My article at CRJ on Tradwives is out! I know you’ll want to trot right over there and read the whole thing—here’s just a taste to whet your appetite:
One evening I casually posed this question to my six children and got six different answers: What is a tradwife? One named a sweet, soft-spoken mother in our church. Another spoke volubly about Shaye Elliott merch. A third began searching through her phone for an account, the name of which she could not remember. A fourth — the most sarcastic of the bunch — shrugged and said, “Is that like a mommy blogger? Weren’t you the original tradwife?” The two boys made a lot of jokes at my expense, and the conversation devolved as everyone pulled out their devices and started scrolling. In the end, we were all stooped over my phone watching professional model Nara Smith, in full makeup and runway fashion, making marshmallows from scratch.
Like so many social media phenomena, the tradwife trend flows like a swift current carving out a new riverbed. A torrent of clicks will transform the hashtag of last week into an entirely new genre by the end of summer. A “generation” online lasts the blink of an eye. It is no surprise, then, that the person some people say was the “original” tradwife — Alena Kate Pettitt, who blogs about manners and housekeeping on her site called Darling Academy — recently expressed fear that the movement had lost its way. “The movement, her movement,” writes Sophia Elmhirst in the New Yorker, “had been hijacked by extremists and grifters.” Which is to say, as a recognizable trope, what the viewer thinks it is will depend on the algorithm, her political and religious inclinations, and, most importantly, her aesthetic preferences.
Linen Aprons and Kefir. The click of a pilot light as the flame is about to catch, the sound of a heavy skillet set carefully over the flame, and the rustle of paper as a block of hand-churned butter is unwrapped; the latest iteration of tradwife influencers leans heavily, though by no means exclusively, into the homey sounds of domestic work. Soothing, motherly voices introduce each task. “Spend the day with me while I put my house together after a busy weekend,” says Lisa at Farmhouse on Boone. “Hello Lovelies,” smiles Parisienne Farmgirl. My favorite is Nara Smith, who confesses to some obscure culinary craving and then says, “So I got started right away.” In awe, I stare open-mouthed while she compresses what would take me a week of hard labor into thirty seconds by dint of brilliant editing software.
I’ve lost myself in the glow of Melanie Renee, a pastor’s wife in Alabama who always says, “Hello, Beautiful people,” and then cooks heaps of delicious food for her nine children on a shiny griddle while restocking her in-home salad bar with the help of her husband and sons. And there is Sophia on TikTok, who tries on clothes from her modest clothing brand, See Rene Boutique, and films herself getting ready for Shabbat. Or the woman who runs The Crafty Corner on Instagram whose immaculately clean house and coffee corner is to die for, and who is definitely not a tradwife, but whose content always appears in my tradwife feed.
Depending on your preferred aesthetic, there will be a slew of content for you to consume. Farming, homesteading, homeschooling, child-rearing, cleaning out your cupboards, teaching music, cooking everything from scratch, going away and coming back again — for tradwife content, the essential ingredient is a woman keeping her home.
Is Anyone in America Trad? I grew up in what we might now call a “traditional” agrarian society. Far away from electricity, running water, or any modern technology, traditional gender roles, what Ivan Illich calls “vernacular gender,” governed social norms. Women cooked and did some work in the fields — older girls and grandmothers minded babies. Men plowed, planted, mended equipment, and traveled into town sometimes. Nobody woke up in the morning and wondered what they would do that day, making a cup of espresso in a sleek device and staring into the middle distance.
What does “traditional” mean? In some ways, even talking about it means that it doesn’t exist. If two people marry and then adopt a more traditional way of life, the very act of choosing belies the existence of a tradition. We are sitting, corporately, in the rubble of dismantled and deconstructed traditions. Almost everything that mediated familial relationships and made them habitable has been torn down. And so, every couple must decide for themselves how they will rebuild. And because we don’t live in a pre-technological agrarian age, just to state the obvious, and everything we do is mediated by technology, the traditions we are building are new, which makes them, by definition, not traditions.
Yet might the assumptions of feminism — that men and women are equal, or at least should be, in every sphere but especially in the workplace — a hundred years on from the 19th Amendment, be considered a tradition? Witness that when women, like the busty and self-confident Estee Williams (who knew almost everything there was to be known about marriage several years before she tied the knot), want to dismantle feminism and reprise ways of life from previous generations (like the 1950s or the 1850s), the hue and cry from the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and even Christianity Today borders on hysteria. Estee insists that a tradwife is a woman who “prefers to take a traditional or ultra-traditional role in marriage, including the beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home,” and that she will probably “submit to her husband and serve her family. This concept is not degrading and she is not considered of lesser importance than him. (This is also common with more traditional Christians).” Delivering this uncomfortably counter-cultural tidbit, she smiles and bats her eyelashes.
And in case you haven’t caught the podcast yet—here it is again.
And now, I kid you not, I’m going to wrap up my paperwork for my third high-school graduate and submit everything! Three down, three to go! And one of them is basically done, so really, two to go! can you even believe it? I can’t believe it. I never thought this would happen to me. I thought I would be homeschooling until the Lord returned. I thought I was going to always be trying to shove spelling and grammar and math facts down the gullets of recalitrant children and wandering around begging them to write their essays before 11 pm on the night they’re due.
Which is to say, congratulate me—and also my child, but mostly me! Try to have as nice as day as I’m having!
Read the article and loved it. One word that you refrained from using when discussing the Tradwife phenomenon, and I understand that it’s a dirty word, was postmodernism. Within the wine world, we have a movement called the “natural wine movement,” which sort of harkens to a mythic/romantic notion of tradition prior to the industrialization of winemaking in the Mid Twentieth century. In the past, when teaching wine, I would break it down into two major categories “Modern/International/New World Wines” vs “Traditional/regional/Old World Wines.” I then felt the need to give The Natural wine movement its own sort of explanation and finally decided that it was a “Postmodern” movement which self consciously used the word Traditional but understood the notion to be a selected tradition. For instance, in Rioja, natural winemakers branded themselves as traditional for digging back past the last 120 years of winemaking tradition in the region (one which celebrates extended barrel age and calls for specific blends) to make a claim for an older, more authentic style which oddly enough fits the current market trends of today with its shorter maceration and abbreviated cellar aging and truly built to be drunk young. I’m not entirely sure how one can get away from a sort of self awareness when one speaks of Tradition these days. Still, in the wine world, there are still tiny enclaves in Georgia, Italy, France, Slovenia, Spain etc. where stubborn folks just do it how it’s been handed down for them to do, replacing innovation and “authenticity” with an intimate understanding of their tiny little region.
I had never watched any Tradwife content, so I hopped on over to Melanie Renee's Instagram and my kids were like, don't you know what a day in the life of a mom of nine is like? I have to say, her life looks nothing like mine!
I'm not sure I'm as inclined to be so cynical about the phenomenon, though. Yes, tapping into these deep longings for commercial gain is par for the course for our culture, but hopefully the Holy Spirit will work through the phenomenon to turn some young women's hearts back toward the home.