The article briefly touches on the links between the "tradwife" movement and the alt-right, but doesn't really press on, even though it also contains these poignant examples:
... Estee Williams, a quasi-Marilyn Monroe with white-blond waves and a cinched waist, advocate marital subservience. Others, like the Australian Jasmine Dinis, sell Biblical womanhood affirmations. One, the Canadian Gwen Swinarton, has pivoted from making porn videos for OnlyFans and A.S.M.R. content for YouTube to the trad-wife space. (In a recent TikTok testimony, she credited the transition to God.) Then there are more openly political, like Abby Roth, who splices mothering tips with anti-abortion content.
Pettitt, the O.G., is a rare Brit and a purist [...] set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood long before the new generation of trad wives began filming themselves saucily kneading sourdough.
In my opinion anyone should be free to decide how they define their roles in their relationship/marriage. If both are happy in a "traditional" marriage with a breadwinner and a housewife, who am I to judge, but there is something very eerie about how radical some people can get about these things.
To me tradwifes almost seem like the feminine counterparts to incels. May they be very happy together.
The difference you are missing between a tradwife and an incel is the tradwife is perpetuating a social circle/family focused lifestyle (and often perpetuating the species through having a reasonable number of children) usually surrounded by a significant social support network of friends and family and like minded individuals. One is very much prosocial behavior (possibly in a way you don't agree with) and the other is antisocial.
You may or may not agree with what each of those groups espouse but they are very different.
I think the misstep is trying to articulate these kinds of inherently personal lifestyle decisions on the broader scale of societies. It just falls into the typical tribal traps.
It would be nice if we could live in a society where you as an individual could decide on the lifestyle that you would like to live and have that personal decision not pigeonhole you into sectarian groups and ideologies that have nothing to do with your personal decision.
> In my opinion anyone should be free to decide how they define their roles in their relationship/marriage. If both are happy in a "traditional" marriage with a breadwinner and a housewife, who am I to judge, but there is something very eerie about how radical some people can get about these things.
Algorithms reward extremism. Every major social media algorithm takes what you're already consuming and tries to find more of it. Ergo, the more things your content is "more" than, the greater audience pull you'll get. This is basically what created the alt-right, or the intellectual dark web, or whatever you want to call it. Attention economies naturally produce more extreme views because people are monetarily incentivized to become more extreme. This isn't a new thing, we saw this much earlier in different ways with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, just as with most things, the Internet and social media cranked it up to 11.
To what extent they "really believe it" is between them and their supposed god and I wouldn't speculate on it. I'm sure many do. I'm sure many also turn the camera off and say "thank fuck we're done for this week" then resume a relatively banal existence. Both however are corrosive to society.
Yeah this whole thing is somewhere between, or an intersection of, roleplay fetish and far-right propaganda. It cannot be effectively understood as a movement or "trend" without locating it as such. Cowardly journalism to even try.
Obviously as it's the left-leaning New Yorker they will choose the least sympathetic examples.
I think the Trad Wife thing should be more about motherhood than what sort of a wife you are. People - women especially - should consciously weigh up the pros and cons of spending your life doing PowerPoints for some company that would replace you in a heartbeat if you dropped dead at your desk vs being more present in your children's life (or even having them in the first place).
This article doesn't mention it, but Hannah Neeleman's father-in-law David Neeleman has founded several airlines, and is worth several hundred million dollars. So she can afford to enjoy whatever unusual lifestyle she wishes, in a way that most of us (Hi Zuck!) can't.
It's a trend I notice in many articles about consumer behavior and trends, even in prestigious mainstream publications. When I dig just a little, the people mentioned are never "normal people." Either their considerable outside wealth is not mentioned, or they are selling something and in need of PR. The ridiculous recent article about "couples who use Slack" is a good example.
I read perhaps the most compelling reason for men to not couple up with aspiring trad wives on 4chan, of all places. The crux of the argument was that women are, more-so than men, subjected to social pressures to conform, and since the trad wife is a societal niche, those women are disproportionately radical, perhaps even mentally ill. The true successor to the 1950s wife is your typical Uggs-wearing, Starbucks-drinking, 2-kids-having soccer mom who works as a nurse.
A factor I think gets left out of this conversation is that the 50's housewife was an aberration, a home-based adult in an age of washing machines, electric ovens and small gardens at most. There used to be so much housework you basically needed a dedicated person to do it all[1].
'50s housewives didn't need to do most of that BUT they were also the primary mental health caregivers for a generation of men who had just come back from something like the second-most brutal war in human history. Typically with support from a member of the clergy but they were on the front lines. It was an enormous but unacknowledged responsibility. And given that we didn't have a repeat of what happened after WW1, on average it must have been pretty well handled.
Today we have memetic warfare [2] instead, and given the social media nature of it, I would expect more women on the frontlines of it than men. Maybe we'll have a lot of 'tradmen' who spend a lot of time fishing, writing poetry, and providing mental health care for their partners working in social media.
It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion. There has always been a minority in the US that believes in the "Husband is head of household and God ordained it so" but that minority is shrinking, not growing, and the majority of stay-at-home mothers I know do not align with that at all.
> It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion
I don't disagree with you, but there were a couple of crucial steps before that: first, extreme views/lifestyles being amplified on social media that lead people to belief that they are more widespread than they may be, and second, people with related political beliefs latching onto and further amplifying this trend for their own political gain.
I feel like this is another example of culture wars where people on one extreme using the people on the other extreme to justify their crazy extreme ways.
When most people are simply more balanced and feel that focusing on the family and having one spouse take care of the kids in a more traditional way is perfectly reasonable.
You can be a housewife and not be submissive, that’s totally rational and most people in America do that without demeaning the housewife in a balanced and rational way.
You can believe in women’s rights and equality and that women should be able to have a great career or education and succeed while still respecting people who crave and coexist in traditional relationships, and it’s okay if you don’t want to do that.
It’s dumb the way we’re like. My way of looking at the world is correct, because look at these crazy people.
The relationship to minimum wage vs cost of living has also changed since the 1950s.
The minimum wage was originally designed so a single earner could, working 40 hours/week, support a (very modest) house, spouse, and kids. That, plus the GI bill (providing college for returning military) set a floor on earnings scale, and allowed a great middle class, where people could actually live, save, and send kids to college on one income. The Republican Party Platform in 1956 was to raise, and continue raising the miniumum wage [0]
Since the minimum wage has stagnated while inflation increased, it is no longer possible to remain above poverty on one-income at minimum wage.
It might also be worth noting that it was not until 1974 that women could get a credit card without their husband's signature [1], and that is just one example of where women's rights have changed.
So, it was both societally and fiscally practical to have a "tradwife" arrangement, and it was similarly impractical to not do so.
If people actually want to go back to running a society where that is the norm, they must not only make regulations forcing it, they mush ALSO make regulations ensuring that it is possible, i.e., boosting the minimum wage to the point where one income will support a whole family and send kids to college. I'd expect if only the income were raised, it would cause more traditional arrangements to happen without restricting rights.
I'm pretty sure actual traditional wives did not record a staged and idealized version of their toils to post content for engagement and sponsorships.
The more traditional wives I know just do it that way because that's what makes sense in their particular family circumstances, often with no political framing at all. When the entire household needs care all day every day, there's no time to make a show of it.
People doing it because it's trendy with influencers are missing the deeper point, and the influencers themselves are LARPing at best.
Exactly. There are actual people's wives out there with varying levels of "traditional-ness" just living their lives as homemakers, stay-at-home moms, having kids, going to church, and so on with no social media or political angle; and then there are the alt-right political-performative TradWives™ LARPing on social media. They're two totally different groups.
I don’t think stay at home wife is “normal” anymore as even during Covid more women were working than not, and the employment rate has recovered since 2020 anyway:
>Ever since Pettitt’s first BBC interview, in 2020, she found herself having to convince radio hosts that she is neither homophobic nor racist. She became “very stressed about communicating quite strongly with news outlets” that she was not associated with the alt-right. More generally, she felt such discussions distracted from her point
I blame Web 2.0 and social media for all of this:
Extremists are bumping into their online opposites, and it results in existential arguing.
Web 2.0 has been a complete disaster. We were not ready to manage the levels of arguing that instantly came along with it. And we continue to fuel it, because clicks make money.
So maybe I can give a little perspective to some of you, from someone living something like this.
Me and my wife are atheists. We don't believe in god. There is no element of Christianity or traditionalism or any of that in our lives. We are a mixed race couple, our kids are not white and there's nothing about "creating more white babies" or any of that nonsense in our outlook or approach. I'm sure that kind of stuff is out there, but by and large I think that stuff is overblown by people who feel uncomfortable with the idea that any woman would want to focus on the happiness of people she loves instead of the demands of people she doesn't. I'm sure we are a bit unorthodox in that we aren't religious conservatives, but that's not really a requirement to want these things either.
Neither one of us come from millionaire families, she comes from a working middle class family and I come from the mud. Neither one of us has beyond a high school education, although we are both very read and have a good understanding of things we are interested in. I sold my youth to put myself where I am today, and risked (and experienced) homelessness to put myself in a position where I could have something more than the corporate ladder. I clawed my way into a position where I could afford a low stress, family focused life, I did it for kids I didn't even have yet, for a woman I didn't even know yet, and I did it without ever taking advantage of another person.
Our main approach is cost cutting. We simply have rich, rewarding lives by getting rid of all the distraction. We eat really good, healthy, delicious food by not relying on others to make it for us. We keep our housing modest, a place to provide us with the shelter and facilities we need to maintain hygiene and take care of ourselves and our kids. It really is very, very easy to have a rewarding life for cheaper than a supposed rewarding but in reality soul crushing life in the rat race. It appears to me, people are convinced that their lives are meaningless unless they're pursuing careers, living in a "tier 1 city" or other marketing propaganda designed to get people to unwittingly dedicate their lives to other people's ambitions. My view is that what really matters in life is cooking good food and spending time with the people you love. You can have a bigger impact on the world by raising competent and healthy children than by working in an office and sitting in traffic.
I think that there are a lot more women in the world that feel guilty or inadequate for wanting to play with their kids, teach them to read and cook them good food rather than pursue some higher ambition that amounts to subservience to a corporate machine, than a lot of people would like to admit. All it takes is that they acknowledge that it isn't some lesser role, it's a higher purpose, it's more rewarding and the path they've been sold is empty. A lot of people don't like seeing it nowadays, hence the constant association with alt right, religious fundamentalism, controlling husbands and all that stuff. In reality, all that is just noise. You'll not wish you spent more time in the office on your deathbed, your kids need a loving person to teach them more than they need a bigger room and a remodeled kitchen down the street from the mall. There's room for personal ambition, but the only rewarding way to pursue that is on your own terms.
[+] [-] micheljansen|1 year ago|reply
In my opinion anyone should be free to decide how they define their roles in their relationship/marriage. If both are happy in a "traditional" marriage with a breadwinner and a housewife, who am I to judge, but there is something very eerie about how radical some people can get about these things.
To me tradwifes almost seem like the feminine counterparts to incels. May they be very happy together.
[+] [-] snapplebobapple|1 year ago|reply
You may or may not agree with what each of those groups espouse but they are very different.
[+] [-] 8338550bff96|1 year ago|reply
It would be nice if we could live in a society where you as an individual could decide on the lifestyle that you would like to live and have that personal decision not pigeonhole you into sectarian groups and ideologies that have nothing to do with your personal decision.
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|1 year ago|reply
Algorithms reward extremism. Every major social media algorithm takes what you're already consuming and tries to find more of it. Ergo, the more things your content is "more" than, the greater audience pull you'll get. This is basically what created the alt-right, or the intellectual dark web, or whatever you want to call it. Attention economies naturally produce more extreme views because people are monetarily incentivized to become more extreme. This isn't a new thing, we saw this much earlier in different ways with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, just as with most things, the Internet and social media cranked it up to 11.
To what extent they "really believe it" is between them and their supposed god and I wouldn't speculate on it. I'm sure many do. I'm sure many also turn the camera off and say "thank fuck we're done for this week" then resume a relatively banal existence. Both however are corrosive to society.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|1 year ago|reply
I think the Trad Wife thing should be more about motherhood than what sort of a wife you are. People - women especially - should consciously weigh up the pros and cons of spending your life doing PowerPoints for some company that would replace you in a heartbeat if you dropped dead at your desk vs being more present in your children's life (or even having them in the first place).
[+] [-] hilux|1 year ago|reply
It's a trend I notice in many articles about consumer behavior and trends, even in prestigious mainstream publications. When I dig just a little, the people mentioned are never "normal people." Either their considerable outside wealth is not mentioned, or they are selling something and in need of PR. The ridiculous recent article about "couples who use Slack" is a good example.
[+] [-] georgeburdell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wooque|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] suoduandao3|1 year ago|reply
'50s housewives didn't need to do most of that BUT they were also the primary mental health caregivers for a generation of men who had just come back from something like the second-most brutal war in human history. Typically with support from a member of the clergy but they were on the front lines. It was an enormous but unacknowledged responsibility. And given that we didn't have a repeat of what happened after WW1, on average it must have been pretty well handled.
Today we have memetic warfare [2] instead, and given the social media nature of it, I would expect more women on the frontlines of it than men. Maybe we'll have a lot of 'tradmen' who spend a lot of time fishing, writing poetry, and providing mental health care for their partners working in social media.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p10G1m3ZfU
[+] [-] aidenn0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stantaylor|1 year ago|reply
I don't disagree with you, but there were a couple of crucial steps before that: first, extreme views/lifestyles being amplified on social media that lead people to belief that they are more widespread than they may be, and second, people with related political beliefs latching onto and further amplifying this trend for their own political gain.
[+] [-] daft_pink|1 year ago|reply
When most people are simply more balanced and feel that focusing on the family and having one spouse take care of the kids in a more traditional way is perfectly reasonable.
You can be a housewife and not be submissive, that’s totally rational and most people in America do that without demeaning the housewife in a balanced and rational way.
You can believe in women’s rights and equality and that women should be able to have a great career or education and succeed while still respecting people who crave and coexist in traditional relationships, and it’s okay if you don’t want to do that.
It’s dumb the way we’re like. My way of looking at the world is correct, because look at these crazy people.
[+] [-] orionblastar|1 year ago|reply
My wife works as a nurse, and we both take turns doing chores around the house. She is not a Trad Wife.
[+] [-] Ancapistani|1 year ago|reply
It’s possible for most people, if both of you want it and you’re willing to sacrifice together.
[+] [-] toss1|1 year ago|reply
The minimum wage was originally designed so a single earner could, working 40 hours/week, support a (very modest) house, spouse, and kids. That, plus the GI bill (providing college for returning military) set a floor on earnings scale, and allowed a great middle class, where people could actually live, save, and send kids to college on one income. The Republican Party Platform in 1956 was to raise, and continue raising the miniumum wage [0]
Since the minimum wage has stagnated while inflation increased, it is no longer possible to remain above poverty on one-income at minimum wage.
It might also be worth noting that it was not until 1974 that women could get a credit card without their husband's signature [1], and that is just one example of where women's rights have changed.
So, it was both societally and fiscally practical to have a "tradwife" arrangement, and it was similarly impractical to not do so.
If people actually want to go back to running a society where that is the norm, they must not only make regulations forcing it, they mush ALSO make regulations ensuring that it is possible, i.e., boosting the minimum wage to the point where one income will support a whole family and send kids to college. I'd expect if only the income were raised, it would cause more traditional arrangements to happen without restricting rights.
[0] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things...
[+] [-] fl0ki|1 year ago|reply
The more traditional wives I know just do it that way because that's what makes sense in their particular family circumstances, often with no political framing at all. When the entire household needs care all day every day, there's no time to make a show of it.
People doing it because it's trendy with influencers are missing the deeper point, and the influencers themselves are LARPing at best.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] incomplete|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dyauspitr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|1 year ago|reply
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192396/employment-rate-o...
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|1 year ago|reply
I blame Web 2.0 and social media for all of this:
Extremists are bumping into their online opposites, and it results in existential arguing. Web 2.0 has been a complete disaster. We were not ready to manage the levels of arguing that instantly came along with it. And we continue to fuel it, because clicks make money.
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|1 year ago|reply
Me and my wife are atheists. We don't believe in god. There is no element of Christianity or traditionalism or any of that in our lives. We are a mixed race couple, our kids are not white and there's nothing about "creating more white babies" or any of that nonsense in our outlook or approach. I'm sure that kind of stuff is out there, but by and large I think that stuff is overblown by people who feel uncomfortable with the idea that any woman would want to focus on the happiness of people she loves instead of the demands of people she doesn't. I'm sure we are a bit unorthodox in that we aren't religious conservatives, but that's not really a requirement to want these things either.
Neither one of us come from millionaire families, she comes from a working middle class family and I come from the mud. Neither one of us has beyond a high school education, although we are both very read and have a good understanding of things we are interested in. I sold my youth to put myself where I am today, and risked (and experienced) homelessness to put myself in a position where I could have something more than the corporate ladder. I clawed my way into a position where I could afford a low stress, family focused life, I did it for kids I didn't even have yet, for a woman I didn't even know yet, and I did it without ever taking advantage of another person.
Our main approach is cost cutting. We simply have rich, rewarding lives by getting rid of all the distraction. We eat really good, healthy, delicious food by not relying on others to make it for us. We keep our housing modest, a place to provide us with the shelter and facilities we need to maintain hygiene and take care of ourselves and our kids. It really is very, very easy to have a rewarding life for cheaper than a supposed rewarding but in reality soul crushing life in the rat race. It appears to me, people are convinced that their lives are meaningless unless they're pursuing careers, living in a "tier 1 city" or other marketing propaganda designed to get people to unwittingly dedicate their lives to other people's ambitions. My view is that what really matters in life is cooking good food and spending time with the people you love. You can have a bigger impact on the world by raising competent and healthy children than by working in an office and sitting in traffic.
I think that there are a lot more women in the world that feel guilty or inadequate for wanting to play with their kids, teach them to read and cook them good food rather than pursue some higher ambition that amounts to subservience to a corporate machine, than a lot of people would like to admit. All it takes is that they acknowledge that it isn't some lesser role, it's a higher purpose, it's more rewarding and the path they've been sold is empty. A lot of people don't like seeing it nowadays, hence the constant association with alt right, religious fundamentalism, controlling husbands and all that stuff. In reality, all that is just noise. You'll not wish you spent more time in the office on your deathbed, your kids need a loving person to teach them more than they need a bigger room and a remodeled kitchen down the street from the mall. There's room for personal ambition, but the only rewarding way to pursue that is on your own terms.
[+] [-] ldehaan|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oldpersonintx|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]