important than having our own earnings. When I see these young women (tradwives and similar), I am disgusted at what they preach. Our collective female ancestors are rolling in their graves because their young offspring happily and stupidly fritter away important economic gains that were inaccessible to women until just a few decades ago. Choice feminism is bullshit; he who holds the purse strings has all the power, being out of the workforce for even a few years obliterates your career, and even if we pretend people don't abandon and divorce other people, the most honest and loving man on Earth can still drop dead from a heart attack or get run over by a bus, and the woman and kids are absolutely screwed. Every able-bodied adult should make (and save!) their own money and I will die on this hill. Patriarchy is insidious, and, sadly, young women are falling en masse for some of its latest, blatantly regressive incarnations.
ReplyDeletePreach, xyk! You have all the amens from my corner.
ReplyDeleteINDEEDY! True.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how alluring it actually is. Sure it's popular on tiktok, but influencers pretending to be SAH-whatevers have always been popular among people whose lives look nothing like that (heck, I used to read farm family homeschooling blogs back before I had kids even though I never had any desire to emulate them). I read an article saying the primary market for tradwife influencing is incels, not women, but who knows the actual truth.
ReplyDeleteThat said... a lot of jobs suck and a lot of people would love to not have to work and still live a comfortable lifestyle. That's just not reality for the bulk of people. But a lot of people still like the fantasy.
I'm of the age that I grew up with a ton of children of divorce whose moms had to find jobs for the first time in middle-age. (Plus even though the Quinbys didn't get divorced, their mom had to become the breadwinner in a couple of the Ramona books.) Our pre-marital counseling with the Episcopal church was interesting because it was done with a guy who came out of retirement (because, uh, the previous minister, who was the father of one of my contemporaries, had cheated on his wife with a parishioner...) and it had an extensive section on how men should be ok with their wives working or even outearning them (which we found funny because we were about to head to grad school to get phds at top institutions in something lucrative... like I wasn't going to not work). But definitely an interesting snapshot of important issues for couples ~20 years prior, give or take a decade.
xykademiqz--with Dame Eleanor, I say preach! The ethos when I grew up could be summarized by my late mother-in-law's disappointment that my sister-in-law had married badly because "she would have to work." But even underneath the "successful women are married and never work" ethos was a murmured strain of "of course, you should get an education and have something to fall back on."
ReplyDeletenicoleandmaggie--the "incel fantasy" of tradwives thing makes a lot of sense. I do think it's a generational thing about working women and divorce & am glad that you got better advice (not that you needed it!) in Episcopal premarital counseling.
I'll join the chorus saying preach! But on the question of why women might volunteer for this, I wonder if it's to do with the fact that women still carry the burden of most domestic chores, and particularly the mental load of household organisation, planning etc. So if you have paid work, you have two full-time jobs, and the paid work is less and less likely to be 9-5. It might be tempting to throw in the towel on the paid work, especially if the unpaid domestic stuff feels more under your control, however illusory that might be. But then having opted for the domestic, you need to justify the choice to yourself and the rest of the world, hence all the cute Instagram shots.
ReplyDeleteMy mother worked most of her life, with the shortest possible break to have kids. Her mother didn't work after marriage, and was miserable. My paternal grandmother was Spanish and had no choice in 1950s Spain but to work, even though the business had to be in her husband's name and she couldn't have her own bank account. I never knew her, sadly, but interestingly, her generation of Spanish women and those slightly younger, have grabbed every chance they got at living life to the full - they're at the gym, on holiday, doing brunch. Yes, they can all knit, sew and crochet beautifully, but they don't extol that to their daughters and grand-daughters. They're bemused sometimes that their daughters and grand-daughters aren't happy despite their relative freedoms, but there's absolutely no nostalgia there.