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The rise and fall of the trad wife: Alena Kate Pettitt helped lead an online movement promoting domesticity. Now she says, “It’s become its own monster.”
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- Title
- The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
- Authors
- The New Yorker
- Published
- Mar 29 2024
- Word count
- 4219 words
Saying this on TV and acting surprised that you attracted a politically outspoken audience seems quite naive to me.
Even if she doesn't share the online neoconservatives' political aims, she seems to share their odd belief that it was the media that ended housewives by stigmatizing them, and not the many economic factors that simply put it beyond most people's means.
Assuming your husband had returned from the war without PTSD. Assuming your husband was well off enough to afford you any luxuries...
She's missing the fact that it's not about her making it, it's her husband needs to make it too if not more than her. Hell, even now, she's lucky her husband made it enough to afford her staying home. Good luck writing two books in the fifties and getting them published.
Also assuming you're white, straight, cis, and able-bodied.
ETA isn't the main idea of feminism to let women choose for themselves? Career, motherhood, homemaker, or none/all of the above? If so, the biggest enemy (as has already been stated in these comments) is economic pressure.
To your edit, I would say that the idea of choice is a cornerstone of feminism.
With that said, culturally, the 'choosing' of a domestic life when you now have the freedom to choose anything has been derided in the past. Like people choosing vanilla ice cream or missionary position - why, when you can have anything, would you choose to be at home baking and taking care of the kids, girlboss?
Everything is a reaction to something else. Once women's liberation won the fight for freedom, staying at home with the kids was a Confederate flag flown in the name of 'heritage' to some. Women needed to be showing up in positions of power because if they didn't then why did we fight so hard?
Not to defend the 'trad' wives because they're inherently a poster boy for the fascists that tolerate them but they're reacting to years of hearing that women need to be powerful and visible and hard charging business ladies or they're not Good Women™. After all, most of these 'trads' are making money with their social media content which if some floozy dame was handing out pictures of her in the kitchen she'd earn a right smack in the face and learn her place. I'm sure the boys down at the station would understand.
They want the 'traditional' lifestyle but crave the visibility they're allowed because they're equals.
The problem with being a woman is that you cannot win, no matter what.
If you're the hard charging business woman, you're a failure, because you should (also) be a caring mother, who is always available for your children and plans every birthday party, encourages their hobbies, carts them around to various activities, etc.
If you're the stay at home Mom, you're succumbing to stereotypes and you should be living your own life and you've chosen such a typical thing to do, when you have so many more options available to you.
If you've chosen not to have children at all, you're a failure as a woman in general and won't you be lonely as you age and lose your looks, your husband leaves you because he wanted children all along and on and on.
I don't have much to say on the "Trad Wife" movement, but I do see all the double standards set for women and how there's no scenario in which they win and that seems to hold true no matter what political position you take. If you're a Leftist, see my second paragraph; if you're on the right, see the first.
I don't have anything in depth to say on this subject, because I'm pretty much out of it, but I can see the dichotomy regularly and how frustrating it is to be a straight woman and be getting constant conflicting messages from our society; there doesn't ever seem to be a correct choice.
Everyone is allowed a choice and every choice is the wrong one to someone.
I have nothing but respect for women who choose to be a stay-at-home wife, weather it is to become a mother or a full time housekeeper. There is a tremendous amount of labor involved in either of those things, and rather obviously one does not get paid money to do such things so it’s a serious loss in terms of agency. At least in theory; in practice you get a lot of less tangible benefits that can be very positive to your life.
Things get a bit stickier if you are doing it because you are following right wing and/or fascist influencers and are trying to spread an ideology that would prevent people from having the freedom to choose otherwise.
The list is even longer, unfortunately. Far longer. I know to an extent it's preaching to the choir. But still, I really feel like smashing this weird obsession some people have with the 1950s so just to remind people:
There's probably more that I can't think up on top of my head, quickly, but christ. As a dude I can't imagine being sane and wanting to go back to that time. Let alone as woman...
Well, she had said "put me in a time machine" so I went with the assumption that she was still her in terms of most of those but you're not wrong. If anything you're probably still under selling it!
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More than anything, the "Trad" is about economic power. There's nothing "traditional" about her being able to read and write and publish a book, and nothing horrifying about washing laundry that she saw her mother approach with dread. It's just another word for having it all: all the freedoms and rights of modern women, earned by femminists, and none of the struggles of her poorer sisters, whether inside the home or out of it. Even her toy turkey pops up from the push of a button, certainly not hand raised, self slaughtered, home dressed and laboriously baked. These people have the means to live in fantasy land exactly like a Barbie and have the gall to prescribe their privilege as chosen morality.
Princess Diana had a job as UN embassador. The Queen works full time into her 90s. How many diapers did she change and how many loads of laundry did she hang dry? (Worked.....may her memory be eternal.) Again, there's nothing traditional here that's yearned for other than Wealth.
When she managed her dream of being a SAHM, she decided to work and write a book. It's just about legitimacy: now that she has the privileged lifestyle she still felt judge and so she has to set out to legitimize her choice.
The Prov 31 matriarch is a very hard working business woman. What rubbish is this.
Jackie Kennedy's full time job was media and campaign. Ms Hepburn was a notoriously terrible mother. Jane Austen never married. Martha Stewart is known for her work which sent her to prison. Oprah is still working full time. The insane hypocrisy of this list is staggering. Four heads of states in a list of 8. There's nothing traditional about this other than that Wealth is God.
And I do feel for her a little. There is hostility towards stay at home partners and there is blatant scorn towards domesticity. That someone chooses to love this role for the sake of the family is a worthy cause, which has been co-opted by extremists and grifters. I feel like where she went wrong was straight from the beginning, where she limited her brand to "women who can afford this life", instead of both men and women celebrating humble efforts in their own homes, even if it's after a long day of work. But, you live by the sword you die by the sword. T-shirts and jeans and gender equality don't get clicks, and she rode the frilly algorithm as long as she could.
I think that's the biggest draw: an identity that comes with implied financial security. It's also why the opposite grift works so well for men: stable access to sex and financial security from alimony.
Actual history is gritty and dark and made out of the blood of women....at least this woman seems aware that she's always sold a fantasy. I'm well aware that my ability to choose to be in a single income household stands firmly upon the shoulders of femminist giants.
I'd love to live in a world where one spouse could stay home and take care of that part of life. As it is now, both me and my partner have to work, and while it seems like we're making decent money in some kind of historical or cross-referenced with the median income sense, it doesn't really feel like we're doing much but keeping our heads above water. Houses are too expensive. I can't even imagine what it's like to have kids in this paradigm. Who are these people that can afford to have some "trad wife" at home and find themselves as a story in the New Yorker? Oh, right...
I didn't write up my full $100k earner post, but I work in IT for a large university and just barely cross that threshold.
My wife never finished school because we couldn't afford it at the time. When we went to have kids, we did the math and learned that she actively provides more value via childcare, home maintainence, and cooking/cleaning than she would earning a wage. Something like 95% of her wage would have gone towards paying for those things to compensate for the 40 hours lost a week to laboring in the workforce.
Now that the kids are off the teat, I'd love to swap positions and do domestic work for a few years, but:
So until the kids are in school full time, its domestic labor. She's becoming a figurehead of the community though.
We're poor for the neighborhood, and definitely can't see how people could handle wages much below $60k for a household even if they went to low CoL towns.
Looking at the things the trad wife stuff focuses on such as home making, crafty things, super scratch baking/cooking, food preservation, etc are all basically hobbies plus the family oriented activities. Personally I love all of these things and it would be amazing to somehow get to quit work and just do my hobbies full time. The same way tons of people want to be able to quit work and just do woodworking or other cottage core activities. I don't really see them as all that different. The only unique part of the trad wife activities is that it can be branded as "traditional marriage" to justify the lifestyle.
Trading financial and personal independence for a life of no financial worry and focusing on your personal hobbies definitely seems worth it to a lot of people, especially lately with how rough the economy is. The influencer stuff helps perpetuate this fantasy version of a stress free life with simple joy, what isn't to love if you are young and scared of becoming independent and already like those things? The pity is just how much of it is tied so closely to white supremacy propaganda and what the trade offs are considering you basically have to put full faith into the husband who controls everything. The whole thing just feels like a gateway drug to potentially abusive situations and politics.
I note the article quickly turned into a generic influencer article. Running it all through the influencer filter, examining it all through the lens of "views" and "sponsors" and "marketing."
Any movement, any anything, is fodder for marketing. That's what marketing is; co-opting (or enhancing) attention. For purposes of selling it, of cashing it in. Online people saw a movement coalescing around "tradwife" and some decided to make that "their thing." Their brand. Their identity.
Some, the ones the article name checked, managed to do it successfully. What's successful? When they're able to cash in of course. They might be doing van life stuff, or clubbing stuff, or cosmetics stuff, any sort of attention grabbing stuff, but what they chose (and found success with) was trad wife stuff. Which brought them the sweet, sweet cash of selling out.
Though, the question can be begged, are they selling out if they never really bought in? Because whoever they are, most, most, most, of the people in the niches and genres you see online haven't bought in to jack shit. They're just after cash, period. They wrap themselves up in the trappings of whatever it is that they think will bring it, and then follow the algorithm, study the statistics, and shape their image accordingly.
On the trad wife thing, who is anyone to run around telling anyone else what they should or shouldn't be doing with their life?
My mother bounced around in jobs a bit throughout my life. Eventually she landed with state government and finished out a career working with the DMV. I will never forget that she cried at the little cake/coffee break ceremony her office threw for her (that a couple of her family members came in for). Because a work friend had asked her what she was going to do now that she was retiring.
Mom said she was going to finally get to be a house wife, what she'd always wanted to be. And cried when she thought of it, and as she said it. And that's exactly what she's done in the years since. She vacuums and cleans the house every day. Usually humming the whole time. Straightens things up, fusses around in the kitchen. Mom's happy.
Who is anyone to roll in and shame mom for wanting to do trad wife stuff? My mom who bemoans most of her life having been wasted chasing a paycheck? A paycheck, though I didn't know at the time, mostly spent on daycare for me and my siblings, on takeout or restaurant meals on crazy weeks when the hours were long but kids still get hungry?
It was almost put in as an afterthought in the article, but the woman did consult with her partner. Because he asked. They communicated. She told him she wanted to be a housewife, and he said he'd like that too. That was the only mention, and it wasn't covered again, but years and years seem to have gone by since that moment in their relationship, and they appear to still be together. Presumably happy, or at least content.
Who is anyone else to tell them they're adulting wrong? What they've decided upon works for them. If you don't think it would work for you .... don't do it. Do something else.
But don't do something that involves you being the decider for someone else. Like, for example, someones who want to embrace a relationship where there's a homemaker and a breadwinner in separate roles. If they and their partner have come to that arrangement freely and of collective will, it's their decision. Not only is it not anyone else's decision, it's definitely not anyone else's business to harass them for it.
And it's doubly definitely not anyone else's place to try and ascribe motivations or reasons that aren't in evidence. That aren't proclaimed by the target. Trying to shape those objections as fact, and use them to shame the target.
Maybe they should knock it off and worry about themselves more? And leave people who have figured out their own lives well enough alone?