The tradwife movement

[Chocaholick]

AIBU to find the ‘tradwife’ movement absolutely horrific?

Essentially it’s a small core of women with deep internalised misogyny, who are making £££ by pretending they don’t work and indoctrinating young women to be ‘submissive’ to men and wait on them hand and foot, while feeding the manosphere and emboldening its members. It uses Christianity to brainwash followers into believing it’s God’s will for husbands to basically treat their wives like servants and ‘lead them’, and imposes a very long list of ‘duties’ on women while all that is expected of men is to work a job (like they wouldn’t be if they were single!).

It seems to be really catching on, even here in the UK.

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.

The ability to switch it off.

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

Yeah thats why they were so much happier 😂

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.

Mothers little helper.

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.

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

Yesteryear. Am reading it at the moment.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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 🤣

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.

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....

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.

No, I know it’s not the same. I’m just saying I can see why some people see the attraction in it, without the full reality of no independence, being ‘managed’ by a man (no chance!) etc. They are being hoodwinked by the rose tinted social media image. There’s definitely a part of me that would love it if DH said he could provide financially if I wanted to stay at home, but a much bigger part of me would want my own money etc.

I remember my sister having to leave work when she got pregnant-that was 68. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and remember few of my mum's peers working.

Watch MAFSAU this season to see it in action

My mum sold Tupperware and I was regularly taken along to the parties with her so can vouch they were absolutely a thing. As far as I recall there was no drunkeness. Though Babycham with glacé cherries would occasionally appear alongside cheese and pineapple on sticks, crackers and cheese and (tupperware) bowls of crisps.
My mum would do a presentation explaining all the different products and the women would ooh and Ah at such innovative ideas as plastic moulds so you could freeze orange squash for ice lollies, and bowls where the seal was broken by pressing the top.
My mum did very well at it and was a star seller in our region and got a sash.

Christianity is very strong on the submissive wife- like most religions they are made up by old men to give the best possible life to old men- so not a surprise.
The elephant in the room is that quite a good proportion of women want to be housewives and mothers, but not work outside the home.
in British society it is no longer accepted being a housewife and mother is a legitimate career, however the proportion of women who want this has not fallen much- so these kind of movements know this play into it. Women that pretend that all women want a career or job does do us all a disservice, because they open the door to this kind of cultist nonsense.
ln France being a housewife is still seen as a career and respected, even if you don't have children- our mad for money culture has shot us all in the foot.

Is that not her choice though? She had said repeatedly that this is the life she had chosen. She also attends business meetings and the husband is often cooking and looking after the kids