When I watch glimpses of “trad wife” social media, I admit that I feel a lot of sympathy for women who speak loudly for the traditional feminine skills and satisfactions of focusing on home life. I was, in many ways, a trad life for much of my marriage. I stayed at home and raised five children. I cooked and cleaned and kept track of appointments and generally made life easier for my husband and children. I even believed that I gave value to the world and to my family by reducing other costs of raising a family.
These days, I see clearly the dangers of being a trad wife. I also believed that if I was just “good enough” at trad wifing, then I wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of divorce, though I was aware that I couldn’t prevent other tragedies that might send me back into the workforce. I mostly closed my eyes and ears to the dangers that were coming for me. I wish sometimes I had spent less time preparing for less likely apocalypses than the one that came for me and that comes to half of married women. But yes, of course not the ones that are doing it “right.”
The problem I see from this side of thirty years of trad wifing and then a painful and devastating divorce is that women who work full-time are still doing most of the work of motherhood and home-keeping. They just do it in addition to working full-time. You can call it “the second shift” or “household labor inequality,” but in a way, I can see the current fad of “the trad wife” as a critique of the failures of feminism. Feminism has not saved women from their labor at home being seen as trivial and unimportant (but woe to the woman who refuses to do such extra labor happily and without complaint or demand for equality). Feminism has not saved women from exhaustion and minimization, from the backlash to the MeToo movement, and the constant power of the patriarchy to steal language and goals from feminism and to repurpose them for the patriarchy itself.
Feminism has enabled women to get educations and to be paid for working full-time at better rates than they used to be. The glass ceiling may still be intact, but inroads are being made in terms of women in leadership throughout the country. I applaud these changes. I am happy that there have been changes in divorce laws and that alimony is commonly given to women who have given up so much of their time and energy doing household labor that helps husbands earn more money. But there is still a long way to go. And sometimes it feels like the gaps in household labor inequality are being ignored. The pandemic was a giant forgetting of how much labor women are expected to do, unpaid, so that society can go on pretending that their labor doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be talked about.
It is a funny thing, this trad wifing. On the one hand, women can get an enormous amount of positive feedback for “choosing their kids” or “choosing their family” instead of being “selfishly focused” on their own careers or their retirement funds. They get positive feedback until they stop doing EVERYTHING for everybody else. Say, if they get sick or become disabled, if they have mental health problems (caused by the patriarchal demands of working 24/7 for everyone but themselves or say, from the fear of not having control over their own futures). But it can definitely be appealing for a while, that kind, patriarchal warmth. It doesn’t last very long, and it is often seasonal (say, around Mother’s Day), but yeah, it can be hard to resist it.
I get it. I really, really get it. More than I wish I got it. My plan when I got married was to be a full-time professor. And send my kids to day-care. I had a long-term career planned out. I wasn’t going to be “like other women.” Except that the labor of actually, ya know, caring for three small children born in three years, was too crushing for me to continue to try to work toward a professorship. So I gave it up. And I got so many kudos from the patriarchy for that. Until I burned out hard at age 35. Then I had no backup plan left, because an old PhD, even one from Princeton, turned out to not be that useful.
I sometimes want to scream at the trad wife women—there’s a train coming for you! You can’t see it, but I can! It won’t stop or turn out of the way! You’re going to get slammed into tiny, little pieces and if you ever stand again, you won’t recognize yourself. But they’re not going to believe a bitter, old woman like me who clearly just didn’t work hard enough for the patriarchy to get all the nice kudos that “the right kind of women” get when they’re old and need help. So, good luck, and I’ll try not to say “I told you so” when you get kicked out. I will try, I promise.
(I’m aware that feminism isn’t really the failure here—it’s patriarchy, but sometimes it feels like the promises of feminism have failed so far beause patriarchy is so very, very powerful and unwilling to give up its grip on us all.)
One of your best articles ever. Stuff like this is a big reason why I didn’t have kids. I think I might be neurodivergent. That makes working a regular full-time job hard enough. I really think adding parenthood on top of that would have cost me my mental health.