Lately, I’ve been trying to understand what makes women decide to become “tradwives,” women who situate themselves as opponents to both feminism and capitalism, who eschew work for homemaking, raising children, and above all, serving their husbands. In her piece in Dissent Magazine, “The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife,” Zoe Hu defines tradlife as such:
“Tradlife” is the handy neologism for a recent set of attitudes and lifestyles devoted to glorifying the nuclear family and its jolly scenery…Even as tradlife looks backward, its pursuit and its rites are communicated mostly over social media in role-playing and image-making, the principal languages of such platforms. Followers post photos and videos of their ostensibly traditional families, wreathing their content with artful connotations of romance, safety, and leisure. Wives narrate to cameras the good fortune they’ve found in being kept women and living alongside stoic breadwinners; they publish pictures of their houses and vacations, which are visibly expensive.
Hu points out that while “earnest criticisms of life under capitalism” are part of the tradlife ethos, it maintains “a willful stupidity about modern capitalism’s historic dependence on the family, a constitutive structure of capitalism, through which property, debt, and economic interest are all consolidated.” These women want to essentialize gender, to say that there is nothing other than men and women, that these map completely onto male and female. Why, though, is it so compelling for this subset of women and countless others, to locate the solution for contemporary angst inside patriarchy?
The “trad” half of tradlife refers to a specific version of “traditional,” echoing imagery of the 1950s that portrays women as ecstatic recipients of men’s affection. I can’t exactly explain the feeling I have when looking at tradwife accounts. It’s a bodily, anxious reaction, sort of like how I feel when holding a pair of tweezers, compulsively looking for ingrown hairs to liberate. Though I experience a strange, almost nervous sensation when I look through these accounts, it is tinged with voyeuristic thrill.
Sentiments you’re likely to see on a tradwife’s social media posts include “Make your husband a sandwich. It’s the least you can do for being under his protection and provision” to a 5-step list of how to become a traditional wife (Point 1: “embrace ultratraditional gender roles.”) The man in question is rarely seen on camera in these accounts, but his presence is a constant. He is, like Jesus at Christmastime, the reason for the season.
During the short time that I’ve been investigating traddies (as I’ve started to think of them), I’ve become aware how essential the concept of choice is to the ideology of tradlife. From my feminist, queer perspective, life as a tradwife seems the opposite of choice, and yet, I believe that every woman should be able to choose the life she lives. It might seem un-feminist, I mean, to say these women are living in a way I have a problem with.
In a paper titled “Becoming a neoliberal subject,” published in Ephemera: theory & politics in organization, Elizabeth Houghton posits that the narrative of neoliberalism (a capitalist ideology that, among other things, emphasizes individual choice and agency) is so embedded in society that it both determines how we understand ourselves as individuals and causes us to “frame one’s identity as an organisational enterprise” in everyday acts of neoliberalism. Though we may see these things as dissent or resistance, we are actually reinforcing the authority of consumer culture. It follows that the belief that one is choosing—whether you are a tradwife or me, writing about them—is something that neoliberalism depends on.
Houghton references Michel Foucault’s work on the self, who wrote that though one may construct the self in “practices of liberation, rather than in domination…such freedoms are still conditioned and determined through the socio-cultural context in which they operate.” Our choices, what Foucault calls “freedoms,” are made within the system of the cultural and societies we live in.
Looking through the Instagram accounts of several tradwives today, I found myself thinking of Fleabag. I’ve rewatched Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show many times, specifically season 2, during which Fleabag becomes entangled with a Catholic priest. At a pivotal moment in episode 4, she gives a now-famous speech to him from one side of the confessional box while gripping a glass of whiskey. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to share the text below, but here’s your warning, anyway.)
When Fleabag begins speaking, she is already distraught. “I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning,” she says. Through the dim screen of the confessional, you first hear the priest laugh, then say, “Okay, well I think there are people who can…” She cuts him off, saying:
No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning…I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that is why people want people like you in their lives. Because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do. And what they’ll get out at the end of it. And even though. I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing I do makes any difference in the end anyway, I’m still scared, why am I still scared? Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.
Feeling so lost, as Fleabag does, is both symptomatic of an age (early 30s) and of this time (the late 2010s/early 2020s). Choice is a burden for her—she wants to give up choice as a way to feel freed from adulthood.
I don’t like what Tradwives espouse, but I understand how their desire to put rules in place and to limit one’s world can be comforting. Can, perhaps, be called “freedom.” Even as someone who’s much more of a Fleabag than a Tradwife, I have the desire for someone to sort it all out (inner child stuff, I suppose) while also understanding that independence and the form of adulthood I’m living in doesn’t support that.
The tradwives, Fleabag, and me—we’re not that different. The tradwives are choosing a form of stability in the face of what they see as society breaking down. Fleabag wants to be told what to do because the myriad choices of adulthood are painful. I’m “choosing” to look at all of this as a way to make sense of how confusing and difficult life can be.
To finish this essay, I wanted to open with a post from one of the most popular tradwives. I clicked through the top and most recent posts on Instagram marked with #tradwife, but I couldn’t bring myself to use one as the featured image for this post. Even if I can’t help but look, I don’t want to amplify “a prayer for the woman trapped in sexual sin…” posted by two sisters dedicated to “bringing back biblical womanhood.” That’s what I’m choosing, for now.