The tradwife movement

They were quite well known yes. And they were an opportunity for women to earn some money for themselves. A bit like being an Avon lady. And no, they were not a bunch of women getting drunk.

Funnily enough I have YouTube running in the background, and Bailey Sarian is waxing lyrical on Betty Crocker, the invented 1950s 60s equivalent of this very phenomenon....

Glad you started this thread @Chocaholick . It’s a very important topic and widely misunderstood. It’s not about being a sahm, having doubts about feminism or making choices, it’s much more pernicious than that.,

It’s class war. It’s racism. The misogyny isn’t even the worst part of it.

Encouraging women to have large families is bad for women’s health, bad for children’s health, poverty and education. When rich, affluent white women are cos playing a lifestyle for the entertainment of poor, desperate women it goes beyond choice. In countries across the world we’ve seen that women’s mortality decreases when childbearing age increases and the number of children decreases.

Education is also undermined in this movement. First in favour of homeschooling, and more recently there’s a trend to diminish the value of a college education.

When you recognise the links back to fundamentalist and end time religious groups, and right wing maga, the push to encourage white women to get back into the home and have lots of little white babies makes sense. This is about repopulating America, and Britain with white Anglo Saxons. The indoctrination that happens in these communities is pernicious.

Personally I don’t entertain the religious zealots or the right wing loons that call door to door or try to engage me in the street. But for a long time I was letting their wives into my living room, listening to podcasts, looking at their instagram feeds.

The trad wives are the most blatant but the same messages are all over the internet because a huge proportion of mommy bloggers are from the Bible Belt, and they have religious and political agendas. Even the culture of perfectionism (perfect homes, perfect bodies, perfect faces) has its roots in Mormonism - you just have to see the connections.

Did women actually have Tupperware parties back in the day?! I always thought that was a euphemism for a bunch of women getting drunk together and moaning about their husbands 🤣

It is very much an idea promoted by the MAGA from America. Who believe women who do not have children should not have the vote. Who believe women should be at home and not in the workplace. It originated from Nazi Germany.
It isolates, removes women’s rights and limits life and educational opportunities.
You become a second class citizen.

Like a turkey voting for Xmas, if, as a woman you think ‘okay’.

Excellent post.

I came across Edward Bernays years ago, and am fascinated by the way that propaganda is sanitised as "marketing" and both have the same goals - societal steering and parting us from our cash by monetising dissatisfaction along the way.

I agree with you that if feminism ignores the fact that some women are more privileged than others we risk creating a movement centred around the needs of white affluent women that ignores or even exacerbates the challenges of other women, arising from wealth/class inequality, race and disability.
However I'd still rather privileged women spent the free time some of us don't have fighting the issues women face in common, rather than doing nothing at all.
And I'd rather clean the toilet or mind the children of a woman with the potential to get out into the world and make an impact in the public sphere than tell her to do it herself so as not to exploit me, and have every aspect of my life decided and delivered by men.

It is a trend based on misinformation. In the 50’s you have middle class professional women who went to work. In the 50’s you have working class women who went to work, in shops, cleaning, factories.
It is based on a weird sort of myth that all women then did not go to work. They did !
In the 70’s there were plenty of women who did not want to go to work but preferred to be at home. But plenty of women who also wanted to be financially independent and have their own money. And plenty of women who were at home on Valium. Car ownership was minimal in the UK so women at home in the UK could be fairly isolated. Bar the Tupperware parties. And as before, many women went to work, shops, cleaners, and professionals. The idea women were all at home is a lie.

Basically the ideal is painted and presented as an ideal and the grass can look greener. Until you realise you are entirely dependant , can only afford to run one car, have to go to work anyway ( for pin money you understand, nothing fundamental to the household budget). Entirely dependant on the sort of man you are with.

What a load of baloney. We are in 2026. The brainless wonders that thought this up are living in cloud cuckoo land.

This one upsets me so much. She was a ballerina and a beautiful dancer. Now she’s chained to a man…

Part of the problem with all these “returning to traditional values” trends is everyone looks at history through rose-tinted glasses, “ah it was a simpler time” and all that crap. No one acknowledges 1. The struggles & negative aspects of that “simpler” time and 2. No one seems to account for the fact it may have worked back then because society was very different and trying to drag outdated values into modern society just isn’t going to work because things like technology, laws, values etc have changed

Following with interest.

I think it's an alarming and fascinating subject, and while easy to dismiss on one level, ie it's just a social media phenomenon, the underpinnings do come with a somewhat sinister flavour.

I'm out of the game somewhat at 57, widowed, adult children and hamstrung in the employment stakes by a combination of what I see now were less than ideal choices and external circumstance of the "you couldn't make this shit up" variety.

I keep abreast of various zeitgeists to keep my brain active, and this one, with the manosphere and as someone else mentioned the ham fisted Christian Nationalist rhetoric employed by world leaders pique my interest daily and make me shudder.

I think it is simply driven by capitalism and over consumption, and the idea that the flow of money supersedes people's actual needs in terms of the conditions required for a healthy society.

On the one hand we can dismiss it as an online phenomenon, but billions consume TikTok and Instagram for hours each day, and they aren't called "influencers" for nothing. Alot of content is now being generated by AI to steer people's thoughts and lifestyle choices by all sorts of entities with vested interests, from simple "buy this" messaging to planting ideology - Cambridge Analytica was just a tip of an iceburg.

The trouble is if you try and point out the potential negatives and possible results, one often gets accused of being a Luddite (a much misunderstood movement) or a conspiracy theorist.

The starry eyed young women who think their submissive lifestyle is a novel epiphany may well do well from the grift opportunity for a time, but they often don't see that being a pretty trad wife by todays standards has a shelf life - and what then? If they don't end up with grandchildren to morph into "TradNan" what will their role be? What will they be "allowed" to do if they truly stand by their "values"? Will they have any independence? Or will they find themselves replaced by a younger model, as their rich husbands gain "silver fox" kudos, and out in the cold? The social media trad wives of today are creating and living a fantasy of marital life that has never really existed.

And if it is all partly to do with the changing face of employment due to the rise of AI etc, it is a despicable, cynical and inhumane venture on every level.

Yesteryear. Am reading it at the moment.

I think a lot of people are not understanding what the trad wife movement really is. It’s not just being a SAHM and doing all the housework while your husband works (which I wouldn’t criticise any woman for, it would be a dream for lots of women, myself included!) The trad wife movement though, believes men should have total control of every single aspect of their family life - where they go on holiday, whether they’re vegetarian or not, which school the kids go to. The woman cannot have an opinion on anything, she must simply agree cos she’s supposed to completely submit to her husband. It also puts women at serious financial risk in a way it wouldn’t have had in the 1950s (where it belongs and where it should stay IMO). Divorce was rare in the 50s, so most women could feel secure in the fact their marriages would last and therefore feel financially secure. Nowadays the divorce rate is 40 something percent, if the husband decides to up and leave, the woman is totally fucked financially, or may feel forced to stay in an abusive marriage (which I suspect many of these trad wife marriages are cos they’re likely to attract very controlling men) cos they can’t afford to leave. There’s something deeply unsettling about either partner in a family having total control over the other

This is the only issue I have with this is the hypocrisy as you say. The Internet trad-wives are the hardest working women I know.

Otherwise, I have no issues with how women want to conduct their marriages, except where it causes emotional/physical harm to their children.

Mothers little helper.

Plenty of women worked where I came from..the working class areas of the North West. If you look through the census women were working at The Mill. You wouid get multi-generational living (because people didn’t have a choice), so Grandma might look after the kids … or in some cases Dad looked after the kids, as there was only work available for women.

Yeah thats why they were so much happier 😂

The ability to switch it off.

At least you can see that it is all BS. Clicks = money.

Not true. Married women may not have worked full time outside the home but the vast majority of women have earned money by home based work like laundering, strawplaiting or weaving, keeping chickens etc etc. When agricultural wages are low, and if they seem bad now they were worse then - purchasing power equivalent of less than £200 pw today for 50 to 60 hours work to keep sometimes families of 8 or 10, it was an economic necessity.
I've done actual research.

This book was published before Facebook and social media was a big thing, and drew on research into depression and the rise of advertising/ visual media across the world in the 21st century

https://amzn.eu/d/09Xl3E1x

It actively charts the rise of anorexia and depression to visual media/ advertising. Certain small islands that were late to access TV saw rises in depression and eating disorders within a decade of it arriving.

Its a very valuable read to understand how human psychology can be affected by comparative media. A rare few are completely unaffected. They have natural “immunity.”

The comment up thread that “women were happier in the 1950s” (a comment that is definitely not true and does not take into consideration class, poverty, health and rights of the time) may be true from the perspective that visual media was less prevalent so women were freer from comparison and perhaps had better self esteem (till they married/ depending on who they married).

If you understand the history of propaganda and how photography was co opted into this from the early days (Stalin etc), you have some mild ability to recognise the vast extent to which was are fooled by ALL media - tv and film included - and how that impacts human behaviour and beliefs.

this bbc article today even points out that the algorithms favour some comments but not others:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyvw9pgjveo

I 100% agree with everything you’ve said. I like working and being independent but life is a constant merry go round of work, childcare, planning meals, cooking, laundry etc and I wish I could afford to go part time or even stop work so our home life was calmer. I had about a year out of the workplace when children were preschool age. The lack of money was tough, but our home was spotless, we had a proper home cooked dinner every day and I had energy! Full time work (and in fairness, ten years and perimenopause) has not helped in that regard.

^This

Economics. Virginia Woolf got to sit around and contemplate and write about womens liberation, but sadly Nellie, Sophie and Lottie, who worked for her wouldn't have had that luxury (and there's evidence that she was a complete cow to work for).

Sadly the huge flaw with feminism is that women do screw over other women (just like men). We live in a exploitative society and a great deal of it is based on people wanting to part you from your money in one way or another, even if it is by selling you an ideology, be it trad wife or feminism.

Well it is relatively recent in the grand scheme of humanity… it’s within many people’s living memory.

I also intentionally specified married women since we’re discussing trad ‘wives’ and married women have always statistically been less likely to work, even in 1700.

The sad (and extremely dangerous) thing is, that a lot of these influencers with extreme views and the lifestyles to match, don’t believe half as much in what they’re saying online as they’d have you believe. It’s the same with popular ‘red pill’ influencers. They know extreme opinions and saying shocking things draws a large audience, and that equals big bucks. Many of them are primarily motivated by money rather than truly believing what they say. Without social media these trad wives may just have been women with more traditional attitudes who are SAHMs without all the ridiculous opinions, but they see a way they can make their lives more extreme and monetise it. Same with some of the incel wankers - without YouTube they may just have been slightly sexist, but fairly harmless blokes, but they see an opportunity to be outrageous and, in some cases, become millionaires - a lot of people would do & say a lot of outrageous things that they don’t really believe if they had the chance to earn a million quid off the back of it. It’s fucked up because they’re brain washing vulnerable young people who haven’t had the life experience yet to form their own opinions and think critically, and indoctrinating them into these extreme lifestyles as a way of finding their identities. IMO social media is the root of all evil. I ‘went dark’ from SM years ago and never looked back. I’m terrified of my (still very young) kids discovering it though. I just hope and pray there’s a backlash by the time they’re teenagers

Depends on the class and the locality I think - in my family with the exception of my paternal grandmother who worked as a milliner in a hat factory, every single other woman on both sides of mine worked in the local cotton mills. They switched to munitions when WW2 was on as they lived down the road from an A V Roe aeroplane factory, but as soon as the war finished they were back in the mills until they retired.