Offended by Competence

If midwifery is being “amidst women” is tradwifery being “against women”?

My introduction to the #tradwife life was via having a Reddit thread that included several disparaging references to my Instagram account sent to me quite awhile ago. In it, the “crunchy to alt right pipeline” was mentioned several times. I was accused of using “Nazi dog whistles” due to the Old English blackletter fonts I chose to use sometimes. I was called a “Renaissance Faire LARPing Christofascist” (which yes, I do in fact want to put on a trucker hat). The term “trad wife” was used aplenty. Most of these commenting women opposed my stance against bowing to gender ideology and this triggered their need to cry “trad”. I read through the (hundreds of) comments realizing that there was a real button that was being pushed in some women.

I have come to theorize that women who belittle anything that can be labeled traditional in their fellow women are both offended by competence and yearning for it. I also think they are both offended by alignment with and yearning for alignment with the female physical body. Tradition represents a life made by us and for us via the transmitted knowledge of those before us as we work in harmony with our bodies—both the pleasure and the pain they feel.

Many women are not really making their lives, they are not the curators of their experience here. They would likely argue the opposite but under critical examination, indeed most all of us fall into this category to some degree. The difference is in how wide we consciously choose to make that degree. What I’m alluding to here is how willing we are to accept things as they are and how much we value and recognize our free will, the thing that can help distance us from “things as they are”. Those who scoff at tradition actually have no concept of what it truly means because they have accepted only the negative sides of it (and history).

Many women have no possession of inherited knowledge. Those transmissions of tradition were not there due to a break in the chain, or they were so diluted they lost meaning, or they may have been ignored. Often, they were stolen. Somewhere down the line in the history of women’s work being erased and diminished and demeaned, much was lost. This is a tragedy for us all and I don’t blame those of us standing here in the muck of it all today. It does remain a fact that impacts our perceptions of how valuable tradition can be. If we have no tradition passed down to us, how are we supposed to comprehend its value? This is where deep yearning really becomes a trademark of what it is to be female on this Earth, in this time, in Western culture.

I always enjoyed the idea that “our grandmother’s prayers are still protecting us”, and I think it would do us good to consider what those prayers would have looked like. Maybe they would have been about increased freedoms and agency, but I don’t think they would have wanted the end result of that freedom to look like women leaving their babies at 8 weeks postpartum to work in an office or making money on Only Fans by sending a multitude of strange men private videos indulging their every strange whim. If we desire to reap the fruits of that matriarchal prayerful protection, we must consider what we are protecting. We must consider that everything that we are as female souls living in very real, material female bodies is actually worth protection. We must consider our female heritage, whether we know it intimately or not.

Birth control, “free love” that turned into porn and hook-up culture and things like OF, delayed childbearing, and an increased reliance on technology in childbearing and child rearing (as a result of women being increasingly separated from their kids) stole bodily harmony from women. Many of these things are still considered the main triumphs of feminism, and as such this disharmonious relationship with our own physicality is woven into the fibers of what it is to be a modern feminist. When women who wear that label with pride witness the shunning of these things, it thus is a strike to their own identity.

Trad, of course, is short for traditional, in reference to one who upholds tradition. Etymology wise, tradition holds a little secret and that is its relationship with treason. “This is a noun of action from past-participle stem of tradere "deliver, hand over," from trans-‘over’ + dare ‘to give’. Tradition is thus a doublet of treason.”

“The senses of tradition and treason still overlapped as late as 1450s, when tradition could mean ‘betrayal,’ and Middle English traditour was ‘betrayer, traitor.’ Traditores in early Church history was the (Latin) word for those who during the persecutions surrendered the Scriptures or holy vessels to the authorities, or betrayed brethren.”

I suspect some women feel similarly betrayed by their sistren who are surrendering to certain aspects of their female existence. I say female here instead of feminine because the foundation of a traditional life is an adherence to the normal course of things our female bodies are meant to complete. To righteously, vigorously and joyfully choose purposeful adherence to female biological imperatives is treason in the eyes of the liberal feminism. If midwifery is to be “with women”, then to the modern feminist, “tradwifery” is to be against her.

"A Mother and Her Children" an Oil Painting by Bernard Pothast from here

But what about deliverance? If deliverance is liberation, then the gift of tradition could be seen as a rescuing. Rescuing us from ourselves, selves who were raised in a world where the child eye-level grocery store tabloids screamed “fat!” and “ugly!” at our sweet little faces while simultaneously informing us of worst of what male violence against women and children can be with true crime porn scrawled across the same covers. Selves who grew up without knowing what the word “heritage” even meant. Selves that drove by the XXX adult store and saw the sex chat phone line commercials come on after midnight and wondered “is this what sex is?”. Selves that never saw a baby born or a woman nurse a baby in their young lives. Perhaps a traditional life is a deliverance from a life where as girls we were given the message that integers and square roots were more relevant to our lives than paying attention to when the blood began to drip from our centers every month.

If you participate in the internet, at least the women’s side of the internet, you will be familiar with Ballerina Farms and its matriarch, Hannah Neeleman. Her story has been widely discussed in the last few weeks due to an article published by The Sunday Times where she is bestowed the title of “The Queen of the Trad Wives” by writer Megan Agnew, with a subtitle that dramatically states “Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?”.

ballerinafarm

A post shared by @ballerinafarm

I’m not too interested in discussing things like her decision to participate in a beauty pageant 12 days postpartum that have been talked to death already. I don’t personally think it is prudent for a woman to make such a choice (as a woman who has given birth and also who also has worked for years with postpartum women while they heal). I do think it is worth noting that when we see photos of women walking across the graduation stage with their newborns we ooh and ahh but a beauty pageant creates such a fuss.

Choice feminism really only applies to certain choices that align with its politics and Hannah’s postpartum antics most certainly do not. Whatever a woman wants to do with her time and body is the right thing, except of course when it is stating that the most powerful you have ever felt is right after giving birth and holding your newborn in your arms as the response to “when have you felt the most empowered?”in a beauty pageant interview, which most certainly was the wrong thing, judging by the response it got by many women.

What I am interested in discussing is perception. The way she is spoken about reveals a lot about how many women perceive themselves. Her ability to be a competent business woman while still being a present mother is confronting. Her ability to earn money while not leaving her children is seen as being a contradiction to the whole trad wife trope. Trad wives don’t work! They just look pretty and make cakes and rub their husband’s feet! Many say Neeleman and women like her are selling a lifestyle that they don’t actually live. “That is the biggest paradox: in selling the life of a stay-at-home mother, Neeleman and the other trad wives have created high-earning jobs. They are being paid to act out a fantasy”, says Agnew.

I find it curious that any other genre of content creator is allowed to make whatever content it is they make and also make money from it without it being an issue. Yet when a wife and mother does it, she is being disingenuous and sneaky. A fashion blogger who works a “regular job” but also does content creation is trying to make money from home. A trad wife who stays home with her kids but also does content creation is also trying to make money from home. Maybe we all just want to make money from home! Maybe, just maybe, we all generally want the same things. Maybe we all aren’t so different.

Those who view the situation in this way are missing something though—this being the fact that a woman making money in her own home with children underfoot is actually very traditional. It may look different than it did 300 or 500 or 1,000 years ago and it may be as a result of technology that can of course be problematic at times. The essence of what is happening here is very in line with what the women before us would have experienced though. Women taking care of life, life they created, while also taking care of business.

If you consider this premise further, much of what is considered trad wife content is related to a showcasing of skills. In Hannah’s case, it is the sourdough baking, the milking of cows and cheese making, the flower gardening, the beautiful meals and animal chores and laundry being hung. All of this while minding her 8 children with no nanny. Often, these sort of skills are hard-won and time consuming and physically challenging and tedious. These skills typically support some amount of self sufficiency and reduce the outsourcing of the basics needed for human health and thriving to outside entities. Yes, her husband’s family is wealthy, but her priorities show a dedication to a vision of competence as a woman and wife and mother. These skills are also perfectly attainable for many other women should they choose to commit the time and focus to them. Why should anyone scoff at that? In many ways, this scoffing feels like a disgust response to excellence.

In a society where technology has replaced the need for basic skill building and where materialistic ideals have made consumption the national pastime, seeing a woman choose domestic capability over careerism and disconnection from home seems to really distress some other women. The woman who stays home with children, especially on a farm, is a jack of all trades by necessity. Careerism encourages hyper specialization and while there is certainly a sort of satisfaction at being very good at one thing at work, I am not sure it beats being pretty good at a lot of things at home with people who love you.

I took the time to listen to the article’s accompanying podcast (above) while tending to my own luxurious trad wife duties of laundry-folding and dishes-doing the other day. The host interviewed Agnew and they agree that the content Hannah makes is “dangerous”, because so many women “fought to get out of the kitchen and out of the domestic sphere.” I would very much relish the opportunity to hear these women try to define the word “danger”.

The issue with this argument, and it is one I hear often, is that it negates the work women do and have always done. If it is perceived as “dangerous” for women to be in the kitchen, or to be raising their own children-what does that say about how we think of our children, our homes, our families, our communities? What does it say about what we think about care work and the women who did it (and still do-again, the people filling in the gaps are still primarily women) for all of millennia?

Also, if we are busy warring against the home, how can we live a comfortable life? Well, by outsourcing. And this begs the question—who do they think is filling the gaps? Who is raising the children, who is making the food and cleaning? The answer is other women. Other women who are apparently deemed less worthy of respite from the awful confines of the work of the home that these more educated women are fighting against. It seems awfully close to how the concept of “sex work is work” demands a sub-class of women upon which the work of sexually satisfying every manner of perverted, lonely, sometimes literally dangerous man—are these care-work-devaluing women not demanding their own sub-class of women too?

Perhaps the vitriol some women have for who they call trad wives has something to do with them embodying the roles of all of the “other women” they hire out to take care of what traditionally is women’s work. As a previous single mother, I had to take my first daughter to daycare and I remember feeling jealousy towards the childcare workers who got to be with her all day while I went to clinical at the hospital and to work at the WIC office. I also similarly felt jealousy towards women who were well-off enough and married who were able to stay home with their babies. I can see how women who have to utilize the services of other women may have some disdain for the women who don’t have to. Those women represent a life where you don’t have to reach so hard to make things work, they represent a life where you get to just be what you are-a mother, a mammal bonding with her young, focusing on food and sleep and sex and love and beauty. Maybe that isn’t what is actually happening in these women’s lives but I think to some degree it is what they can represent to other women.

In her work of shaping perceptions, the author of the piece makes frequent subtle but obvious digs at Neeleman’s status as a mother who actually mothers. From the article this is very evident:

“She takes the baby from her husband. She will not leave Neeleman’s chest for the four hours we’re together.”

“I notice there’s no TV. ‘We watch some stuff on the computer,’ one of her daughters says. YouTube videos? ‘No, just Little House on the Prairie.’ How about iPads? ‘No,’ another little girl says. ‘Except we can play ring-a-ring-o’-roses and jump on the tramp and play lacrosse and that’s everything.’ How about phones? ‘No,’ says eight-year-old George, one of the older kids. ‘Sometimes if we go with our cousins and we play [on a phone], then we’re, like, addicted to ’em.’”

“They have a cleaner but no childcare; Neeleman does all the food shopping — kids in tow — and cooks from scratch (they ‘don’t do’ ready meals).”

A mother holding her own baby? Taking her children to the grocery store? Not using technology every waking second of her children’s lives to pacify them (I say as I type this and my children watch PBS kids)? Food that doesn’t just come straight out of a box and into the microwave? The fact that these things are mentioned in a way that I can only describe as “sneeringly”, sort of as a “wink wink” from one lib fem (author) to another (reader), as if to say “can you believe this woman?!” before sharing a cackle and a swig of canned wine says all we need to know about the author’s feelings about the subject of her writing.

On the aforementioned podcast, they marvel at Hannah’s ability to stay calm around her own children as if it is a Herculean task, but perhaps it’s just one woman who doesn’t have patience observing another who does. Or maybe more accurately it’s just one woman who is not accustomed to the presence of children observing one who is. The author made sure to mention that her head was “clanging” from being around the kids for 4 hours. I’m not judging Agnew. If you are not used to kids, especially several of them in their own home where they are most comfortable and therefore the most loud and boisterous, it can be a lot. However, I do think it is strange that in this day and age there are adult women, adults in general really, who are not used to children.

They go on to speak about how Neeleman was the first pregnant student ever at Juilliard as if it is a negative thing. It is of course considered a negative because pregnancy is often considered to be a negative thing in a culture where women spend much of their sexually active years avoiding it, especially if they are pursuing some other sort of ambitious life. Obviously, she had to give up something she cared deeply about in giving up ballet, and this truly is no small sacrifice.

Motherhood simply just does require sacrifice, and that is just a fact of the childbearing continuum and of women’s lives. I have seen people on social media stating that other women should not compare their own sacrifices, the things they may have given up to be mothers to Hannah giving up Juilliard level dancing, to which I would like to point out that there are many remarkable women doing many remarkable things who also chose motherhood. Many of those women would agree that it is worth it and this is actually a testament to the power of birth and mothering and children.

I also found it sort of humorous when Agnew stated “Despite the more traditional aspects of their relationship, Daniel (Hannah’s husband) is a hands-on father, taking the kids out to the farm and doing all the laundry.” Does she not realize that being a hands-on father can be traditional? 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.

Corey Arnold for The Sunday Times Magazine

The fact that Daniel and Hannah have 8 children living in their own personal cottage economy is *of course* up for discussion. The article states “‘Trad wives are seen as a counterculture against the rot of low birth rates,’ says Leslie Root, a behavioural scientist at the University of Colorado. ‘This isn’t isolated, it is part of a wider political anxiety that I am worried might ultimately end in attempts to circumscribe women’s lives.’”Interestingly, Leslie’s website states that a large portion of her current work is with the Colorado Fertility Project and that the other topics she focuses her “research and intellectual trajectory” include “the fertility postponement transition and lowest-low fertility; fertility intentions; parity distributions; voluntary childlessness and popular ethics of childbearing; gender, reproductive labor, neoliberalism, and post-socialism; reproductive justice; and the politics of abortion and contraception.” Hmm… sounds like exactly the kind of expert that would infer that giving birth narrows and limits the lives of women.

When Hannah is asked about the term trad wife she states “I don’t necessarily identify with it because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before. So for me to have the label of a traditional woman, I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that. I don’t even know what feminism means any more.” Neither do I,Hannah. It does appear to be something that somewhat detests motherhood, at least the brand of motherhood that resembles anything like what it may have looked like in the past. This, despite the fact that even in its resemblance, it is distinct from it. 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.

In the podcast, the author said she came away from the interview feeling “quite grateful but also like my life is quite slovenly and sinful and terrible in comparison…you know….my late nights on a Friday after work….”. It’s telling isn’t it, that she would say this. Again, maybe we all want some version of the same things. Maybe we are all searching for deliverance from a life informed by materialism, from the constant moving of the female goal post to something that doesn’t feel female at all, from the culturally forced perception that we must constantly be warring against our own bodies. Maybe we are all yearning for a life where the priorities are not all jumbled and out of order. Maybe we are all searching for our stolen and lost heritage, some through the wrong avenues, some through the right. Maybe we could all stand a little tradition.

Just for fun, here is the authoress in her finest LARPing attire, standing on her hillbilly porch. Oops, she forgot her apron!