Episode 21
· 39:55
A lot of this comes back to the idea that when we talk about trad wives, we talk about we're talking about the women when so much of this is about men. This is about men and control.
Carmina Ravanera:If you've been on social media lately, you might have seen some content about the tradwife movement and from tradwives themselves. Popular accounts from women like Hannah Neelman, Estee Williams, and Nara Smith post photos and videos of an idealized domestic lifestyle, taking care of children, cooking from scratch, baking bread, and keeping a clean and organized house, often with a feminine aesthetic that harkens back to the 1950s . They make beautiful content that showcases the value of, quote, traditionally gendered households where men are the breadwinners and women are the breadmakers, full time wives and mothers who create the perfect home lives for their perfect families. It might be easy to think that this movement is simply about empowering women to return to tradition. But when you dig deeper, there's much more to the story.
Carmina Ravanera:In this episode, we're going to be speaking with researchers to unpack the tradwife movement, what it does, and who it really benefits. I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And I'm doctor Sonia Kang, academic director at GATE. I wanna start by saying that we don't intend to focus this episode on critiquing any specific trad wife. And as we'll talk more about later, we will definitely not be making value judgments about women who choose to work outside the home or not. Instead, this episode is going to go into what researchers are saying about the tradwife movement, where it comes from, and how it's more complicated than just some women choosing to leave the paid workforce. So to get this conversation going, what even is a tradwife?
Carmina Ravanera:On the surface, it might seem like the term tradwife actually just refers to stay at home moms. But I spoke to doctor Devin Proctor, assistant professor of anthropology at Elon University, about what, quote, unquote, tradwife actually means.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Fundamentally, a tradwife is is just a woman who identifies herself as a person who does not have a job, who stays home, usually raises children, and is in charge of the domestic sphere with cooking and cleaning and and things like that, which really just encapsulates a stay at home parent. You know? And, you know, I was one of those. We were we were all anyone with kids was a stay at home parent in during COVID, so, you know, that that doesn't really encapsulate what a trad wife is. When we think of trad wives, that's what we think of, a woman who stays home and doesn't have a job and does all these things.
Dr. Devin Proctor:But there's a lot of other stuff smuggled into it. Like, it can involve some very, DIY kind of prepping, anticonsumerist kind of food and product making. It can it can kind of skew both left and right politically in those spheres. But it also, in most of the tradwife understanding, involves submission and obedience to a man, which is where I think tradwifery or tradwife concept really, really differs from simply being a stare stay at home parent or a homemaker. Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:There's this idea of submissive, obedience. And in recent years, since since the trad wife trend has really taken off in places like TikTok, a lot of the trad wife accounts you'll see don't really have any of that involved with it. You know, it'll be people without children, without spouses, who don't have kind of a blatantly misogynistic political bends and are really just women cosplaying the nineteen fifties or or maybe kind of older cottagecore aesthetics of the frontier woman or something. So it it's come to mean a lot of things, but but I think at its heart, it is that staying at home, raising children, in charge of the domestic domestic sphere, and obedient and submissive to a male spouse.
Carmina Ravanera:It's important to point out here that not every influencer whom the public labels a trad wife thinks of herself as a trad wife, But it's a term that seems to have taken on a life of its own on the Internet, and many of these trad wife accounts are extremely popular. For example, Hannah Neeleman's Instagram account at ballerina farm has 10,000,000 followers.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. So a trad wife isn't just a stay at home parent. It's so much more. It often implies an adherence to traditional gender roles, submission to a husband, and having a general aesthetic vibe like Miriam Maisel in the first few episodes of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Carmina Ravanera:And that aesthetic is actually an intentional way to play up traditional gender roles. I spoke to doctor Laura Jane Bower, lecturer in criminology at Edinburgh Napier University, and she helped me understand why trad wives tend to use what she calls a hyper feminine aesthetic.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:Yeah. Like, we normally talk about aesthetics as how we present ourselves, perhaps even like a persona or a character that we embody online. And trad wives, they're content creators, they're influencers as well, particularly on TikTok or Instagram or where the movement kind of first started in 2013. We see a lot more blog usage or even websites as well. So an aesthetic is how you present yourself or how you communicate your lifestyle or even your identity to your audience.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:And what's quite irritating about the tradwife movement is no tradwife is the same. We see really different aesthetics depending on the location that they are content creating in or even as well just in general, their brand identity. But the one thing that tends to unite all tradwives is they really have a hyper hyper feminine aesthetic. So they are presenting themselves in a very overtly prominent feminine way. They are adopting sometimes very feminine voices.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:They're advocating for traditional gender roles. They're utilizing images or icons. We see a lot of vintage dressing in amongst some trad wives. And amongst that, we see them wanting to return to women's natural sense of femininity. So going back to these almost supposedly biologically revealed social roles where women are expected to be the mother and raise children.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:And as a result, they're looking to embody these very hyperfeminine images. And this can manifest in multiple ways as well, but it normally comes back to this idea that they're trying to return to their old fashioned views of femininity.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So this focus on hyperfemininity is about a focus on the past and the idea that society was a lot better off when women stayed out of the paid workforce.
Carmina Ravanera:I think it's easy to understand why some people feel nostalgic for a different decade. Today, more women are in the paid workforce than ever before. But as you've heard us talking about all the time, society generally isn't set up to support them, especially working mothers. They face a lot of barriers at work. The ideal worker is still thought of as someone who has no other obligations, especially not caregiving responsibilities, and childcare can be crushingly expensive.
Carmina Ravanera:Being a woman in the workforce, especially being a woman of color, a woman with disabilities, or a woman who has recently immigrated to the country, is often exhausting and unfair. But we also need to pause and think critically about this kind of nostalgia. Was there ever really a time when women didn't work? If so, which women are we talking about? And what exactly is this tradition that trad wives are referring to when they talk about traditional gender roles?
Carmina Ravanera:Devin helped to unpack all of this.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Whenever I hear that, like, well, it's just like in the past when women didn't work outside the home. I'm like, when when was that exactly? Like, what which past are you talking about and for who? You know? Who which women are you talking about that didn't work outside the home?
Dr. Devin Proctor:Largely, when when I speak about history and stuff, I'm talking about North American and Western European history. Obviously, gender plays out very differently across the world, and that this trad wife trend is really only taking hold in North America and Western Europe. So if we go back in history, we look at, like, preindustrial history. Women were working alongside men in the fields. They were tending animals.
Dr. Devin Proctor:They were trading goods and processing food, and they were doing all of these things outside of the home. But the work and home were blurred. You know? Your your main job really was the economy of the home because most work was done out of the home. Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:We didn't we didn't go to factories. We didn't go to nine to five jobs. So while they were working, it was largely what one could consider somewhat domestic work, but so were the men for the most part. Right? So then when when we move into the industrial era, women were working alongside men in factories and in mines and and in domestic service, especially when we're working a lot in domestic service.
Dr. Devin Proctor:When we look back at this time in kind of the mid to late eighteen hundreds, there's this kind of Victorian feminine gentility that that we look back at, this idea that the woman is delicate and precious and has to be protected, and it's very much a Victorian ideal, which is ridiculously being being put out into the world at the same time that people are enslaved. Right? So, obviously, women of color in The United States in the mid nineteenth century are working. They're working without pay because, you know, they're working under enslavement, but you can't say that black women in America in the nineteenth century were not laboring because that they absolutely were. But then again, so were many women who were immigrants to the country.
Dr. Devin Proctor:So were many of the social and economic underclasses in the country. This gentility was only really afforded to a very specific wealthy minority of people. Right? But it was, propagated in popular culture into the twentieth century, into when we look at a lot of trad wives and their aesthetic, it it leans towards the nineteen fifties aesthetic. Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:When, similarly, there were many women who stayed home and didn't work, probably more so than in Victorian period, but it was still represented by a very slim, very white, very cis het, economically privileged set of people who could afford to live on a single wage.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So when we think about traditional gender roles, that tradition is limited to a very specific group of people from a specific era, white wealthy women who could afford to stay home.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. And Devin went on to explain how even the idea of the nuclear family as natural and traditional was socially created and not that long ago.
Dr. Devin Proctor:This is one thing that's interesting about the fifties when we have this kind of rosy retrospective look at the nineteen fifties as this perfect and ideal time. A lot of it has to do with the media that comes out, you know, the Donna Reed and the father's knows father knows best that come out of this era and the leave it to beaver era, which show this single working man with a wife who doesn't work and raises the kids and everything. A, that was, as I said, only really available to a small section of the population, but, also, this is one of the only times that was available to even most of them in the history of the world or at least in history of the Western world that post World War two America was, like, the only economy ever that could sustainably support single wage family units. Right? And and at the time, we decided that the nuclear family was this beautiful thing that was now the new norm, and it somehow became traditional even though we invented it in, you know, the nineteen fifties because this economy would support it.
Dr. Devin Proctor:And so we divorced ourself from this idea of multigenerational households that would then divide up the labor into this nuclear family, which, you know, only took a couple decades to stop working, you know, financially and economically. But we've still got this idea that it's somehow the way families are supposed to look through media, through advertising, through a very concerted kind of Cold War ideal of, you know, communal stuff is for the Russians. And, you know, we do things in individual units and, you know, throw in the word nuclear, and it's all space age y. So it it becomes like the way families are supposed to be, but it's not sustainable for basically anyone, and and we saw that. And so you get into kind of the contemporary era where there's this idea now that what happened wasn't it wasn't economics.
Dr. Devin Proctor:It was feminism. You know? Feminism forced women to leave the home with which they really loved, and they wanted to stay there. Right? But there's this idea now that feminism somehow created this women working outside of the home when, mostly, it was a combination of those economic factors where single wages were no longer sustainable and also a part of this much longer civil rights narrative that involved race and gender and sexuality and disability and indigeneity and immigration and, you know, ethnicity and also women.
Dr. Devin Proctor:You know? And this was a part of the the larger thing where women were gaining autonomy and agency. And with that autonomy and agency, they said we would like to work outside the home. It's what we want. Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:So this the very long answer, I think, to a short question, but that that's that's my response. When when people said it's traditional for women to not work outside the home, it's it's absolutely not and has never been traditional except in this one tiny place in the fifties if you were rich and white. And that's about it.
Dr. Sonia Kang:We always have to be careful when we talk about what's traditional or natural. The idea of returning to traditional gender roles doesn't make sense if you start unpacking where those gender roles come from. Many or even most women in the Western world for most of history have been working outside the home. And especially now, it's not doable for most families to live on only one income. What's viewed as natural is actually created by specific social, political, and economic circumstances.
Carmina Ravanera:So that's actually a mini myth within a myth that we need to debunk here. Women have every right to choose to stay away from paid work, but they shouldn't feel pressured by the idea that staying home is the natural and therefore right thing to do.
Dr. Sonia Kang:There's something else I want to address here, which is the idea of choice. It's pretty common to see trad wives giving their followers a little disclaimer like, this is just a choice I'm making for myself, but I'm not pushing it on anyone else. Although many trad wives denounce feminism and believe that it's a cause of many of society's problems, some talk about how making this choice for themselves is feminist in and of itself. Scholars refer to this kind of language as choice feminism.
Carmina Ravanera:Right. This is something I spoke to Devin and Laura about. What is this rhetoric of choice feminism, and what does it do?
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:Choice feminism considers how anything that a woman does can essentially be considered or seen as feminist or cast as feminist. So for example, if a woman manages to achieve a CEO position, then that indicates that any woman could potentially achieve a CEO position. And she smashed the glass ceiling, and we see it as a success for all women. But it also trickles down to that we should start viewing stay at home women as, also choosing to engage in lifestyles that they don't want to enter the workplace or they've chosen to leave the workplace. But why this becomes quite a problematic narrative is the trad wives are not the same even remotely as stay at home mothers.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:They are because stay at home mothers are just choosing not essentially to engage in the workplace, whether through choice or whether through economic necessity because sometimes it's not a choice as well. Whereas trad wives, they're advocating for traditional gender roles where women should be seen as wanting to return to these old fashioned ideas of the nuclear family and serving their husband or engaging in this caring role where their needs are not prioritized and they're putting their family first. And this is where we get into some quite dangerous trajectories. But, also, a lot of trad wives themselves do not wanna be called feminist. There are some trad wives like Alena Pettitt in The UK in particular who has said even though she doesn't like the label feminist, she acknowledges and believes in gender equality, but a lot of trad wives are very overt and really loud about how much they hate feminism, and they see it as the destruction of humanity as well.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:So I think some trad wives would not want to be seen as feminist in the slightest, so we gotta be careful there. But, also, we start going into this idea of forgetting that choice means that you have agency. You're choosing to do this. You have the ability to, and we know not all women do that. We know not all women want to leave the workplace for a variety of reasons.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:Childcare is crippling at the moment as well. It's so expensive. And also just structurally as well, we know that some people have more financial income that they can do or leave this. So we've gotta be really careful when we use the term word choice.
Dr. Devin Proctor:We want everyone to have agency and autonomy that, you know, I I do at least. I would hope most people want that. The problem is the idea that being a woman makes your choices feminist ignores the fact that feminism is also a political positioning. It is also it's got rules. It's, you know, it's it's got a history that it is betterment for not only women, but betterment for people across the gender spectrum.
Dr. Devin Proctor:It also ignores the fact that having the choice to be a stay at home mother, a stay at home wife means just by the nature of you being able to make the choice, means you are in a position of privilege to make that choice. Because, I mean, on both sides of the spectrum, there are plenty of women in the world who would love to not work, but because of economic constraints, domestic constraints, societal constraints, their own, limited freedom of movement, an inability to, you know, be in society that way. They just don't have the choice to, you know, either work or not work. Either that society around them or their own domestic situation says that they must stay at the home even if they wanna work, or they can't afford to stay home because economically they need to be out there working. So it's a choice that only a select few people can make.
Dr. Devin Proctor:And and in that way, it's anti feminist because women are overrepresented in positions of economic precarity. So when you talk about economic precarity, you are also largely talking about women, globally speaking, but also North American and and Western Europe. But even if that wasn't enough for this not to be a feminist choice, the tenants of trad the concept of trad wife identity stand directly against so many of these hard fought feminist games, like economic autonomy for women. You know? A a big part of trad wife identification is you are not in charge of the finances because you don't have the job.
Dr. Devin Proctor:And, you know, a lot of these women talk about getting an allowance. You know? And that's not economic autonomy. Right? Sexual autonomy and freedom from abuse.
Dr. Devin Proctor:In a lot of these spaces, they talk about discipline. You know? They talk about disciplinarian relationships wherein men can and do physically discipline their wives, which is abuse. I mean, it's it's abuse. No matter what, you know, cultural context you're coming from, we're talking about abuse.
Dr. Devin Proctor:It's legally defined as such. These are things that feminism has fought against. Right? And so making a choice to to do something that feminism has overtly fought against, I don't think you can you can really argue that you're making a feminist choice in in that case. Happy to hear counterarguments to that, but that this is a that's that's how I'm feeling about it.
Carmina Ravanera:So while it may be a choice for some tradwives, many women can't just choose whether or not to leave the workforce. Keep in mind that many of these trad wife influencers already had a lot of money, so there's a class aspect here. And it's also important to remember that feminism is a social and political movement with a specific history that goes against much of what trad wives are advocating for.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. Spreading the idea that it's not natural for women to be in the paid workforce and that women should submit to their husbands negates the work that feminists have been doing over many decades to ensure that women can be economically independent and retain their ability to leave potentially abusive or harmful situations.
Carmina Ravanera:Something else that both of these scholars brought up is how the focus is on trad wives themselves, but not the men who are also part of trad culture. And at the end of the day, we have to think about who is benefiting from this movement.
Dr. Devin Proctor:A lot of this comes back to the idea that when we talk about trad wives, we talk about, you know, Hannah Neeleman. We talk about Estee Williams. We talk about Alena Kate Pettit. We're talking about the women when so much of this is about men. This is about men and control.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Right? And putting a pretty face on it and putting the the choice feminism up front as like, oh, no. This is women making this choice. It's a choice to not have control over your own life. And, you know, dig down a little bit, and you end up with who are the men involved in this situation, who are then getting this control, who is this benefiting at the end of the day.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. The other thing we should talk about here is intersectionality. I think these accounts and their content are designed to be as attractive as possible. They're built to capture and keep your attention, which makes people more prone to falling into a cycle of consuming them without thinking about race or anything else at all. But it turns out that this movement is linked to racial histories that we shouldn't ignore.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:We've seen quite a few tradwife content creators overtly come out and say they reject racism. They truly believe in racial equality. And we also see some tradwives who identify as either mixed race or even as black women themselves, like Solie Osorio. We've gotta be really careful here. But and it's a big but on why this matters is some of the ideas that we talk about in terms of traditional gender roles.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:I think we forget about the fact that, actually, we still haven't achieved racial equality in society in the slightest. Also, we've actually seen some quite overt examples of several trad wives either openly supporting white supremacists as well, or the big example we talk about, Ayla Stewart as well and her white baby challenge, where there's a lot of misconceptions about what this involved. But in 2019, she was a very prominent tradwife blogger, and she set a challenge for her followers to have as many children as possible that were white. And we interpret that as having some very dangerous consequences as well of who should have children and who should not. And also, when we look at different types of tradwives, we often see this idea of the southern belle.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:We always think of the southern belle as an archetype, particularly in literary settings or reading as well. If you think of, Scarlet O'Hara as well from Gone With Wind, where they're seen as very respectable traditional women often from the Deep South in The US, and they are normally seen as perpetuating or embodying ideas of good womanhood based on southern values. But we know increasingly that this idea of the southern belle, we've gotta be really careful of how we talk about who is seen as a woman and who is less likely to be seen as a woman. And what we mean there is what type of femininity is valued in society and who's forgotten as well. And we see these ideas a lot, and we're talking about this all throughout society, not just in the trad wife movement.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:If you look at, like, the band, Lady A, for example, in come in country music, that's now starting to change about how we view colonial attitudes and who we see as worthy in society. What we are saying is if you're choosing a label that has historic people who have overtly been racist or you're choosing a label that has connotations or stereotypes or harks back to these ideas, you've just gotta make the conscious choice.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Well, I spoke earlier about kind of this Victorian ideal of the feminine gentility happening concurrently with legalized chattel slavery in in this country. There was very obviously a racial distinction there. They were and a lot of the artwork you see from the period of these Victorian women being shielded and protected from things, they're being protected from things like wild animals and bad weather and very often black men. You see black men in these depictions very often. And so there's this identity that this feminine gentility was also whiteness.
Dr. Devin Proctor:It was also gentility that comes of whiteness that needs to be protected from people of color, influence of color, anything other than whiteness. Right? And while that was obviously kind of more overtly a product of that time, it definitely hasn't gone away. You know? When when we see women white women especially weaponizing that same sort of need for protection.
Dr. Devin Proctor:But in tradwife in the tradwife situations, all of that is obscured with this idea that it's about womanhood and femininity. But as we said earlier, this was a femininity that was only available to white women of a certain social status. And it also if we're going back to preindustrial domestic labor, again, the kind of blurred the difference between work and home. A similar thing's going on now in the workforce. When we look at in terms of professional childcare, 90% of that is done by women, and women of color are vastly overrepresented in that industry as well.
Dr. Devin Proctor:And it's the same thing with food preparation and food service is largely populated by women. And of those women, women of color are far more overrepresented. Right? So women of color, women of immigrant status, people who have been historically economically precarious, not only as women, but intersectionally as women of color, as women of, you know, nonestablished citizenship, stuff like that, they are doing this same domestic work, right, of the child rearing and the food prep and the cleaning. Cleaning services as well, almost all women overrepresented women of color.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Right? So this work is being done by a bunch of people who don't look like the trad wives, but it's being done for economic reasons because of economic precarity. And the trad wife aesthetic obscures all of this, right, that that this work is being done by people. And, you know, that's those are just some of the the, I think, many racial inflections that are easy to not see but are also really hard to not to unsee. What you know, once once you've seen that, it's hard not to to see it, in in everything else too.
Dr. Sonia Kang:The nostalgic femininity that is most often put forward by trad wives is historically linked to whiteness. It obscures that these traditional gender roles were not often held by women of color. Women of color in particular have long been overrepresented in paid roles involving cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. But because this work happens in the paid economy, it's not seen as aligning with the so called domestic feminine ideal. And it's important to note that while not all trad wives take this stance, some have openly embraced racist and white supremacist views and allow themselves to be linked to alt right hashtags, accounts, and ideas.
Carmina Ravanera:I think Laura sums it up well in her research on the trad wife movement. She writes, through nostalgic attempts to reposition traditional femininity as empowering for women, trad culture unintentionally fails to address the historical, colonial rooted connections of white supremacy, inherent misogyny, and classist undertones embedded within the trad wife label. I really recommend checking out both Devin and Laura's research to learn more. We've left some links in the show notes.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So the trad wife movement reinforces a mythologized version of traditional gender roles, and it's deeply, though often subtly, tied to whiteness and class privilege. But these connections aren't always obvious when you're just scrolling through content. So let's say someone tells me that the trad wife movement is just about empowering women to choose traditional gender roles. What can I say to debunk this idea?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, here's what the researchers had to say.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:It's funny, actually. I had this debate with my husband, like, three days ago completely randomly where he described how because my mother-in-law is a stay at home mother, you know, and he described how are you just attacking stay at home mothers? And that's not the case at all. I think that's so unfeminist and, to be honest, quite horrible and alienating in this debate. But what we are saying is so so one of the main myths that we're talking about is separating tradwives from stay at home mothers.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:They are they are not the same because one of the things that we talk about with the tradwife movement is actually inherently hypocritical as well because these women are advocating for women to return to the home. So give up their position in the labor market and suggesting that they will get more satisfaction from embodying these traditional gender roles of if you submit to your husband, if you obey your husband, you'll have a more successful marriage. If you become much better at managing the household budgets, then this will improve your status as a wife or your relationship. Yet they're profiting from this. They're not doing it themselves.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:They are content creators, and they are earning money from this content. Yes. You might argue they're trying to show that the trad lifestyle is beneficial and that they are bringing these people into the community and raising it visible, but they're almost selling a false promise. The only other thing I would say is a lot of people that we see as examples who are talking about trad wives all the time. If we look at Ballerina Farm, for example, or even Nara Smith, they haven't once used the term trad wife themselves, yet we're assigning them a label.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:Like, I always wonder why do we always focus on tradwives? Why don't we talk about trad husbands? Why do we always look at the women as well? And the final point, I suppose, is we've got to understand tradwives themselves are just trying to operate in the patriarchy. They are living in a system that is inherently negative towards women, and perhaps they are just trying to carve out success in the way they know how to.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:And the point isn't to attack tradwives, I don't think. And I think some of the narrative has been quite ugly in social media and in media communities. And don't get me wrong. Some of the ideas are really quite dangerous, and we've gotta call that out. But, also, I think we've got to approach it from the perspective of trad wives are subjected to a system of inequality as well.
Dr. Laura Jane Bower:And but then again, even in terms of agency, they are choosing to do this. So we can't infantilize people. We can't pretend that they don't know what they're doing.
Dr. Devin Proctor:I think you start with whose tradition. You know, whose tradition are we talking about? Who was represented by this tradition, and who is left out from this tradition? And if we're gonna call something traditional, explain to me when was this happening, who was involved in this. You know?
Dr. Devin Proctor:And then in the now you know? So let's say you've established it is traditional, which I think would be hard to do. But if you do, in the now, who stands to benefit by this return supposed return to tradition? Who comes out better when we when we cosplay this supposed mythologized tradition? Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:And then, specifically, when we talk about the individual videos, there is something I haven't talked about at all in this that that is equally input maybe not equally. Also important, like, when we're watching, like, a ballerina farm video. Right? How is this video being curated? You know?
Dr. Devin Proctor:This is presented to us like it's real life. But I don't know. I have young kids, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't, like, make buttermilk from scratch while holding my kid in one take. You know what I mean? It happens eventually, but, like, where are the other kids?
Dr. Devin Proctor:And, like, who's wrangling them while she's on camera? You know? Like, how many takes did you have to do? Also, you're looking at someone in, you know, rustic conditions with beautiful tools and everything. Right?
Dr. Devin Proctor:But, also, don't forget that, you know, that family owns JetBlue. You know? They're also ridiculously wealthy. Right? So not only do you have to question, like, we're we're we're calling tradition.
Dr. Devin Proctor:We whose tradition is this, and is it really a tradition? But, also, what we're seeing isn't real. It's curated just as much as any social media down to the fact that these women do have jobs. Their jobs are their influencers, and they make a lot of money having no jobs, supposedly. So, I mean, that that's that's how I would counter it.
Dr. Devin Proctor:Whose tradition?
Carmina Ravanera:So first off, let's be clear. Tradwife influencers are, in fact, working outside the domestic sphere through social media, and many are making a lot of money for it, contrary to what they're putting out there. What they're really offering is a curated, sanitized, and ahistorical version of femininity and feminism. And we need to think about how tradwives fit into our broader patriarchal system, and importantly, who is benefiting from it.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. The Tradwife movement is definitely more complex than it seems at first glance. It's definitely not just about women freely choosing traditional gender roles. As Devin puts it so well, what tradition are we talking about, who benefits from it, and who gets erased?
Carmina Ravanera:I also want to leave us with an idea for the future. Instead of turning to traditional values as the answer to society's problems, maybe it's time to imagine something more transformative, something that actually makes life feel safer, fairer, and more livable for women and for all marginalized groups.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And with that, this myth is busted. Make sure you subscribe. We'll be back with a new episode soon.
Carmina Ravanera:In the meantime, happy myth busting. GATE's busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to busted. You can also find more interesting podcast series from the Institute for Gender and the Economy by searching gate audio wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.
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