On the threat trad wives present to women everywhere
Living in America has made me acutely aware of very real threat trad wives pose to women everywhere.
Before I moved to America last summer, I’d heard of trad wives, and sometimes scrolled through Instagram feeds of women who posted, enthusiastically, about embracing traditional gender roles. I found them baffling, and I didn’t know any women who would choose to adopt, let alone, embrace a role which made them more enslaved to patriarchal servitude.
I’ve only really started paying them closer attention since I’ve been living in America, partly due to the approaching election, which has brought into sharp and terrifying focus the very real threat that the Trump Vance ticket represents to women’s lives, and partly because I’m now organically consuming more American content than I was when I lived in England. And in the last few weeks, I’ve spent more time than I like to admit to, lost in the alluringly photogenic feeds of homesteaders in Idaho or home-makers in Utah, accounts where motherhood is vaunted as a place of spiritual sanctity, and where the kids are always compliant and apple-cheeked, and there’s always fresh bread, at the very least, being slid from the oven. The version (note:version) of life they present is always obscenely photogenic. It’s easy to lose track of reality staring at the feeds of Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm, or Estee Williams, dolled up, quite literally, like a pastiche of a 1950s housewife while posting about the joys of complete submission to her husband, or Nara Smith’s EMDR-heavy videos, making coca-cola from scratch while looking outrageously beautiful.
Naively, I assumed these women were cosplaying for social media, a place which has, after all, an elemence of performance woven through it. Dressing up as a milk maid and cooking marshmallows from scratch isn’t my idea of a good time, but if Neeleman enjoyed it, who was I to care? And while submitting to my husband sure as hell isn’t what I want from marriage (just ask Pete), if that satisfied Williams, what did it have to do with me? But then several things happened which changed my view on trad wives - opened my eyes, if you like - and made me realise that what these women represent does, in fact, have a lot to do with me, and that I should care, very much, and so should you.