This is something right out of the Handmaid’s Tale!
You are asking, “What is a Trad Wife?” well here is a hint, it is coming our of the evangelical far-right. It hasn’t made it into a dictionary yet so here is the definition from the
Urban Dictionary...
Short for "traditional wife." Used in alt-right circles to refer to women that embody traditionally feminine and wifely qualities (submissiveness, chastity, willingness to do household chores, etc).
Father Knows Best? It is all about the traditional housewife from the 1950s… barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen!
What is a 'trad wife'? These controversial women are drawing attention – and opinions
USA Today
By Ariana Triggs, Claire Hardwick, & David Oliver
July 14, 2023
Perfectly coiffed hair. A pinup dress. A gorgeous home-cooked meal on a decadent dining room table.
These images convey that of a "traditional wife," a woman you might picture as being from the 1950s.
But these women – known as "trad wives," and typically Christian conservatives – are here today and gaining attention on TikTok to the tune of nearly 187 million views. Many of their followers celebrate the life these women aim to showcase, but others worry they are idealizing a time when women enjoyed less autonomy and fewer rights than they have now − especially as we head into a heated election season.
My mother was a traditional housewife but that was in the 50s. Women could either become a housewife, a teacher, a sectary, or a nurse, those were the options my mother had when she was growing up. She was a sectary at a surveyors office and my father was one of the partners.
Journalist and author Jo Piazza believes there are aspects of the trad wife aesthetic that can be harmful to young, impressionable girls. The purported '50s sitcom lifestyle was just that: a television ideal more than a real-life one.
"It's a false nostalgia for a time that didn't exist for the majority of the population, and for a time that was incredibly demeaning, condescending and difficult for women," she says.
Piazza appreciates that women can make the choice to solely be caregivers and homemakers. Where it goes awry, she says, is that trad wives make it seem as if their choice is superior. Williams, for her part, says she's just living her life and not trying to change anyone else's.
For them they made the right choice but that doesn’t mean it is the right choice for others.
There’s been plenty of pushback against this seemingly rising tide of influencers promising women freedom in the confines of their homes, and the movement has been tied to the far-right. But there’s also a layer to these videos that some say isn’t being fully realized. Under a thin veneer of idealized homemaking are ideals pulled from often fundamentalist religious values, some of which can be mechanisms of controlling women.
“The religious underpinnings can’t be ignored,” says Jo Piazza, an author and host of the podcast Under the Influence, which in part examines the trad wife phenomenon. “The tenets of trad wives that say women should be submissive to their husbands and give up all their agency are directly tied to extreme patriarchal evangelical views.”
Can you say “Handmaid’s Tale?”
Tia Levings calls trad wife content a form of “lifestyle evangelism.” Some of these videos, Levings, a writer, ex-fundamentalist, and author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, said, are part of an effort to tacitly recruit people to the influencer’s religion by making it seem attractive via the kind of life they live. “The trad wives take ordinary cultural elements and desires, such as motherhood and staying home to raise one’s children, and fetishize it, elevating it to a heavenly calling that renders anyone outside of their homey-warm glow as less-than at best, bound for hell at worst,” Levings wrote on her Substack. “They pit ridiculous and fictional opposites against each other, revealing the fundamentalist binaries of their worldview.”
Meanwhile, Salon has another take on it.
There's serious money in peddling fantasies of female submission online, but it may be exacerbating male loneliness
By AMANDA MARCOTTE
NOVEMBER 27, 2023
[…]
It's a neat marketing trick from tradwives to position themselves as a dangerous threat that feminists are desperate to take out. It helps sell the central, lucrative fantasy to credulous audiences: That female submission is a woman's natural desire, one that's being stolen from them by sinister feminist forces. And that you, male viewer, would be gifted with a compliant helpmeet of your very own, if not for those dastardly feminists. But these brave women of YouTube, with their picture-perfect make-up and slender-but-curvy physiques, will stand up to those bitches and restore your birthright: A smoking hot 22-year-old housewife who never talks back, never gets tired, never says "no," and never gains weight, no matter how many children she has.
By feeding conservative audiences a largely imaginary war with feminists, the tradwives are also pulling off another sleight of hand: distracting from how their content preys upon men, especially young men, by selling them a silly fantasy as reality. In the process, they're contributing to the male loneliness epidemic, by discouraging young men from developing the skills and mindset they need to get a real girlfriend, instead of just subsisting on a steady stream of social media delusions.
An article in an Indian news site
ED Times reports,
Tradwives, spanning the political spectrum, uphold the belief that a woman’s place is in the home as a wife and mother. Whether driven by personal, political, or religious convictions, these women justify their lifestyle choices as a return to traditional values in an increasingly modernized society.
“In recent years, the identity of the tradwife has been adopted by women preferring domestic duties over the modern workforce,” notes journalist Sian Norris. “The tradwife aesthetic is soft, feminine, and sometimes political.”
[…]
Far-right tradwives epitomize a broader trend within the far-right movement, leveraging gendered narratives to promote racially focused agendas. Their advocacy for traditional gender roles and condemnation of feminism align with far-right ideals, framing women’s empowerment as detrimental to societal stability and racial purity.
It all fits nicely in with their Christian Nationalism movement and their “Father Knows Best” views. Now consider,
Bans on no-fault divorces would be unpopular, but the Republicans may be too caught up in a moral panic to care
Open Democracy
Chrissy Stroop
7 December 2023
Republican populist Ronald Reagan was the first – and, until Donald Trump, only – US president to have been divorced. He is also the reason that Americans have been able to divorce without the imposition of an undue government burden over the past 50 or so years, having been the first US politician to sign a no-fault divorce bill into state law while governor of California in 1969.
[…]
And it’s even funnier that Trump, who is even more beholden to a Christian nationalist base, could become the president who takes the country back to the bad old days, in which abusive spouses (usually husbands) could often rely on the difficulty of obtaining a divorce to help them trap their abused counterparts (usually wives) in terrible marriages.
Do you see a trend here?
Banning abortions
Banning divorce
Traditional marriage
Banning same-sex marriages
Forcing gays, and trans people back in to the closet
Onward Christian Soldiers
*****
I don’t have any problems with a woman being a traditional wife, if it a choice I don’t have a problem but what I have a problem with if this is forced on a woman.
