The Rise of the Tradwife

A beautiful woman softly walks into view, she has perfect natural makeup, long blond hair in a half updo, and a mid-length floral dress that swishes gently around her as she makes her way to the kitchen bench.  She has a baby, maybe about 2 months old, all bundled up close to her chest in a baby carrier. 

She’s making her husband and kids breakfast- homemade bread, scrambled eggs from her chickens, cut up fruit, and coffee for her husband. 

She speaks to the camera in a soothing tone that evokes a feeling of safety and nostalgia of a time past as she dishes up the breakfast and serves her husband and children.  We see her go about her day looking effortless as she cooks, cleans, homeschools, and takes care of her family.  She speaks about the privilege of looking after her husband, and how much she loves being a traditional wife. 

We see so much beauty, glamour, and safety in the glimpse of the lifestyle she shares with us through her YouTube and TikTok videos. 

She aligns herself with the TradWife movement- a movement of women who reject feminism and gender equality in favour of a more traditional lifestyle where they don’t have careers, and spend their days looking after their husband and kids- deferring to their husband as the authority and head of the family. 

She’d gotten up an hour or two before her husband and kids, exhausted after a rough night in the living room with the baby so that her husband wasn’t woken by a crying baby in their bedroom.  She’d carefully applied her makeup and done her hair, and picked a dress she knew her husband loved because she wanted to ask him if she could catch up with friends on Wednesday night, so she needed him in a good mood. 

She’d bounced their fussy baby in the carrier as she juggled serving breakfast to four children, and her husband who sat at the table watching her.  She was absolutely exhausted from homeschooling children, making meals, cleaning, booking appointments etc. by the time her husband got home from work at 3pm and asked her to make him a snack. 

She made the snack while doing her best to appease cranky children, as he sat in the living room scrolling on his phone, before she rushes to change the toddler who’d filled his nappy. 

She then starts on dinner, careful to make something her husband enjoys as he sits at the table reading the Bible while she sorts out fights, entertains young children, and nurses the baby as she cooks. 

The kids are finally all down to sleep and she has again cleaned the house from the afternoon and dinnertime mess by around 10pm.  There’s still laundry that needs to be done, but she is utterly exhausted from very little sleep with a tiny baby so she lays in bed next to her husband who has been scrolling and reading since dinner finished. 

He rolls over to her side of the bed and she feels his hand on her, and a sense of dread fills her.  

She still hasn’t recovered from a traumatic birth with the newest baby, and still has severe pain from extensive tearing and stitches; but she can't tell him no.  When they got married she vowed to obey him, as the Bible says our bodies are not our own and that wives (alongside slaves) are to count their suffering as joy. 

The TradWife movement has its roots in Christian, patriarchal ideology, and is not the beautiful, fulfilling lifestyle it’s portrayed to be.   

I was raised to be a TradWife and lived as such for most of my life, while also teaching other women to live this way in my capacity as the wife of a leader within our religious group.  I don’t think I will ever not feel horrible guilt at helping to perpetuate such an abusive way of life. 

After leaving the TradWife lifestyle I began to grow incredibly angry with those who had taught me that it was the ideal, but then I realised something. The women who are in this lifestyle and who are touting it are nothing but pawns in a much larger political game. 

The TradWife movement reared its ugly head in direct opposition to feminism, claiming to be the answer to the horrific anxiety, depression, and dissatisfaction that many women suffer from.  They claim that being married to a ‘traditionally masculine’ man, and submitting to him as the head of your household will cure you. 

In the 1940’s doctor’s started diagnosing women with something called ‘Housewife Syndrome’, a perceived mental illness characterized by a depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and general unhappiness and dissatisfaction with ‘traditional femininity’ and ‘feminine tasks’. 

These women were treated by psychologists and psychiatrists, because it was inconceivable to these individuals that a mentally healthy woman would want more than the 1950’s housewife life. 

Many of them were prescribed ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ including barbiturates and amphetamines, to help with their symptoms; and some women were even institutionalized.   

The reality is that the beautiful, slim, happy housewife of the 50’s that is being increasingly romanticized couldn’t be further from the truth.  These women were living in a world where marital rape and domestic violence were accepted as part of life, where they couldn’t have a bank account without the signature of their husband, father or brother, where they were excluded from most jobs because of their gender, excluded from education, and viewed as nothing but a servant to men; and they were heavily medicated to deal with the significant toll it took on them. 

When I lived as a tradwife the mental and physical toll was no different.  Like the other tradwives I knew, I was constantly exhausted and had no choice but to give up everything I would have liked to pursue in life for the sake of my husband.  We all felt constant guilt for wanting more and were prevented from pursuing personal goals when we tried to. 

Stories of controlling, angry husbands, mental and physical abuse, and marital rape were exchanged when we got together- and the worst thing was we all thought it was our duty as wives to suffer whatever our husbands dished out, counting it as joy to Christ, and calling our husband Lord as Sarah did to Abraham. (1 Peter 2 & 3). 

None of us truly comprehended the reality of the abuse we were living, because we had been taught that men are naturally aggressive and it’s normal and even expected for them to force submission. 

I think there may have been some degree of understanding among those who had converted later in life and had experienced more normal relationships in the past, but even then there was disconnect because we were all so desperate to please God in our vocation as wives and mothers- as Betty states in Mona Lisa Smile, ‘the role we are born to fill’. 

We’d been taught that our husbands would be unkind and that if they were, it was our responsibility to pray for them, and submit harder because if they were unkind or abusive (not that the word ‘abuse’ was ever used) is was because we’d crushed their manhood in some way and they were compensating for that.   

As a result, we ended up in this vicious cycle of blaming ourselves for their abusive actions, and leaving ourselves open to further abuse as we became more and more submissive, thinking it would fix our situation. 

In the tradwife culture, no part of a woman’s life is her own, and you are expected to defer to your husband’s authority in everything from what you cook from dinner, to who you socialize with, and how you wear your makeup and hair. 

You were created to be this man’s helpmeet, and nothing more, and he will treat you as such.  You are not allowed independent thought, because as the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7) you are more prone to being deceived and making bad decisions (1 Tim 2:13,14); and this is why it is so hard to escape this life. 

 You defer to him in everything because he is the god-ordained decision maker as the stronger vessel, and you are not capable of the depth of wisdom that he has been given by god.  You are brainwashed into thinking that your husband is better at decision making and is more intelligent than you, and that any doubts you have are because you are the weaker vessel, and you’re being deceived by the devil, and so you push them away. 

These kinds of beliefs were common in the 50’s; and have always been maintained by fringe groups of conservative Christians, but we’re seeing a return in the mainstream, and not just among Christians. 

I’m seeing atheist and agnostic tradwife proponents take these Christian beliefs and justify them by different means, such as saying that men are biologically stronger and so women should submit, or that women are apparently more emotional and therefore not as capable of good decision making (newsflash: your intense anger is an emotion men...). 

Conservative Christian women living this lifestyle does make sense (for want if a better way to put it), because of the religious indoctrination behind it; but why are the liberal Christian, athiest, and agnostic granddaughters and great-granddaughters of feminists returning to this kind of life, submitting to these sexist, abusive men, and idealizing it? 

In a way I do believe that part of it is due to the concept that the generation that forgets is destined to repeat- i.e. these girls have never experienced the same level of misogyny and sexism that their ancestors protested in the early feminist movements, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. 

When we look at Berlin in the 1920’s and 1930’s we see a culture that was quite progressive for its time.  There was a level of acceptance for queers, the first gender affirmation surgery took place in Berlin in the 30’s, feminism was on the rise, and the city was a hub for liberal intellectuals. 

Unfortunately, the more conservative portion of the German population was horrified at what was going on in Germany, labelling it immoral and claiming that it would lead to the destruction of society. 

The Nazi party began their fight against the liberal culture of the time, pushing a ‘return’ to more conservative values with a massive emphasis on the heteronormative family, including stay at home housewives.  Traditional values were promoted as a large part of the answer to the financial and social instability Germany experienced post WW1. Women were increasingly barred from education, and excluded from politics, while those who were deemed ‘racially pure’ were encouraged to bear as many children as possible. 

Starting at the age of 10 girls were taught to be submissive wives and mothers through compulsory membership in the Nazi League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel).  

Later on, women who were deemed ‘asocial’ for ‘unladylike’ behavior were imprisoned and sent to the camps, including those who had had abortions. 

The idea was that a heteronormative, patriarchal family was foundational to a stable society, and the Nazis severely persecuted individuals who rebelled against the ideal- especially queers and feminists. 

Right now the west is experiencing financial and social instability, and people are looking for something to cling on to, or some kind of answer to fix everything. 

We don’t have to look far to find well known conservative voices promoting the heteronormative, patriarchal family as an answer to the current instability faced by our society, including politicians who actually have potential power to enforce these ideas through limiting access to women’s healthcare, queer suppression, controlling education etc. 

Highly conservative Christians have always existed as a fringe group that lives with tradwife ideals, and while this is horrible, the rise of tradwives in the mainstream is cause for concern when we look at the kind of right wing culture that tends to rely on this kind of lifestyle. 

These girls and young women are being promised security in exchange for deferring to a man, and have zero understanding of what they’re actually getting into until it’s too late, and leaving becomes incredibly difficult if not impossible because they have no education or way to support themselves and their children if they do leave...and this is without taking into account the incredible emotional difficulty of leaving a relationship where you are totally and utterly controlled.  

These women are being told that they are a vital part of re-establishing a more moral, stable society; and have very little understanding of the political games they’re being manipulated for. 

Enforcement of the ‘traditional’ family is a cornerstone of the fascist playbook, and tradwives are nothing but a pawn in the conservative political game, and we need to take a leaf from the history books.