Opinion Piece: The Trad Wife movement has been co-opted by far-right, anti-feminists, so why are the rest of us still deep-diving?
I’m obsessed with the trad wives. I can’t help myself. Whenever I open up Instagram, I find myself scrolling down to the farmhouse posts where women in 50s curls churn butter, grind wheat and bake banana bread with their seven toddlers dressed in Amish couture tugging at their pant legs. For me, it started with a fascination with Cottage Core, another less controversial movement of Instagrammers who escaped to the country to live in (and usually renovate) an old cottage, where they now mindfully keep chickens and fold napkins.
It’s not hard to understand why a way back to a simpler life might appeal to the overworked younger generations, who were promised the economic flourishing of the eighties and instead, got handed back-to-back recessions and an archaic job market. These younger (30ish) women were promised a world of house renovations, filofaxes and first-wave leg warmers, whilst they issued invoice after invoice from their part-time career in arts and media. What they (we) got was mounting student debt, dating apps and a part-time career as a waiter.
Once upon a time, the man of the household was paid a hefty amount to support the family, whereas the woman took on the task of homemaking, another full-time job. And it is a full-time job.
Many have commented on the recent Times piece with Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, where what looks to the world like an easy living for Neeleman is revealed to be a testing existence that results in weeks of bed-bound exhaustion, due to having to look after 8 children, and run a home, a farm and an Instagram account without any help. Not to mention, she manages to make it look effortless and herself look pretty all at the same time.
But after centuries of having no choice, the women said ‘No, we want careers and freedom’, and the men said, ‘Gosh, that’s radical, but OK…’ and for a while everyone thought it had been fixed.
People my age who want to start families are left with a difficult choice. The pay gap is still very much a thing, but now, a single wage isn’t enough to sustain even a small family, and both partners are expected to go back to work AND take on another half of a full-time job - childcare and running a home.
No wonder so many people my age are looking back to a simpler time when the measure of success wasn’t based on your career status or how many Instagram followers you have (the irony is not lost that the Trad Wives are essentially building a career on socials whilst hailing those who don’t have one).
We’re told we can have it all. We can have a career, a family and a social life. But I don’t know if we can without a lump sum of inheritance or the privilege of being able to move back in with your parents to look after a newborn, an unsung luxury that many of my peers have had no choice but to take advantage of.
Support for motherhood doesn’t seem to have improved as much as we think it has in the last 100 years. In 2015, the Guardian published a piece citing that 54,000 women lose their jobs each year just for getting pregnant. In the last few months, I’ve heard of four people in my circle who have lost their high-flying jobs whilst on maternity due to ‘the role being reexamined’. Government-funded freelance maternity pay on the other hand equates to £180 for a set period, not enough to sustain your part of the deal.
Why on earth can’t new parents, self-employed or otherwise, apply for Universal Credit during this time?
Tradwifedom: How I Cope - a parody: https://youtu.be/GF2TWet47-0?si=gJBV0AP5vS4eKgyd
I’m very lucky to have the privilege of making a living as a freelance performer and writer. My fiancé is a jobbing actor. There has been a flurry of comedians over the last few years doing Edinburgh Fringe - an important port of call for furthering one’s comedy career and acquiring more regular work - pregnant or with a newborn, some of these instances having a hugely negative impact on the mental and physical health of all involved, thus impacting the work they are there to do and the wellbeing of the baby. This is not a reckless publicity stunt but their only option bar quitting their careers.
Now, the alternative is to give up their work entirely, and if that was your path, wouldn’t you rather convince yourself that you were doing it by choice?
The cost of childcare, even with government support, is atrocious. Women are working full-time jobs just to pay for their child’s nursery. Women who go back to work often have to work flexible hours and therefore lose whatever it is they fought their careers to reach before getting pregnant, as well as any chance of moving forward with their careers.
So what will we do? Give up? They say that when you have a kid, the gene kicks in that tells you nothing matters but them. That doesn’t sound so bad. I love to be with family, I bake, and I’m quite good at home decor.
When the suffragettes were fighting for the vote, there was a movement of domesticated women fighting against them, totally misunderstanding that feminism is about choice. These women were comfortable in their roles, like passive cats. Are these the same women? Probably.
However, I can’t help thinking that the Trad Wife movement is less of a nostalgic worshipping of a simpler time unburdened with modern stresses; less too a call to arms for Christian fundamentalism and sketchy, patriarchal conservative values; less even a precursor to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead; but instead it hails from something else entirely. What I believe the Trad Wife movement really came from is, at its core, a reaction to a world that, instead of rewriting its patriarchal system so that it allows mothers to thrive (in life and work) or allowing families to work together to support themselves, this system has stuck a bandaid on the issue and said ‘that’ll do’.
The pull of Tradwifedom hails from the same place that the pull of the cult of Wellness does, or the choice not to have children at all. Because it’s tough. And the only way to make it not hard is to completely demolish this current form of society and go back to living in small communities in huts in the woods, which, actually, I am all for - as long as there’s an espresso coffee machine and good wifi.