THIS COULD BE YOU!
Snark
Tradwife.
Does that word mean anything to you?
Last night I was nosing around online about tradwives. My husband glanced at my screen and asked, “What’s a tradwife?”
I gave him the quick explanation: a tradwife (short for traditional wife) is a woman who chooses to stay at home and embrace a l950’s-style marriage. Think June Cleaver(ish). She runs the house, homeschools the kids, bakes, and makes just about everything from scratch, dresses like she’s on a retro magazine cover 24/7, and most notably, elevates her husband to the exalted position of King of The Castel and Ruler of Everything he Surveys, including her.
Got it? Great.
Tradwives began showing up on the social media radar around 2010. Many of them launched lifestyle blogs, partly to connect with like-minded women, but also (and let’s not kid ourselves) to brand and monetize their lifestyle choice. So technically they’re not working, but they’re working. A lot of those blogs have serious followings, even among women who aren’t living the trad life. I wonder, do they hand their hard-earned money over to their husbands? Do they ask permission to keep a smidge for themselves?
Their content seems to revolve around the bliss of domesticity: keeping hearth and home, homeschooling with joy, churning butter from scratch (okay, maybe not butter, but for sure sourdough), greeting their husband at the door looking flawless, and maintaining an aura of polished docile attentiveness while he unwinds from his day of slogging at [insert vague man job here].
Tradwives tend to be more conservative, evangelical, or fundamentalist, and their understanding of what it means to be a godly Christian woman is being a wife and mother.
That got me wondering: what about traditional women in other religions? For example, could my Orthodox Jewish married contemporaries be considered tradwives? Research leads me to believe that while Orthodox Jewish women embrace traditional gender roles within their families and communities, their practices are rooted in strict Jewish law and traditions, not the tradwife movement. Still, part of me wonders, weren’t they the original tradwife?
My snarkiness is showing; I acknowledge it. I’m a child of the 60’s. I am what you would expect me to be.
My mom was a working woman but back in the day she needed my dad’s approval just to apply for a job. She was the Notions Department buyer for Walker Scott Department Store for several years. The very minute her boss found out she was pregnant, she was fired. It was considered unseemly that a husband would allow his pregnant wife to work!
At a job interview in the early 1980’s a prospective boss asked me if I was pregnant or planning on becoming pregnant. As illegal as that question was, I realized the generational differences, so I answered.
I think tradwives may live in their own little world, and I think they may be worked to death. But they never have to second-guess a decision because they’re not the ones making them. And their husbands always know where they are: at home, looking perfect, waiting to serve dinner with a smile.