I’m at 35,000 feet where, thanks to the miracle of modern satellite technology, I am able to do something I rarely do — watch daytime TV. Specifically, a talk show discussing the recent “trad wife” phenomenon.
There is no one definition of a trad wife. But generally, they are young stay-at-home mothers who invite followers into their “traditional” lifestyles, where they spend multiple hours a day posting video content about how they bake their own bread and manufacture crayons from scratch — all while wearing pricey designer dresses and bringing in major bank as they monetize their updated version of “tradition.”
Detractors, including those who have escaped the lifestyle, say that these women are oppressed and represent everything that is wrong with “traditional gender roles.” Catholic stay-at-home wives reflexively defend it because they see the words “wife” and “tradition” and thus think they must also be trad wives.
Meanwhile, the women themselves just talk about how they love, love, love milling their own wheat while wearing five-inch stiletto heels. And they count their followers. And their money.
So, let’s start off by getting one thing straight. This trad wife movement is not about traditional Catholic women who happen to stay at home with their kids. It may share some external similarities with their lives, but at heart it is very different. Remember how your mom used to spend several hours a day with a butter churn in one hand and a selfie stick in the other? Yeah, me neither.
This movement is a reaction to the “you can have it all” mentality. We were told that the only path to fulfillment for a woman was to have a career. It wasn’t enough to have kids, and it wasn’t enough to have a job. We weren’t really living up to our capacity unless we were breaking glass ceilings and kicking it in the boardroom, while simultaneously keeping the home fires burning.
There’s nothing wrong with breaking glass ceilings, nor with having a career. But the immense pressure to “have it all” left a lot of women exhausted.
Not surprisingly, it led to a backlash. And the backlash has swung too far the other way.
These trad wives seem to be trying to out do each other as some kind of 21st century pioneer women. One bakes her own bread. The next one mills her own wheat. The next one is growing the wheat and harvesting it herself. It’s all for show, for popular consumption, and for gaining followers — dissatisfied women living vicariously through these carefully curated, completely unrealistic domestic vignettes.
The point of stay-at-home motherhood, or any other kind of motherhood, isn’t to out do others for the sake of boosting followers and clicks. It is to create a setting for family life, to form children.
The other thing I have noticed is that, especially among the escapees from trad-wifedom, there is very little mention of actual flesh-and-blood husbands. They talk about how trad wives are constantly expected to serve their men. And about how the expectations placed on them were overwhelming, how they lost themselves, how they had no money of their own, no freedom, no identity. They say that this “traditional gender role” lifestyle destroyed them. And I’m thinking, “Well, it just sounds to me like perhaps you were married to a jerk.” But nobody wants to blame one man. They would rather target the entire, vague concept of “traditional gender roles.”
Hannah Neeleman who has been dubbed the “Queen of the Trad Wives,” seems to have a healthy marriage, a supportive husband and a somewhat balanced religious faith; she is Mormon. But she eschews the “trad wife” label entirely.
Speaking of which: to me, the main difference between “trad wives” and the rest of us lies in an understanding of true Christian marriage. Sure, I’ve seen some “faith” talk in the trad wife world, but it seems to resemble the false god of the polygamous cults, the god who says that the husband reigns supreme, that his wishes always come first and he is unilaterally to be served.
This is not the Christian view of marriage.
A Christian marriage is the union of two people, both created in the image and likeness of God, both committed to joining their lives and to absolutely, unfailingly looking out for what is best for each other. Yes, men and women are different. We have different bodies, different brain structures, different strengths and weaknesses. And that leads to different roles in the family. But each couple is unique. And it is up to those two people to discern, in their individual circumstances, what that looks like — how to best structure their family life and raise their children.
A Christian marriage is a partnership of equals. Different in gender and structure and temperament and a million other things, but 100 percent equal in dignity.
And yes, it is a beautiful thing when a woman puts a real effort into pleasing her husband. Just as it is a beautiful thing when a man puts that same effort into pleasing his wife. Both are necessary for a marriage to thrive. Not this crazy one way, “the husband is king and the wife is his servant” mentality that some of these trad wives seem to have retrieved from the ash heap of history.
Of course, there were problems with “traditional gender roles” in the past. And they originated then, as they originate today, in the failure to recognize the dignity of the woman. The problem wasn’t that she stayed at home or that she prepared meals for her husband. The problem was that she and her work were perceived as being “lesser than” instead of complementary.
Ex-trad wives complain that they didn’t earn their own money, and thus when the marriage ended, they had nothing. But in a healthy marriage, truly loving spouses don’t see money as “mine” or “yours.” The household income is “ours.” And, in previous generations, society recognized the vulnerable position of stay-at-home spouses. Divorce law protected them. If a husband abandoned his wife, or drove her away by mistreatment, he had to do right by her, financially. Now, in the era of no-fault divorce, abandoning a spouse physically means abandoning them financially as well. Which puts stay-at-home wives in a very vulnerable position. And makes it even more imperative to marry someone who loves and who can be trusted.
Catholic wives, you are not “trad wives.” Your value doesn’t come from your work in the home, your followers, your clicks or your 15 minutes of fame. It comes from the fact that you are created and loved by God. The beauty you bring to the world comes from the mutual love and respect that you share with your husband, and the lives you bring forth and form.
To be a truly good wife, you don’t need your own YouTube channel. And you don’t need to live like a 19th-century homesteader. You just need to love your family and let your light shine.
So, go forth and show the world what a real “traditional wife” looks like.
Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver.
