Trad Wife. This phrase has been the subject of much controversy on social media platforms, with the recent controversies surrounding influencers such as Ballerina Farm, a woman who makes content about her life as a “traditional” stay at home mother of eight children. A Trad Wife can be explained as a woman who embraces “traditional gender roles” in her relationship and homelife. This means that she takes care of all the childcare, cooking, cleaning, and homemaking. This differs from being a stay-at-home mom, with the Trad Wife having a focus on submission to one’s husband, and oftentimes religious undertones behind the decision to live this way. Trad Wife content is videos and posts made by women who partake in this lifestyle, often sharing the fulfillment they have found living this way. This content caters to those who wish to return to the gender roles of the past, evoking aesthetic images of home baked pie and the idea of returning to a simpler life, glamorizing and rewriting the past. They accomplish this through only showing the highlights, and not the hours of work and sacrifice that go into living this way, misleading people about this lifestyle. There is a concerning political impact to be found in the rise of Trad Wife content.
Trad Wife content matters because of the historical issues of a lifestyle of traditional gender roles, the inaccessibility of such a lifestyle for most, and the political implications in a world post-Roe V. Wade. Traditional gender roles have historically harmed women. They have restricted them to becoming only a wife and mother. This is not to say that women who choose these roles are wrong; the issue arises when the ability to choose is removed. When living in traditional gender roles, a wife and mother is all a woman is allowed to be. She is not an autonomous person, but is instead someone whose sole purpose for existence is to serve her husband and have children.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explores both the historical role of women as a group, as well as how a woman on an individual level is relegated to her role, stating, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 283). She explores in Childhood, how even from a young age, girls are discouraged from being loud and boisterous, while their male counterparts are encouraged. This separation continues as they age. In Girlhood, de Beauvoir states how the girl finds herself trapped in housework, quoting Liepmann, to show how girls are given chores while the boys have no duties (de Beauvoir 346). This leads girls to see marriage as an escape: “She has a harder time than the young man in accomplishing herself as an autonomous individual…even if she chooses independence, she still makes a place in her life for the man” (de Beauvoir 381). Trad Wives embody this, claiming to find their independence in denying themselves agency, and spending their lives in submission to a man.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf complements de Beauvoir’s look at the harm of gender roles by showing how they have limited the creativity of women. She brings up how the subjugation of women has lost us the possibility of many brilliant works through the story of a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare, sharing how she could have been just as great as her brother, but due to her womanhood was denied the ability to write (Woolf 46). She also explores how even when women were given the ability to write, they faced many difficulties when trying to focus: “If a woman wrote she would have to write in the common sitting room…she was always interrupted” (Woolf 66). Writing requires a long period of time without interruption to accomplish, and the role women were placed into in society in this era did not allow for this. When one has to take care of children, cook the meals, and clean the house, they have no time for themselves. One wonders what else would have come out of women authors of this era had they not had to hide their writings as they worked due to the restrictions placed upon them by gender roles–what else they could have accomplished had they had agency over their own lives.
Just like there is a class barrier to writing, there is a class barrier to the lifestyle promoted by the Trad Wife. When Trad Wives make their content, they often don’t disclose the privilege that is found in their husband’s salaries, and the material resources that they are provided as a result. A key component of living a Trad Wife lifestyle is for the husband to be the sole breadwinner, and for the wife to only focus on the homemaking. In today’s world the ability to live on a single source of income as a family is unattainable for the vast majority.
Trad Wife content creators are able to create due to their material needs covered by their husband’s privileged wallet, but for someone who wishes to emulate that lifestyle without the wealthy salary, they would find themselves struggling. When Woolf writes of the importance of “a room of one’s own,” she isn’t just referring to the need for a physical space, but for all other needs to be met:
“Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money, and idleness, she did not do so badly…give her a room of her own and five hundred a year…and she will write a better book” (Woolf 94).
Woolf expands on the importance of income and class, stating, “Intellectual freedom depends on material things…and women have always been poor” (Woolf 108). Women in Trad Wife lifestyles make no income of their own: they are fully dependent on a man, and should something horrible happen, their source of material things would vanish.
De Beauvoir also looks at the class disparity in the role of women, looking at the balance of men and women who were serfs during the Middle Ages, stating, “Shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal…the serf and his wife owned nothing…man had no reason to want to become the master of woman who owned nothing; but the bonds of work and interest that joined them raised the spouse to the rank of companion” (de Beauvoir 110). This continues throughout history with the working class. For the poor, it was not possible for the women to submit and stay at home; they both needed to work if they wanted to eat and feed their children. The Trad Wife lifestyle of a single breadwinner is simply not achievable for the vast majority, and never has been. It is an idealized version of the past based purely on the experience of history’s most privileged.
A large part of the Trad Wife lifestyle is the idea of a set “women’s role.” That a woman must marry a husband, have children, and cook and clean in order to be “true.” This idea is not only reductive, but also dangerous. It is thinking like this that drives policies that restrict the rights of women.
In The Independent Woman de Beauvior writes,
“For a woman to accomplish her femininity, she is required to be object and prey, that is, she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject…Renouncing her femininity means renouncing part of her humanity. Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for “letting themselves go”; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails” (de Beauvoir 723).
If a woman denies her femininity she is denied her humanity. For in their eyes, a woman can never be equal to a man, but if she does not remain feminine, she isn’t a true woman. But if the woman does not let go of her femininity, then she is a weak woman. It is a double-edged sword–-a lose-lose.
The Trad Wife definition of a woman as someone who submits to men is also uncomfortable, for it only defines women in terms of the men in their lives. A woman is simply a person who identifies as one, there should not be any other restrictions. Woolf wrote of the many definitions she found of what a woman is, asking, “Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year?…Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” (Woolf 26). She goes on to describe how many of them conflict:
“Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’?…What is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope: Most women have no character at all. And here is La Bruyère: Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes——a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite.” (Woolf 29).
A woman is not an animal like a cat or a dog who has simple characteristics that can be studied to determine what makes it a cat or a dog, a woman is a human being who makes her own choices and has her own thoughts.
The thinking of women through the Trad Wife ideal has had tangible harm. Current Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris has faced criticism for not having biological children, something no man running for office has faced. After the 2020 election results were announced, a call to “repeal the 19th” trended on Twitter, referring to the amendment that granted women the right to vote. It is the thinking of women through the lens of the Trad Wife definition that has led to this: that a woman must have biological children, should submit to men, and not have a voice of her own. On its surface, Trad Wife content may appear harmless, but the thinking beneath it proves otherwise.
Works Cited
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Vintage Books, 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Mariner Classics, 1989.