Sep 6, 2023·edited Sep 6, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I grew up with a tradwife mom.
I'm the oldest of eight children in a traditional Catholic Quiverfull family that homeschooled.
My mom thought that Lori Alexander was a shining beacon of hope. And this article doesn't even bring in publications like ABOVE RUBIES or CREATED TO BE HIS HELPMEET (both publications are vile, promote abuse, and I do not recommend them). To my mother, the highest purpose of womanhood was to have a ton of babies and to educate them at home. We constantly had to prove that we were better than public school kids.
Here's the thing: tradwives can't maintain that lifestyle alone. They have to loop other people into the abusive cycles, and even then it's barely maintainable.
As the oldest daughter, I was doing my family's laundry at 6. I was practically running the household and homeschooling myself by the time I was 12. After the 6th grade, I educated myself. When I was 16, I was doing the grocery shopping and running errands for the entire family.
My story has a happy ending. There was a local university nearby, so I started commuting as a 17-year-old. My parents were so proud of their homeschooling achievement (as if they've ever actually helped me beyond elementary school). I went to grad school and married someone outside of that lifestyle. PhD and first tenure-track job at 28.
I am so grateful to be in a happy marriage and to earn my own money. I love my work. I like having a room of my own and a husband who sees me as a full person.
My teaching, research and advocacy is dedicated to undoing white Christian nationalism. I renounce my parents and all their works.
I could save myself, but not my sisters. They keep marrying men within my parents' sphere of influence. I wish I could save them, or even warn them in a way that they would listen.
I'm so glad your story has a happy ending, Sara, and I genuinely grieve for the women in these scenarios who can't see a way out (or even why they would want one).
Thank you for sharing your story, Sara. Congratulations on making a life of your own. The burden put onto you at such a young age reminded me of something Jeanette Walls, the author of the Glass Castle, said on a podcast. Paraphrasing here but essentially the housework and child work always falls onto the oldest daughter. Not the oldest child. The oldest daughter.
Parentification is a massive issue in the Quiverfull movement, and honestly? It's a kind of abuse. I'm really sorry you had to go through all that, and I'm glad you got out.
My For You page keeps bringing up a tradwife account called Farm on Boone (or something like that). Mostly shows an exhausted looking mother of seven making cheese or bread or meals for her family. The kids only appear fleetingly, except for one serious faced girl who couldn't be more than ten or eleven, always seen helping her mum in some way. I've often been struck by her presence as the only "helper" in the family. The other kids appear to be boys or baby girls.
Sara - I felt so seen reading your comment. I also came from a catholic, homeschooling family (of 5) and was also the oldest girl. The idea of parentification is something I have been wrestling with in therapy. I have also been lucky enough to exit this lifestyle/worldview, but I did it a little later in life. I would be so curious to hear other stories of women that grew up in families like these and forged their own (different) path. I personally have felt a bit lonely on my journey. Most of my friends grew up so differently than me (in more "normal" households) that it is hard to communicate some of the complicated feelings I still grapple with around the "normal" decisions we have made (sending our children to public school, stopping at 2, re-entering the workforce for me). It's like the old voice of my upbringing is always still there with me, fretting along with whatever choices I am making (although this voice gets quieter with time, its always there).
To Anne - this is entirely selfish, but I would love love love to have a piece focusing on the children (daughters!) of these households who go their own way (please!)
To me what it boils down to is that these women have recognized that it is impossible to be employed, raise children, and do all the housework by yourself without becoming exhausted, miserable, and beaten down. But instead of realizing that the solution is some combination of MEN ACTUALLY HELPING AT HOME, a cultural shift back towards more community-oriented ways of raising children, and policy intervention, they think the solution is just to retreat into the home.
It makes me really sad, actually.
(Also, I feel very called out by that dc Talk line. It's not my fault that I was a 13-year-old who had limited music options!)
Sep 6, 2023·edited Sep 6, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I agree fully with this! My take on them is frankly very materialist.
There's an unfortunate truth to trad wife account's claims of "failures of feminism": women were encouraged to enter the workforce (or forced to, due to a changing economic environment and the decline of middle class opportunities) without much structural change that would provide support for raising children under these conditions. If anything, it's become harder as traditional institutions crumble and forms of family support become less accessible for many, while standards for cleanliness, parental involvement, etc. have only gone up (which AHP has written about quite extensively, I believe). A rational response to this would be to advocate for structural change in favor of mothers (as the real culprit here is quite clearly neoliberal capitalism and not feminism)...but the escapist, reactionary response is to forgo that career nonsense altogether.
As a feminist who someday wants to be a mother, I find the retrograde and fundamentalist undertones disgusting to their core....yet the more I think about the immense isolation and stress of raising children without sacrificing my career, the more the rose-tinted images of traditional motherhood that have burrowed in the back of my mind have started to have a certain (insiduous!) appeal.
I have decided not to have children precisely because I know I couldn’t meet those demands. Maybe in a more collectivist world I would love being a mother. But not in this one.
This hits exactly on what I wanted to say. It's impossible to "have it all" under our current structures and instead of changing the structures we decide that women should become less in order to compensate.
Yes, LG! This is it exactly. I've been thinking a lot about tradwives lately so this piece was very timely. I have two very young children (my youngest is a literal tiny baby) and before they were born I was pretty set on pursuing a career in academia. As many of us know, that's not the most stable or family-friendly choice, and, at least where I'm from and in the field I'm in, the work opportunities are few and far between. So while I've been both primary caregiver for my kids at these very early stages and dealing with my feelings of not knowing where my life is going, seeing these tradwives in their curated form makes me secretly think that if I found religion I could happily stay in the home and raise my kids without doing anything else for me. Definitely insidious! I feel that these accounts and what they promote really prey on a vulnerable time for parents with very young children, in particular, when everything else seems to prey on that time too.
Uff, Hannah, LG, so true. I’m at the tail end of my first year of parenting. There is a loss of self and a vulnerability to navigating being a mother of a baby (amazing/exhausting). As an older mom, I have had a lot of time to solidify my sense of self and identity, so much so that I’m somewhat surprised at the fact that I feel guilty about wanting more time for myself. I try to remember that there are many ways you show up for your kids beyond just being in their presence. Like providing for them...which is why men aren’t made to feel guilty when they are not home.
I’m sorry, Hannah, that you feel somewhat stuck in your role and I hope you still find ways to (non-guiltily) find time for yourself!
Totally agree with this but let's also remember that it's only middle-class (and usually white) women who were encouraged and/or forced to enter the workforce. Working class women have always been there.
This needs to be in bold lettering and all caps! And also why this whole thing, #tradwife makes me want to puke. (well one of the many reasons) What a luxury to be able to stay at home with your kids if you want, also aren't all of the women working- I mean being an "influencer is a shit ton of work" AND don't get me started on how they pimp out their kids on these accounts.
Yes, yes, what they're doing is NOT "traditional" because "traditional" was deeply embedded in networks of other women - and servants if you had money, and in the U.S. enslaved people - participating in community-wide economies of barter and exchange of time and service and help.
As usual, it's a case of people mistaking "what life was like in the 1950s for middle class white people" (or, sometimes, "what life was like in the Victorian era for upper-middle-class white people") for what humanity "naturally" is.
I have theory that this prevails because the 1950s were the time when pop culture as we currently experience it was really invented and we grew up watching reruns of I Love Lucy or whatever and now expect life to be like that? Like, 1950s life as "default" before the 60s came along and overturned the traditional order. And as a new generation is coming up that was not raised on the same pop culture narratives, maybe their perspectives will change? But I don't know.
And I think it's also tied to the fact that we don't get taught honest history about ourselves. I mean, we can see it SUPER clearly right now in the history wars in Florida and North Carolina etc, but it's everywhere - how many people get any history that really delves into womanhood, sexuality, and gender in high school? In college? Unless we're taught differently, we tend to carry a comforting sense of 'well, life has generally always been the same," that is so, so not the case.
Eric Foner has a great line that goes something like - the history we're taught in school does not explain the world we live in. Bingo. (the bingo is mine, hahaha)
Yes - the line in the Elle piece about an influencer selling that she lived "like her grandparents" really stood out to me as a huge [CITATION NEEDED]. I bet there's a lot about her grandparents' day to day, material lives that would not line up with the traditions she claims to be following. Even within our own families actual history gets buried under these narratives.
Right? My grandparents on my dad's side both worked outside the home until my grandfather's death after which my grandmother lived off his pension. And my grandparents on my mother's side were farmers and worked their asses off until their bodies broken. Ain't nobody living a bougie upper middle class life.
Ah, such good points Cate!! Lately I've felt cheated of learning many important things in my many years of education, but especially gender / women's studies theories and history. Like... Yes please, I would have preferred to become aware of the many oppressive and unrealistic and contradictory norms via education vs. experiencing them in real life without warning or explanation! Same goes for sexuality & sexual orientation... AND matresence. Feeling like I'm playing catch up. Like, gets slapped in the face, learns that slapping is a thing and that I have a face kind of catch up 😅.
@Caddy, yes! Several years back, Michele Landsberg, a well-known Canadian feminist & journalist, spoke to my office on International Women's Day. (Most of the younger women there had no clue who she was, although I was a longtime reader.) She mentioned growing up as a young woman in the repressive 1950s. "Don't let anyone tell you it was like "Happy Days" and all that crap -- it was awful!" she said.
This touches on a sociological study...bah, I can't remember the name of it or the sociologist but she's a famous one. Essentially, via surveying and historical perspectives, the study's "conclusion" (quotation marks because I'm deeply paraphrasing here) was that (white) people idealize the 1950s because that was the last full decade when Americans felt supported. There were jobs, homes, fairer taxes, capitalism wasn't at its height yet, and the middle class was a solid, growing class. Social mobility was still largely possible for most white Americans. When the 60s hit, people started standing up for their rights and the Republicans started grabbing more power in increasingly insidious ways. Thus, the 50s are idealized as a sort of golden age, "before things started going downhill." (But again, mainly only downhill for white, middle-class and lower class Americans. POC already had it ridiculously hard regardless of class and most deal with worse today.)
I also recently read an interesting theory that the Hollywood censorship rules played a big part in what sort of lives and issues were portrayed from that time. Had never occurred to me!
This thread is so real. What we are taught is conditioning into the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not education--or at least very little. The Way We Never Were and A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz explore this in detail--it's stunning how many more women were in graduate school and college prior to World War II. It's a backlash and we're still living it.
I don't know, I don't really agree with this - to me, it doesn't seem like it arises from a rejection of the stress and exhaustion that comes from working and raising a family in the U.S. It seems like it arises from a desire to adhere to the hierarchical structures of patriarchy and white supremacy and Christian supremacy, and to benefit from them as such.
I agree with you. I was a stay at home mom (though def not "trad wife") for a decade and am now a working mom. I think all (or close to all) Moms are completely exhausted, whether they work or not. There is still more than enough domestic work to keep you busy all hours of the day and night, especially if your spouse is not expected to lift a finger when he gets home from work.
I think that absolutely contributes to some of it. But I grew up with these kinds of women, and they would talk about how tired and exhausted they were.
[edit to clarfiy] By "these women" I mean women living in evangelical culture that allowed them to work outside the home but wasn't thrilled about it. They went to college, they had careers, and they had to do ALL the childcare and domestic work themselves, and they were so tired. Some of them dropped their careers because they just couldn't handle it anymore.
It *is* physically harder to have babies or small kids at 40 than at 22, no one (women included!) can "have it all." But then they attach some other information or chain of logic that just doesn't follow.
As a reader, once you have bought into the first premise (which again, is often true, or at least a defensible statement), you are more likely to buy the next thing they say.
It's insidious, and this pattern is ALL over the interwebs. (PragerU is the first example that leaps to mind.)
I love though that there's no acknowledgement that physically you can have a kid at 22 but most of us are a lot better parents (emotionally, mentally, financially) when we're older. I had a kid at 34 and frankly was in a much better place than I was at 30, let alone 22!!
For sure, we get more emotional maturity and life experience, and (hopefully) better judgement as we get older, and that means we often become better at dealing with demanding situations (like kids!), and there is usually (hopefully?) more financial stability, and that isn't a small thing--especially when dependents are in the picture. All of these are tremendous boons for raising kids.
And also, all of this must be balanced against the physical realities that child rearing (and gestating, and bearing) can be intensely physically demanding, and that gets harder to cope with as we age. Also, as we get older, our kin networks are also getting older, meaning options like grandparents-as-childcare may not be an option.
There is no one right answer for everyone (heck, there might not be an exactly "right" answer for any of us), so all we can do is make the best decisions we can with the resources we have available, and help each other out.
It sounds like you found a great window for yourself, and that is, truly, wonderful. :)
A sentence in your final paragraph leapt out at me in glowing neon letters.
"I have a sense of what their husbands are like."
THAT'S the story I want to read. I want Men's Health or GQ or somebody to do a deep dive, or a roundtable Q&A, or SOMETHING with the men who are married to these women. What do they think? Are they allowed to? Because I feel like COME ON — for all the submissiveness cosplay, these are some IRON-WILLED women who have manifested powerful media brands. The men are as vestigial as male praying mantises. They're there to supply a paycheck: food, clothing, a giant pickup truck or two, but also ring lights and makeup and hair dye. And they're there to help create another kid every once in a while. But are they voting stockholders? I don't really think so. And as a man, I want to know what it's really like to be married to a person like this. Because I don't think I'd last a week.
I think there's a real split between men who are ABSOLUTELY on board, like very Jim Bob Duggar-style.....and men who are passive to their wives desires for these "traditional" arrangements. You're right, a deep-dive would be fascinating (if you could get the men to speak with any amount of self-reflection)
All I know is that I watched the Fundie Fridays video about Morgan and her husband and he was absolutely terrible to her--so dismissive, so controlling. It was frightening to see. I don't want to see more of these husbands.
I feel like I had a head start on these accounts as a white female teenager growing up in the South, and then a young mom in suburban Atlanta where there were absolutely impossible standards, even pre-Instagram. The photo on the beach in white clothing has been a thing since the early 90s, and it's such a weird signal of something...family unity? whiteness? wealth and happiness?
And every "tradmom" I knew had a job of some sort that they kept on the downlow! Photographer, clerk in a store, MLM stuff, writer for a food blog, childcare worker at their church, even working at a Hallmark store. It's like they had to have something for themselves even if it was just a "little job." (see Bama Rush for "little" stuff).
I also live in the south and I couldn't agree more!! And now that I'm a mom, it sure is interesting to try to find a supportive community or affordable child care that isn't somehow tied to the church or very conservative views 😬
It sure is. I hung out with the crunchy moms for a while, but then they got into anti-vax and were weirdly conservative and home-school-y, which is not me. It's like, if you weren't staying at home, you had to sort of pretend you wanted to? Which I NEVER did. It's a weird-ass place. We moved to Michigan in 2017 and I've had no regrets.
Ah, so fascinating! Yeah, I also wrestled with this a bit mentally, which was so unexpected, because I never wanted to be a full-time home mom. All the sudden I felt guilty for not wanting to be one. Thankfully I had a long maternity leave which gave me plenty of time to "try out" SHAM and go slowly insane, leaving me VERY SURE of my choice to return to work ha.
I think my next challenge will be the crunchy "full circle" problem that Anne talks about... It's helpful to know it's the same stuff w/ a different label.
Interestingly, my husband didn't get to do this as he had to return to work very soon after our son was born. For a long time he bemoaned this, saying he'd just love to be a SAHD (which added to my guilt)... and then we went on a 2 week trip with our kid and he changed his tune 🤣. I guess sometimes you have to live the path to know it's not for you.
That was my experience when my kids were little, too. I was a LLL leader and when I was going through certification the woman who was supposed to guide me through the process actually switched me to someone else because I’d worked for Planned Parenthood. I’m really proud of the LLL group me and my co-leader put together (affirmed every birthing and feeding choice), but I heard it got bad after we stepped down.
Whoa same! I loved my first LLL leaders in about 2003-2005, but then it got that weird SAHM vibe. The original ones had helped with pumping and working, supplementing with formula, etc, but then it changed to be very purist. Not helpful for me.
Yep. My co-leader and I both stared masters programs in 2012, so we both stepped back then. The leader who took over was a faithful Catholic and got in with the anti-vaxxers, so there was a lot more about natural birth, not vaxxing, and EBF for years and years. The people who really added to the discussion--WOC, people who exclusively pumped, people who supplemented, a lesbian couple who tandem fed--all stepped away as the homesteader, Quiverfull members took over.
OMG the "little job" or "side hustle" bs! The MLM grooming and abuse amongst the Christian mom world is insane! You are so on point though. Every SAH wife I knew/know living out the tradwife ideals who has had a "job" has prioritized a job that allows them to continue prioritizing their partner without compromising their availability or husband's pride. Mostly MLMs, but blogging was and still seems to be big among them. So few of them stick with it, for multiple reasons, but they almost always lose money and I know several wives - myself included - who have been blamed and shamed for wasting time and money on "silly side projects" in an effort to discourage financial earning attempts in the future (especially if it was an MLM endeavor). Which further makes it difficult for women to leave if they decide at any point that they don't want this life anymore.
Holy shit this is eye-opening, terrifying, and so well written. Thank you for spotlighting how "#Tradwife content is not cute or inspirational or harmless; it’s the handmaiden of the Christian Nationalist agenda. It’s regressive, anti-choice politics in a housedress offering you quick and easy morning glory muffins." Here's the thing—I always considered myself "traditional" insofar as I married my high school boyfriend at age 21, we've been married for 33 years, I loved raising my two kids, and I revel in making my home. BUT I have a graduate degree, I developed a career, I am independent, and we have a marriage based on mutual respect and power-sharing. My point is, it's possible to be "traditional" in terms of being married long term and celebrate some aspects of homemaking, but not be passive and submissive. I would never want my daughter or son to view any of these #tradwife influencers as a role model, and I'm positive they would be as horrified by their world view as I am. Thanks again for this post.
Exactly. What you wrote also relates to why I'm a member at an inclusive, progressive Presbyterian church, even though at my core I'm agnostic. In addition to appreciating the supportive community and finding the Scripture interesting and enlightening, I don't want the regressive influences to "own" Christianity.
I too was and am a more traditional wife in that I’m in a long happy marriage, raised two kids, I even secularly home schooled them with an amazing group of families in the greater Seattle area! I do have a degree and I worked outside the home until I had kids, but am privileged enough to not need to at this point, and I too revel in making my home, caring for my senior dogs, reading, writing, and cooking, I’m also very progressive and a feminist and find this #tradwife content pretty horrifying and unsettling. It also really bums me out that it makes some of the things I’ve enjoyed most in my life seem really unhealthy and bad for women, as that’s obviously not my experience, but I also know that the way I’ve lived my life probably wouldn’t be controversial enough content for a social media following either. When you get into the weeds of a life without a major agenda there’s a lot of laundry and dishes involved. 😉😂
I appreciate this coming from a similar point of view, I have been married to my high school boyfriend for almost 15 years, my hobbies are baking and sewing. But I have a PhD and worked incredibly hard to get somewhere in my career before having a kid. I chafe at sharing my personal life widely because I am from a red state and I absolutely do not want to be mistaken for a "tradwife."
One of the other things that I worry about regressive influences "owning" is support for/acknowledgement of/public grief around pre-natal and neo-natal loss. It stuck out to me, probably because I've dealt with both, that the first influencer AHP cites has infertility and loss in her bio and talks about her "children in heaven" along with those on earth. As someone who's had a second-trimester loss, I find it really comforting to see other people talk about their losses and children, but I usually only see it so openly in "trad"/religious spaces. (Part of the problem is that most of society is so shitty on this issue that the space is wide open for co-opting!) BUT obviously their discussion in these terms often comes from a deeply anti-choice place (along with all of the other baggage), which is problematic.
Sep 6, 2023·edited Sep 6, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
Loved this piece! The thing I also notice about all these women, besides their whiteness, is their thinness. This may just be partially a side effect of what the algorithms push and what our culture wants to look at, but it also tracks with my experience growing up in the church. There was always this sense that you would never be one of these beautiful, gentle, godly women if you were not thin and thereby conventionally attractive. This may also be because these kinds of girls had an easy time getting boyfriends in youth group or just kind of made the lifestyle seem the most appealing. Also the word "princess" is bandied about a lot in these circles, meaning a "royal child in the kingdom of God," and with all the Disneyfied cultural connotations of that word, I *never* actually felt like a princess. I have never ever been thin and spent a lot of my adolescence hung up on that fact, and so this kind of trend jumps out at me. All this to say, this aesthetic of a godly woman definitely predates social media, and I think it's a big part of why I never felt at home in any church, knowing I'd never be thin or beautiful enough resemble them in either looks or interests. It seemed impossible to be a true Christian woman without also being "beautiful," and that feels very reinforced by these Instagram personas.
It also begs the question: is God who you are really being beautiful for? Whose ideal woman is this *actually*?
I grew up in the denomination that Gwen Shamblin came from before she went and started her cult. My mom definitely had her first book on a bookshelf in our house.
TLDR: I guess my point is that it's easy for women who look like this to believe that they are being rewarded by God for their behavior simply because our society is set up by men to reward submissive women who conform to beauty standards.
Yeah, I also wonder if it's a version of the prosperity gospel - like "I know how loved/blessed by God I am for being good by how thin/beautiful He's made me" or something twisted like that. The theology of all of this is UGH.
I think this (partially) comes from a mindset of the body being a temple of God. I was raised in/part of conservative churches up until a few years ago and it was definitely communicated out that to be a proper temple, one kept themself at an "appropriate weight", dressed & groomed regularly (read haircut & highlights), etc. This is also to keep the husband's eye from straying - the wife naturally needs to be beautiful. All the preachers' wives were beautiful and thinner.
This has put me in mind of a post by Chelsea Summers, in her blog, Pretty Dumb Things, many years ago. Recounting her experiences as a highly successful stripper, this post described a particular moment in her career when she focused her life on achieving a maximum of physical perfection, as understood in that scene. It’s a terrific piece (she’s a dynamite writer) in which she describes a sort of hypnotic bliss in the self-annihilation of becoming a perfect object. No thoughts needed: just gym, tanning, grooming, working, sleeping. No questions or choices. The tradwife/SAHG lifestyle strikes me as a more elaborate version of that.
In the great tradition of their spiritual ancestor, the late, terrible Phyllis Schlaffly, I don’t think the hypocrisy registers if you’re doing it to further the movement.
I don't follow any of these people, so I'm curious - are they at all honest about content creation being work? I feel like people I've followed in other spheres have been pretty straightforward about the fact that they are doing their job, they have brand partners, they have to produce X amount of Y type of content per day to keep up, etc...do the tradwives admit to any of that, or do they try their best to obscure the economics and labor of their influencer jobs?
I don't follow them either!! But I heard that the Transformed Wife (which AHP mentions in her piece) was really hypocritical about her actions since she says women shouldn't preach but... She spends hours a day preaching from her Instagram soapbox
I don't follow any of these accounts but some of them seem like they're actually... porn? Which is fine! I'm not anti-porn, but it feels to me like the joke is on anyone who doesn't realize that? (I'm talking about the social media #tradwife phenomenon, especially tik tok... obviously there are lots of actual stay-at-home wives/girlfriends adhering to traditional gender roles in their private lives... to me a completely separate thing from this public performance on social media.)
As always, your writing is so insightful and connects dots that have been buzzing in my mind in the background but remained unarticulated. The self-annihilation theme also just resonates with what so many (putatively liberal and feminist) moms I know joke or complain about, like how moms take the majority of photos of their children, often with their husbands in the photos too. This mixture of moms being the seers but not the seen, undervalued emotional labor around documenting the lives of children, as well as how social media like tradmoms make moms feel inadequate if they are photographed even slightly unflatteringly to the point where they would rather just be erased from the narrative than being caught not performing motherhood well.
My grandmother would LITERALLY cut herself out of photos of herself that she didn't like!! Every now & then I find a photo with an odd-shaped corner snipped out where Grandma was once in the picture!
Because it centers on kind of the available models of and fantasy material for Christian women, this makes me think of an article I wrote in grad school -- so, like, 20 years ago -- comparing Christian and secular romance novels. Not long single-titles, but series ones like Harlequin etc. based on fairly strong formulas. I haven't actually sat down and reread the article in years and years, and my memory is a little fuzzy on a lot of it, but IIRC the most interesting difference I found was in the prevailing narrative about what it meant to fall in love and head toward your happily ever after. The heroes in the secular books were much more dominant figures than the heroes in the Christian ones -- they were, like, billionaire cowboy neurosurgeons, while the Christian heroes were much more just some guy. But the secular plots very often revolved around the hero being tamed by the heroine. He didn't believe in love and she taught him to believe, that kind of thing. He as a dominant figure submitted to something bigger than him -- love -- but did so because of a heroine who was typically less objectively attractive and successful but had force of personality on her side. And the Christian books didn't have that so much. The heroes already recognized something bigger than themselves in God (that may be why they were less dominant figures to begin with), but also they were less likely to be seriously changed by their relationship with the heroine. In these books for women readers, Christianity kind of constrained the available size of the fantasy on both ends: You don't get the dream of the billionaire cowboy doctor's masculine power and you also don't get to tame the man you end up with. A lot has changed over the past 20 years, but something still feels familiar.
May I recommend Daniel Silliman's Reading Evangelicals to you? I feel like the chapter on Love Comes Softly especially would be SO relevant to your interests!
This idea of erasure is fascinating. And terrifying.
My mom got pregnant with me in 1969 right before she turned 18. She was a SAHM until my dad walked out the summer I was 7. My grandparents weren't wealthy at that time, but were middle class enough to make sure we didn't fall through the cracks. Like we were poor but not quite poor enough to qualify for food stamps. Mom essentially raised me without help from my dad. She went back to college for a second degree (guaranteed employment) in nursing with the support of the grandparents, who looked after me. Despite her working life and benignly negligent parenting, her socialization patterns are strong. She erases herself by throwing out all "junk." There will be nothing left that reflects who she is when she dies. Her "pastime" is cleaning her house. She's smart and funny but shut off any creativity at an early age. It's heartbreaking.
I've done better for myself, sort of. I've always had a rich inner life and serial hobbies (yay, ADHD!). But most of my adult life has been about caring for family and the home. I'm terrible at the latter, and I'm burnt out on the former. My friends became so wrapped up in being parents, while I fought to maintain a sense of self while my son was tiny. He's a young adult, but still living at home because money. Husband is retired. I'm trying to shift responsibilities to others with limited success. I have zero time for myself. I'm out of the house 10 hours a day. Weekends are about garden care (hobby, but also a chore), lawn care (husband is not healthy enough to mow safely), and so on. I've done the calculus on going on strike. It would ultimately cause harm, so not an option. (I haven't given up, and I'm still searching for and trying different tweaks and solutions.)
The point of all that is that despite all the progress we've made, the pressure to stuff ourselves into these roles permeates everything including our psyches. I applaud everyone who resists and pushes back. I'm an archivist, and I've process a couple of family collections with materials from the mid-20th century.
TL, DR: The glorification of #TradWife life is disturbing. People who identify or present as women are constantly subjected to pressures that tell them whatever lifestyle they choose is wrong, This trend is more pressure. Women are so often still seen as roles rather than people. (I think men can be trapped similarly but have more avenues to break free of it.)
My mother was militant about self-erasure, & also about archiving family materials. I always felt she wanted proof that she had existed, & I don’t know what to do with the archives. My experience growing up was much too painful to enjoy paging through them. No grandchildren for Mom; self-erasure is not in fact fertile. (I suspect self-erasure is, in fact, a sin -- the sin of rejecting the life God offers ... liberal God talk: It does not judge the women forced into this sin.)
I'm sorry about your husband's health, but is there any way to shift mowing to your son? Husband does the laundry or grocery shopping? Everyone cooks a meal on a certain day of the week? I'll confess our division of labor is the traditional 'he does the outside, I do the inside' but I also make it work for me by doing what tasks I want to do, when. And I've outsourced vacuuming to my kids because the vacuum is heavy and I have a bad back.
I was parenting small children in the early 2000s, and as result of trauma history (and some idealism about communality in parenting) I got drawn into the Attachment Parenting space. No one much was on the internet in those days (Thank God, or the hole I ended up in might have been much, more deeper.), but the virulence of the Attachment Parenting gospel was strong enough that it didn't really need the internet. And it boiled down to self-annihilation, exactly as you say. As in, if you were properly encouraging attachment as a parent then you would carry your child around all day. If you put them down for any length of time then they would experience attachment anxiety and that would be utterly traumatic for them and it would be ALL YOUR FAULT. Of course you should breast feed, and on demand 24 hours a day. If you made your child wait for the breast because you needed to do something during the day or (god forbid) you actually needed to sleep at night so that you were not so dangerously tired that you might do yourself, your child, or someone else serious harm then, again, they would experience abandonment and trauma and it would be ALL YOUR FAULT.
Attachment parenting gurus loved to talk about how we were "meant" to live in villages, and in that schema children were experiencing such an ideal childhood that their feet never touched the ground until they were toddlers and they never, ever cried. The reality was that in order to be a stay-at-home mom you had to have a husband who made 6 figures so that you would have the extra money and time to participate in endless mommy and baby play groups, yoga classes, and the like, instead of being trapped at home alone doing endless loads of laundry (so many shit-covered cotton diapers on top of everything else), totally touched out, desperate for your overworked, underpaid spouse to come home so someone else could hold the baby for JUST A MOMENT, but also dreading their return because it wasn't like you had showered for days because YOU CAN'T SHOWER WITH A BABY IN YOUR ARMS and they might want to have sex. Except you're so touched out the thought of sex is literally disgusting.
I would have likely had some mild post-partum depression regardless, but submitting to that insanity and the horrible guilt I felt every time I wanted even a moment to myself as a result (How could you possibly traumatize your child so wantonly, you selfish bitch!) dropped me in a depressive hole that it took years to climb out of.
Yes yes yes!!! It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to take some aspects of AP that felt right to me and let go of others that I started to feel like a person again. My kids are 23 months apart and being a SAHM was so hard in those early days. I don’t regret it now that they’re 14 and 16 and I’m in my own career, but I also almost don’t even recognize myself then.
I think about who I was then and the first thought was, Who even was I? I can't even see myself, but only my functional use to my family in those years. The only part of me that was left following AP was this incredibly resentful, angry, depressed zombie. How was that better for my children? They simply ended up deeply attached to a crazy person.
Okay...this needs a deep dive. There's a conversation upthread about La Leche League getting co-opted by those people when before it was a supportive group for all kinds of nursing people, working, supplementing, whatever. AP was the same way. I didn't recognize it as culty til much later (my kids are also older, 17 and 20). I got into it because my first kid actually refused being put down, so I found about slings. The guilt was insane.
Two words were where I drew the line: SHOWER SLINGS. I was going to be DAMNED if I couldn't take a shower by myself even if the baby was screaming (safely in a bassinet).
I agree this needs a deep dive. And though it's obviously separate from this whole #tradwife phenomenon, I feel like it's connected. Because ultimately it's about idealizing a theoretical idea about "traditional" parenting, but not actually acknowledging the systemic issues being confronted by mothers in capitalist patriarchy. So, it's simply guilting mothers into annihilating themselves by trapping themselves in a mothering role that is unsustainable for the vast majority of women.
Don't even get me started on La Leche League and AP. My ex-husband and I referred to them as the Milk Police. I really wanted to breastfeed, but literally no one (not my breastfeeding coaches, my midwife, or the moms I knew who had older kids) bothered to tell me how triggering on-demand breastfeeding would be for someone with sexual trauma history. I had spent my whole adult life staking a claim to controlling who got to touch me intimately and how. But now I was supposed to let another human touch me intimately whenever they wanted, while often pulling my hair, biting me, and regardless of whether my nipples were cracked or bleeding or I was sick or dangerously exhausted? And if I refused them at any point then I was a bad mom? That was a seriously messed-up head trip.
I am so sorry. What a shitty thing to deal with, especially with no support. The all-or-nothing mindset sucks for many reasons, and that is a HUGE one that I haven't heard anyone else talk about, even though I'm sure you are not alone. It is definitely self-annihilation through allowing another human access to your body at all times.
Yes, please, can we talk about AP? It‘s currently totally en vogue in my country. Apparently as a milder version where „everyone‘s needs counts“. But if your child will „experience lifelong trauma“*, how important is your need to sleep or god forbid just have a moment to yourself? And even with our extensive maternal leave, if it‘s up to your child to decide when to stop breastfeeding/sleeping in your bed/… how shall you work?
Yes! AP doesn't acknowledge the systemic issues most women are confronted by. It simply makes women responsible for maintaining some sort of idealized utopic reality for their children in the midst of an overall reality that is dystopic as often as not, and if they don't then all the trauma their children may experience is their fault.
The point about self-annihilation is so so smart, and also reminds me about what I think whenever I see this content, which is: this is definitely at least sort of a kink thing, right? The presence of sexuality in these kinds of posts (the trads more than the girlfriends) feels far more intense for being absent.
As you can imagine, The Transformed Wife talks *a lot* about being pliable to your husband's desires. The other "cooler" couples talk a lot about sex in the "God loves sex" sort of way (not in the domination/kink realm) but, well, that's the sort of sex they would never talk about publicly
I have witnessed the sexual proscriptions of the "cool, young" evangelicals and it is chilling. There is an entire curriculum based on creating a "guaranteed sex day" each week, largely framed as a day the wife can not say no to sex. And the folks who follow this speak of it as if this is a totally normal, even enviable way to organize a relationship. The gender essentialism and stereotypes this is based on are obviously deeply problematic and speak to the ways that following tradwife guidelines can start to blur into what would fit the definition of an abusive relationship.
Anyone else remember the woman that was famous for the 72 hour rule? I don't recall where I heard about her, or if this was in the early days of IG, but the 72 hour rule was that she never let her husband go more than 72 hours without sexual release. I can maybe see that in the newlywed days, but the idea of that now just exhausts me. Maybe it's just the fact that it focuses on him and his release, and never her owning the fact that maybe she'd like an orgasm every 3 days...
"Absent" except for the many, many children being had, right? You can't think about "as many children as God wills" without thinking about the mechanisms by which the children would come to be, which is lots of sex (presumably when the husband wants it, of course, which then becomes when the wife wants it, any time) without birth control of any kind (including the rhythm method/cycle planning). The "fruitful womb" imagery is a big cozy wool over the eyes of sex and sexuality, but it's the total "don't think about purple elephants" rule. It's in your mind even if it's not right in front of your eyes.
That also dovetails with all the crunchy anti-vaxx stuff too, IMO. (At least based on the crunchy moms I know.) "Natural" childbirth becomes yoked to "natural" sex, i.e. no protection or attempting to curtail sex's most obvious by-product.
It would be a lot healthier if it were a kink. This is more like received wisdom. Some of the Evangelical women YouTubers were alllll about purity culture right up to the moment they got married, and then they talk about how hard it was to make that turn from being completely "pure" to being sexual with their husbands, and the really open folks talk about the very real problems they have developing a sexual relationship when they've been taught "sex bad" their entire lives. Of course, these are the same women who promoted that culture right up until it affected them personally.
One of the things that I've noticed younger progressive influencers and YT folks say these days is "if you want to wait until marriage, that's fine," which is I think a bit of a change from the sex-positive feminism of the 90s, which used to warn people about waiting because of the challenges that can arise. I think it's great to say that all choices are value neutral, with the caveat that your challenges are going to be different from couples who have already been intimate, and you're going to have to be prepared for the possibility that you're not sexually compatible right away, or ever.
There are explicitly kinky Christian-oriented groups, or at least there used to be, such as Taken in Hand. Apparently it only now exists on the Internet archive, but it was very much about Christian couples getting off on male dominance and female submission in all realms including sex in service to being godly or some such nonsense.
It always makes me think about the ‘Christian domestic discipline’ trend where husbands spanked their wives for bad behaviour but it ‘wasn’t kink or abusive’…
The last line had me thinking: are these women the other side of the extreme #girlboss #momboss coin? When I really reflect on this, in both cases I don't know much about either of the archetypes, outside of what's shared for well...influencing. Both feel tired and exhausted, both feel preachy. Both seem to be reacting/perpetuating the increasing expectations placed on women today in the public square (just in opposing directions). If women are in a general state of duress, certainly some will over function and others will retreat into the self. The van diagram overlaps more than I'd originally think - the line truly turns in to a circle somewhere!
This is really astute — there's no there, there, just a hollowing out in order to reify different aspects of the status quo. (Patriarchal theocracy on one end and patriarchal capitalism on the other)
I haven’t even finished but the chilling reference to the Federalist Society reminded me of this quote by Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and father of the field of public relations (propaganda) whose breathtakingly impactful work was appropriated by Goebbels in Nazi Germany: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
Omg yes! That’s where I first learned of him. I was going to say that, but I feel like I reference it constantly and decided to hold back. Esp since I haven’t finished the series, which is absolutely brilliant. :)
We are kindred spirits! I feel like I do (or can lol) link every Rich Text back to an Adam Curtis doc. I've learned so much about how the world actually works!
I was hooked after my first Adam Curtis documentary and I can't even explain what they are, which I find kind of disturbing about myself? But they're so ... everything.
it really is. I HIGHLY recommend the documentary referenced below - it really is mind-blowing on every level, and very well-researched and well-presented. It really kind of fundamentally changes how we understand history.
Omg let me know what you think! I’ve still only seen the first hour so we can be a little documentary club ;) dying to finish but haven’t found the chance. Here it is!
I had no idea "stay at home girlfriend" was a trend. That makes me so sad. Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and Christian supremacy are powerful forces encouraging some people to attach themselves to their rung on the ladder, and it's very, very depressing to see people participate in their own oppression. There's nothing wrong with working out and relaxing and taking care of your skin. But there is everything wrong with centering these activities as what is *valuable about you*. And there is everything wrong about perpetuating the belief that what women give to the world is "physical beauty" (as defined by racist, ablest, etc. norms) and nothing else. It is harmful to the woman practicing the value, and it is harmful to the society being shaped by the value.
Yes!!! Another way to say this (I think): it’s super harmful for girls and women to think of themselves not as subjects moving through the world and acting in it, but rather as objects being viewed in the world and being acted upon.
I knew about the stay-at-home girlfriend trend, and I think it’s the one that’s the most obviously reactionary because it appeared a year or two into the pandemic.
I grew up with a tradwife mom.
I'm the oldest of eight children in a traditional Catholic Quiverfull family that homeschooled.
My mom thought that Lori Alexander was a shining beacon of hope. And this article doesn't even bring in publications like ABOVE RUBIES or CREATED TO BE HIS HELPMEET (both publications are vile, promote abuse, and I do not recommend them). To my mother, the highest purpose of womanhood was to have a ton of babies and to educate them at home. We constantly had to prove that we were better than public school kids.
Here's the thing: tradwives can't maintain that lifestyle alone. They have to loop other people into the abusive cycles, and even then it's barely maintainable.
As the oldest daughter, I was doing my family's laundry at 6. I was practically running the household and homeschooling myself by the time I was 12. After the 6th grade, I educated myself. When I was 16, I was doing the grocery shopping and running errands for the entire family.
My story has a happy ending. There was a local university nearby, so I started commuting as a 17-year-old. My parents were so proud of their homeschooling achievement (as if they've ever actually helped me beyond elementary school). I went to grad school and married someone outside of that lifestyle. PhD and first tenure-track job at 28.
I am so grateful to be in a happy marriage and to earn my own money. I love my work. I like having a room of my own and a husband who sees me as a full person.
My teaching, research and advocacy is dedicated to undoing white Christian nationalism. I renounce my parents and all their works.
I could save myself, but not my sisters. They keep marrying men within my parents' sphere of influence. I wish I could save them, or even warn them in a way that they would listen.
I'm so glad your story has a happy ending, Sara, and I genuinely grieve for the women in these scenarios who can't see a way out (or even why they would want one).
Thank you for sharing your story, Sara. Congratulations on making a life of your own. The burden put onto you at such a young age reminded me of something Jeanette Walls, the author of the Glass Castle, said on a podcast. Paraphrasing here but essentially the housework and child work always falls onto the oldest daughter. Not the oldest child. The oldest daughter.
Parentification is a massive issue in the Quiverfull movement, and honestly? It's a kind of abuse. I'm really sorry you had to go through all that, and I'm glad you got out.
Sara, you are the f*uckin bomb. That’s all. 💥
My For You page keeps bringing up a tradwife account called Farm on Boone (or something like that). Mostly shows an exhausted looking mother of seven making cheese or bread or meals for her family. The kids only appear fleetingly, except for one serious faced girl who couldn't be more than ten or eleven, always seen helping her mum in some way. I've often been struck by her presence as the only "helper" in the family. The other kids appear to be boys or baby girls.
The chasm between what is expected of daughters and what is expected of sons in these families is wider than the Grand Canyon.
Sara - I felt so seen reading your comment. I also came from a catholic, homeschooling family (of 5) and was also the oldest girl. The idea of parentification is something I have been wrestling with in therapy. I have also been lucky enough to exit this lifestyle/worldview, but I did it a little later in life. I would be so curious to hear other stories of women that grew up in families like these and forged their own (different) path. I personally have felt a bit lonely on my journey. Most of my friends grew up so differently than me (in more "normal" households) that it is hard to communicate some of the complicated feelings I still grapple with around the "normal" decisions we have made (sending our children to public school, stopping at 2, re-entering the workforce for me). It's like the old voice of my upbringing is always still there with me, fretting along with whatever choices I am making (although this voice gets quieter with time, its always there).
To Anne - this is entirely selfish, but I would love love love to have a piece focusing on the children (daughters!) of these households who go their own way (please!)
To me what it boils down to is that these women have recognized that it is impossible to be employed, raise children, and do all the housework by yourself without becoming exhausted, miserable, and beaten down. But instead of realizing that the solution is some combination of MEN ACTUALLY HELPING AT HOME, a cultural shift back towards more community-oriented ways of raising children, and policy intervention, they think the solution is just to retreat into the home.
It makes me really sad, actually.
(Also, I feel very called out by that dc Talk line. It's not my fault that I was a 13-year-old who had limited music options!)
I agree fully with this! My take on them is frankly very materialist.
There's an unfortunate truth to trad wife account's claims of "failures of feminism": women were encouraged to enter the workforce (or forced to, due to a changing economic environment and the decline of middle class opportunities) without much structural change that would provide support for raising children under these conditions. If anything, it's become harder as traditional institutions crumble and forms of family support become less accessible for many, while standards for cleanliness, parental involvement, etc. have only gone up (which AHP has written about quite extensively, I believe). A rational response to this would be to advocate for structural change in favor of mothers (as the real culprit here is quite clearly neoliberal capitalism and not feminism)...but the escapist, reactionary response is to forgo that career nonsense altogether.
As a feminist who someday wants to be a mother, I find the retrograde and fundamentalist undertones disgusting to their core....yet the more I think about the immense isolation and stress of raising children without sacrificing my career, the more the rose-tinted images of traditional motherhood that have burrowed in the back of my mind have started to have a certain (insiduous!) appeal.
this right here
I have decided not to have children precisely because I know I couldn’t meet those demands. Maybe in a more collectivist world I would love being a mother. But not in this one.
This hits exactly on what I wanted to say. It's impossible to "have it all" under our current structures and instead of changing the structures we decide that women should become less in order to compensate.
Yes, LG! This is it exactly. I've been thinking a lot about tradwives lately so this piece was very timely. I have two very young children (my youngest is a literal tiny baby) and before they were born I was pretty set on pursuing a career in academia. As many of us know, that's not the most stable or family-friendly choice, and, at least where I'm from and in the field I'm in, the work opportunities are few and far between. So while I've been both primary caregiver for my kids at these very early stages and dealing with my feelings of not knowing where my life is going, seeing these tradwives in their curated form makes me secretly think that if I found religion I could happily stay in the home and raise my kids without doing anything else for me. Definitely insidious! I feel that these accounts and what they promote really prey on a vulnerable time for parents with very young children, in particular, when everything else seems to prey on that time too.
Uff, Hannah, LG, so true. I’m at the tail end of my first year of parenting. There is a loss of self and a vulnerability to navigating being a mother of a baby (amazing/exhausting). As an older mom, I have had a lot of time to solidify my sense of self and identity, so much so that I’m somewhat surprised at the fact that I feel guilty about wanting more time for myself. I try to remember that there are many ways you show up for your kids beyond just being in their presence. Like providing for them...which is why men aren’t made to feel guilty when they are not home.
I’m sorry, Hannah, that you feel somewhat stuck in your role and I hope you still find ways to (non-guiltily) find time for yourself!
And, btw, all of this content is curated BS which makes it that much more insidious
Exactly!
Totally agree with this but let's also remember that it's only middle-class (and usually white) women who were encouraged and/or forced to enter the workforce. Working class women have always been there.
This needs to be in bold lettering and all caps! And also why this whole thing, #tradwife makes me want to puke. (well one of the many reasons) What a luxury to be able to stay at home with your kids if you want, also aren't all of the women working- I mean being an "influencer is a shit ton of work" AND don't get me started on how they pimp out their kids on these accounts.
Yes, yes, what they're doing is NOT "traditional" because "traditional" was deeply embedded in networks of other women - and servants if you had money, and in the U.S. enslaved people - participating in community-wide economies of barter and exchange of time and service and help.
As usual, it's a case of people mistaking "what life was like in the 1950s for middle class white people" (or, sometimes, "what life was like in the Victorian era for upper-middle-class white people") for what humanity "naturally" is.
I have theory that this prevails because the 1950s were the time when pop culture as we currently experience it was really invented and we grew up watching reruns of I Love Lucy or whatever and now expect life to be like that? Like, 1950s life as "default" before the 60s came along and overturned the traditional order. And as a new generation is coming up that was not raised on the same pop culture narratives, maybe their perspectives will change? But I don't know.
And I think it's also tied to the fact that we don't get taught honest history about ourselves. I mean, we can see it SUPER clearly right now in the history wars in Florida and North Carolina etc, but it's everywhere - how many people get any history that really delves into womanhood, sexuality, and gender in high school? In college? Unless we're taught differently, we tend to carry a comforting sense of 'well, life has generally always been the same," that is so, so not the case.
Eric Foner has a great line that goes something like - the history we're taught in school does not explain the world we live in. Bingo. (the bingo is mine, hahaha)
Yes - the line in the Elle piece about an influencer selling that she lived "like her grandparents" really stood out to me as a huge [CITATION NEEDED]. I bet there's a lot about her grandparents' day to day, material lives that would not line up with the traditions she claims to be following. Even within our own families actual history gets buried under these narratives.
Right? My grandparents on my dad's side both worked outside the home until my grandfather's death after which my grandmother lived off his pension. And my grandparents on my mother's side were farmers and worked their asses off until their bodies broken. Ain't nobody living a bougie upper middle class life.
Releasing baby ducks in their nap-dress (insert eye roll)
Ah, such good points Cate!! Lately I've felt cheated of learning many important things in my many years of education, but especially gender / women's studies theories and history. Like... Yes please, I would have preferred to become aware of the many oppressive and unrealistic and contradictory norms via education vs. experiencing them in real life without warning or explanation! Same goes for sexuality & sexual orientation... AND matresence. Feeling like I'm playing catch up. Like, gets slapped in the face, learns that slapping is a thing and that I have a face kind of catch up 😅.
@Caddy, yes! Several years back, Michele Landsberg, a well-known Canadian feminist & journalist, spoke to my office on International Women's Day. (Most of the younger women there had no clue who she was, although I was a longtime reader.) She mentioned growing up as a young woman in the repressive 1950s. "Don't let anyone tell you it was like "Happy Days" and all that crap -- it was awful!" she said.
This touches on a sociological study...bah, I can't remember the name of it or the sociologist but she's a famous one. Essentially, via surveying and historical perspectives, the study's "conclusion" (quotation marks because I'm deeply paraphrasing here) was that (white) people idealize the 1950s because that was the last full decade when Americans felt supported. There were jobs, homes, fairer taxes, capitalism wasn't at its height yet, and the middle class was a solid, growing class. Social mobility was still largely possible for most white Americans. When the 60s hit, people started standing up for their rights and the Republicans started grabbing more power in increasingly insidious ways. Thus, the 50s are idealized as a sort of golden age, "before things started going downhill." (But again, mainly only downhill for white, middle-class and lower class Americans. POC already had it ridiculously hard regardless of class and most deal with worse today.)
I also recently read an interesting theory that the Hollywood censorship rules played a big part in what sort of lives and issues were portrayed from that time. Had never occurred to me!
Oh that’s not a theory, that’s a fact! The Hayes Code had a huge huge amount of control over what kinds of stories were told.
YES, Cate, thank you SO much for saying this!
This thread is so real. What we are taught is conditioning into the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not education--or at least very little. The Way We Never Were and A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz explore this in detail--it's stunning how many more women were in graduate school and college prior to World War II. It's a backlash and we're still living it.
I don't know, I don't really agree with this - to me, it doesn't seem like it arises from a rejection of the stress and exhaustion that comes from working and raising a family in the U.S. It seems like it arises from a desire to adhere to the hierarchical structures of patriarchy and white supremacy and Christian supremacy, and to benefit from them as such.
I agree with you. I was a stay at home mom (though def not "trad wife") for a decade and am now a working mom. I think all (or close to all) Moms are completely exhausted, whether they work or not. There is still more than enough domestic work to keep you busy all hours of the day and night, especially if your spouse is not expected to lift a finger when he gets home from work.
I think that absolutely contributes to some of it. But I grew up with these kinds of women, and they would talk about how tired and exhausted they were.
[edit to clarfiy] By "these women" I mean women living in evangelical culture that allowed them to work outside the home but wasn't thrilled about it. They went to college, they had careers, and they had to do ALL the childcare and domestic work themselves, and they were so tired. Some of them dropped their careers because they just couldn't handle it anymore.
The most compelling lies have a grain of truth.
It *is* physically harder to have babies or small kids at 40 than at 22, no one (women included!) can "have it all." But then they attach some other information or chain of logic that just doesn't follow.
As a reader, once you have bought into the first premise (which again, is often true, or at least a defensible statement), you are more likely to buy the next thing they say.
It's insidious, and this pattern is ALL over the interwebs. (PragerU is the first example that leaps to mind.)
I love though that there's no acknowledgement that physically you can have a kid at 22 but most of us are a lot better parents (emotionally, mentally, financially) when we're older. I had a kid at 34 and frankly was in a much better place than I was at 30, let alone 22!!
For sure, we get more emotional maturity and life experience, and (hopefully) better judgement as we get older, and that means we often become better at dealing with demanding situations (like kids!), and there is usually (hopefully?) more financial stability, and that isn't a small thing--especially when dependents are in the picture. All of these are tremendous boons for raising kids.
And also, all of this must be balanced against the physical realities that child rearing (and gestating, and bearing) can be intensely physically demanding, and that gets harder to cope with as we age. Also, as we get older, our kin networks are also getting older, meaning options like grandparents-as-childcare may not be an option.
There is no one right answer for everyone (heck, there might not be an exactly "right" answer for any of us), so all we can do is make the best decisions we can with the resources we have available, and help each other out.
It sounds like you found a great window for yourself, and that is, truly, wonderful. :)
Yes, this is absolutely right!
A sentence in your final paragraph leapt out at me in glowing neon letters.
"I have a sense of what their husbands are like."
THAT'S the story I want to read. I want Men's Health or GQ or somebody to do a deep dive, or a roundtable Q&A, or SOMETHING with the men who are married to these women. What do they think? Are they allowed to? Because I feel like COME ON — for all the submissiveness cosplay, these are some IRON-WILLED women who have manifested powerful media brands. The men are as vestigial as male praying mantises. They're there to supply a paycheck: food, clothing, a giant pickup truck or two, but also ring lights and makeup and hair dye. And they're there to help create another kid every once in a while. But are they voting stockholders? I don't really think so. And as a man, I want to know what it's really like to be married to a person like this. Because I don't think I'd last a week.
I think there's a real split between men who are ABSOLUTELY on board, like very Jim Bob Duggar-style.....and men who are passive to their wives desires for these "traditional" arrangements. You're right, a deep-dive would be fascinating (if you could get the men to speak with any amount of self-reflection)
I would lose sleep to read that piece, no question! @AHP, maybe in all your free time 😉
All I know is that I watched the Fundie Fridays video about Morgan and her husband and he was absolutely terrible to her--so dismissive, so controlling. It was frightening to see. I don't want to see more of these husbands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnKPMNF5Vo
Freaking hilarious -- "as vestigial as male praying mantises" !!!
OH SHIT. Your last line.
I feel like I had a head start on these accounts as a white female teenager growing up in the South, and then a young mom in suburban Atlanta where there were absolutely impossible standards, even pre-Instagram. The photo on the beach in white clothing has been a thing since the early 90s, and it's such a weird signal of something...family unity? whiteness? wealth and happiness?
And every "tradmom" I knew had a job of some sort that they kept on the downlow! Photographer, clerk in a store, MLM stuff, writer for a food blog, childcare worker at their church, even working at a Hallmark store. It's like they had to have something for themselves even if it was just a "little job." (see Bama Rush for "little" stuff).
White clothing on the beach!!! SUCH a class signifier in the South!
I also live in the south and I couldn't agree more!! And now that I'm a mom, it sure is interesting to try to find a supportive community or affordable child care that isn't somehow tied to the church or very conservative views 😬
It sure is. I hung out with the crunchy moms for a while, but then they got into anti-vax and were weirdly conservative and home-school-y, which is not me. It's like, if you weren't staying at home, you had to sort of pretend you wanted to? Which I NEVER did. It's a weird-ass place. We moved to Michigan in 2017 and I've had no regrets.
Ah, so fascinating! Yeah, I also wrestled with this a bit mentally, which was so unexpected, because I never wanted to be a full-time home mom. All the sudden I felt guilty for not wanting to be one. Thankfully I had a long maternity leave which gave me plenty of time to "try out" SHAM and go slowly insane, leaving me VERY SURE of my choice to return to work ha.
I think my next challenge will be the crunchy "full circle" problem that Anne talks about... It's helpful to know it's the same stuff w/ a different label.
Interestingly, my husband didn't get to do this as he had to return to work very soon after our son was born. For a long time he bemoaned this, saying he'd just love to be a SAHD (which added to my guilt)... and then we went on a 2 week trip with our kid and he changed his tune 🤣. I guess sometimes you have to live the path to know it's not for you.
That was my experience when my kids were little, too. I was a LLL leader and when I was going through certification the woman who was supposed to guide me through the process actually switched me to someone else because I’d worked for Planned Parenthood. I’m really proud of the LLL group me and my co-leader put together (affirmed every birthing and feeding choice), but I heard it got bad after we stepped down.
Whoa same! I loved my first LLL leaders in about 2003-2005, but then it got that weird SAHM vibe. The original ones had helped with pumping and working, supplementing with formula, etc, but then it changed to be very purist. Not helpful for me.
Yep. My co-leader and I both stared masters programs in 2012, so we both stepped back then. The leader who took over was a faithful Catholic and got in with the anti-vaxxers, so there was a lot more about natural birth, not vaxxing, and EBF for years and years. The people who really added to the discussion--WOC, people who exclusively pumped, people who supplemented, a lesbian couple who tandem fed--all stepped away as the homesteader, Quiverfull members took over.
WTF? This might be deserving of a deep dive...the co-opting of LLL by that group.
OMG the "little job" or "side hustle" bs! The MLM grooming and abuse amongst the Christian mom world is insane! You are so on point though. Every SAH wife I knew/know living out the tradwife ideals who has had a "job" has prioritized a job that allows them to continue prioritizing their partner without compromising their availability or husband's pride. Mostly MLMs, but blogging was and still seems to be big among them. So few of them stick with it, for multiple reasons, but they almost always lose money and I know several wives - myself included - who have been blamed and shamed for wasting time and money on "silly side projects" in an effort to discourage financial earning attempts in the future (especially if it was an MLM endeavor). Which further makes it difficult for women to leave if they decide at any point that they don't want this life anymore.
Holy shit this is eye-opening, terrifying, and so well written. Thank you for spotlighting how "#Tradwife content is not cute or inspirational or harmless; it’s the handmaiden of the Christian Nationalist agenda. It’s regressive, anti-choice politics in a housedress offering you quick and easy morning glory muffins." Here's the thing—I always considered myself "traditional" insofar as I married my high school boyfriend at age 21, we've been married for 33 years, I loved raising my two kids, and I revel in making my home. BUT I have a graduate degree, I developed a career, I am independent, and we have a marriage based on mutual respect and power-sharing. My point is, it's possible to be "traditional" in terms of being married long term and celebrate some aspects of homemaking, but not be passive and submissive. I would never want my daughter or son to view any of these #tradwife influencers as a role model, and I'm positive they would be as horrified by their world view as I am. Thanks again for this post.
This is a beautiful comment. We can't let the regressive influences "own" long happy marriages and homemaking (not to mention child rearing).
We can like and do all of these things and still be independent and powerful.
Exactly. What you wrote also relates to why I'm a member at an inclusive, progressive Presbyterian church, even though at my core I'm agnostic. In addition to appreciating the supportive community and finding the Scripture interesting and enlightening, I don't want the regressive influences to "own" Christianity.
I too was and am a more traditional wife in that I’m in a long happy marriage, raised two kids, I even secularly home schooled them with an amazing group of families in the greater Seattle area! I do have a degree and I worked outside the home until I had kids, but am privileged enough to not need to at this point, and I too revel in making my home, caring for my senior dogs, reading, writing, and cooking, I’m also very progressive and a feminist and find this #tradwife content pretty horrifying and unsettling. It also really bums me out that it makes some of the things I’ve enjoyed most in my life seem really unhealthy and bad for women, as that’s obviously not my experience, but I also know that the way I’ve lived my life probably wouldn’t be controversial enough content for a social media following either. When you get into the weeds of a life without a major agenda there’s a lot of laundry and dishes involved. 😉😂
I appreciate this coming from a similar point of view, I have been married to my high school boyfriend for almost 15 years, my hobbies are baking and sewing. But I have a PhD and worked incredibly hard to get somewhere in my career before having a kid. I chafe at sharing my personal life widely because I am from a red state and I absolutely do not want to be mistaken for a "tradwife."
One of the other things that I worry about regressive influences "owning" is support for/acknowledgement of/public grief around pre-natal and neo-natal loss. It stuck out to me, probably because I've dealt with both, that the first influencer AHP cites has infertility and loss in her bio and talks about her "children in heaven" along with those on earth. As someone who's had a second-trimester loss, I find it really comforting to see other people talk about their losses and children, but I usually only see it so openly in "trad"/religious spaces. (Part of the problem is that most of society is so shitty on this issue that the space is wide open for co-opting!) BUT obviously their discussion in these terms often comes from a deeply anti-choice place (along with all of the other baggage), which is problematic.
Loved this piece! The thing I also notice about all these women, besides their whiteness, is their thinness. This may just be partially a side effect of what the algorithms push and what our culture wants to look at, but it also tracks with my experience growing up in the church. There was always this sense that you would never be one of these beautiful, gentle, godly women if you were not thin and thereby conventionally attractive. This may also be because these kinds of girls had an easy time getting boyfriends in youth group or just kind of made the lifestyle seem the most appealing. Also the word "princess" is bandied about a lot in these circles, meaning a "royal child in the kingdom of God," and with all the Disneyfied cultural connotations of that word, I *never* actually felt like a princess. I have never ever been thin and spent a lot of my adolescence hung up on that fact, and so this kind of trend jumps out at me. All this to say, this aesthetic of a godly woman definitely predates social media, and I think it's a big part of why I never felt at home in any church, knowing I'd never be thin or beautiful enough resemble them in either looks or interests. It seemed impossible to be a true Christian woman without also being "beautiful," and that feels very reinforced by these Instagram personas.
It also begs the question: is God who you are really being beautiful for? Whose ideal woman is this *actually*?
Also no surprise that there's a ton of overlap between weightless MLMs and these churches!
I grew up in the denomination that Gwen Shamblin came from before she went and started her cult. My mom definitely had her first book on a bookshelf in our house.
TLDR: I guess my point is that it's easy for women who look like this to believe that they are being rewarded by God for their behavior simply because our society is set up by men to reward submissive women who conform to beauty standards.
Yeah, I also wonder if it's a version of the prosperity gospel - like "I know how loved/blessed by God I am for being good by how thin/beautiful He's made me" or something twisted like that. The theology of all of this is UGH.
I think this (partially) comes from a mindset of the body being a temple of God. I was raised in/part of conservative churches up until a few years ago and it was definitely communicated out that to be a proper temple, one kept themself at an "appropriate weight", dressed & groomed regularly (read haircut & highlights), etc. This is also to keep the husband's eye from straying - the wife naturally needs to be beautiful. All the preachers' wives were beautiful and thinner.
Sometimes it's explicit--see the popularity of that "Captivating" book aka Gender Essentialism with a Pretty Filter.
Shudder
Is that the one by John and Stasi Eldredge?
Yeah, the female version of Wild at Heart.
This has put me in mind of a post by Chelsea Summers, in her blog, Pretty Dumb Things, many years ago. Recounting her experiences as a highly successful stripper, this post described a particular moment in her career when she focused her life on achieving a maximum of physical perfection, as understood in that scene. It’s a terrific piece (she’s a dynamite writer) in which she describes a sort of hypnotic bliss in the self-annihilation of becoming a perfect object. No thoughts needed: just gym, tanning, grooming, working, sleeping. No questions or choices. The tradwife/SAHG lifestyle strikes me as a more elaborate version of that.
Fascinating!!
I don’t see how you can be an actual #tradwife and constantly display yourself to an audience. Doesn’t that make you - modern?
In the great tradition of their spiritual ancestor, the late, terrible Phyllis Schlaffly, I don’t think the hypocrisy registers if you’re doing it to further the movement.
ding ding ding
I agree with you, Micheline! Plus, isn't being an influencer/content creator and having brand deals a full time job in itself?
I don't follow any of these people, so I'm curious - are they at all honest about content creation being work? I feel like people I've followed in other spheres have been pretty straightforward about the fact that they are doing their job, they have brand partners, they have to produce X amount of Y type of content per day to keep up, etc...do the tradwives admit to any of that, or do they try their best to obscure the economics and labor of their influencer jobs?
I don't follow them either!! But I heard that the Transformed Wife (which AHP mentions in her piece) was really hypocritical about her actions since she says women shouldn't preach but... She spends hours a day preaching from her Instagram soapbox
I don't follow any of these accounts but some of them seem like they're actually... porn? Which is fine! I'm not anti-porn, but it feels to me like the joke is on anyone who doesn't realize that? (I'm talking about the social media #tradwife phenomenon, especially tik tok... obviously there are lots of actual stay-at-home wives/girlfriends adhering to traditional gender roles in their private lives... to me a completely separate thing from this public performance on social media.)
As always, your writing is so insightful and connects dots that have been buzzing in my mind in the background but remained unarticulated. The self-annihilation theme also just resonates with what so many (putatively liberal and feminist) moms I know joke or complain about, like how moms take the majority of photos of their children, often with their husbands in the photos too. This mixture of moms being the seers but not the seen, undervalued emotional labor around documenting the lives of children, as well as how social media like tradmoms make moms feel inadequate if they are photographed even slightly unflatteringly to the point where they would rather just be erased from the narrative than being caught not performing motherhood well.
The photo-taking point is SPOT ON
Have you ever seen Victorian "hidden mother photos"? It was common enough that there's an article about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_mother_photography
My grandmother would LITERALLY cut herself out of photos of herself that she didn't like!! Every now & then I find a photo with an odd-shaped corner snipped out where Grandma was once in the picture!
Glennon Doyle talked about the photos thing in her podcast. Or rather firecracker Amanda did!
Because it centers on kind of the available models of and fantasy material for Christian women, this makes me think of an article I wrote in grad school -- so, like, 20 years ago -- comparing Christian and secular romance novels. Not long single-titles, but series ones like Harlequin etc. based on fairly strong formulas. I haven't actually sat down and reread the article in years and years, and my memory is a little fuzzy on a lot of it, but IIRC the most interesting difference I found was in the prevailing narrative about what it meant to fall in love and head toward your happily ever after. The heroes in the secular books were much more dominant figures than the heroes in the Christian ones -- they were, like, billionaire cowboy neurosurgeons, while the Christian heroes were much more just some guy. But the secular plots very often revolved around the hero being tamed by the heroine. He didn't believe in love and she taught him to believe, that kind of thing. He as a dominant figure submitted to something bigger than him -- love -- but did so because of a heroine who was typically less objectively attractive and successful but had force of personality on her side. And the Christian books didn't have that so much. The heroes already recognized something bigger than themselves in God (that may be why they were less dominant figures to begin with), but also they were less likely to be seriously changed by their relationship with the heroine. In these books for women readers, Christianity kind of constrained the available size of the fantasy on both ends: You don't get the dream of the billionaire cowboy doctor's masculine power and you also don't get to tame the man you end up with. A lot has changed over the past 20 years, but something still feels familiar.
Such an interesting connection, thank you Laura!
May I recommend Daniel Silliman's Reading Evangelicals to you? I feel like the chapter on Love Comes Softly especially would be SO relevant to your interests!
Thanks, I'll check it out.
OMG billionaire cowboy doctor.
This idea of erasure is fascinating. And terrifying.
My mom got pregnant with me in 1969 right before she turned 18. She was a SAHM until my dad walked out the summer I was 7. My grandparents weren't wealthy at that time, but were middle class enough to make sure we didn't fall through the cracks. Like we were poor but not quite poor enough to qualify for food stamps. Mom essentially raised me without help from my dad. She went back to college for a second degree (guaranteed employment) in nursing with the support of the grandparents, who looked after me. Despite her working life and benignly negligent parenting, her socialization patterns are strong. She erases herself by throwing out all "junk." There will be nothing left that reflects who she is when she dies. Her "pastime" is cleaning her house. She's smart and funny but shut off any creativity at an early age. It's heartbreaking.
I've done better for myself, sort of. I've always had a rich inner life and serial hobbies (yay, ADHD!). But most of my adult life has been about caring for family and the home. I'm terrible at the latter, and I'm burnt out on the former. My friends became so wrapped up in being parents, while I fought to maintain a sense of self while my son was tiny. He's a young adult, but still living at home because money. Husband is retired. I'm trying to shift responsibilities to others with limited success. I have zero time for myself. I'm out of the house 10 hours a day. Weekends are about garden care (hobby, but also a chore), lawn care (husband is not healthy enough to mow safely), and so on. I've done the calculus on going on strike. It would ultimately cause harm, so not an option. (I haven't given up, and I'm still searching for and trying different tweaks and solutions.)
The point of all that is that despite all the progress we've made, the pressure to stuff ourselves into these roles permeates everything including our psyches. I applaud everyone who resists and pushes back. I'm an archivist, and I've process a couple of family collections with materials from the mid-20th century.
TL, DR: The glorification of #TradWife life is disturbing. People who identify or present as women are constantly subjected to pressures that tell them whatever lifestyle they choose is wrong, This trend is more pressure. Women are so often still seen as roles rather than people. (I think men can be trapped similarly but have more avenues to break free of it.)
My mother was militant about self-erasure, & also about archiving family materials. I always felt she wanted proof that she had existed, & I don’t know what to do with the archives. My experience growing up was much too painful to enjoy paging through them. No grandchildren for Mom; self-erasure is not in fact fertile. (I suspect self-erasure is, in fact, a sin -- the sin of rejecting the life God offers ... liberal God talk: It does not judge the women forced into this sin.)
I'm sorry about your husband's health, but is there any way to shift mowing to your son? Husband does the laundry or grocery shopping? Everyone cooks a meal on a certain day of the week? I'll confess our division of labor is the traditional 'he does the outside, I do the inside' but I also make it work for me by doing what tasks I want to do, when. And I've outsourced vacuuming to my kids because the vacuum is heavy and I have a bad back.
I was parenting small children in the early 2000s, and as result of trauma history (and some idealism about communality in parenting) I got drawn into the Attachment Parenting space. No one much was on the internet in those days (Thank God, or the hole I ended up in might have been much, more deeper.), but the virulence of the Attachment Parenting gospel was strong enough that it didn't really need the internet. And it boiled down to self-annihilation, exactly as you say. As in, if you were properly encouraging attachment as a parent then you would carry your child around all day. If you put them down for any length of time then they would experience attachment anxiety and that would be utterly traumatic for them and it would be ALL YOUR FAULT. Of course you should breast feed, and on demand 24 hours a day. If you made your child wait for the breast because you needed to do something during the day or (god forbid) you actually needed to sleep at night so that you were not so dangerously tired that you might do yourself, your child, or someone else serious harm then, again, they would experience abandonment and trauma and it would be ALL YOUR FAULT.
Attachment parenting gurus loved to talk about how we were "meant" to live in villages, and in that schema children were experiencing such an ideal childhood that their feet never touched the ground until they were toddlers and they never, ever cried. The reality was that in order to be a stay-at-home mom you had to have a husband who made 6 figures so that you would have the extra money and time to participate in endless mommy and baby play groups, yoga classes, and the like, instead of being trapped at home alone doing endless loads of laundry (so many shit-covered cotton diapers on top of everything else), totally touched out, desperate for your overworked, underpaid spouse to come home so someone else could hold the baby for JUST A MOMENT, but also dreading their return because it wasn't like you had showered for days because YOU CAN'T SHOWER WITH A BABY IN YOUR ARMS and they might want to have sex. Except you're so touched out the thought of sex is literally disgusting.
I would have likely had some mild post-partum depression regardless, but submitting to that insanity and the horrible guilt I felt every time I wanted even a moment to myself as a result (How could you possibly traumatize your child so wantonly, you selfish bitch!) dropped me in a depressive hole that it took years to climb out of.
Yes yes yes!!! It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to take some aspects of AP that felt right to me and let go of others that I started to feel like a person again. My kids are 23 months apart and being a SAHM was so hard in those early days. I don’t regret it now that they’re 14 and 16 and I’m in my own career, but I also almost don’t even recognize myself then.
I think about who I was then and the first thought was, Who even was I? I can't even see myself, but only my functional use to my family in those years. The only part of me that was left following AP was this incredibly resentful, angry, depressed zombie. How was that better for my children? They simply ended up deeply attached to a crazy person.
Okay...this needs a deep dive. There's a conversation upthread about La Leche League getting co-opted by those people when before it was a supportive group for all kinds of nursing people, working, supplementing, whatever. AP was the same way. I didn't recognize it as culty til much later (my kids are also older, 17 and 20). I got into it because my first kid actually refused being put down, so I found about slings. The guilt was insane.
Two words were where I drew the line: SHOWER SLINGS. I was going to be DAMNED if I couldn't take a shower by myself even if the baby was screaming (safely in a bassinet).
I agree this needs a deep dive. And though it's obviously separate from this whole #tradwife phenomenon, I feel like it's connected. Because ultimately it's about idealizing a theoretical idea about "traditional" parenting, but not actually acknowledging the systemic issues being confronted by mothers in capitalist patriarchy. So, it's simply guilting mothers into annihilating themselves by trapping themselves in a mothering role that is unsustainable for the vast majority of women.
Don't even get me started on La Leche League and AP. My ex-husband and I referred to them as the Milk Police. I really wanted to breastfeed, but literally no one (not my breastfeeding coaches, my midwife, or the moms I knew who had older kids) bothered to tell me how triggering on-demand breastfeeding would be for someone with sexual trauma history. I had spent my whole adult life staking a claim to controlling who got to touch me intimately and how. But now I was supposed to let another human touch me intimately whenever they wanted, while often pulling my hair, biting me, and regardless of whether my nipples were cracked or bleeding or I was sick or dangerously exhausted? And if I refused them at any point then I was a bad mom? That was a seriously messed-up head trip.
I am so sorry. What a shitty thing to deal with, especially with no support. The all-or-nothing mindset sucks for many reasons, and that is a HUGE one that I haven't heard anyone else talk about, even though I'm sure you are not alone. It is definitely self-annihilation through allowing another human access to your body at all times.
Yes, please, can we talk about AP? It‘s currently totally en vogue in my country. Apparently as a milder version where „everyone‘s needs counts“. But if your child will „experience lifelong trauma“*, how important is your need to sleep or god forbid just have a moment to yourself? And even with our extensive maternal leave, if it‘s up to your child to decide when to stop breastfeeding/sleeping in your bed/… how shall you work?
Yes! AP doesn't acknowledge the systemic issues most women are confronted by. It simply makes women responsible for maintaining some sort of idealized utopic reality for their children in the midst of an overall reality that is dystopic as often as not, and if they don't then all the trauma their children may experience is their fault.
Me too.
This is rife on Instagram for parents of babies/young kids these days... just another thing to feeling guilty about!
The point about self-annihilation is so so smart, and also reminds me about what I think whenever I see this content, which is: this is definitely at least sort of a kink thing, right? The presence of sexuality in these kinds of posts (the trads more than the girlfriends) feels far more intense for being absent.
As you can imagine, The Transformed Wife talks *a lot* about being pliable to your husband's desires. The other "cooler" couples talk a lot about sex in the "God loves sex" sort of way (not in the domination/kink realm) but, well, that's the sort of sex they would never talk about publicly
I have witnessed the sexual proscriptions of the "cool, young" evangelicals and it is chilling. There is an entire curriculum based on creating a "guaranteed sex day" each week, largely framed as a day the wife can not say no to sex. And the folks who follow this speak of it as if this is a totally normal, even enviable way to organize a relationship. The gender essentialism and stereotypes this is based on are obviously deeply problematic and speak to the ways that following tradwife guidelines can start to blur into what would fit the definition of an abusive relationship.
Anyone else remember the woman that was famous for the 72 hour rule? I don't recall where I heard about her, or if this was in the early days of IG, but the 72 hour rule was that she never let her husband go more than 72 hours without sexual release. I can maybe see that in the newlywed days, but the idea of that now just exhausts me. Maybe it's just the fact that it focuses on him and his release, and never her owning the fact that maybe she'd like an orgasm every 3 days...
"Absent" except for the many, many children being had, right? You can't think about "as many children as God wills" without thinking about the mechanisms by which the children would come to be, which is lots of sex (presumably when the husband wants it, of course, which then becomes when the wife wants it, any time) without birth control of any kind (including the rhythm method/cycle planning). The "fruitful womb" imagery is a big cozy wool over the eyes of sex and sexuality, but it's the total "don't think about purple elephants" rule. It's in your mind even if it's not right in front of your eyes.
That also dovetails with all the crunchy anti-vaxx stuff too, IMO. (At least based on the crunchy moms I know.) "Natural" childbirth becomes yoked to "natural" sex, i.e. no protection or attempting to curtail sex's most obvious by-product.
It would be a lot healthier if it were a kink. This is more like received wisdom. Some of the Evangelical women YouTubers were alllll about purity culture right up to the moment they got married, and then they talk about how hard it was to make that turn from being completely "pure" to being sexual with their husbands, and the really open folks talk about the very real problems they have developing a sexual relationship when they've been taught "sex bad" their entire lives. Of course, these are the same women who promoted that culture right up until it affected them personally.
One of the things that I've noticed younger progressive influencers and YT folks say these days is "if you want to wait until marriage, that's fine," which is I think a bit of a change from the sex-positive feminism of the 90s, which used to warn people about waiting because of the challenges that can arise. I think it's great to say that all choices are value neutral, with the caveat that your challenges are going to be different from couples who have already been intimate, and you're going to have to be prepared for the possibility that you're not sexually compatible right away, or ever.
There are explicitly kinky Christian-oriented groups, or at least there used to be, such as Taken in Hand. Apparently it only now exists on the Internet archive, but it was very much about Christian couples getting off on male dominance and female submission in all realms including sex in service to being godly or some such nonsense.
It always makes me think about the ‘Christian domestic discipline’ trend where husbands spanked their wives for bad behaviour but it ‘wasn’t kink or abusive’…
The last line had me thinking: are these women the other side of the extreme #girlboss #momboss coin? When I really reflect on this, in both cases I don't know much about either of the archetypes, outside of what's shared for well...influencing. Both feel tired and exhausted, both feel preachy. Both seem to be reacting/perpetuating the increasing expectations placed on women today in the public square (just in opposing directions). If women are in a general state of duress, certainly some will over function and others will retreat into the self. The van diagram overlaps more than I'd originally think - the line truly turns in to a circle somewhere!
This is really astute — there's no there, there, just a hollowing out in order to reify different aspects of the status quo. (Patriarchal theocracy on one end and patriarchal capitalism on the other)
I haven’t even finished but the chilling reference to the Federalist Society reminded me of this quote by Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and father of the field of public relations (propaganda) whose breathtakingly impactful work was appropriated by Goebbels in Nazi Germany: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
There is an incredible BBC documentary series about this very thing!!! It's called The Century of Self by Adam Curtis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Omg yes! That’s where I first learned of him. I was going to say that, but I feel like I reference it constantly and decided to hold back. Esp since I haven’t finished the series, which is absolutely brilliant. :)
We are kindred spirits! I feel like I do (or can lol) link every Rich Text back to an Adam Curtis doc. I've learned so much about how the world actually works!
Haha we are! I love it! ❤️
I was hooked after my first Adam Curtis documentary and I can't even explain what they are, which I find kind of disturbing about myself? But they're so ... everything.
You couldn't have put it better. :)
I mean, I really can't. 😂
Ha! Yep! Neither could I - maybe someone can, but not me (and apparently not you LOL)! ;)
whoa. 🤯 it's all in plain sight, isn't it? Thanks for that amazing quote, it's fascinating it was Freud's nephew!
it really is. I HIGHLY recommend the documentary referenced below - it really is mind-blowing on every level, and very well-researched and well-presented. It really kind of fundamentally changes how we understand history.
I am absolutely watching it tonight! Thanks so much for mentioning it.
Omg let me know what you think! I’ve still only seen the first hour so we can be a little documentary club ;) dying to finish but haven’t found the chance. Here it is!
ooo I love that!
WHEW
I had no idea "stay at home girlfriend" was a trend. That makes me so sad. Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and Christian supremacy are powerful forces encouraging some people to attach themselves to their rung on the ladder, and it's very, very depressing to see people participate in their own oppression. There's nothing wrong with working out and relaxing and taking care of your skin. But there is everything wrong with centering these activities as what is *valuable about you*. And there is everything wrong about perpetuating the belief that what women give to the world is "physical beauty" (as defined by racist, ablest, etc. norms) and nothing else. It is harmful to the woman practicing the value, and it is harmful to the society being shaped by the value.
Yes!!! Another way to say this (I think): it’s super harmful for girls and women to think of themselves not as subjects moving through the world and acting in it, but rather as objects being viewed in the world and being acted upon.
I knew about the stay-at-home girlfriend trend, and I think it’s the one that’s the most obviously reactionary because it appeared a year or two into the pandemic.
However it feels like the semi-sanitized version of the sugar baby phenomenon, which started a bit earlier.