The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife

newyorker.com

23 pointschapulin74 comments

The article briefly touches on the links between the "tradwife" movement and the alt-right, but doesn't really press on, even though it also contains these poignant examples:

  ... Estee Williams, a quasi-Marilyn Monroe with white-blond waves and a cinched waist, advocate marital subservience. Others, like the Australian Jasmine Dinis, sell Biblical womanhood affirmations. One, the Canadian Gwen Swinarton, has pivoted from making porn videos for OnlyFans and A.S.M.R. content for YouTube to the trad-wife space. (In a recent TikTok testimony, she credited the transition to God.) Then there are more openly political, like Abby Roth, who splices mothering tips with anti-abortion content.
    
  Pettitt, the O.G., is a rare Brit and a purist [...] set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood long before the new generation of trad wives began filming themselves saucily kneading sourdough.

and there is more in the linked article from The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/jan/27/tradwives-ne...)

In my opinion anyone should be free to decide how they define their roles in their relationship/marriage. If both are happy in a "traditional" marriage with a breadwinner and a housewife, who am I to judge, but there is something very eerie about how radical some people can get about these things.

To me tradwifes almost seem like the feminine counterparts to incels. May they be very happy together.

Yeah this whole thing is somewhere between, or an intersection of, roleplay fetish and far-right propaganda. It cannot be effectively understood as a movement or "trend" without locating it as such. Cowardly journalism to even try.

> In my opinion anyone should be free to decide how they define their roles in their relationship/marriage. If both are happy in a "traditional" marriage with a breadwinner and a housewife, who am I to judge, but there is something very eerie about how radical some people can get about these things.

Algorithms reward extremism. Every major social media algorithm takes what you're already consuming and tries to find more of it. Ergo, the more things your content is "more" than, the greater audience pull you'll get. This is basically what created the alt-right, or the intellectual dark web, or whatever you want to call it. Attention economies naturally produce more extreme views because people are monetarily incentivized to become more extreme. This isn't a new thing, we saw this much earlier in different ways with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, just as with most things, the Internet and social media cranked it up to 11.

To what extent they "really believe it" is between them and their supposed god and I wouldn't speculate on it. I'm sure many do. I'm sure many also turn the camera off and say "thank fuck we're done for this week" then resume a relatively banal existence. Both however are corrosive to society.

You basically made the comment that I was considering. The problem isn't whether some people want to live in specific types of relationships. The problem is how social media amplifies extremism, as you note. It makes a small minority of people doing a specific thing look like an actual trend when it isn't. Throw in monetization--people making money peddling specific beliefs as if they actually believe and live them when in fact they may not--and it's just a recipe for a mess.

I think the misstep is trying to articulate these kinds of inherently personal lifestyle decisions on the broader scale of societies. It just falls into the typical tribal traps.

It would be nice if we could live in a society where you as an individual could decide on the lifestyle that you would like to live and have that personal decision not pigeonhole you into sectarian groups and ideologies that have nothing to do with your personal decision.

Sure but then also don’t go on Instagram or TikTok promoting that lifestyle as the ideology of a sectarian group.

Obviously as it's the left-leaning New Yorker they will choose the least sympathetic examples.

I think the Trad Wife thing should be more about motherhood than what sort of a wife you are. People - women especially - should consciously weigh up the pros and cons of spending your life doing PowerPoints for some company that would replace you in a heartbeat if you dropped dead at your desk vs being more present in your children's life (or even having them in the first place).

They chose an actually extremely soft approach to this, almost completely skipping over the question of the role of these influencers in the ecosystem of right wing religious nationalist propaganda they are clearly a part of.

> People - women especially - should consciously weigh up the pros and cons of spending your life doing PowerPoints for some company

People - women especially - already do this! Talk to them about it! They mostly all have extremely fraught and internally conflicted experiences of and beliefs about their capitulation to economic & social pressure and the demands that places on their own desires & values & hopes for their families and their futures. The fact that some still do choose professional achievement for some part of their lives doesn't mean they haven't considered the consequences or alternatives.

And also, I mean, it's not a novel observation to point out that these women all have serious professional jobs: influencer. The cumulative stresses & demands of the life in front of the camera are well attested and articulated at this point. The effects of this sort of blurring of spheres and public professionalization of caregiving on the children who grow up in it is just beginning to become apparent but I haven't noticed anyone thinking it looks good for them.

That’s such a false dichotomy. There is a whole spectrum of existence between being a corporate PowerPoint drone and being a subservient housewife.

I agree, but I never mentioned subservience at all. Those are your words.

Not mine, the article mentions subservience.

The difference you are missing between a tradwife and an incel is the tradwife is perpetuating a social circle/family focused lifestyle (and often perpetuating the species through having a reasonable number of children) usually surrounded by a significant social support network of friends and family and like minded individuals. One is very much prosocial behavior (possibly in a way you don't agree with) and the other is antisocial.

You may or may not agree with what each of those groups espouse but they are very different.

That was my immediate reaction. They’re completely different and I imagine incels would rage against all groups including this one.

But I do agree with the original commenter in one way — leave traditional marriages alone and let them be happy.

Far from all Incels are antisocial. An incel is just a (typically young and male) nonbreeding human of breeding age. Most species have them. Human societies in the past got around the problem a little by discouraging polygamy and shifting enough risk of death onto men only that men were a minority and likely to breed by default if they made it into adulthood. Modern society doesn't like fifteen year olds dying in farming accidents or warfare, so there are a lot of men involuntarily celibate instead. But that category covers a huge range of situations and behaviors. It's just become associated with the antisocial subset because it's an effective insult - by definition, no one wants to be incel.

This article doesn't mention it, but Hannah Neeleman's father-in-law David Neeleman has founded several airlines, and is worth several hundred million dollars. So she can afford to enjoy whatever unusual lifestyle she wishes, in a way that most of us (Hi Zuck!) can't.

It's a trend I notice in many articles about consumer behavior and trends, even in prestigious mainstream publications. When I dig just a little, the people mentioned are never "normal people." Either their considerable outside wealth is not mentioned, or they are selling something and in need of PR. The ridiculous recent article about "couples who use Slack" is a good example.

I read perhaps the most compelling reason for men to not couple up with aspiring trad wives on 4chan, of all places. The crux of the argument was that women are, more-so than men, subjected to social pressures to conform, and since the trad wife is a societal niche, those women are disproportionately radical, perhaps even mentally ill. The true successor to the 1950s wife is your typical Uggs-wearing, Starbucks-drinking, 2-kids-having soccer mom who works as a nurse.

Why would you be surprised to see a misogynist position on 4chan? I'm barely surprised to see it repeated here.

What’s misogynistic about the paraphrased 4chan comment? That just seems like your stereotypical suburban woman.

Yeah man gendered stereotypes about women are usually pretty misogynist.

But I wasn't even talking about that. I meant the assumption that women are more susceptible to social pressure than men are. And especially that, once assuming they are, that failure to surrender to that pressure is on a continuum with mental illness.

Either of these alone is a nasty thing to think about half of people. Combined it positions women as either powerlessly accepting the role prepared for them, or condemns them for "incorrectly" deviating from it. It leaves no room for the agency of women, or respect for their own decisions about their lives. Again, just a very 4chan misogynist view of gender roles.

That's a good point, you are right, trad wives are probably a bit deranged.

A factor I think gets left out of this conversation is that the 50's housewife was an aberration, a home-based adult in an age of washing machines, electric ovens and small gardens at most. There used to be so much housework you basically needed a dedicated person to do it all[1].

'50s housewives didn't need to do most of that BUT they were also the primary mental health caregivers for a generation of men who had just come back from something like the second-most brutal war in human history. Typically with support from a member of the clergy but they were on the front lines. It was an enormous but unacknowledged responsibility. And given that we didn't have a repeat of what happened after WW1, on average it must have been pretty well handled.

Today we have memetic warfare [2] instead, and given the social media nature of it, I would expect more women on the frontlines of it than men. Maybe we'll have a lot of 'tradmen' who spend a lot of time fishing, writing poetry, and providing mental health care for their partners working in social media.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p10G1m3ZfU

It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion. There has always been a minority in the US that believes in the "Husband is head of household and God ordained it so" but that minority is shrinking, not growing, and the majority of stay-at-home mothers I know do not align with that at all.

> It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion

I don't disagree with you, but there were a couple of crucial steps before that: first, extreme views/lifestyles being amplified on social media that lead people to belief that they are more widespread than they may be, and second, people with related political beliefs latching onto and further amplifying this trend for their own political gain.

I feel like this is another example of culture wars where people on one extreme using the people on the other extreme to justify their crazy extreme ways.

When most people are simply more balanced and feel that focusing on the family and having one spouse take care of the kids in a more traditional way is perfectly reasonable.

You can be a housewife and not be submissive, that’s totally rational and most people in America do that without demeaning the housewife in a balanced and rational way.

You can believe in women’s rights and equality and that women should be able to have a great career or education and succeed while still respecting people who crave and coexist in traditional relationships, and it’s okay if you don’t want to do that.

It’s dumb the way we’re like. My way of looking at the world is correct, because look at these crazy people.

Marriage has changed since the 1950s, both spouses have to work to earn rent or mortgage for an apartment or house. Fewer people are having babies: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/...

My wife works as a nurse, and we both take turns doing chores around the house. She is not a Trad Wife.

My wife doesn’t have to work; she’s able to stay home with our children.

It’s possible for most people, if both of you want it and you’re willing to sacrifice together.

I see this sentiment a lot. What I've never heard along with it is how much money the single-earner of the household pulls in. Care to share?

When I was doing it, about $120K/yr.

So double the American national average?

There's no such thing as the 'american average'. Your wage's utility largely depends on your local factors, because when buying a home, no where do you possibly buy the 'average American house', the 'average American grocery bill', the 'average American appliance costs', etc. Each local market can be very different.

???

I'm very puzzled at your comment, but anyways here: Bureau of Labor Statistics release about American National Average salaries for Q1 of 2024, with quite a lot of breakdowns for demographics

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t03.htm

They're saying it's not an informative measure in discussions about affordability or lifestyle because no individual lives some national average life, not that it can't be calculated or used in policy analysis.

Suppose you have town A where food costs $10/unit and housing costs $2/unit and town B where food cost $2/unit and housing costs $10/unit.

According to statistics, the average cost of food and housing in the country of ABCland (consisting only of town A and town B) is $6/unit food, $6/unit housing. From this one concludes completely incorrectly that food and housing are as expensive for the average resident of ABC land.

Except... that's not true at all. No matter where you are in ABC land, housing and food have extremely different costs. Now suppose, wages are $12 in both A and B. Do you think the results will look the same in town A and town B? Why? or why not? Will both suffer the same problems? Why or why not?

And that's the point, if DOL says that wages are on average $60k, that says nothing about what the cost of living is in any particular area. For all you know the poster above could live in a high cost of living area, in which case, this is a modest wage. Or he could live in a low cost of living area where this is exorbitant. Or he could live in a place where food is cheap, but housing expensive, or vice versa. Without knowing the details of where the wage is being used, it's impossible to form a coherent narrative.

> Without knowing the details of where the wage is being used, it's impossible to form a coherent narrative

We use the average because we do not know the details of where the wage is being used. I'm aware that I've even made a pretty big assumption that the OP we're talking about is even living in America, but lacking any more specific information all we have to fall back on is probability. Hacker News is majority American users, so I feel it's a reasonable assumption.

America is made up of many small markets, sure. But the nature of averages is such that some people will be below the average, most will be clustered around the average, and some will be higher, regardless of which market they live in

Some markets may have a higher income floor than others, but the highest minimum wage in the USA right now is 17 an hour, which is roughly 35k per year if you're full time. That means there are no markets in the country that have a higher yearly income floor than the national average.

So here's my narrative: It actually does not matter what market this person lived in, whether it was super high cost of living or otherwise. They were still earning a salary that was likely 2-3x more than what many other people in their market were likely making, which is a pretty privileged spot to be in no matter where you live

It also is important to remember the context. This OP was talking about living on just one income, allowing their wife to not work a job and be a full time child raiser instead. Having someone making 2x the average means they are earning as much in one income as 2 average earning parents would be, even in the same market. That was the intention of my criticism in the first place: It's relatively easy to say "just have one partner stay home and raise the kids" when you earn as much as two average people!

This is true regardless of the market you live in because you will still be able to afford a much higher quality of life than a single income making the "average". Adjusted for the market you live in, of course, but still!

It's really sensitive to lifestyle expectations and local costs, but it doesn't need to take that much if its the priority and part of a shared vision.

Many couples even find their way into that dynamic involuntarily when one spouse becomes disabled, often in an even more challenging way, but still find a way to make things work.

> Many couples even find their way into that dynamic involuntarily when one spouse becomes disabled, often in an even more challenging way, but still find a way to make things work.

This is one of the big 'unseen' risks with dual income couples. Elizabeth warren talks about it a lot in her book 'The Two Income Trap'. While it seems having two incomes makes you more robust against any job loss.. The opposite is true, and the data bear it out. Essentially if you both earn 100k, then you will adjust your lifestyle to depend on 200k in income. Now if one spouse loses their job, the other spouse has to make up the 100k somehow. Most cannot and go bankrupt. It is actually very hard to increase your earnings when you start hitting the upper income levels. While easy to go from 120 k to 150k for example, it becomes harder when you're earning 200k to go to 250k.

On the other hand, if you have a working spouse and a non-working spouse (realistically, most non-working spouses have some work experience) and are earning 100k, then you create lifestyle expectations around 100k. If the 100k guy loses his job, then, in most cases both historically and today (and again, Warren gives substantial data to support this claim), the non-working spouse is often able to find a job that will pay almost as much. Either way, in the single income case, they new gap between expectations and earnings is much less than the gap in the dual income case. Historically, much fewer single income couples go bankrupt.

Now, obviously, if you both work and depend on only one income, that's fine, but most people (and again, the data bear it out unequivocally) cannot do this.

I belong to a Catholic parish in the downtown area of a HCOL west coast city (median income 79k). Men at the parish earn anywhere from 70 to 200k+ (I know as the head of a men's group... the guys talk to me, come to me for career advice, etc). Most of the families have a stay at home mother (some have stay at home fathers, usually if the wife is a nurse / doctor). Sometimes the stay at home spouse has a 'hobby' job that gets done when dad (or working mom) is at home (light online sales, etc). Either way, all of them make it work on these incomes, and almost all own their home. It truly is do-able I believe. I do think having a strong support network helps.

Given that single-parents manage (sort-of), it seems logical that adding reliable free child-care into the mix shouldn't make things harder.

I do have a friend who was making little enough to qualify for SNAP that made it work. It was definitely tight for him for a while, but after a series of promotions he's making a lot more.

My wife is also a SAHM, but we are in a rather unique position (I make a lot of money and we fostered and adopted children with attachment issues). Now that the kids are old/emotionally stable enough she's looking at working again and the earnings would be less than 1/4 mine; with us already in a high tax-bracket the total added income is an even smaller amount. Still probably going to do it though because she wants to work, and no matter the budget adding even just a few thousand on the margins can make a big difference.

Myself and my three siblings all have young and growing families with stay-at-home moms. Incomes ranging from 80k to 200k (guessing some), fairly LCOL in North Dakota. Most of the parents involved are what may best be summed up as "good with money" but not crazy wealthy, more like work hard / save hard / be wise, and set their children up well for success. We went to state colleges and have practical degrees: engineering, biology, business, and education.

My brother does it for about 70k a year. 3 kids. He lives just outside a 10k person town. It's quite a nice life they live.

Just shy of $180k.

ETA: but our oldest is 15. When we started this in 2008, I was making $12.75 / hour.

That's 2.4X the median household income in the US; it seems very doable. Do you think it would be doable if your 2008 wage had only been adjusted for inflation?

Yes. We moved to a very low COL area to make the most of our resources.

We wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable, but it’s doable.

My wife has been a homemaker since I got my first career job. For the first few years (~2013-2016) I was making $64k. I've maxed my 401k every year. I started making more in 2017 and now make pretty well into six figures, but we still don't spend more than $60k or so in a year, and IMO we've always lived quite well (now with two young kids). I didn't, but if you saved up for a few years living with your parents in your early 20s, you could buy a house and then do pretty okay on 60k+. Especially if both people worked and saved before moving out.

$60k seems to be just above the median individual income for men 25-34 (1134*52=58968):

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-weekly-earnings-of-...

When I analyzed this a couple years ago, the minimal yearly expenditure to live a more Spartan version of our lifestyle (without compromising on things like food or heating) but with the same home was a little over $40k. Everything over that for us is just prioritization. Covid inflation may have altered the cutoff since then, but I don't think it changes the qualitative picture significantly.

> the minimal yearly expenditure to live a more Spartan version of our lifestyle (without compromising on things like food or heating) but with the same home was a little over $40k. Everything over that for us is just prioritization.

The mortgage alone for a house to fit a family of 4 would be close to $40k in many medium-high COL places.

Well yeah but obviously, don't try to live in a HCOL area if you're not going to economically win out. Local electrician apprenticeship programs here advertise ~55k wages at the end of a residential apprenticeship and ~86k for commercial (assuming 40 hrs/week; I don't know whether that's a reasonable assumption). You need a high school diploma or GED, and need to pass an aptitude test to qualify for the commercial apprentice program.

> Well yeah but obviously, don't try to live in a HCOL area if you're not going to economically win out.

Well, clearly the solution is for everyone to work remotely for a high-COL area based company and live in a low COL area. Gee, why didn't everyone think of that.

My point being, you still need to be earning roughly 50% more than median to make things work. Your original math seems to point to you lucking out somewhere, e.g. low rate mortgage or being a high-earning in a low-COL area.

_______________________________

How long is the path from High School Diploma/GED to being a fully licensed commercial electrician?

How many people have full support of their network while earning that license through apprenticeship?

Or work for a L-MCOL based company in a L-MCOL area. For software, I know of at least one local company in my area that pays 185k/year at senior level and 90k for SDE1. I do happen to work for a remote company right now, but software is the more important factor there. I am high earning in a low CoL area now, though that wasn't luck. That was intentional.

Of course not everyone can do software, so I pointed to something like electrical work with lower barriers to entry (and which is obviously local). The local program I'm looking at says a residential apprenticeship is 4000 on-the-job hours and commercial is 8000, so 2-4 years assuming 40 hours/week. Same as going to college, except you get paid during that time, starting at 33k and 38k respectively and increasing during the apprenticeship. If you lived with family and kept expenses low, that could easily represent $100k saved when others are graduating from school.

Obviously not everyone can be an electrician either, but for example public school teachers here make 60k after 3 years of experience, going up by about 2k with each YOE. I'm sure there are other similar "normal" jobs that people would think of as middle class where it's doable.

I don't know how many people have a support network. Certainly we should be shaming parents if they won't help their kids once they turn 18. Especially if the kid is on a responsible path and starting a career, and just wants to save before leaving home.

Anyway, point is it's not that unattainable to be a single income household if it's important to you. Obviously it's easy for me, but the stats show it's not that rare:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2021/home.h...

Married, spouse present women overall have a 74.5% labor force participation when they have children 6-17 and 65.4% when they have children under 6. i.e. 25.5% and 34.6% stay at home, respectively. Married, spouse present hispanic women have 36.8% and 47.5% respective homemaker rates. I doubt it's because they're all making 1.5x median. They just place a high priority on family. For some people, staying at home is even the economically optimal arrangement, and they can't afford to have a second income.

My grandfather supported his wife and 2 kids with a 9-5 factory job. He definitely sacrificed his hands (nothing gory, just lots of joint issues late in life) but in return he got a stable pension, benefits, and a solid middle class existence.

What do you have to sacrifice to do it now?

> What do you have to sacrifice to do it now?

Living in a 1950s-sized home on a similarly-varied diet in a non-Tier-1 city.

How's the job availability in those cities?

Strong. The US is full of vibrant 100k population cities.

My wife is a SAHM as well, and... I don't especially like it? Me being the only breadwinner means that, if I lose my job, we're hosed. Not as hosed as we could be (house and cars are paid off), but I don't like the feeling that it's all on my shoulders, especially given that I don't fully trust my company right now.

Your house and car are paid off... You could probably retire early at this point, if you've saved some amount of money. Some feelings are completely illogical, IMO.

Retiring with kids still at home would really be something.

I'm 35 and am thinking about doing that or at least seeing if I can transition to part-time before my kids are school age (and, depending on what they want, maybe homeschooling or hybrid schooling. Maybe lead a homeschool pod/do something more community oriented). We could pay off our current mortgage if we wanted. Right now we're saving so we can move somewhere a little nicer though. Wife's always been a homemaker and I didn't hit an IPO jackpot or anything. Just worked at 2 BigCos (not FAANG) and a startup that will probably not one day be a jackpot.

I know there are people I've worked with who must be multi-millionaires (at least one has told me they are); I don't know what keeps them working corporate jobs.

I'm older than you with no kids and I couldn't do it. Living with some disability means always needing health insurance and still paying quite a bit for medical care; it's hard to imagine retirement.

Yeah, we've been quite fortunate with our health. One possibility if you were so inclined is that the Obamacare plans only have an income test, not an asset one, so if you've still been able to build assets and plan for your retirement income to be just above 138% of federal poverty level (so you don't qualify for normal medicaid), then you get the full ACA subsidy (so a free silver plan).

My plans are more around layoff than retirement (it's happened to me before) and do feature some assets such that I can probably manipulate my income as needed, but given the Republican urge to get rid of Obamacare[0] and the likelihood of them winning control next year is pretty worrying. I guess there's always Mexico.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-o...

> I've worked with who must be multi-millionaires (at least one has told me they are); I don't know what keeps them working corporate jobs.

What many people discover is that they actually have a desire to work in some way or another, which makes sense in the big picture of being human: feeling like you're making some kind of contribution to a communal end seems like a pretty innate since that's how communities and cultures sustain.

If you've matured a career and gotten sufficiently comfortable with its processes, many people can find satisfaction in it even when they become aware that the "communal end" is bullshit. You just do your part, complain to friends at dinner parties, bank the paycheck, and justify your indulgences in luxury to how much you put up with to earn them.

Many find that once you take that away, you find yourself staring at a blank slate where you're not really prepared to make comparably significant contributions to anything else and are reluctant to start grinding from the bottom in a new field/skill.

Retirement is harder than many assume, and especially early retirement. And not just because of the financials involved.

I get the desire to keep oneself productive and make contributions to the world, but it seems like standups and sprint planning aren't that, and for the most part, corporate work involves doing a satisfactory job, but realizing that doing a particularly good job at anything isn't worth it for various reasons (i.e. the idea of "craftsmanship" is generally inappropriate in a corporate context).

Surely there's communal satisfaction to be found making improvements to e.g. digikam. Or we've seen bright college kids try to make things like diaspora or mastodon over the years, but they don't know what they're doing, so it always ends up being something that barely runs and costs way too much to be able to scale. Someone that actually knew what they were doing could easily write something 100x more efficient.

It's not so much "why do you do stuff", but "why do you work at a corporation and worry about OKRs and sprints and 360 peer reviews instead of doing stuff?"

We've got multiple kids, so that makes it much harder :-). Also: wow is health insurance expensive!

I don't know about your state, but when I was unemployed earlier this year, we qualified for Medicaid. We are financially independent except for the house so if it were paid off, that would be my plan for the kids. Certainly makes me less worried about taking time off to start a business or something .. the state would immediately cover my kids and my wife and I would be four hundred a year or something

Because you'd make no income you qualify for a lot of benefits.

I recall a talk where the speaker (I think Elizabeth Warren?) argued the opposite; when the budget was doable with a single job, then when the primary breadwinner lost their job, both adults could get lesser jobs to make a large fraction of the previous amount and give a longer runway.

However when you are already relying on both adult's salaries just to service debt and pay rent/mortgage, then you are more fragile.

I can see either one being potentially true depending on circumstances.

Yes, this is the main thesis of her book 'The Two Income Trap'. By and large, dual income couples are significantly more fragile in terms of resiliency to job loss.

Well, that sucks, because already I feel pretty fragile.

The relationship to minimum wage vs cost of living has also changed since the 1950s.

The minimum wage was originally designed so a single earner could, working 40 hours/week, support a (very modest) house, spouse, and kids. That, plus the GI bill (providing college for returning military) set a floor on earnings scale, and allowed a great middle class, where people could actually live, save, and send kids to college on one income. The Republican Party Platform in 1956 was to raise, and continue raising the miniumum wage [0]

Since the minimum wage has stagnated while inflation increased, it is no longer possible to remain above poverty on one-income at minimum wage.

It might also be worth noting that it was not until 1974 that women could get a credit card without their husband's signature [1], and that is just one example of where women's rights have changed.

So, it was both societally and fiscally practical to have a "tradwife" arrangement, and it was similarly impractical to not do so.

If people actually want to go back to running a society where that is the norm, they must not only make regulations forcing it, they mush ALSO make regulations ensuring that it is possible, i.e., boosting the minimum wage to the point where one income will support a whole family and send kids to college. I'd expect if only the income were raised, it would cause more traditional arrangements to happen without restricting rights.

[0] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things...

I'm pretty sure actual traditional wives did not record a staged and idealized version of their toils to post content for engagement and sponsorships.

The more traditional wives I know just do it that way because that's what makes sense in their particular family circumstances, often with no political framing at all. When the entire household needs care all day every day, there's no time to make a show of it.

People doing it because it's trendy with influencers are missing the deeper point, and the influencers themselves are LARPing at best.

Exactly. There are actual people's wives out there with varying levels of "traditional-ness" just living their lives as homemakers, stay-at-home moms, having kids, going to church, and so on with no social media or political angle; and then there are the alt-right political-performative TradWives™ LARPing on social media. They're two totally different groups.

https://archive.is/aQwIY

Having a normal stay at home wife is more popular than ever especially since COVID when a disproportionately high number of women lost their jobs.

I don’t think stay at home wife is “normal” anymore as even during Covid more women were working than not, and the employment rate has recovered since 2020 anyway:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/192396/employment-rate-o...

>Ever since Pettitt’s first BBC interview, in 2020, she found herself having to convince radio hosts that she is neither homophobic nor racist. She became “very stressed about communicating quite strongly with news outlets” that she was not associated with the alt-right. More generally, she felt such discussions distracted from her point

I blame Web 2.0 and social media for all of this:

Extremists are bumping into their online opposites, and it results in existential arguing. Web 2.0 has been a complete disaster. We were not ready to manage the levels of arguing that instantly came along with it. And we continue to fuel it, because clicks make money.

So maybe I can give a little perspective to some of you, from someone living something like this.

Me and my wife are atheists. We don't believe in god. There is no element of Christianity or traditionalism or any of that in our lives. We are a mixed race couple, our kids are not white and there's nothing about "creating more white babies" or any of that nonsense in our outlook or approach. I'm sure that kind of stuff is out there, but by and large I think that stuff is overblown by people who feel uncomfortable with the idea that any woman would want to focus on the happiness of people she loves instead of the demands of people she doesn't. I'm sure we are a bit unorthodox in that we aren't religious conservatives, but that's not really a requirement to want these things either.

Neither one of us come from millionaire families, she comes from a working middle class family and I come from the mud. Neither one of us has beyond a high school education, although we are both very read and have a good understanding of things we are interested in. I sold my youth to put myself where I am today, and risked (and experienced) homelessness to put myself in a position where I could have something more than the corporate ladder. I clawed my way into a position where I could afford a low stress, family focused life, I did it for kids I didn't even have yet, for a woman I didn't even know yet, and I did it without ever taking advantage of another person.

Our main approach is cost cutting. We simply have rich, rewarding lives by getting rid of all the distraction. We eat really good, healthy, delicious food by not relying on others to make it for us. We keep our housing modest, a place to provide us with the shelter and facilities we need to maintain hygiene and take care of ourselves and our kids. It really is very, very easy to have a rewarding life for cheaper than a supposed rewarding but in reality soul crushing life in the rat race. It appears to me, people are convinced that their lives are meaningless unless they're pursuing careers, living in a "tier 1 city" or other marketing propaganda designed to get people to unwittingly dedicate their lives to other people's ambitions. My view is that what really matters in life is cooking good food and spending time with the people you love. You can have a bigger impact on the world by raising competent and healthy children than by working in an office and sitting in traffic.

I think that there are a lot more women in the world that feel guilty or inadequate for wanting to play with their kids, teach them to read and cook them good food rather than pursue some higher ambition that amounts to subservience to a corporate machine, than a lot of people would like to admit. All it takes is that they acknowledge that it isn't some lesser role, it's a higher purpose, it's more rewarding and the path they've been sold is empty. A lot of people don't like seeing it nowadays, hence the constant association with alt right, religious fundamentalism, controlling husbands and all that stuff. In reality, all that is just noise. You'll not wish you spent more time in the office on your deathbed, your kids need a loving person to teach them more than they need a bigger room and a remodeled kitchen down the street from the mall. There's room for personal ambition, but the only rewarding way to pursue that is on your own terms.

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