Trad Wives are Eating the Rich

A thousand think pieces can't stop the allure of a life spent at home

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Here at Radical Moms Union we’re experts in dissecting Internet tropes that intersect with motherhood. I think it’s what the Gen Zers call “chronically online”. A current trend is the growing appeal and repulsion to the #TradWife. To wit:

For the uninitiated, the Trad Wife comes in many online forms. It started on Twitter with a small cluster anonymous trad wife accounts circa 2018/19 that espoused the virtues of dressing modestly, participating in traditional gender roles in the household, scratch cooking, homesteading, having a lot of children, and blaming feminism for the degradation of women’s standing in the world.

During the pandemic, they exploded across social media. But they are more TradWifeLite, many don’t go all Biblical or full stepford submission but believe it’s better to spend their energies at home investing in their families than in the workplace. The homebirth, they homeschool, they homestead, etc.

You’ve probably seen them frolicking barefoot across your Instagram feed. They are the women in flaxen dresses, canvas aprons walking dreamily through their chicken flecked homestead. Their bios either pledge allegiance to the ‘Divine Feminine or to Serving 1 King’. A lot of adoring posts about appreciating their husband’s innate and ‘sacred’ masculinity. Some husbands have, uh, very sacred masculine features indeed.

Sitting in a creek T-R-A-D-I-N-G

A couple of enterprising freelance ‘reporters’ have carved a lucrative beat out of making fun / raising alarms about the Trad Wives. They’re derided as: “anti-feminist,” “white supremacist,” “dangerous,” and the “soft face of the alt right.”

Why Do We Want to Live Like Agrarian Peasants So Badly ?

We find this discourse preeetttyyy boring, especially since a lot of these accounts aren’t really prescriptive. They’re offering a (somewhat staged) version of their cozy (sexy??) lives. Leave ‘em alone! Sure there’s some of this stuff but whatever:

The think pieces go bonkers for this which is also boring, especially when almost every piece mentions Lori Alexander, aka the ‘Transformed Wife.’ She is like a 1980s daytime talk show throwback, scolding the audience from the stage for being wicked, there to incite jeers.

She encourages women to not participate in public life, focus on having children, submit to their husbands dutifully, and live a modest life of servitude to hearth and home.  I found this gem on her blog about mothering with chronic illness: “Learn to suffer in silence so you don’t make your children’s lives miserable even though you are.”

LOL, ok, ya kook. 

Alexander has served as a convenient boogie man to all the Bushwick based bloggers who need a Tradwife figurehead to hold up as a threat; luring impressionable girls to give up on their dreams of a communications degree and instead serve as barefoot broodmares on an Indiana homestead. 

Here’s the thing, Alexander has a modest following of 56k, she’s also, um, older?

Not really the busty milk maid, cinched waist housewife you may have pictured? So why is her content so threatening?

Why is she treated like the Steve Bannon of stay at home moms?

What’s worse , why are all the drop out of the workforce to invest your family instead of a corporation considered to be ‘alt right’ in stead of ummm extremely punk rock?

Why do they treat this online cohort of fermenters and homeschoolers as an insurrectionist mob ready to slit throats at Teen Vogue?

Maybe it’s because modern motherhood and wifedom sucks? Because the alternative is a years and years of long term situationships to dudes who are more likely to give you HPV than bed with a mattress frame?

Maybe because of the lack of functioning welfare state, public education, and viable healthcare system make modern marriage resemble a broke non-profit where parents are under-resourced and over leveraged, to exhausted fuck or fight, and keeping the whole enterprise going for the kids. 

No thanks! 

While it’s fashionable for urbanites to attend a $38 mimosa brunch in a shirt that says “eat the rich '' the Tradwives are eating homegrown plums while dropping out of capitalism entirely! In your face, College! 

Women are yearning for something other than the Standard American Motherhood Experience. These trad tropes, while sometimes unrealistic (quitting your job to homestead) and extreme (not voting because God doesn’t want you to), capture the imagination because these Tradwives ENJOY BEING MOTHERS. 

The wine mom, the silky mom, the hot mess mom, the ‘honest’ mom, all these other online motherhood identities are dedicated to the agonies of motherhood, the unfairness of gender roles, THE MENTAL LOAD, the luke warm coffee in the morning, the crisp wine at night, the sleepless nights, etc etc it's SOOO BOOORRING. What an utter lack of imagination. Meanwhile the tradwives are like, watch me cure my child’s eczema with elderberry juice. Here’s a course on 327 uses for breastmilk! 

Go Ahead, Lose Yourself in Motherhood! DO IT!!

People accuse the Trad Wives of being a throwback to a time when women didn’t have a choice but to be an obedient housewife because of social and political mores. While women have more of a choice now but the choices, uh, suck??  Estee Williams, a popular TikTok TradWife with over 120k followers, told CNN she felt pressure to pursue a career, taking on a challenging course load in college while also working a job. But Williams said balancing it all was exhausting, and she realized she didn’t “want to experience the stress that her mother did as a single, working parent.”

This should not be a controversial statement and YET, there has been a bacterial bloom of think pieces gawking and sneering at the idea.

WOMEN WHO DON’T WANT TO GO COLLEGE!??

WOMEN WHO RATHER HAVE BABIES THAN A TINDER PROFILE!??

WOMEN WHO DON’T HATE THEIR INCOMPETENT HUSBAND!?

WOMEN WHO WANT TO PICK BERRIES AND MAKE BONE BROTH INSTEAD OF SIT AT DESK 8 HOURS A DAY FOR THEIR BULLSHIT EMAIL JOBS!!?

WOMEN WHO *WANT* TO COOK AND CLEAN?

THESE WOMEN DON’T WANT $54,000 IN DEBT FOR A USELESS HUMANITIES DEGREE?? WTF IS WRONG WITH THEM??

And honestly, in the cosmic scorecard of who is right or wrong on the internet, the Tradwives have a competitive advantage for two reasons. The first is that in their curated online world devoted to domestic bliss, there’s a husband to feel blissful about and you know what? THAT’S NICE. 

That’s a nice thing that women should have. A capable husband who goes out and tills or mows or banks or whatever while she collects eggs and makes quilts. That is a NICE and APPEALING thing. Any woman who sneers at this sort of relationship is probably living in an overpriced 400 sq foot apartment that she splits with a ‘long-term boyfriend’ who has ambitions to write screenplays while being chronically unemployed and incapable of filling out paperwork for healthcare because of his “anxiety”. One of them is probably “poly.”

no

 It’s OK to want a man who is strong, capable, and gainfully employed! Especially one who says, “you don’t have to work if you don’t want to.”

RADICAL MOMS ARE NOT HORNY FOR WORK!!!!!  

The second reason, and I really have to hand it to them for this: TradWives have monetized not making an income. They post about how having an income doesn’t determine their worth, how it’s “perfectly acceptable to depend on a man” and that serving their husband is way more fulfilling than serving their boss-- all the while making an income promoting their lifestyle on Instagram with digital products, affiliate links and blogs. 

Well played, Ambyr. 

In a sense the TradWife is like a pro wrestler for moms. For some she’s the heel, for others she's the hero. Meanwhile she’s never breaking kayfabe, crotch chopping all the way to the bank. Long may she reign.