Thank you for this!!! I have CHOSEN to be a homemaker, wife & mother. I worked as a nanny for many years & just knew that I didn’t want to outsource that care of our children, for a variety of reasons.
EVERYDAY I feel so grateful to have my husband providing & protecting us and I feel when I share these things I am (mostly) looked down upon. Kind of like - why would she be doing & saying these archaic things?! I also get treated like I am stupid & childlike because I have traditional values.
I grew up in a chaotic & abusive home and all I ever wanted was to be happily married & have my own family to love & share this sacred life with. I LOVE your work! Thank you again sister 🙏🏼❤️
Thank you Bianca! I’m so glad you found your way to the life you always felt aligned with, that is beautiful.
I also think for others to say that that sort of life or the desires themselves are archaic is a mark of how out of alignment much of society is with the normal course of human life. When did a mother wanting to raise her own children rather than drive miles and miles away while they are cared for by those who have no investment in them become normal? Similarly funny how “archaic” also automatically means negative too.
I’m really sorry other people have treated you badly for living your life in a way that feels best to you! But women have been the doctors, scientists, butchers, priestesses, engineers, artists, doulas, etc. of their communities since the beginning of time, and many find it upsetting, offensive, and existentially threatening to our freedom to be told that choosing to reproduce means we should never get to do those things ever again and that wanting to do those things means we don’t love our family or community. Not all women feel that their relationships to other people are professions, or that our relationships to others fulfill our need for an independent identity, and it’s those women’s efforts that protect and free all women. Bc when some women are less fortunate than you and their husband cheats on them, leaves them, or beats them…it’s thanks to women like me (who fight to have a publicly-acknowledged “profession” aka money for my work just like men get- and all the things that make that possible, like high quality childcare, and paid maternity leave) who protect those women from destitution and harm. Financial enslavement to men isn’t romantic and it isn’t safety. You’re just lucky. Luck doesn’t cut it for most women around the world.
I realize you are replying to Bianca here, but I wanted to say a few things.
Of course women have always worked, no one is denying this or suggesting they should not be allowed to. It’s the defensive and vitriolic reaction to women who choose not to engage in work outside the home (as seen in your comment above) that I’m writing about here. There is no existential threat to your (or mine) right to work by women who choose to be mothers and homemakers. I also am absolutely not prescriptive to others about these choices. I actually do work outside the home in a profession that is very much based on relationships and care. This said,I do think that when we have very small children, our relationships with them are the most important and our obligation to them is the highest, and therefore if we can help it at all, we should not be putting them in childcare or leaving them for extended periods of time to fulfill our passions (note the use of the word “extended”). We have to acknowledge what is best for their needs. We also have to realize that this doesn’t mean our passions and work do not matter, simply that there are phases in life where they will be less central (and that there will also be future phases where they are more central). No one is saying you don’t get to do those things if you reproduce, and if that is what you got out of this, you are absolutely applying your own personal defensiveness because that is not my message. I don’t see the fact that I work as a reason to suggest to other women that they owe me their freedom they way you are doing so here. Again, women have always worked, they just did so in their own homes in care of their own children before the Industrial Revolution, and going back to that model to whatever degree is possible would do wonders for the good of many children and many women. We also should be able to trust other women and their judgement-if they want to be home and be in a reciprocal relationship with their husbands, we should trust their choices. Some women have really good marriages, and that is wonderful. I myself have one. I also had to escape an abusive one and was a single mother at one point in my life as well, and had to work several jobs and out my child is daycare. Now I work fairly minimally because my husband’s job allows this, and get to be home to actually raise my children myself now. The former abusive relationship version of me wasn’t aided by other women with fancier jobs (I did not feel “protected” from my destitution or harm, nor did I feel “freed” by other women). What freed me and protected me was my own determination, and later, my current husband. Don’t conflate your choice to work in our current society with feminists in the 60s fighting to pass Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, we are well past that. The struggle now isn’t for women to have the right to work, it’s for them to have the right to raise their own babies and not have to pump in a closet to feed a 8 week old who is at daycare due to a trash economy and an extremely sick consumeristic society.
My comment was defensive of my beliefs, yes. Women who imply that they don’t work bc they “love their family” or “want to raise their children properly” are implying women who work paid jobs don’t want or value those things, and that offends me. I think it’s very unfair to say my comment was vitriolic, though.
Well, yes there can be an existential threat. Women who choose to sacrifice their paid work bc they are caught in a patriarchal system (ie no good childcare, no maternity leave) *and who then preach it as a virtue* to work for free, are giving in to and enabling this abusive patriarchal system that exploits women for free labor and deprioritizes the health of women and children both in and outside the home.
I know women who are stay at home moms/homemakers (I was raised by one) and many do the exact same thing as women who pursued careers but sacrificed the chance to have children- they proselytize their lifestyle bc they can’t acknowledge they had to give up major dreams that men don’t have to. It’s taking the “blue pill” rather than the “red pill” (to use a matrix reference). Saying “I CHOSE” to be a homemaker/career woman. Well, yes, it’s important to have a strong, resilient, empowered sense of self by taking responsibility for one’s choices and refusing to identify as a victim….but it’s not really true that women just naturally choose to either quit their job entirely or severely kneecap their career bc they have no access to good childcare or maternity leave, or else not have kids at all bc their job has no good childcare or maternity leave. We are forced to choose between these shitty, totally unacceptable options bc the world is still a patriarchal, woman-hating (or at least woman-exploiting) place. We should recognize that and change things to our benefit.
Working women and homemakers need to join together to change these circumstances for the future generations- but they can’t do that when there’s judgement on both sides, and a childish refusal to acknowledge any dissatisfaction with one’s circumstances at all. Even you passed judgement when you said you’re glad you can stay home to “actually raise” your kids…implying women who put their kids in daycare or who have a nanny don’t actually raise them. I know people who had nannies who feel like they weren’t really raised by their mom (dad always gets off the hook- doesn’t he?) and I know others who loved daycare and say it’s where they gained confidence and friendships. I was homeschooled for quite a long time…and it was really wonderful for me in many, many ways, but also very harmful in other ways. As an introverted, anxious child, I would have benefited from MUCH more time away from my mom and immediate family (and my mom is a WONDERFUL person and my family is AMAZING and are the most important people to me). So that’s my background. I definitely have a strong negative reaction to women who act like someone should be thanking them for quitting their job and living through their kids. I feel extremely strongly that it is wildly unnatural and unhealthy for women to have no or little identity outside of their nuclear family, and I think it can create problems of resentment for their children. If I have kids someday, I will proudly pursue my personal dreams (just for me, not for anyone else) in front of my kids- me doing so, ironically, would be an amazing gift for any child (especially daughter) I might have. If you believe you must sacrifice your dreams to be a proper mother, then you teach your daughter to sacrifice her dreams for her kids…thus, out of love, you are ensuring your daughters never achieve their dreams. And you are ensuring your sons see women as sub-human vending machines. People don’t respect people who have no personal needs or boundaries. So misogyny comes from men, but self-abnegation comes from mothers. Both are societal problems, imo.
The issue is refusing to look outside the box and recognize that we actually do still deserve more freedoms as women- we are still in this revolutionary fight to have basic freedoms- including the freedom to work the full range of professions FOR PAY, WHILE having children. We’re only halfway through the fight: we can technically get hired, and work the job, now. But we still cant rise through the ranks, yet, unless we never reproduce. That’s unacceptable. I don’t agree with women who claim that opting out of that fight entirely by quitting their paid work isn’t harming the fight. For example, if you’re a homemaker, passionate about that as a life calling, and not arguing for wages for housework, then you’re part of the problem. And if you’re a career woman with no kids, and you’re not discussing how hard it is to be childless some days, and how it’s discrimination for your workplace to not provide paid maternity leave and good, affordable, high-quality childcare, then you’re also the problem.
You’re a brave and strong woman for escaping your abusive ex. Glad to hear you’re doing well!
By your logic, all women owe it to one another to do paid work at all possible stages of their lives, which simply is not true or fair or practical. This also negates the basic needs of infants.
My saying I want to “actually raise my own children” is in reference to objective facts. If I am home with my children, caring for them and teaching them, I am raising them. If they are with others much more than they are with myself, they would be being raised in a much more real capacity by those others. There is a lot of research that shows the positive impact on the mother being the primary caregiver for children 0-3, if you are the type more compelled by research than by common sense.
It is really true that some women do just naturally (and happily)choose to leave their careers to raise their babies, actually. Motherhood is (shocking, I know!) actually very fulfilling.
I never suggested women should give up their dreams in motherhood (I certainly haven’t!). My children see me working on many things I enjoy and make time for—motherhood isn’t just drudgery, after all. You should know though, it is some women’s dreams are to be a mother.
Paid leave and good child care are not the bar that I hold for the policies that will truly help mothers. Both of these things only ultimately encourage separation. Of course I think we should have paid leave. Do I think it is the ultimate fix though? Absolutely not. That’s crumbs.
Yes, that is my logic, and yes, we do owe it to each other to agitate for, make the case for, and demand pay for our work- be it homemaker or doctor. It isn’t true to my worldview and values, and it is only impractical…until it’s been done. Wages for housework, paid maternity leave, and quality childcare doesn’t fly in the face of infant development- it is in line with infant’s needs.
Well, no. Being alone in a structure with your infant nearly 24/7 with no breaks, isn’t more healthy for them than doing that a third of the time, then handing them off to grandma/grandpa, then a (good, evidence based) daycare. However, yes, we agree that being alone in a structure with your infant nearly 24/7 with no breaks is probably better than dumping them in a shitty daycare for 15 hours a day.
Paid maternity leave for 2 years and 1 year of paid paternal leave solves this problem. Billionaire CEOs can simply institute these policies in all their businesses/corporations and accept halved salaries/net worths (oh no! Only being worth 1 billion instead of 2 billion!). The idiots controlling the market would simply have to not freak out and it would work fine. Pensions would also fix the problem.
Thats nice that some women want to be full-time mothers and homemakers. Those mothers should still be paid to do that societal labor, though, imo.
If your *only* dream in life is to be a mother…I’m concerned. If *a* major dream in your life is to be a mother- great! Frankly, it should be!
No. Actually long-enough paid leave does not encourage separation. It encourages women (and men) to spend OODLES more time with their infant babies, in the developmental stages that are most crucial to their children’s future health and happiness. Even just one year of paid leave would ensure almost all kids get to breastfeed. I disagree it’s crumbs. I can’t see how we move forward at all liberating ourselves and the world from patriarchy and all the social instability and violence that it causes, without, as bare minimum starters, paid maternity leave and high quality affordable childcare. Care and the family must become legitimately accounted for in a capitalist system for us to get anywhere- that means, in my opinion, putting equal capital in the hands of women as men OR changing the system so it doesn’t rely on capital at all. I’m in favor of preserving the capitalist system and trying the first option.
I don’t totally disagree with your points here. I personally think a mother’s pension, something like social security, could be a good option. You might be interested to know though, that even within countries with the best paid leave policies that breastfeeding has dismal rates. This is because we have a cultural problem, not just an economic one. I also am somewhat of a localist and so believe more in working within the community with elder women and other mothers in order to create co-op childcare that would allow women to work part time if desired and needed, I’m not that interested in the government providing that care that I would rather a grandmother, neighbor, older sibling or friend could provide with much more personal investment and care. I think this is something we need to work for from the inside out, not the outside in.
Also, I have never in my life met a woman whose only dream is to be a mother.
I appreciate what you've shared here, Emily! A couple of thoughts (long comment incoming)...
1) "Her ability to earn money while not leaving her children is seen as being a contradiction to the whole trad wife trope."
The idea of defining traditional family life via carefully-curated income-generating media created by home-based mothers is, to me, ridiculous. I agree with another commenter here who said that the traditional grandmothers they know, who stewarded and used traditional skills, never would have oriented their lives around a camera's interpretive eye. The simple act of translating private life into the public eye for monetization is a choice that falls more into the realm of modern career-orientation and the industrialized exploitation of life than I have seen anyone acknowledge. (Though I don't think many women see it as being exploitative, especially in an age where anyone falling under the age of 35 has not necessarily been taught to be cautious about what goes up on the internet and has also potentially been raised with a blurred line between public/private and unmonetized/monetized living.)
2) "Maybe not in every tradition and in every time in human history, but fathers being present and playing with their children is not some modern gift of feminism to today’s mothers. At one point in time, fathers also worked in the home, just like mothers. The home-the cottage economy-was the basis of life, and so too was family."
YES. Home-tending requires a collection of skills and the cultivation of an attentiveness that is often labeled as being women's work. However, I'm quite done with the continual regurgitation of the [modern, industrialized] idea that men do not traditionally belong in home-tending spaces or in child-care. That whole notion of one sex's separation from the home and the other sex being confined within it seems to me to be a delusion that can only thrive in cultures where we rely on money as our means to survive instead of working directly for our food and housing. My mother used to tell me stories of when she was quite small and her carpenter father would deliver milk in the wee hours of the morning, her and her mother riding along. Now, I'm sure labels aplenty could be slapped onto my mother's family, but what she vividly remembered was being tended by both her parents. She simply was incorporated into whatever each of them was doing, which sometimes was spending time in the garden or the kitchen with her mother and sometimes spending time in the shop beneath their barn with her father, or going along on a job. Both parents worked from a home base, neither was removed from the daily work of homemaking.
In later years we briefly lived with my grandparents, and I can never remember an instance in which one spouse shrugged off a specific household task waiting in the wings as the other person's job. If the kitchen needed cleaning after a meal, my grandfather was just as likely to jump in and do the cleaning as my grandmother. And gratitude was frequently and clearly expressed for the work contributed by each person. Some of my favorite memories from living there involve my grandfather's cheerful invitation to join him for a good dishwashing session (or, on the other hand, following his example and taking it upon my child-self to give the kitchen a sneaky deep scrub as a surprise for my grandmother while she was napping or up in the garden).
I see this same ignorance of the split away from both sexes having responsibility in home-making and childrearing with many of my Amish clients and friends, who are just about as traditional as you can get in the modern US. There's a definite sex-based leaning in responsibilities, but the line of that split is much more fluid than many might guess. Men in the Amish communities where I work, if they have a job that requires their frequent absence from the home, often pay for their wives to have "hired girls", teenage girls who are out of school but not yet married, for multiple days out of the week. The work of the home and the direct care of the family is not considered a one person job. In many families, the men wash dishes, mind household chores, and take the toddlers out to the field or down to the shop. In many families, the women work in the field or in the barn, mind the checkbook balance, and guide the direction of the family's economic status. Definitely not what might fall under the label of "tradwife".
Hi Jan-sorry it took me so long to reply, I’m slowly wading through the comments on this one and they are all long so it is taking some time!
Speaking to your comment about the validity of Hannah and her situation being seen as the definition of traditional life-I do agree on the surface. That is, I agree that women filming the pretty parts of their lives and monetizing it requires a certain level of tech, time, and perhaps vanity that the women of yore both didn’t have access to or didn’t have altogether. However, my analysis is more that it is actually very traditional for women to be working in a way which economically bolsters the family while also still minding children and being at home. It looks very very different here of course, but it’s the general underlying concept. It’s both very modern and very traditional in a way.
As for your comments on work in the home and the sexes, I just really enjoyed reading that. Your grandparents sound absolutely lovely. Even though both my husband and I work outside the home, we both do it the least amount possible because we both value time at home and facilitating a situation where daycare is not necessary more than financial wealth at this point in our lives. This also means we take a lot of turns in the housework and child rearing. There are still some things that are sex-coded though-I don’t generally chop wood or mow the grass or fix the cars, he generally doesn’t mend the kid’s clothing or cook anywhere near as much or do research and make the majority of the health/medical choices for the family. Once in a while though, I’m chopping wood and he is making the tea and tincture cocktails when the kids are sick. I think we just have an attitude of “whatever needs done, will get done” either way really!
I take care of Amish women occasionally as well and can concur to your sentiments here-and I think they really just have a similar “things must be done” mentality. I think living rurally in general also facilitates this. Perhaps there is a geographical factor at play here actually now that I think about it!
Good question, Kateriina! I made that statement without having a well-considered foundation beneath it. I suppose I believe it to be true because of the number of older women I personally know who do have access to social media and who have significant craftswomanship in home skills, but who, unlike the women in my age group or younger, are averse to the idea of projecting their lives to a wide audience.
Saying it all so I don’t have to😃🙌🏼 Great piece. Especially resonate with this: “I am frankly exhausted of feeling the need to defend the value of motherhood, something that feels so obvious, and I do think the current feminist landscape is the setting in which this defense feels necessary.” I’m also exhausted of having to explain that no I’m not a fan of toxic high-control religious environments. Valuing motherhood needs a rebrand.
You are absolutely right Amber-it is so strange how discussing one of, if not the most, valuable and normal roles any one person takes on in the normal course of human life (motherhood OR fatherhood) means defense is even necessary. We shouldn’t have to defend what is our most basic and honorable work. Yet here we are.
1). This whole thing makes me want to buy a Christy Dawn dress.
2). I, too, am tired of apologizing for the life I chose. So I don’t anymore. Now I just laugh it off when people are snarky because I’m happy and we have a happy family and their discomfort at me staying home and being financially supported by a man is not my problem.
3). I do find it fascinating how much it triggers people and I appreciate your analysis! Great writing!
Zero disrespect to tradwives or tradition: I have heaps of skepticism about anyone who allows (invites?) cameras into her/his home. Who lets her/his kids be made public? The traditional grandmas I knew would never seek attention or curate their experience for public consumption.
I agree that putting children on the internet is overall a poor idea but I do not think it is the focus of her work, and therefore doesn’t feel especially exploitative to me. Still not great, I agree.
I was born in 1972 to a feminist mother in an urban/suburban area. I've always lived near or in a major city, surrounded by urban women. Then my daughter went away to a Christian college in West Michigan! And married a homeschooled man, the eldest of seven! She's applying to medical school and is definitely a feminist "accomplishment" like I think my mom would be really proud of her. She wants to be a mom and a surgeon, and has women my age in the field giving her amazing support. The people she is around are SO healthy. Not like vegan and progressive healthy California standards. Like actually healthy people who are in harmony in their bodies and their communities. I love the thought of that harmony with our bodies. That to me was the interesting thing in this piece. It's less interesting that people are mad about it. One thing different about women and men is we women care a lot what other people think about our choices. So there are two battles. To make choices aligned within ourselves, and to accept the sneerfullness of others at the easiest targets. People sneer at men too, but they do it differently, and men seem to easily care less. For me, it never stops being upsetting. Great piece. I'm so happy this trad influence is available for young women. I'm sure if I'd ever met one single woman like my son in law's mother growing up, I would have had more than two kids and felt more fulfilled, less tortured. I didn't hear ever that motherhood is a great gift to humanity and the planet. But I'm so grateful for the two kids I have. Best thing I've ever done.
Thank you for this comment Desiree, I think it is really helpful and beautiful. Your daughter, your mother, yourself and your daughter’s mother-in-law all sound like amazing women in your own rights!
I especially appreciate what you had to say about the difference in men and women and how they choose to cope, or are able to cope, with how other people react to their choices. It is one thing to be in alignment with ourselves, but it is another thing entirely to be in alignment with ourselves and also in acceptance of any critical perception of that alignment. I do agree that it comes much more easily for men, I suppose that it is a function of women’s sociability perhaps?
Also- what you said about not hearing motherhood spoken of with high praise- I think many of us could echo that sentiment, and I also think that the world would look much different than it does if the opposite it was true.
Also, you are beautiful (as is Neeleman). It’s fine to put that out there too. Among the many reasons women avoid or fear having babies is they think it will make them ugly. I admit to having this fear too, though I wouldn’t have actually avoided having babies because of it. Happily, having babies in no way made me ugly nor did I have to “give up” on my appearance. I suspect some of the venom directed at highly visible “tradwives” is because they are attractive.
Emily, most women I know are against tradwifery because our moms lived it.
I grew up homeschooled with exclusively homeschooled peers. We were, most of us, Christian (I still am, though most of my peers can’t say the same). Some moms wore head coverings; some made their own bread out of freshly ground wheat berries (DELICIOUS btw, I dream of that bread but my mom couldn’t really sustain the logistics required!); some had to work a weekend job as e.g. an RN to be able to afford to stay home during the week where others had wealthy husbands who paid for housekeepers in assistance to a homemaking homeschooling wife; but all these moms stayed home and taught their children. Home births and hospital births, Narnia=demonic or pro-CS Lewis, different cultural backgrounds (I’m Puerto Rican, and we were in NY so the homeschool groups were pretty diverse).
It didn’t end very well.
Full stop, I know at least 5 men in this group who left their wives and families unexpectedly for another woman when their children were teens. My raised-Catholic, public-school and day-care, working-mom husband pointed this out to me when we were first dating; isn’t that weird, he said? Huh, guess so, I said. And why is that, he said? Huh, I’m not quite sure… I said, not understanding his point. He pointed something else out - we were at my parents’ friends home for dinner early in our relationship - why are the dads just sitting, why aren’t they helping to clean up from dinner? Huh, I said. I’m not quite sure. His dad, you see, has always helped with housework.
I also know at least 5 of my childhood friends no longer speak to their moms. My husband’s peer group - none of them are estranged from their parents. None.
It’s quite easy for young, optimistic women who have made choices that make them happy to believe these choices must generalize across all of humanity. MUST generalize. Must. This is a folly and a vanity that most young women will grow out of. I count myself fortunate to have had this illusion taken from me at a very young age. There is no life path you can follow that guarantees a certain outcome. None.
I can only hope it turns out better for the “tradwives” like Mrs. Ballerina Farm, who plaster their childrens’ faces, bodies, and life stories all over the internet. I’m not super hopeful about this, but I suppose anything can happen.
My own life sounds very similar to what you are describing of your mother and her friends. I work 12 hour shifts every Saturday and Sunday as a nurse and then homeschool and housewife it up Mon-Fri. I even have a wheat mill (that bread DOES sound delicious!). This said, my husband does help with housework. He is home all weekend with the kids, has dinner waiting for me when I get home and makes my lunches, has my gas tank filled up for me and everything. We take turns. I truly think that the dynamic we have is very traditional in many ways BECAUSE of this fact. That is basically my critique-that people don’t really grasp all of what “traditional” can include. Way way way back to hunter gatherer societies, people, men and women, were generally egalitarian and took on roles that fit their physiology and which benefited the overall group. In pre-industrial times, we can look to the cottage family economy to illustrate something similar. This is how I view my own situation-we work well together in our respective roles to do the best thing for our home and family, and both of us work the least amount possible outside of the home.
I obviously cannot guarantee anything about the future of my marriage or relationship with my children but I feel pretty good about things. The reason being that I feel that the issues you brought up-divorce and estrangement-are not consequences of the set up but more of the quality of the people themselves, their life experiences, and their expectations. I have a similar life to the ones you described but my husband helps me, for example. I also think people love to get divorced for reasons that could be worked through, and being estranged from your parents is super trendy right now, so perhaps it is a little bit of an overall culture problem.
Also, I there are always exceptions to generalizations and I think that that goes without saying.
I agree that putting kids on the internet is generally problematic but that wasn’t the point of what I had to say here really. I do think that people who actively make money from their kid’s presence online (family bloggers, people who make and manage social media for their wannabe star kids etc) are on a much, much, more problematic level than Neeleman. Her kids running around in the background of a cooking video cannot be equated to family vlogs heavily featuring children or whatever.
You have a point of course. I didn’t want to have the exact same life as my parents, nor did they want the exact same life as theirs. Which is fine, and often unavoidable.
Something that changed in my perspective after having kids is that I think more about “how do I sustain values and culture over generations” rather than “what do I believe and why”. It’s not either/or obviously but the focus has shifted. I don’t have easy answers (and everything I’m doing in my life is by necessity experimental) but I do have a need to look for answers.
Liz, I have known more than a few people who lived within groups manifesting the dynamic you describe. I've lived through elements of it myself, though on the fringes of those groups (impossible to try to explain to even professionally trained therapists who haven't lived it also--my younger self tried and failed). It definitely does not end well. AND I would definitely not use the word "traditional" to describe any of what I witnessed or experienced. Nor would I call it particularly faith-based, though it often coincides with some form of conservatively expressed faith. I used to lay the blame with conservative Biblical doctrine, but at this point (though my own faith is not particularly conservative) I think it has less to do with religion than with a deep corruption of beliefs around human responsibility to Life.
Jan, thank you for this, I am in full agreement. This is basically what I just wrote in more (probably unnecessarily 😂) personal, anecdotal words. This isn’t actually traditional in the great span of the human story. It’s just people misinterpreting and corrupting tradition and then treating one another poorly with that as an excuse.
I am also a Christian (and enjoy your substack). I think at this point it’s probably impossible to be “traditional” - we are modern or postmodern through and through. Any project of recovery is so very much like a LARP. I like Michael Martin’s words on this in his work on sophiology (he is a farmer and homeschool dad - both stereotypically “trad” I suppose - and a very unorthodox thinker):
“There is no place to which to retreat. Nothing to preserve. Nothing to restore. There is only the future, the eschaton, the parousia which is always/already here. Let us embrace it.”
I am pretty involved in a local birth justice group - and I think, while we all want healthy and safe vaginal birth and high breast feeding rates and appropriate access to midwifery and just OPTIONS for anything but the iatrogenic norm, it strikes me that reference to the past is going to be a mistake in some ways - besides the context where you correct wide-eyed OBs claiming 1 in 10 moms died in childbirth or some wild number. Home birth today, with professionalized doula + midwife, is already not home birth of 300 years ago with women in your community supporting you and sitting with you. Neither is free birth, although I understand what free birthers are trying to do. We can sit and wish for these circumstances all day and meanwhile women are getting the cut above and the cut below; I don’t think we can afford to be nostalgic, we have too much work to do. And it’s OK that home birth looks different today. We can sit with that and grieve it and then continue in the work.
What bothers me about modern “tradwifery” besides the creepy kids-on-social-media factor is just… like I said, the delusion that there is a pure way of living. There just isn’t. And I know an awful lot of kids and mothers hurt by that in the 90s and we’re going to be doing that all over again? Ugh!!! The simulation of traditional living is creepy. And that’s what it is; a simulation.
Liz, I just want to point out I agree with much of your points here. Also that purity is never my aim-I don’t think it is possible to be perfectly traditional as I think both that that can mean so very many different things and also that, as you state here, whether we like it or not we are modern people. I still think we can learn from history and I still think that tradition in the sense of passed on transmissions of heritage in the form of story/song/craft/skill/food etc are very valuable.
As someone who has free-birthed a few times, I don’t actually think the idea of tradition or history even really occurred to me in the making of those choices to be honest. I just knew I wanted to be left alone (I’m a cat not an elephant if you know what I mean! 😂). I think birth can exist in a realm that both ties us to the women before us (literally) and also in the modern settings of today-it is about moving past fear in my opinion. So many views of the past in childbirth (that 1 in 10 reference you made is a good one) are extremely fearful, as are the modern “birth as a medical emergency” attitudes. Both don’t really do us any favors.
No children should be on social media. Period. Uncontroversial statement. I'm not on SSRIs but if I had to blame anyone I'd blame lazy and unscrupulous psychiatrists who lie to 16 year olds about how meds will impact them for the long haul.
In a recent postpartum training I did with Rachelle Seliga, she made the observation (my paraphrase) that there's limited use in continually searching for the "old" ways of living, since we live in present time within an entirely different constellation of resources, community, and even physiology than our long distant ancestral lines likely experienced. Definitely in birth, especially in birth. You're absolutely right that what we do today, even if modeled on our sense of what might be traditional, is not actually traditional in the truest sense of the word. We're well beyond that now; even those of us reaching for what we see as excellence in older ways of being are essentially braiding flotsam & jetsam carried forward in the current of culture into our contemporary way of being. Thanks for bringing Michael Martin's body of work into this conversation. I looked him up and am eager to explore more of his way of thinking.
Also, this is likely a conversation for a different context, but on the subject of grief around modern vs historical birth care, I truly wonder if we even know exactly what we're grieving.
Emily, if only you would have seen how big my smile was when I saw this comment of yours! Rachelle’s body of work is incredible. So glad you studied with her—and of course you have. ♥️
Firstly, I am sorry for the pain you have been through ❤️ “This is a folly and a vanity that most young women will grow out of. I count myself fortunate to have had this illusion taken from me at a very young age.“ - This to me reads women who chose this lifestyle are foolish little girls, who need a “reality check”.
As if choosing to be a homemaker, wife & mother is a waste of time or perhaps ‘succumbing’ to the patriarchy. Instead of it being driven by our BIOLOGICAL desires - for the majority of women.
Perhaps we should be encouraging young people the VAULE of finding a good partner they can create a life with.
Let's teach young women & men that who they marry will affect EVERYTHING in their future, for better or for worse. We need a MAJOR culture shift!!! 🙏🏻
I agree, Bianca! From early on I hope young people can learn this and learn about attachment and care and the relationships around them. Any thoughts or ways you do this?
??? I have not been through much pain myself. My mom was a very good and loving mom who did a lot of good for us. My dad did not leave us the way other childrens’ dads left them. But my goodness, the pain of my friends certainly makes me angry on their behalf.
I have no issue with moms who quietly tend to their corner of the universe. I do take strong issue with narcissists who put their children on the internet.
Yeah, I agree with some of the sentiments in this article but the overall tone makes me pause. My grandmother prayed every day to have the opportunity to work because her own mother was trapped in a physically abusive marriage to an alcoholic, but my great grandma could not leave because there was no way for her to earn a sustainable income. My grandmas on both sides were adamant that I should never depend on a man financially.
I have my own issues with capitalism and how caregiving work is under-valued, but it feels so tone-deaf that the author is pictured at the end of this article in a $300 dress! Not to mention that Hannah Neeleman is married to a (multi, multi) millionaire and has a staff that includes a teacher for her kids. Her situation is extremely unique and that is part of why people criticize her. (Although I do think Agnes’s article was unfair and oftentimes ridiculous).
I also agree with yours that the Neelemens are businesspeople who are ultimately using their home, their lifestyle, and their children as products. I think it’s unfair to the children, who deserve privacy.
My point here isn’t that women shouldn’t work. Every time I discuss anything related to these topics, it gets perceived as such but that is not my point at all. This is why I stated that a woman working the home to attain financial resourcing while also often having children underfoot is in fact quite traditional, being that women have always worked! Both for money and for goods, and of course also doing the gathering (and also hunting) in way deep past. I have a job, I am a nurse, and I have worked hard to find a way to make the most amount of money possible while also working the least amount of time away from home-and my husband does the same. I think women who are mothers need the freedom to focus on mothering first and foremost though, and my criticism lies in a societal set up that facilitates both the actual need for mothers to work (due to inflation and cost of living) and the perceived “need” (materialism, “keeping up with the joneses” kind of stuff). I very much know that being a house wife isn’t available or practical for some women (I was a single mother once receiving state aid and working multiple jobs while in nursing school so I know this fact intimately). I also know the pain of being in a relationship with an abusive man and addict and needing a back up plan (why I was a single mother). I also don’t think every woman in every relationship needs a back up plan though.
I am not being prescriptive to other women here, just observant of something that feels like a collective wound to the feminine soul (the tearing away of mothers from their babies due to the economic state of things being the main source of that wound).
As for my dress (😅), I sell from my collection of vintage clothes and books I have hoarded from my younger years (that I thrifted for pennies) in order to pay companies that I feel are doing a decent job in spite of the state of things by paying their employees a fair wage for things that I think are pretty. I am very mindful and intentional of my purchasing and afford it via thriftiness and prioritizing a very small but beautiful wardrobe.
I think living on a LARP farm is actually a great outcome. I would love to live on a hobby farm with a billionaire husband. Honestly who wouldn’t? My husband and I have a running joke that we are going to leave behind everything and run away to a little plot of land in upstate NY to keep bees. Perhaps one day it will be a reality.
No - it’s her exploitation of her children that bothers me. Being truly “trad” means cherishing and protecting the innocence of children.
I wouldn’t film my family for the internet and have no desire to follow influencers that do. I’m wondering though, if there are women who are interested in the sorts of skills promoted by tradwives who have no other way to learn about them (e.g. through cultural communities or inter-generational teaching) perhaps these online women can help demonstrate possibilities? A lot of us use YouTube to learn various skills after all: are online tradwives the next level?
I say this having never looked at any of their content of course.
I think it is just pure entertainment really, and I’m so it can be very motivating but it isn’t instructional. Humans love to watch the human things they don’t do very much of. That’s why cooking shows and sports are so popular-they let us witness people doing the most human of things! I think a lot of the skills she showcases are along these same lines.
I have also not seen their content, and had the same thought. For my daughter and I, we were introduced to many new on family through the TV show about the Dugger family called "19 and Counting" because they had 19 children. Their family has gone through many, many problems and the adult daughters now have exposed that they followed a religious cult. However. The mother of that family, by putting her family on TV, did very positive things for me and my daughter. With far reaching impact. We are not in a cult, so that's a good start. But I had never seen anything like what she showed us by opening up her home to cameras.
That’s interesting. Yes, cults should be avoided. I experienced some cult action in childhood and I was/am witness to the destruction of individual lives, family relationships and the inter generational impact. It’s why I’m wary of any project to “escape” the corrupt/immoral/decadent “mainstream” by creating isolated novel communities. Even if I fully agree that said mainstream is corrupt/decadent/immoral etc. Humans are humans; the same weaknesses are in all of us and the human nasty side is not necessary better in a small self-referencing group than in a large post-modern community (to put it charitably). Plus everybody needs reality checks and correctives; I don’t care how brilliant or well intentioned you are.
Anyway, that’s kind of a separate rant. I suspect people watch read wives for the same reason I watch Bernadette Banner and other historical costumers sometimes: they create beautiful things and demonstrate it with videos that are themselves a work of art promoting an ideal.
It sounds like what online tradwives are demonstrating is an aesthetic. It’s not a how-to manual, it’s like art with the message that “something about this kind of life is beautiful.” I would say there is value in that. I personally would not aspire to something if I thought it included only ugliness and drudgery. If you have the ideal in your mind, and you can attain something like it every now and then, then some (or even a lot) of drudgery and ugliness is ok. In this way then perhaps housewives are a corrective to people who portray motherhood as a miserable or at best darkly humourous out experience. There are plenty of those out there, perhaps most memorably the mom influencer who committed suicide recently, her name is escaping me.
But, of course, the “always trying to sell you something” is the catch. You can’t embody an ideal or an authentic life only by buying consumer products and to the extent that this illusion is promoted, a lie is being perpetuated.
That’s the most I’ve said in a while about things I know little about; it would be wise for me to stop now 🤣
I do think there is something to what you are saying here about trad wives being a sort of antidote to the “motherhood sucks/wine mom” brand of internet motherhood! I think overall it is a welcome and needed antidote even if there are things about it (like the kids on the internet thing) that are not ideal.
Sorry, I should have said “tradwives” are a corrective” above, not housewives. Substack appears to not allow comment corrections, which is super annoying lol
I’ve been thinking about this all day and getting more and more worked up about how tradition is at complete odds with attention-mongering and plastering your kids (as another poster said) all over social media. There must be oodles of tradmoms/tradwives out there who don’t crave the validation of complete strangers and who don’t pimp their kids out for attention. Making your kids public is bordering on child abuse . . . in my view. If you really care about your kids, you don't warp them by teaching them that life belongs in front of a camera. Nevermind what's good for the wife: what good for the children? I smell a rat with this Ballerina Lady. Not because of her choice to live a traditional life - bravo! - but because of the narcissistic level of attention seeking. Emily - I don’t disagree with your points (summed up well in the conclusion) but dear god Ballerina Lady has me too distracted and angry to think more about your message. I am offended by Ballerina Lady!
I agree that putting children in front of the camera is fertile ground for distortion of reality for them and should be avoided. I also think there are degrees of problematic when it comes to kids being present in the content of their parents. Kids running around in the background of a cooking video is very different from kids being the focus of the content that their parents then profit off of, often with very personal stories being show publicly for views. I honestly haven’t consumed a ton of her content really so I could be wrong but I feel like the kids are not the focus. Still, the family is prominent, and there is no way to know the kids’ feelings (both in the present and the future) about being involved so that is a fair argument!
How far back do we want to explore the break in heritage, or what I call lineage? There is a strand dating back thousands of years now where the Feminine has been removed from her role in the families, community, and culture's wellbeing. I think we will continue to argue this to no end if our minds stay narrowed and do not open to the fact that women are and, and, and. There is a distortion of women's roles in both the tradwife movement and feminism equally. Women's value holds work in and outside of the home. There are seasons of our lives when physiology dictates our energy be directed inward, and seasons of it directed outwardly. I believe that most women have a role to fulfill in their homes and outside of them. I believe that women are central to birthing a new world and that its curation will come from the innate creation blueprint that resides in our bodies. It will come from our direct connection to God/Source/the Divine. There is this period of mass confusion ongoing between this argument that isn't even addressing the third way that is available to us. Our capacity for creation as women surpasses this limitation of either label a cultural revolution wants to place on us. When we learn to use our capacity in its fullness we will have thriving families with mothers centralized in that role while also restructuring communities and the world outside of their homes.
This is a long lost legacy that is bubbling up into remembrance right now. This is the lineage of women that I come from.
I agree there is a third way and my angle here is just speaking to a current iteration of how femininity is perceived. I also that the seasons of a woman’s life of course demand different expressions of creativity from here-and some of those will of course be outside the home. I am speaking about a woman with small children here as a woman with small children though, so the season we are in is one that demands much of our time to be dedicated to the private realm.
You have a point about competence. I have two university degrees. They did help me achieve many goals, although from a few decades out I question a lot of what I was taught. But from another point of view my Baba who was illiterate her whole life, had way more practical skills than I do. Something was lost, albeit there were many complex social forces at work.
Mind you the simplest explanation is that both my mother and I were born when our mothers were in our late 30s, and so I had limited time with my grandparents. Missing out on time with grandparents and other older relatives is an immediate result of delaying having babies.
But hey, it’s not too late for me to learn how to keep a tomato plant alive.
It certainly is not!!! Also the point you make about delayed childbearing and lessened time with grandparents really shows what is lost there because it is that precise time that has so much potential for the handing down of those skills.
I have the same feelings about my degree and the questioning of much of what was taught in the schooling I endured to earn it. Academia is a whole other topic though 😅
Mothers are powerful beings, we take no shit and defend our homestead. This makes us a true threat to those who would co-opt and corrupt our families.
We protect civilization from extinction and pass on our knowledge. We nurture other women and build stronger communities. We strengthen the gene pool for all of humankind.
The critics can pound sand as they whine about my choices and push their cats around in strollers. Who cares?
Yes….it’s the “trad-wives” that are crazy they say. I’m with you. Truly worried for the cat pushers and tiny dog wearers.
Joking aside: on board with this level of 🖕🏼
I’m too busy raising a tiny human and baking my sourdough and cooking from scratch and knitting and raising chickens and planning camping trips and baking cakes for birthdays to worry about the worriers.
I think there is a lot of envy for their way of life. I totally understand that. I live in a very unnatural environment and I think that has a lot of ramifications for family life as well. You have to do more active entertaining of young kids in an urban environment where they can’t ever play freely and unsupervised. Kids are bored out of their minds and become very hard to manage at home. They pull out all the books, play with knives, stove tops etc. and are completely dysregulated and very demanding of adult attention (probably because they’re extremely bored) We try to manage that by buying ever more toys and giving them iPads. But many parents are discovering that no matter how many toys you buy, you can’t stay ahead of that boredom from being cut off from nature (or in other words, TRUE adventures).
Historically, kids got to run outside. But for many of us that’s just impossible. My children were much easier to manage when they had free access to nature (on my in laws’ property). And I don’t just mean they go outside and not in my way. Their behavior inside the house is also far better such that instead of just being underfoot and trying to make a mess when I cook, they can play independently. Or if they’re interested, capable of calmly taking instructions and helping. That month with my in laws showed me that I could parent a lot more like her, if only I didn’t live the way I do.
Nature and children have a special connection and many of us have lost that. And even those who are aware of it have no way to get it back (like us).
Yes! I have some thoughts about our way of life too. For all the wonders that modernity has brought us, it’s taken other things away. Our houses didn’t used to be full of bleach and power tools. Our cabinets didn’t have to be childproofed. We didn’t have electrical outlets, but that also meant we didn’t have anything that would instantly kill a child. But these days I feel like our modern household is full of hazards and every other word that comes out of my mouth is “no”. I read that hunter gatherer toddlers can just play around the camp with minimal supervision… not possible in the city. They can contribute to food production in meaningful ways, because our kitchens weren’t full of, once again, power tools.
I don’t know that I can give up modernity but I long for a simpler way of life, the kind that Hannah has. But having that life is not simple these days. My 3 yo seems to as well. My husband once put on a wordless documentary about Kazakh women milking cows and making cheese, butter and yogurt in hopes of putting her to sleep. To his surprised she watched for HOURS. Today at bedtime she said “I WANNA WATCH A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT WOMEN MAKING MILK PRODUCTS”.
Oh goodness this made me laugh because my husband puts on this YouTube channel that is an old Russian couple cooking outdoors with no words and my kids LOVE it. What an interesting point you make about the landscape of the home now that potentially dangerous tech has made it’s way into our day to day.
I was recently called a trad wife which was wild to me considering the circumstances: in June I quit a job that had been mentally and physically tanking me. My husband had a new job that allowed for us to be totally supported/me not need to frantically look for a job to make ends meet. So I’ve gotten to stay home with our sons over the summer and it’s been awesome.
Someone’s response to that was to tell me that I’m becoming a crazy trad wife 😵💫.
Well firstly I am so happy for you that you get to be home with your children for the time being, what a gift! Also it is mad that that is the response you got for simply being a mother and doing what is best for your family while you are able to due to your husband’s job! It’s really sad that women simply mothering and not having to split themselves into so many pieces for so many different roles (something I am convinced is a main culprit for maternal mental health issues) is perceived as a negative.
Thank you for this!!! I have CHOSEN to be a homemaker, wife & mother. I worked as a nanny for many years & just knew that I didn’t want to outsource that care of our children, for a variety of reasons.
EVERYDAY I feel so grateful to have my husband providing & protecting us and I feel when I share these things I am (mostly) looked down upon. Kind of like - why would she be doing & saying these archaic things?! I also get treated like I am stupid & childlike because I have traditional values.
I grew up in a chaotic & abusive home and all I ever wanted was to be happily married & have my own family to love & share this sacred life with. I LOVE your work! Thank you again sister 🙏🏼❤️
Thank you Bianca! I’m so glad you found your way to the life you always felt aligned with, that is beautiful.
I also think for others to say that that sort of life or the desires themselves are archaic is a mark of how out of alignment much of society is with the normal course of human life. When did a mother wanting to raise her own children rather than drive miles and miles away while they are cared for by those who have no investment in them become normal? Similarly funny how “archaic” also automatically means negative too.
I’m really sorry other people have treated you badly for living your life in a way that feels best to you! But women have been the doctors, scientists, butchers, priestesses, engineers, artists, doulas, etc. of their communities since the beginning of time, and many find it upsetting, offensive, and existentially threatening to our freedom to be told that choosing to reproduce means we should never get to do those things ever again and that wanting to do those things means we don’t love our family or community. Not all women feel that their relationships to other people are professions, or that our relationships to others fulfill our need for an independent identity, and it’s those women’s efforts that protect and free all women. Bc when some women are less fortunate than you and their husband cheats on them, leaves them, or beats them…it’s thanks to women like me (who fight to have a publicly-acknowledged “profession” aka money for my work just like men get- and all the things that make that possible, like high quality childcare, and paid maternity leave) who protect those women from destitution and harm. Financial enslavement to men isn’t romantic and it isn’t safety. You’re just lucky. Luck doesn’t cut it for most women around the world.
I realize you are replying to Bianca here, but I wanted to say a few things.
Of course women have always worked, no one is denying this or suggesting they should not be allowed to. It’s the defensive and vitriolic reaction to women who choose not to engage in work outside the home (as seen in your comment above) that I’m writing about here. There is no existential threat to your (or mine) right to work by women who choose to be mothers and homemakers. I also am absolutely not prescriptive to others about these choices. I actually do work outside the home in a profession that is very much based on relationships and care. This said,I do think that when we have very small children, our relationships with them are the most important and our obligation to them is the highest, and therefore if we can help it at all, we should not be putting them in childcare or leaving them for extended periods of time to fulfill our passions (note the use of the word “extended”). We have to acknowledge what is best for their needs. We also have to realize that this doesn’t mean our passions and work do not matter, simply that there are phases in life where they will be less central (and that there will also be future phases where they are more central). No one is saying you don’t get to do those things if you reproduce, and if that is what you got out of this, you are absolutely applying your own personal defensiveness because that is not my message. I don’t see the fact that I work as a reason to suggest to other women that they owe me their freedom they way you are doing so here. Again, women have always worked, they just did so in their own homes in care of their own children before the Industrial Revolution, and going back to that model to whatever degree is possible would do wonders for the good of many children and many women. We also should be able to trust other women and their judgement-if they want to be home and be in a reciprocal relationship with their husbands, we should trust their choices. Some women have really good marriages, and that is wonderful. I myself have one. I also had to escape an abusive one and was a single mother at one point in my life as well, and had to work several jobs and out my child is daycare. Now I work fairly minimally because my husband’s job allows this, and get to be home to actually raise my children myself now. The former abusive relationship version of me wasn’t aided by other women with fancier jobs (I did not feel “protected” from my destitution or harm, nor did I feel “freed” by other women). What freed me and protected me was my own determination, and later, my current husband. Don’t conflate your choice to work in our current society with feminists in the 60s fighting to pass Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, we are well past that. The struggle now isn’t for women to have the right to work, it’s for them to have the right to raise their own babies and not have to pump in a closet to feed a 8 week old who is at daycare due to a trash economy and an extremely sick consumeristic society.
Very well said.
My comment was defensive of my beliefs, yes. Women who imply that they don’t work bc they “love their family” or “want to raise their children properly” are implying women who work paid jobs don’t want or value those things, and that offends me. I think it’s very unfair to say my comment was vitriolic, though.
Well, yes there can be an existential threat. Women who choose to sacrifice their paid work bc they are caught in a patriarchal system (ie no good childcare, no maternity leave) *and who then preach it as a virtue* to work for free, are giving in to and enabling this abusive patriarchal system that exploits women for free labor and deprioritizes the health of women and children both in and outside the home.
I know women who are stay at home moms/homemakers (I was raised by one) and many do the exact same thing as women who pursued careers but sacrificed the chance to have children- they proselytize their lifestyle bc they can’t acknowledge they had to give up major dreams that men don’t have to. It’s taking the “blue pill” rather than the “red pill” (to use a matrix reference). Saying “I CHOSE” to be a homemaker/career woman. Well, yes, it’s important to have a strong, resilient, empowered sense of self by taking responsibility for one’s choices and refusing to identify as a victim….but it’s not really true that women just naturally choose to either quit their job entirely or severely kneecap their career bc they have no access to good childcare or maternity leave, or else not have kids at all bc their job has no good childcare or maternity leave. We are forced to choose between these shitty, totally unacceptable options bc the world is still a patriarchal, woman-hating (or at least woman-exploiting) place. We should recognize that and change things to our benefit.
Working women and homemakers need to join together to change these circumstances for the future generations- but they can’t do that when there’s judgement on both sides, and a childish refusal to acknowledge any dissatisfaction with one’s circumstances at all. Even you passed judgement when you said you’re glad you can stay home to “actually raise” your kids…implying women who put their kids in daycare or who have a nanny don’t actually raise them. I know people who had nannies who feel like they weren’t really raised by their mom (dad always gets off the hook- doesn’t he?) and I know others who loved daycare and say it’s where they gained confidence and friendships. I was homeschooled for quite a long time…and it was really wonderful for me in many, many ways, but also very harmful in other ways. As an introverted, anxious child, I would have benefited from MUCH more time away from my mom and immediate family (and my mom is a WONDERFUL person and my family is AMAZING and are the most important people to me). So that’s my background. I definitely have a strong negative reaction to women who act like someone should be thanking them for quitting their job and living through their kids. I feel extremely strongly that it is wildly unnatural and unhealthy for women to have no or little identity outside of their nuclear family, and I think it can create problems of resentment for their children. If I have kids someday, I will proudly pursue my personal dreams (just for me, not for anyone else) in front of my kids- me doing so, ironically, would be an amazing gift for any child (especially daughter) I might have. If you believe you must sacrifice your dreams to be a proper mother, then you teach your daughter to sacrifice her dreams for her kids…thus, out of love, you are ensuring your daughters never achieve their dreams. And you are ensuring your sons see women as sub-human vending machines. People don’t respect people who have no personal needs or boundaries. So misogyny comes from men, but self-abnegation comes from mothers. Both are societal problems, imo.
The issue is refusing to look outside the box and recognize that we actually do still deserve more freedoms as women- we are still in this revolutionary fight to have basic freedoms- including the freedom to work the full range of professions FOR PAY, WHILE having children. We’re only halfway through the fight: we can technically get hired, and work the job, now. But we still cant rise through the ranks, yet, unless we never reproduce. That’s unacceptable. I don’t agree with women who claim that opting out of that fight entirely by quitting their paid work isn’t harming the fight. For example, if you’re a homemaker, passionate about that as a life calling, and not arguing for wages for housework, then you’re part of the problem. And if you’re a career woman with no kids, and you’re not discussing how hard it is to be childless some days, and how it’s discrimination for your workplace to not provide paid maternity leave and good, affordable, high-quality childcare, then you’re also the problem.
You’re a brave and strong woman for escaping your abusive ex. Glad to hear you’re doing well!
By your logic, all women owe it to one another to do paid work at all possible stages of their lives, which simply is not true or fair or practical. This also negates the basic needs of infants.
My saying I want to “actually raise my own children” is in reference to objective facts. If I am home with my children, caring for them and teaching them, I am raising them. If they are with others much more than they are with myself, they would be being raised in a much more real capacity by those others. There is a lot of research that shows the positive impact on the mother being the primary caregiver for children 0-3, if you are the type more compelled by research than by common sense.
It is really true that some women do just naturally (and happily)choose to leave their careers to raise their babies, actually. Motherhood is (shocking, I know!) actually very fulfilling.
I never suggested women should give up their dreams in motherhood (I certainly haven’t!). My children see me working on many things I enjoy and make time for—motherhood isn’t just drudgery, after all. You should know though, it is some women’s dreams are to be a mother.
Paid leave and good child care are not the bar that I hold for the policies that will truly help mothers. Both of these things only ultimately encourage separation. Of course I think we should have paid leave. Do I think it is the ultimate fix though? Absolutely not. That’s crumbs.
Yes, that is my logic, and yes, we do owe it to each other to agitate for, make the case for, and demand pay for our work- be it homemaker or doctor. It isn’t true to my worldview and values, and it is only impractical…until it’s been done. Wages for housework, paid maternity leave, and quality childcare doesn’t fly in the face of infant development- it is in line with infant’s needs.
Well, no. Being alone in a structure with your infant nearly 24/7 with no breaks, isn’t more healthy for them than doing that a third of the time, then handing them off to grandma/grandpa, then a (good, evidence based) daycare. However, yes, we agree that being alone in a structure with your infant nearly 24/7 with no breaks is probably better than dumping them in a shitty daycare for 15 hours a day.
Paid maternity leave for 2 years and 1 year of paid paternal leave solves this problem. Billionaire CEOs can simply institute these policies in all their businesses/corporations and accept halved salaries/net worths (oh no! Only being worth 1 billion instead of 2 billion!). The idiots controlling the market would simply have to not freak out and it would work fine. Pensions would also fix the problem.
Thats nice that some women want to be full-time mothers and homemakers. Those mothers should still be paid to do that societal labor, though, imo.
If your *only* dream in life is to be a mother…I’m concerned. If *a* major dream in your life is to be a mother- great! Frankly, it should be!
No. Actually long-enough paid leave does not encourage separation. It encourages women (and men) to spend OODLES more time with their infant babies, in the developmental stages that are most crucial to their children’s future health and happiness. Even just one year of paid leave would ensure almost all kids get to breastfeed. I disagree it’s crumbs. I can’t see how we move forward at all liberating ourselves and the world from patriarchy and all the social instability and violence that it causes, without, as bare minimum starters, paid maternity leave and high quality affordable childcare. Care and the family must become legitimately accounted for in a capitalist system for us to get anywhere- that means, in my opinion, putting equal capital in the hands of women as men OR changing the system so it doesn’t rely on capital at all. I’m in favor of preserving the capitalist system and trying the first option.
I don’t totally disagree with your points here. I personally think a mother’s pension, something like social security, could be a good option. You might be interested to know though, that even within countries with the best paid leave policies that breastfeeding has dismal rates. This is because we have a cultural problem, not just an economic one. I also am somewhat of a localist and so believe more in working within the community with elder women and other mothers in order to create co-op childcare that would allow women to work part time if desired and needed, I’m not that interested in the government providing that care that I would rather a grandmother, neighbor, older sibling or friend could provide with much more personal investment and care. I think this is something we need to work for from the inside out, not the outside in.
Also, I have never in my life met a woman whose only dream is to be a mother.
I appreciate what you've shared here, Emily! A couple of thoughts (long comment incoming)...
1) "Her ability to earn money while not leaving her children is seen as being a contradiction to the whole trad wife trope."
The idea of defining traditional family life via carefully-curated income-generating media created by home-based mothers is, to me, ridiculous. I agree with another commenter here who said that the traditional grandmothers they know, who stewarded and used traditional skills, never would have oriented their lives around a camera's interpretive eye. The simple act of translating private life into the public eye for monetization is a choice that falls more into the realm of modern career-orientation and the industrialized exploitation of life than I have seen anyone acknowledge. (Though I don't think many women see it as being exploitative, especially in an age where anyone falling under the age of 35 has not necessarily been taught to be cautious about what goes up on the internet and has also potentially been raised with a blurred line between public/private and unmonetized/monetized living.)
2) "Maybe not in every tradition and in every time in human history, but fathers being present and playing with their children is not some modern gift of feminism to today’s mothers. At one point in time, fathers also worked in the home, just like mothers. The home-the cottage economy-was the basis of life, and so too was family."
YES. Home-tending requires a collection of skills and the cultivation of an attentiveness that is often labeled as being women's work. However, I'm quite done with the continual regurgitation of the [modern, industrialized] idea that men do not traditionally belong in home-tending spaces or in child-care. That whole notion of one sex's separation from the home and the other sex being confined within it seems to me to be a delusion that can only thrive in cultures where we rely on money as our means to survive instead of working directly for our food and housing. My mother used to tell me stories of when she was quite small and her carpenter father would deliver milk in the wee hours of the morning, her and her mother riding along. Now, I'm sure labels aplenty could be slapped onto my mother's family, but what she vividly remembered was being tended by both her parents. She simply was incorporated into whatever each of them was doing, which sometimes was spending time in the garden or the kitchen with her mother and sometimes spending time in the shop beneath their barn with her father, or going along on a job. Both parents worked from a home base, neither was removed from the daily work of homemaking.
In later years we briefly lived with my grandparents, and I can never remember an instance in which one spouse shrugged off a specific household task waiting in the wings as the other person's job. If the kitchen needed cleaning after a meal, my grandfather was just as likely to jump in and do the cleaning as my grandmother. And gratitude was frequently and clearly expressed for the work contributed by each person. Some of my favorite memories from living there involve my grandfather's cheerful invitation to join him for a good dishwashing session (or, on the other hand, following his example and taking it upon my child-self to give the kitchen a sneaky deep scrub as a surprise for my grandmother while she was napping or up in the garden).
I see this same ignorance of the split away from both sexes having responsibility in home-making and childrearing with many of my Amish clients and friends, who are just about as traditional as you can get in the modern US. There's a definite sex-based leaning in responsibilities, but the line of that split is much more fluid than many might guess. Men in the Amish communities where I work, if they have a job that requires their frequent absence from the home, often pay for their wives to have "hired girls", teenage girls who are out of school but not yet married, for multiple days out of the week. The work of the home and the direct care of the family is not considered a one person job. In many families, the men wash dishes, mind household chores, and take the toddlers out to the field or down to the shop. In many families, the women work in the field or in the barn, mind the checkbook balance, and guide the direction of the family's economic status. Definitely not what might fall under the label of "tradwife".
Hi Jan-sorry it took me so long to reply, I’m slowly wading through the comments on this one and they are all long so it is taking some time!
Speaking to your comment about the validity of Hannah and her situation being seen as the definition of traditional life-I do agree on the surface. That is, I agree that women filming the pretty parts of their lives and monetizing it requires a certain level of tech, time, and perhaps vanity that the women of yore both didn’t have access to or didn’t have altogether. However, my analysis is more that it is actually very traditional for women to be working in a way which economically bolsters the family while also still minding children and being at home. It looks very very different here of course, but it’s the general underlying concept. It’s both very modern and very traditional in a way.
As for your comments on work in the home and the sexes, I just really enjoyed reading that. Your grandparents sound absolutely lovely. Even though both my husband and I work outside the home, we both do it the least amount possible because we both value time at home and facilitating a situation where daycare is not necessary more than financial wealth at this point in our lives. This also means we take a lot of turns in the housework and child rearing. There are still some things that are sex-coded though-I don’t generally chop wood or mow the grass or fix the cars, he generally doesn’t mend the kid’s clothing or cook anywhere near as much or do research and make the majority of the health/medical choices for the family. Once in a while though, I’m chopping wood and he is making the tea and tincture cocktails when the kids are sick. I think we just have an attitude of “whatever needs done, will get done” either way really!
I take care of Amish women occasionally as well and can concur to your sentiments here-and I think they really just have a similar “things must be done” mentality. I think living rurally in general also facilitates this. Perhaps there is a geographical factor at play here actually now that I think about it!
Good question, Kateriina! I made that statement without having a well-considered foundation beneath it. I suppose I believe it to be true because of the number of older women I personally know who do have access to social media and who have significant craftswomanship in home skills, but who, unlike the women in my age group or younger, are averse to the idea of projecting their lives to a wide audience.
Saying it all so I don’t have to😃🙌🏼 Great piece. Especially resonate with this: “I am frankly exhausted of feeling the need to defend the value of motherhood, something that feels so obvious, and I do think the current feminist landscape is the setting in which this defense feels necessary.” I’m also exhausted of having to explain that no I’m not a fan of toxic high-control religious environments. Valuing motherhood needs a rebrand.
You are absolutely right Amber-it is so strange how discussing one of, if not the most, valuable and normal roles any one person takes on in the normal course of human life (motherhood OR fatherhood) means defense is even necessary. We shouldn’t have to defend what is our most basic and honorable work. Yet here we are.
It does need a rebrand - retweet!!
Emily you’ve been on FIRE lately
Thank you Sara! ♥️
1). This whole thing makes me want to buy a Christy Dawn dress.
2). I, too, am tired of apologizing for the life I chose. So I don’t anymore. Now I just laugh it off when people are snarky because I’m happy and we have a happy family and their discomfort at me staying home and being financially supported by a man is not my problem.
3). I do find it fascinating how much it triggers people and I appreciate your analysis! Great writing!
1) you should, they are lovely!
2) glad you choose not to apologize because none are needed ♥️
3) the world is trigger happy and most anything I/we can say will cause some sort of fuss. Also thank you!
Zero disrespect to tradwives or tradition: I have heaps of skepticism about anyone who allows (invites?) cameras into her/his home. Who lets her/his kids be made public? The traditional grandmas I knew would never seek attention or curate their experience for public consumption.
I’m inclined to agree about the cameras. At the same time, online is where a lot of discussion is happening, rightly or wrongly.
I agree that putting children on the internet is overall a poor idea but I do not think it is the focus of her work, and therefore doesn’t feel especially exploitative to me. Still not great, I agree.
I was born in 1972 to a feminist mother in an urban/suburban area. I've always lived near or in a major city, surrounded by urban women. Then my daughter went away to a Christian college in West Michigan! And married a homeschooled man, the eldest of seven! She's applying to medical school and is definitely a feminist "accomplishment" like I think my mom would be really proud of her. She wants to be a mom and a surgeon, and has women my age in the field giving her amazing support. The people she is around are SO healthy. Not like vegan and progressive healthy California standards. Like actually healthy people who are in harmony in their bodies and their communities. I love the thought of that harmony with our bodies. That to me was the interesting thing in this piece. It's less interesting that people are mad about it. One thing different about women and men is we women care a lot what other people think about our choices. So there are two battles. To make choices aligned within ourselves, and to accept the sneerfullness of others at the easiest targets. People sneer at men too, but they do it differently, and men seem to easily care less. For me, it never stops being upsetting. Great piece. I'm so happy this trad influence is available for young women. I'm sure if I'd ever met one single woman like my son in law's mother growing up, I would have had more than two kids and felt more fulfilled, less tortured. I didn't hear ever that motherhood is a great gift to humanity and the planet. But I'm so grateful for the two kids I have. Best thing I've ever done.
Thank you for this comment Desiree, I think it is really helpful and beautiful. Your daughter, your mother, yourself and your daughter’s mother-in-law all sound like amazing women in your own rights!
I especially appreciate what you had to say about the difference in men and women and how they choose to cope, or are able to cope, with how other people react to their choices. It is one thing to be in alignment with ourselves, but it is another thing entirely to be in alignment with ourselves and also in acceptance of any critical perception of that alignment. I do agree that it comes much more easily for men, I suppose that it is a function of women’s sociability perhaps?
Also- what you said about not hearing motherhood spoken of with high praise- I think many of us could echo that sentiment, and I also think that the world would look much different than it does if the opposite it was true.
"Sneerfulness" is a great word! Thank you for making it.
Haha I was also pleased with it! Your comment made my day!
Also, you are beautiful (as is Neeleman). It’s fine to put that out there too. Among the many reasons women avoid or fear having babies is they think it will make them ugly. I admit to having this fear too, though I wouldn’t have actually avoided having babies because of it. Happily, having babies in no way made me ugly nor did I have to “give up” on my appearance. I suspect some of the venom directed at highly visible “tradwives” is because they are attractive.
Well thank you so much! Always nice to hear and a nice reminder, to us all really. Here’s to beauty in motherhood and beautiful mothers 🥂♥️
Emily, most women I know are against tradwifery because our moms lived it.
I grew up homeschooled with exclusively homeschooled peers. We were, most of us, Christian (I still am, though most of my peers can’t say the same). Some moms wore head coverings; some made their own bread out of freshly ground wheat berries (DELICIOUS btw, I dream of that bread but my mom couldn’t really sustain the logistics required!); some had to work a weekend job as e.g. an RN to be able to afford to stay home during the week where others had wealthy husbands who paid for housekeepers in assistance to a homemaking homeschooling wife; but all these moms stayed home and taught their children. Home births and hospital births, Narnia=demonic or pro-CS Lewis, different cultural backgrounds (I’m Puerto Rican, and we were in NY so the homeschool groups were pretty diverse).
It didn’t end very well.
Full stop, I know at least 5 men in this group who left their wives and families unexpectedly for another woman when their children were teens. My raised-Catholic, public-school and day-care, working-mom husband pointed this out to me when we were first dating; isn’t that weird, he said? Huh, guess so, I said. And why is that, he said? Huh, I’m not quite sure… I said, not understanding his point. He pointed something else out - we were at my parents’ friends home for dinner early in our relationship - why are the dads just sitting, why aren’t they helping to clean up from dinner? Huh, I said. I’m not quite sure. His dad, you see, has always helped with housework.
I also know at least 5 of my childhood friends no longer speak to their moms. My husband’s peer group - none of them are estranged from their parents. None.
It’s quite easy for young, optimistic women who have made choices that make them happy to believe these choices must generalize across all of humanity. MUST generalize. Must. This is a folly and a vanity that most young women will grow out of. I count myself fortunate to have had this illusion taken from me at a very young age. There is no life path you can follow that guarantees a certain outcome. None.
I can only hope it turns out better for the “tradwives” like Mrs. Ballerina Farm, who plaster their childrens’ faces, bodies, and life stories all over the internet. I’m not super hopeful about this, but I suppose anything can happen.
My own life sounds very similar to what you are describing of your mother and her friends. I work 12 hour shifts every Saturday and Sunday as a nurse and then homeschool and housewife it up Mon-Fri. I even have a wheat mill (that bread DOES sound delicious!). This said, my husband does help with housework. He is home all weekend with the kids, has dinner waiting for me when I get home and makes my lunches, has my gas tank filled up for me and everything. We take turns. I truly think that the dynamic we have is very traditional in many ways BECAUSE of this fact. That is basically my critique-that people don’t really grasp all of what “traditional” can include. Way way way back to hunter gatherer societies, people, men and women, were generally egalitarian and took on roles that fit their physiology and which benefited the overall group. In pre-industrial times, we can look to the cottage family economy to illustrate something similar. This is how I view my own situation-we work well together in our respective roles to do the best thing for our home and family, and both of us work the least amount possible outside of the home.
I obviously cannot guarantee anything about the future of my marriage or relationship with my children but I feel pretty good about things. The reason being that I feel that the issues you brought up-divorce and estrangement-are not consequences of the set up but more of the quality of the people themselves, their life experiences, and their expectations. I have a similar life to the ones you described but my husband helps me, for example. I also think people love to get divorced for reasons that could be worked through, and being estranged from your parents is super trendy right now, so perhaps it is a little bit of an overall culture problem.
Also, I there are always exceptions to generalizations and I think that that goes without saying.
I agree that putting kids on the internet is generally problematic but that wasn’t the point of what I had to say here really. I do think that people who actively make money from their kid’s presence online (family bloggers, people who make and manage social media for their wannabe star kids etc) are on a much, much, more problematic level than Neeleman. Her kids running around in the background of a cooking video cannot be equated to family vlogs heavily featuring children or whatever.
You have a point of course. I didn’t want to have the exact same life as my parents, nor did they want the exact same life as theirs. Which is fine, and often unavoidable.
Something that changed in my perspective after having kids is that I think more about “how do I sustain values and culture over generations” rather than “what do I believe and why”. It’s not either/or obviously but the focus has shifted. I don’t have easy answers (and everything I’m doing in my life is by necessity experimental) but I do have a need to look for answers.
"By necessity, experimental" is wonderfully fertile ground, and with an excellent question in mind to guide you.
I agree! (And am also very much in the same place)
Liz, I have known more than a few people who lived within groups manifesting the dynamic you describe. I've lived through elements of it myself, though on the fringes of those groups (impossible to try to explain to even professionally trained therapists who haven't lived it also--my younger self tried and failed). It definitely does not end well. AND I would definitely not use the word "traditional" to describe any of what I witnessed or experienced. Nor would I call it particularly faith-based, though it often coincides with some form of conservatively expressed faith. I used to lay the blame with conservative Biblical doctrine, but at this point (though my own faith is not particularly conservative) I think it has less to do with religion than with a deep corruption of beliefs around human responsibility to Life.
Jan, thank you for this, I am in full agreement. This is basically what I just wrote in more (probably unnecessarily 😂) personal, anecdotal words. This isn’t actually traditional in the great span of the human story. It’s just people misinterpreting and corrupting tradition and then treating one another poorly with that as an excuse.
I am also a Christian (and enjoy your substack). I think at this point it’s probably impossible to be “traditional” - we are modern or postmodern through and through. Any project of recovery is so very much like a LARP. I like Michael Martin’s words on this in his work on sophiology (he is a farmer and homeschool dad - both stereotypically “trad” I suppose - and a very unorthodox thinker):
“There is no place to which to retreat. Nothing to preserve. Nothing to restore. There is only the future, the eschaton, the parousia which is always/already here. Let us embrace it.”
I am pretty involved in a local birth justice group - and I think, while we all want healthy and safe vaginal birth and high breast feeding rates and appropriate access to midwifery and just OPTIONS for anything but the iatrogenic norm, it strikes me that reference to the past is going to be a mistake in some ways - besides the context where you correct wide-eyed OBs claiming 1 in 10 moms died in childbirth or some wild number. Home birth today, with professionalized doula + midwife, is already not home birth of 300 years ago with women in your community supporting you and sitting with you. Neither is free birth, although I understand what free birthers are trying to do. We can sit and wish for these circumstances all day and meanwhile women are getting the cut above and the cut below; I don’t think we can afford to be nostalgic, we have too much work to do. And it’s OK that home birth looks different today. We can sit with that and grieve it and then continue in the work.
What bothers me about modern “tradwifery” besides the creepy kids-on-social-media factor is just… like I said, the delusion that there is a pure way of living. There just isn’t. And I know an awful lot of kids and mothers hurt by that in the 90s and we’re going to be doing that all over again? Ugh!!! The simulation of traditional living is creepy. And that’s what it is; a simulation.
Liz, I just want to point out I agree with much of your points here. Also that purity is never my aim-I don’t think it is possible to be perfectly traditional as I think both that that can mean so very many different things and also that, as you state here, whether we like it or not we are modern people. I still think we can learn from history and I still think that tradition in the sense of passed on transmissions of heritage in the form of story/song/craft/skill/food etc are very valuable.
As someone who has free-birthed a few times, I don’t actually think the idea of tradition or history even really occurred to me in the making of those choices to be honest. I just knew I wanted to be left alone (I’m a cat not an elephant if you know what I mean! 😂). I think birth can exist in a realm that both ties us to the women before us (literally) and also in the modern settings of today-it is about moving past fear in my opinion. So many views of the past in childbirth (that 1 in 10 reference you made is a good one) are extremely fearful, as are the modern “birth as a medical emergency” attitudes. Both don’t really do us any favors.
> What bothers me about modern “tradwifery” besides the creepy kids-on-social-media factor
But you have no problem with non-trad kids on social media.
> The simulation of traditional living is creepy.
As opposed to the mainstream living that ends with women on life long anti-depressants.
No children should be on social media. Period. Uncontroversial statement. I'm not on SSRIs but if I had to blame anyone I'd blame lazy and unscrupulous psychiatrists who lie to 16 year olds about how meds will impact them for the long haul.
> No children should be on social media. Period.
And yet the only time people complain is when the children in question are from trad households.
Speak for yourself, Eugine. :)
In a recent postpartum training I did with Rachelle Seliga, she made the observation (my paraphrase) that there's limited use in continually searching for the "old" ways of living, since we live in present time within an entirely different constellation of resources, community, and even physiology than our long distant ancestral lines likely experienced. Definitely in birth, especially in birth. You're absolutely right that what we do today, even if modeled on our sense of what might be traditional, is not actually traditional in the truest sense of the word. We're well beyond that now; even those of us reaching for what we see as excellence in older ways of being are essentially braiding flotsam & jetsam carried forward in the current of culture into our contemporary way of being. Thanks for bringing Michael Martin's body of work into this conversation. I looked him up and am eager to explore more of his way of thinking.
Also, this is likely a conversation for a different context, but on the subject of grief around modern vs historical birth care, I truly wonder if we even know exactly what we're grieving.
Just here to say I took Innate Traditions in 2020 and it changed my whole life, so happy to see you have studied with Rachelle as well.
Emily, if only you would have seen how big my smile was when I saw this comment of yours! Rachelle’s body of work is incredible. So glad you studied with her—and of course you have. ♥️
Firstly, I am sorry for the pain you have been through ❤️ “This is a folly and a vanity that most young women will grow out of. I count myself fortunate to have had this illusion taken from me at a very young age.“ - This to me reads women who chose this lifestyle are foolish little girls, who need a “reality check”.
As if choosing to be a homemaker, wife & mother is a waste of time or perhaps ‘succumbing’ to the patriarchy. Instead of it being driven by our BIOLOGICAL desires - for the majority of women.
Perhaps we should be encouraging young people the VAULE of finding a good partner they can create a life with.
Let's teach young women & men that who they marry will affect EVERYTHING in their future, for better or for worse. We need a MAJOR culture shift!!! 🙏🏻
This is a lot of what I was getting at-aligning with our female physiology is a perfect foundation for a life that is rewarding and satisfying.
I agree, Bianca! From early on I hope young people can learn this and learn about attachment and care and the relationships around them. Any thoughts or ways you do this?
It will take a major cultural shift! Which is already occurring slowly but surely ❤️🙏🏻
??? I have not been through much pain myself. My mom was a very good and loving mom who did a lot of good for us. My dad did not leave us the way other childrens’ dads left them. But my goodness, the pain of my friends certainly makes me angry on their behalf.
I have no issue with moms who quietly tend to their corner of the universe. I do take strong issue with narcissists who put their children on the internet.
Yeah, I agree with some of the sentiments in this article but the overall tone makes me pause. My grandmother prayed every day to have the opportunity to work because her own mother was trapped in a physically abusive marriage to an alcoholic, but my great grandma could not leave because there was no way for her to earn a sustainable income. My grandmas on both sides were adamant that I should never depend on a man financially.
I have my own issues with capitalism and how caregiving work is under-valued, but it feels so tone-deaf that the author is pictured at the end of this article in a $300 dress! Not to mention that Hannah Neeleman is married to a (multi, multi) millionaire and has a staff that includes a teacher for her kids. Her situation is extremely unique and that is part of why people criticize her. (Although I do think Agnes’s article was unfair and oftentimes ridiculous).
I also agree with yours that the Neelemens are businesspeople who are ultimately using their home, their lifestyle, and their children as products. I think it’s unfair to the children, who deserve privacy.
My point here isn’t that women shouldn’t work. Every time I discuss anything related to these topics, it gets perceived as such but that is not my point at all. This is why I stated that a woman working the home to attain financial resourcing while also often having children underfoot is in fact quite traditional, being that women have always worked! Both for money and for goods, and of course also doing the gathering (and also hunting) in way deep past. I have a job, I am a nurse, and I have worked hard to find a way to make the most amount of money possible while also working the least amount of time away from home-and my husband does the same. I think women who are mothers need the freedom to focus on mothering first and foremost though, and my criticism lies in a societal set up that facilitates both the actual need for mothers to work (due to inflation and cost of living) and the perceived “need” (materialism, “keeping up with the joneses” kind of stuff). I very much know that being a house wife isn’t available or practical for some women (I was a single mother once receiving state aid and working multiple jobs while in nursing school so I know this fact intimately). I also know the pain of being in a relationship with an abusive man and addict and needing a back up plan (why I was a single mother). I also don’t think every woman in every relationship needs a back up plan though.
I am not being prescriptive to other women here, just observant of something that feels like a collective wound to the feminine soul (the tearing away of mothers from their babies due to the economic state of things being the main source of that wound).
As for my dress (😅), I sell from my collection of vintage clothes and books I have hoarded from my younger years (that I thrifted for pennies) in order to pay companies that I feel are doing a decent job in spite of the state of things by paying their employees a fair wage for things that I think are pretty. I am very mindful and intentional of my purchasing and afford it via thriftiness and prioritizing a very small but beautiful wardrobe.
I think living on a LARP farm is actually a great outcome. I would love to live on a hobby farm with a billionaire husband. Honestly who wouldn’t? My husband and I have a running joke that we are going to leave behind everything and run away to a little plot of land in upstate NY to keep bees. Perhaps one day it will be a reality.
No - it’s her exploitation of her children that bothers me. Being truly “trad” means cherishing and protecting the innocence of children.
I wouldn’t film my family for the internet and have no desire to follow influencers that do. I’m wondering though, if there are women who are interested in the sorts of skills promoted by tradwives who have no other way to learn about them (e.g. through cultural communities or inter-generational teaching) perhaps these online women can help demonstrate possibilities? A lot of us use YouTube to learn various skills after all: are online tradwives the next level?
I say this having never looked at any of their content of course.
I think it is just pure entertainment really, and I’m so it can be very motivating but it isn’t instructional. Humans love to watch the human things they don’t do very much of. That’s why cooking shows and sports are so popular-they let us witness people doing the most human of things! I think a lot of the skills she showcases are along these same lines.
I have also not seen their content, and had the same thought. For my daughter and I, we were introduced to many new on family through the TV show about the Dugger family called "19 and Counting" because they had 19 children. Their family has gone through many, many problems and the adult daughters now have exposed that they followed a religious cult. However. The mother of that family, by putting her family on TV, did very positive things for me and my daughter. With far reaching impact. We are not in a cult, so that's a good start. But I had never seen anything like what she showed us by opening up her home to cameras.
That’s interesting. Yes, cults should be avoided. I experienced some cult action in childhood and I was/am witness to the destruction of individual lives, family relationships and the inter generational impact. It’s why I’m wary of any project to “escape” the corrupt/immoral/decadent “mainstream” by creating isolated novel communities. Even if I fully agree that said mainstream is corrupt/decadent/immoral etc. Humans are humans; the same weaknesses are in all of us and the human nasty side is not necessary better in a small self-referencing group than in a large post-modern community (to put it charitably). Plus everybody needs reality checks and correctives; I don’t care how brilliant or well intentioned you are.
Anyway, that’s kind of a separate rant. I suspect people watch read wives for the same reason I watch Bernadette Banner and other historical costumers sometimes: they create beautiful things and demonstrate it with videos that are themselves a work of art promoting an ideal.
It sounds like what online tradwives are demonstrating is an aesthetic. It’s not a how-to manual, it’s like art with the message that “something about this kind of life is beautiful.” I would say there is value in that. I personally would not aspire to something if I thought it included only ugliness and drudgery. If you have the ideal in your mind, and you can attain something like it every now and then, then some (or even a lot) of drudgery and ugliness is ok. In this way then perhaps housewives are a corrective to people who portray motherhood as a miserable or at best darkly humourous out experience. There are plenty of those out there, perhaps most memorably the mom influencer who committed suicide recently, her name is escaping me.
But, of course, the “always trying to sell you something” is the catch. You can’t embody an ideal or an authentic life only by buying consumer products and to the extent that this illusion is promoted, a lie is being perpetuated.
That’s the most I’ve said in a while about things I know little about; it would be wise for me to stop now 🤣
I do think there is something to what you are saying here about trad wives being a sort of antidote to the “motherhood sucks/wine mom” brand of internet motherhood! I think overall it is a welcome and needed antidote even if there are things about it (like the kids on the internet thing) that are not ideal.
Sorry, I should have said “tradwives” are a corrective” above, not housewives. Substack appears to not allow comment corrections, which is super annoying lol
I’ve been thinking about this all day and getting more and more worked up about how tradition is at complete odds with attention-mongering and plastering your kids (as another poster said) all over social media. There must be oodles of tradmoms/tradwives out there who don’t crave the validation of complete strangers and who don’t pimp their kids out for attention. Making your kids public is bordering on child abuse . . . in my view. If you really care about your kids, you don't warp them by teaching them that life belongs in front of a camera. Nevermind what's good for the wife: what good for the children? I smell a rat with this Ballerina Lady. Not because of her choice to live a traditional life - bravo! - but because of the narcissistic level of attention seeking. Emily - I don’t disagree with your points (summed up well in the conclusion) but dear god Ballerina Lady has me too distracted and angry to think more about your message. I am offended by Ballerina Lady!
I agree that putting children in front of the camera is fertile ground for distortion of reality for them and should be avoided. I also think there are degrees of problematic when it comes to kids being present in the content of their parents. Kids running around in the background of a cooking video is very different from kids being the focus of the content that their parents then profit off of, often with very personal stories being show publicly for views. I honestly haven’t consumed a ton of her content really so I could be wrong but I feel like the kids are not the focus. Still, the family is prominent, and there is no way to know the kids’ feelings (both in the present and the future) about being involved so that is a fair argument!
How far back do we want to explore the break in heritage, or what I call lineage? There is a strand dating back thousands of years now where the Feminine has been removed from her role in the families, community, and culture's wellbeing. I think we will continue to argue this to no end if our minds stay narrowed and do not open to the fact that women are and, and, and. There is a distortion of women's roles in both the tradwife movement and feminism equally. Women's value holds work in and outside of the home. There are seasons of our lives when physiology dictates our energy be directed inward, and seasons of it directed outwardly. I believe that most women have a role to fulfill in their homes and outside of them. I believe that women are central to birthing a new world and that its curation will come from the innate creation blueprint that resides in our bodies. It will come from our direct connection to God/Source/the Divine. There is this period of mass confusion ongoing between this argument that isn't even addressing the third way that is available to us. Our capacity for creation as women surpasses this limitation of either label a cultural revolution wants to place on us. When we learn to use our capacity in its fullness we will have thriving families with mothers centralized in that role while also restructuring communities and the world outside of their homes.
This is a long lost legacy that is bubbling up into remembrance right now. This is the lineage of women that I come from.
I agree there is a third way and my angle here is just speaking to a current iteration of how femininity is perceived. I also that the seasons of a woman’s life of course demand different expressions of creativity from here-and some of those will of course be outside the home. I am speaking about a woman with small children here as a woman with small children though, so the season we are in is one that demands much of our time to be dedicated to the private realm.
You have a point about competence. I have two university degrees. They did help me achieve many goals, although from a few decades out I question a lot of what I was taught. But from another point of view my Baba who was illiterate her whole life, had way more practical skills than I do. Something was lost, albeit there were many complex social forces at work.
Mind you the simplest explanation is that both my mother and I were born when our mothers were in our late 30s, and so I had limited time with my grandparents. Missing out on time with grandparents and other older relatives is an immediate result of delaying having babies.
But hey, it’s not too late for me to learn how to keep a tomato plant alive.
It certainly is not!!! Also the point you make about delayed childbearing and lessened time with grandparents really shows what is lost there because it is that precise time that has so much potential for the handing down of those skills.
I have the same feelings about my degree and the questioning of much of what was taught in the schooling I endured to earn it. Academia is a whole other topic though 😅
Great piece.
Mothers are powerful beings, we take no shit and defend our homestead. This makes us a true threat to those who would co-opt and corrupt our families.
We protect civilization from extinction and pass on our knowledge. We nurture other women and build stronger communities. We strengthen the gene pool for all of humankind.
The critics can pound sand as they whine about my choices and push their cats around in strollers. Who cares?
Seize the day my sisters.
All I have to say is 👏👏👏
Thank you for putting on your armor and joining the fight!
Most of your critics are other women. You all spend so much time taking each other down and reacting defensively to each other. What's up with that 🧐
Yes….it’s the “trad-wives” that are crazy they say. I’m with you. Truly worried for the cat pushers and tiny dog wearers.
Joking aside: on board with this level of 🖕🏼
I’m too busy raising a tiny human and baking my sourdough and cooking from scratch and knitting and raising chickens and planning camping trips and baking cakes for birthdays to worry about the worriers.
I think there is a lot of envy for their way of life. I totally understand that. I live in a very unnatural environment and I think that has a lot of ramifications for family life as well. You have to do more active entertaining of young kids in an urban environment where they can’t ever play freely and unsupervised. Kids are bored out of their minds and become very hard to manage at home. They pull out all the books, play with knives, stove tops etc. and are completely dysregulated and very demanding of adult attention (probably because they’re extremely bored) We try to manage that by buying ever more toys and giving them iPads. But many parents are discovering that no matter how many toys you buy, you can’t stay ahead of that boredom from being cut off from nature (or in other words, TRUE adventures).
Historically, kids got to run outside. But for many of us that’s just impossible. My children were much easier to manage when they had free access to nature (on my in laws’ property). And I don’t just mean they go outside and not in my way. Their behavior inside the house is also far better such that instead of just being underfoot and trying to make a mess when I cook, they can play independently. Or if they’re interested, capable of calmly taking instructions and helping. That month with my in laws showed me that I could parent a lot more like her, if only I didn’t live the way I do.
Nature and children have a special connection and many of us have lost that. And even those who are aware of it have no way to get it back (like us).
It really is remarkable how intensely time in nature impacts us all, especially children (but then again, is it?!).
Yes! I have some thoughts about our way of life too. For all the wonders that modernity has brought us, it’s taken other things away. Our houses didn’t used to be full of bleach and power tools. Our cabinets didn’t have to be childproofed. We didn’t have electrical outlets, but that also meant we didn’t have anything that would instantly kill a child. But these days I feel like our modern household is full of hazards and every other word that comes out of my mouth is “no”. I read that hunter gatherer toddlers can just play around the camp with minimal supervision… not possible in the city. They can contribute to food production in meaningful ways, because our kitchens weren’t full of, once again, power tools.
I don’t know that I can give up modernity but I long for a simpler way of life, the kind that Hannah has. But having that life is not simple these days. My 3 yo seems to as well. My husband once put on a wordless documentary about Kazakh women milking cows and making cheese, butter and yogurt in hopes of putting her to sleep. To his surprised she watched for HOURS. Today at bedtime she said “I WANNA WATCH A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT WOMEN MAKING MILK PRODUCTS”.
Oh goodness this made me laugh because my husband puts on this YouTube channel that is an old Russian couple cooking outdoors with no words and my kids LOVE it. What an interesting point you make about the landscape of the home now that potentially dangerous tech has made it’s way into our day to day.
I was recently called a trad wife which was wild to me considering the circumstances: in June I quit a job that had been mentally and physically tanking me. My husband had a new job that allowed for us to be totally supported/me not need to frantically look for a job to make ends meet. So I’ve gotten to stay home with our sons over the summer and it’s been awesome.
Someone’s response to that was to tell me that I’m becoming a crazy trad wife 😵💫.
Well firstly I am so happy for you that you get to be home with your children for the time being, what a gift! Also it is mad that that is the response you got for simply being a mother and doing what is best for your family while you are able to due to your husband’s job! It’s really sad that women simply mothering and not having to split themselves into so many pieces for so many different roles (something I am convinced is a main culprit for maternal mental health issues) is perceived as a negative.
Great article aside, I love that you and Hannah both enjoy a lovely Christy Dawn dress!
Aww thank you Claudia! I actually do have that same strawberry dress she is wearing there-they are just the perfect and easy daily dress! ☺️😏