Would We All Be Happier as Tradwives?

The myth of the perfect past, the bogeyman of feminism, and the hypocrisy of influencers

Typically, I write about all things literary. Occasionally, like today, I can’t help but tread into controversial territory. An idea starts to simmer and if ignored it will boil over—preoccupying me for days. So, my apologies. Back to the usual programming soon.

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Maybe you’ve been seeing the trend for years or maybe you’re just now noticing the rise of influencers described as “tradwives.” What does the term even mean? “Tradwife” can mean anything from your friendly neighborhood homeschooling mom who likes baking sourdough, growing tomatoes, and wearing sundresses to the influencer making money off each reel she posts about how women are made for the home and it’s a sin to have a job or question your husband. Tradwifery is an aesthetic of cottage core or 1950s-inspired wives ranging from making pretty videos celebrating the beauty of domestic life to claiming that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. It’s a reactionary trend and there are pockets of it that I find highly alarming.

But before the tradwives (or aspiring tradwives) write off what I have to say as progressivist slop, let me lay some groundwork. I got married at 20 and had three kids by 27. I not only made my own baby food, I grew the vegetables in my own garden before pureeing them. I had chickens and sheep and goats. I cloth diapered. My husband raised a cow so we could fill the deep freezer with grass-fed beef. I quit grad school to stay home with my kids. We went to Latin Mass and I wore a veil. We homeschooled for a decade. If you’re looking for tradwife cred, I’ve got it. And I’ll raise you moving to a farm with no flushing toilets. (Yes, that does mean I potty trained kids on a compost toilet.) I tell you this simply because I am not against “trad” choices of homeschooling, staying home with your kids, homesteading, etc. I have rendered lard from pigs my husband had butchered. I have made candles from wax harvested from my family’s beehives. You can’t out tradwife me. I am, however, very alarmed by Tradwife Inc. And by that I mean influencers who make money off of selling a lie: that women must conform to a certain aesthetic in order to be faithful, holy wives.

There’s nothing wrong with more “traditional” choices. I’m not sorry I stayed home with my kids, grew our own food, or even potty trained on a compost toilet! But I watch with concern as women (especially young women) are being sold a lie. That lie is that your family life should match a certain tradwife aesthetic, that the way certain influencers are living life is not one way but the way. Let’s consider the issues with this.

Tradwifery vs. Reality

One problem is that a cottage core aesthetic is nothing like “traditional” life. The way our ancestors actually lived (not just snipping some Rosemary from your kitchen garden in pearls and heels and then making money off of an Instagram reel about how magical it is to be a Tradwife with a garden) was very hard. The Instagram tradwife aesthetic reminds me of Marie Antoinette prancing around the fake little farm village made for her at the opulent palace of Versailles. She loved to wear a little shepherdess’ dress and carried a charming basket over her arm to collect eggs. (Her servants would, of course, clean the eggs before Marie Antoinette showed up so that when she put them in her basket they wouldn’t be dirty. Perish the thought!) It’s a form of dress up. Which is fine! Dressing up is fun. But it’s not, well, aspirational. No one has to or needs to. The tradwife aesthetic is disconnected from reality. Actual farming is hard work. Milking goats at the crack of dawn might sound a little bit magical and there’s days where it’s fun, but it can also be horrible when the morning is freezing and the goat kicks a dirty hoof in the milk bucket ruining the milk. ASK ME HOW I KNOW. If you really want a traditional life you’ll be dealing with a lot of livestock poop and you will ruin your nicest sundress from Ivy City Co (no shade, I have two of their dresses and they’re great, but they’re for church, not farm life). There is much that’s admirable and human about reconnecting with the land and I am for it. But there’s nothing glamorous about farming. If there is, you’re playacting, not living “traditionally.”

But the thing that drives me absolutely nuts is the hypocrisy. We’re told, “Women are only for the home. Thou must not work, ladies.” However, the Tradwife can make money selling you this claim on social media. Maybe she’ll have courses, speaking events, products to sell. She can run a business telling you this lie and laughing all the way to the bank. As someone who supported my family for years through writing and speaking, I don’t think making money on content creation is a bad or evil thing! I write plenty of essays on this Substack for paid subscribers. But if you’re doing the opposite of what you’re telling your followers to do, that’s called a grift. You can’t leave your kids to travel to speaking gigs and sell your book that tells women they shouldn’t pursue work beyond the home (or even have the right to vote!). That’s just silly.

Two Silly Perspectives

When my oldest was a baby I started an art history graduate program. I loved my classes but after one semester, I had qualms about whether it was the right time for me to be getting a PhD. Art history jobs were thin on the ground. We would need to move to wherever I could get a job teaching at a university or curating for a museum. I would have to put growing our family on hold because I get so sick when I’m pregnant I would never be able to keep up with my program. It just stopped making sense. I wanted to focus on my baby. I decided to leave the program.

The program director asked me to discuss it with a faculty member before I made my final decision. She was the only faculty member who had a child. And she told me I was making a big mistake. I was throwing away an amazing opportunity to live a creative and fulfilling life. This was my only chance to escape the drudgery of motherhood. “You’ll become intellectually stagnant and the only women who will talk to you will talk about mom stuff: diapers, baby food, boring stuff. It doesn’t matter if you are with your baby or if somebody else takes care of him. At this age, even a dog could take care of your child. It’s nothing.” Motherhood to her was a series of tasks without value, requiring no creativity, meaningless.

A few years later, I was contributing to our income as a freelance writer. Tradwives on Facebook were not happy about this. A woman? WORKING? That’s what husbands are for. To spend naptimes and Saturday morning cultivating a creative endeavor was morally abhorrent. I was told my husband, already working long hours, should take a second job to avoid this horror. We should sell our little starter home (which they looked up pictures of online) and move into a trailer or apartment to save money. That would actually have been more expensive since our house was a steal and apartments were expensive, but it’s also absurd. For my kids to never see their dad because he’s working insane hours? To move them from a little house with a big yard to an apartment with less space? All to avoid me doing something I love and am good at? It boggles the mind.

Both perspectives are bad. One ignores the value, challenge, and joy of motherhood. The other dismisses reality and what is good for a particular family in order to check the boxes of someone’s made-up list. But many young women are swallowing the nonsense of the second group because they’re reacting to the flaws of the first. Marriage, motherhood, and family life are not unimportant drudgery. And young women who have just become wives and want to start families or are new moms rightly push back against that lie and want to find voices that affirm the value, creativity, and goodness of family life. But then some of those voices twist that message to become, “not only is the work of family life important, it’s the ONLY work you’re allowed to do if you want to be a good wife/mother/Christian.” And when it feels like you’re constantly having to go against the grain to find appreciation and affirmation of choices that lean “traditional” you are more likely to be less critical of those you think are on your side. You are less skeptical than you should be of the grifters.

The best way to tell a lie is to tell some of the truth. The call to marriage and motherhood is a beautiful one. Nothing has been so transformative and fulfilling to me as my experience of family life. It’s incredible! But does that mean that I am not allowed to have other pursuits and to prayerfully discern how God is calling my family to structure our lives? No, it does not. Does it mean I can only wear dresses? Does it mean that my biggest concern should be making myself attractive so I can be a “good wife”? Does it mean I should subscribe to some fantasy that women in the past had it better when they couldn’t own property, vote, have a credit card, or escape an abusive marriage? It does not.

The Bogeyman of Feminism

While there is plenty to criticize in modern feminism, we actually don’t have to throw out important advances for women’s safety and success and adhere to a 1950s life. But it seems that “feminism” is such a bogeyman to some in conservative circles that anything “anti-feminist” is immediately embraced, even if it’s a pimp and sex trafficker like Andrew Tate or grifter Hannah Pearl Davis complaining that the problem with Catholics is that they venerate a woman (Mary) too much and women are terrible and inferior. If pushing back against feminism means embracing the evil exploitation of women and misogyny, count me out. But thankfully, you can critique what you think is wrong with the world without having to turn back time and accept the flaws of the past. I don’t want to go back to the Mad Men era when many of the members of my community couldn’t drink at the same water fountain. I like wearing pants and being able to have a credit card. I like doing work that I enjoy. I like sharing household tasks with my husband. Being dedicated to my family doesn’t need to look like the 1950s. And furthermore, my grandmothers and great-grandmothers were not living utopian lives in that era, there was divorce, addiction, and abandonment. Being a woman in the mid-20th century was not a paradise for my ancestors. That’s not to say that we don’t have our own problems today. We do! But I don’t think being apologists for misogynists is the exciting solution we’re looking for.

Some Final Thoughts

I’m not a young mom anymore. I have 4 kids and my oldest is in high school. I’ll be 40 next year when my husband and I will celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. And after building up all my tradwife cred, I’ve likely lost it because my kids go to school now and I work full-time. My husband’s a better cook than I am. Our backyard chickens were murdered by feral dogs and we haven’t replaced them. I’m not completing the checklist of tradwife anymore. And you know what? My family is happy. We’re close, connected, and love to be together. This season is glorious.

I say this to the young women who are finding their way in the confusing world of social media voices, the young women who so deeply want to be good wives and good moms: Don’t listen to the grifters. Don’t listen to the people trying to sell you an aesthetic. There is so much freedom, so many options available to you. There are so many ways to structure a beautiful family life. You can stay home! You can work! You can work a little on the side! You can determine what’s best for your family in this season and then regroup and try something else. You can homeschool, you can hybrid school, you can send your kids to school. You can bake bread. You can buy bread. You can wear jeans. You can wear sundresses. It is up to you. And you are not simply your husband’s sidekick/housekeeper. You are part of an incredible team, an essential member of the exciting project of family life which requires so much sacrifice on everyone’s part. And those sacrifices are beautiful and good. But they don’t require you playing dress up or ignoring your creative talents in other spheres. If the tradwife aesthetic feels like a bad fit, that’s because it’s not for everyone. It never was. And anybody trying to convince you otherwise is selling something.