Trad wives

In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.  Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.

The tradwife smiles as she feeds her sourdough starter, wearing a long dress and a baby and wrangling the occasional toddler underfoot. She beams at her husband as he comes in from a long day on the ranch, or from the hedge-fund trenches. She makes salt-dough modeling clay for the little ones, whether her stove is from Lowe’s or La Cornue. The Cut describes her Instagram account as both “dangerous” and “stupid.” CNN experts lament that too many girls are turning to her as a “Band-Aid with ideological cover,” and fret about the sourdough-starter-to-White-Supremacy pipeline. Tradwives, both self-identified and smacked with admiring or hostile labels, are the latest cultural phenomenon in media crosshairs.

I don’t know who Joe Jonas’s publicist is, but whoever they are, they deserve a raise. In the wake of the singer’s divorce from Sophie Turner, the coverage of the split in gossip outlets like TMZ and the New York Post’s Page Six describes has made quite clear who the good guy is (Jonas), and who the fall guy is (Turner).   In the wake of the split, tabloids explain that Jonas is caring for their children “pretty much all of the time” and that he is in “dad mode” while on tour.   In the pages of the gossip outlets, the divorce is explained by the fact that Turner “likes to party” while Jonas “likes to stay home.

Estee Williams was studying meteorology at college when she dropped out to follow her dream: being a stay-at-home housewife. Now, while spending her days packing her husband’s lunchbox and scrubbing the skirting boards, she films videos for TikTok in flowy dresses where she promotes a return to "traditional" values. Think Betty Draper minus the melancholy. She is the figurehead of the #tradwife movement. If you’re not familiar, the online tradwives are the product of a marriage between Instagram models and Fifties TV moms. They reject however many waves of feminism there are now and long for a return of the traditional nuclear family that once existed in America (for maybe forty years).

Tie up your apron strings— it's time to get to work, ladies. The coronavirus threat has forced all of us into our homes as the CDC and the White House encourage strict measures of social distancing. The disruption to American life and the economy is no joke, and it's going to take some serious resilience and creativity to make it out the other side. The good news? Now is the perfect time to adopt the much-derided tradwife lifestyle, and it seems many women are already on board. I left my self-imposed quarantine briefly on Tuesday to pick up a few essentials at the grocery store: eggs, milk, flour, butter, sugar, and yeast.

‘A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate’, read the shirts assembled by slave labor in Myanmar, the messaging likely dreamed up by graduates of a small liberal arts school whose annual tuition would make a generous stimulus package for a city in any developing country. I like seeing women in the Senate, don’t get me wrong. I just see the former option, the house, as much more preferable for myself for a variety of reasons. I went through my Girl Boss phase in my late teens — my hard working immigrant parents, the descendants of a long, long line of ‘tradwives’, wanted different things for their only daughter.