Althouse: The tradwife.

January 21, 2020

The tradwife.

Video at BBC.

46 comments:

Big Mike said...: Was there supposed to be something to click on?; 1/21/20, 3:24 PM
Mr Wibble said...: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-51113371/submitting-to-my-husband-like-it-s-1959-why-i-became-a-tradwife; 1/21/20, 3:28 PM
Mr Wibble said...: I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, good for them for realizing that it's not demeaning to want to raise the kids and keep up the house. A generation of young women were told that they had to seek out careers, and that they had to view relationships with men as power struggles where they could never submit or else they would be traitors to the 'sisterhood'. It's nice to see some women rejecting that poisonous mindset.

On the other hand, I suspect that some amount of this is merely social positioning. Whereas upper middle class white women could once distinguish themselves from their social circle by having a career, now everyone has a career so this is a way of making themselves seem unique.; 1/21/20, 3:32 PM
Seeing Red said...: Submit is a subjective word. A SAH wife doesn’t have to submit. You married a partner.; 1/21/20, 3:35 PM
Lucid-Ideas said...: Ever since the whole 'Men want debt-free virgins without tattoos' there's been little things like this popping here and there around the web. I take it with a heavy dose of skepticism. Again, the malleable nature of women keeps them morphing into what someone can see is 'selling' in the marketplace of ideas, and more and more dudes are completely fed up with RBF (Resting Bitch Face)/That's Not Funny soon-to-be eternal cat ladies.

If it's coming from mainstream media, it's marketing. Still, it's nice to see it as an indication of which way the wind might be blowing, just keep in mind it's not the girls making the weather.; 1/21/20, 3:35 PM
Susan said...: Social positioning for sure.

TradWife is code for: My husband makes enough dough I don't have to work. I pay him back for long days with his nose to the grindstone by pretending he's in charge.; 1/21/20, 3:50 PM
whitney said...: "The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must pay them both."

- Henry Ford 'My Life and Work' (1922); 1/21/20, 3:59 PM
wendybar said...: Her body, her choice.; 1/21/20, 4:01 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Don’t know why the embed didn’t work.

Replaced it with a link.; 1/21/20, 4:04 PM
Mr Wibble said...: Submit is a subjective word. A SAH wife doesn’t have to submit. You married a partner.

Submission doesn't mean slavery. Any relationship is going to have a lead/follow dynamic, or else you're going to have conflict. If every decision has to be a compromise you'd quickly burn out. No one wants to litigate every single aspect of your life and relationship.

That doesn't mean that the follower can't have their input, or take charge of certain things, but there is an unspoken deference to the leader. To use Edmund Burke's metaphor of "little platoons", an officer has to see the big picture, make critical decisions, and provide guidance, but the platoon sergeant has a lot of say in how things are run, and a good officer will listen to the PSG's advice and trust his judgment on how to run the platoon day to day. In a marriage, a husband may make the big decisions, but if he's smart he listens to his wife's advice and trusts her to manage certain things the way she wants.

Now, could the roles be reversed? Sure, but I suspect that it's a lot less appealing for the vast majority of women. Most of the relationships I've seen where the wife was the breadwinner and decision-maker and the husband stayed home... did not end well.; 1/21/20, 4:04 PM
Wince said...: I like her, but what am I missing?

A single dude has to work a paying job and do the housework.; 1/21/20, 4:10 PM
Rabel said...: I watched the video and approve except that the stingy bastard of a husband should buy the girl a Peloton before that ass gets totally out of control.; 1/21/20, 4:12 PM
Mr Wibble said...: I watched the video and approve except that the stingy bastard of a husband should buy the girl a Peloton before that ass gets totally out of control.

Squat rack in the garage.; 1/21/20, 4:12 PM
tim in vermont said...: 'Men want debt-free virgins without tattoos’

No, we want debt saddled tattooed ladies who will sleep around whenever they get the chance. It only makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.; 1/21/20, 4:14 PM
Beth B said...: Oh, yay! Something new for women to tear each other up over! It's been awhile since we've had something to bitch about.; 1/21/20, 4:15 PM
Shouting Thomas said...: I repeat, the documentary on the fundamentalist Christian Gloriavale commune in New Zealand now on Amazon is fascinating for a number of reasons. I’ll try to be brief.

1. The documentary is told mostly from the perspective of members who are happy living in the commune. Almost every similar documentary on such communities is told from the perspective of those who were unhappy and left. The reason for this is obvious to me. Documentary film making is dominated by leftists determined to portray religious life in the worst light.

2. One of the selling points of the ad campaign for the show is that feminism is absent and that Gloriavale is a bastion of male supremacy. The proof for this purported male dominance is pretty unconvincing. From the female side, the argument is that early education of children is almost entirely a female responsibility. This is true, but it’s also true of U.S. society. I’ve got grandkids in pre-school and kindergarten. The staff in those institutions is 100% female so far as I can tell. I’ve yet to meet a single male staff member. Panic over male sexual abuse of children has, in my lifetime, made employment for men in pre-school and elementary schools virtually taboo. So, I see no difference between Gloriavale and the U.S. in this regard.

The men at Gloriavale work at jobs no college educated hipster in the U.S. wants. The primary occupations of the men are animal husbandry, farming and running factories that produce such things as animal food from cow offal. The work is dirty, dangerous, smelly and completely unattractive to Americans. Gloriavale looks to me like 19th century rural America. In contemporary America, the sort of jobs done by the men at Gloriavale are also almost uniformly perform by men, too.

I wouldn’t want to live in Gloriavale. In fact, I couldn’t. I’m too tainted by media driven modern life. Men and women aren’t so much unequal in Gloriavale as different. What’s really missing at Gloriavale is the Sex and the City fantasy of life in the office world of the big city, and screwing around.

3. Gloriavale has existed for 50 years and is growing. People seem quite happy and content. One of the obvious differences between Gloriavale and the Sex and the City fantasy is that the Gloriavale communards are surrounded all their lives by huge extended families bound to care for one another through old age and death. No cat ladies. No old people left to rot alone in institutions.

It’s a great documentary. I’m hoping the prof will watch.; 1/21/20, 4:16 PM
tim in vermont said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 1/21/20, 4:25 PM
whitney said...: Gloriavale kind of sounds like the Amish.; 1/21/20, 4:26 PM
Lucid-Ideas said...: In recent memory two other trad-tropes come immediately to mind.

1) The SJW/ingroup-outgroup female scolding on that Facebook knitting group (Never before was so much outrage created over something so dainty by people so insignificant).

2) That Insta chick who did the whole 50s housewife baking motif. The hate she got for merely baking cakes dressed like I Love Lucy was LUnaCY like I never saw...

Anything a woman does of her own accord which remotely suggests interest or adherence to values pre-Friedan makes them unpersonable on the level of Goldstein in modern society. It reinforces, yet again, that the sisterhood is real and very very displeased...like...all the friggin' time.; 1/21/20, 4:27 PM
Quaestor said...: In a corporation of two, there must be a dominant partner. Otherwise too many issues remain deadlocked.

For those who troubled by the obvious, there is this solution.

Unfortunately, it only seems to work for couples employed in the filth harvesting trade.; 1/21/20, 4:28 PM
Leland said...: I'll await Tradguy's take.; 1/21/20, 4:32 PM
traditionalguy said...: The best post of the year.The return of sanity to a mad, mad world. Sanity is breaking out all over the world. The return of Proverbs 31 women is upon us.; 1/21/20, 4:40 PM
Rosalyn C. said...: Meanwhile she's aggressively marketing her youtube channel and will take every opportunity to monitize her brand, so Not trad wife. What if she started making more money than her husband? Would she go out on speaking engagements and book tours? Would she quit?; 1/21/20, 4:41 PM
iowan2 said...: Our DIL is a tradwife. Has been for 10 years. She is now laying the ground work to resume her, work from home, business, creating complicated spreadsheets for businesses. She had one going when the twins were born, and was forced to drop all of it when number 3, then 4 showed up. She will do fine, but always prioritize mothering. Moms are great at that.; 1/21/20, 4:48 PM
Seeing Red said...: I think it depends on who is stronger in which area for submission.

For example, He earns the money, I invest it. I’ll run things by him, but I’m more involved than he is.; 1/21/20, 4:50 PM
Shouting Thomas said...: In retirement, I’ve bought a house with my daughter and son-in-law and I’m probably the primary caretaker for my three grandkids.

I don’t regard serving my family as a form of “submission.” Being with them and serving them is wonderful. The same was true when I raised my children. I organized my work life to be with them as much as possible.

While I admire Althouse’s success and I’m glad that opportunity was available to her, the office life was something of a nightmare for me. I regarded it mostly as an S&M torture chamber, and I generally regarded the work as pointless bullshit.

On the other hand, I was proud of my ability to make a very good living in a profession most people imagined was cerebral and glamorous.

I lived always for the time with my children and in my studio writing and playing music, along with my work as a church musician and public performer.

Working in an office in the glamorous big city was the price I paid. Feminism is so focused on this crappy S&M world of the office, as if being in it is a great goal. It always looked like a pile of shit to me, albeit a pile of shit I had to endure for the money.; 1/21/20, 4:53 PM
Seeing Red said...: Via Insty:

BLUE STATE BLUES: California’s AB5 Leaves Women Business Owners Reeling.

Aimee Benavides has built a thriving career as a translator and interpreter while homeschooling her nine-year-old daughter, who has autism, and 11-year-old son, who is heavily involved in STEM enrichment classes. What makes it all possible is the home-based business she started in 2010, after leaving a full-time job in the court system.

It isn’t easy to juggle it all. Sometimes she starts work at 5:30 am to get her work done—or brings her son to the school board meetings where she takes on evening projects. “The times I don’t take my son with me, they ask, ‘How is your son?’” she says.

Still, Benavides would not trade the flexibility of self-employment for a traditional job. Benavides’ business allows her and her husband, an IT professional, to afford the cost of living in Fresno, Calif., while still permitting them to manage their family responsibilities....

And I think I read at Insty, there’s a bill in Congress to do the same.; 1/21/20, 4:55 PM
MadisonMan said...: How typical that people who disagree with her viewpoint try to shame her by saying that the phrase "TradWife" is somehow claimed by White Supremacists. My response to that would be "And.....?"; 1/21/20, 5:00 PM
Lee Moore said...: What if she started making more money than her husband?

The (statistical) evidence is that even in households where both husband and wife say, think and believe that they are totally happy with Mrs being more career and financially successful than Mr....they aren't, at least at the amygdalic level.

Mrs gradually ceases to find Mr sexually attractive, sex in the marriage drops off, Mr starts fearing that Mrs is up to something with some guy at work, and....he's usually right. On to divorce and Mrs marrying someone higher in the foodchain, if she's still youngish and attractiv-ish.

The reason, obviously, is that women marry "up" for good solid evolutionary reasons - "up" means more material support and security for Mrs and bairns. Even where love, and wkeness, persuades the young and naive Mrs to marry "down", evolution keeps on reminding her amygdala that she could do better.; 1/21/20, 5:00 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: Meh, I want my wife working. The other 16 hours of the day provide plenty of time for the cooking, cleaning, hosting, and all of her other domestic obligations.; 1/21/20, 5:01 PM
Shouting Thomas said...: @The Cracker

Those are minor functions in a family with children.

What’s really important is that there’s somebody there with the kids before and after school, somebody who isn’t harried and hurrying to get off to work.

In the case of my pre-school 4 year old twins, the important thing to me is that they are cared for by somebody who loves them and loves being with them. They are only in pre-school half days and they spend their afternoons with me. We have a great time together.

This period of their lives is so short. I’ve turned down job after job to be with them. Next fall, all the grandkids will be in school full to time and I can take a job, in addition to the my church job. Being with the kids during this stage is far more important than a job and more money.; 1/21/20, 5:08 PM
john said...: Since when is chastity a "wifely quality"?; 1/21/20, 5:22 PM
tim in vermont said...: "Since when is chastity a "wifely quality”?

Since the men who didn’t care whose kids they were raising all fell out of the gene pool.; 1/21/20, 5:25 PM
tim in vermont said...: OK, mostly fell out.; 1/21/20, 5:27 PM
Mark O said...: To be enshrined in the Althouse Hall of Infamy:

Since when is chastity a "wifely quality"?; 1/21/20, 5:33 PM
Dust Bunny Queen said...: Marriage is a partnership. There has to be a division of labor. There are many ways to make this division.

You can do it by how much one person likes a certain role.
How competent or good a person is in a role.
Who can physically do the jobs.
Assessing the financial considerations of who can bring home the more income to support the partnership.
What concessions in your living style are you ready to make.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't especially like. Who likes scrubbing toilets or cleaning the shower? I'm pretty sure my husband doesn't like standing in a muddy hole in the snow either.

Sometimes you have to just suck it up and work.

Often you can share the duties and assign tasks. For instance: Now that I am retired from my business....I do almost everything inside the house, most of the yard work and manage the finances. My husband works hard at a difficult and dirty job for his business and brings home the bacon. Even so. He has some small chores around the house. I have job duties in the business.

If you are going to spend your time keeping score and being resentful...you are doing it all wrong. The end result is what counts. Not how many points you can score on each other.; 1/21/20, 5:38 PM
traditionalguy said...: A good Tradwife portrait would be Steinbeck's characters Samuel and Liza Hamilton in East of Eden. They raised 9 children on the worst piece of land in the Salinas Valley but were highly respected people. It took the fear of God to do that. The Tradwife can only happen in a Christian marriage with a Tradguy and raising Tradchildren.

NB:The 1620 Mayflower Pilgrims were the original role models and once were highly respected for that way of life.; 1/21/20, 5:43 PM
Seeing Red said...: If you are going to spend your time keeping score and being resentful...you are doing it all wrong. The end result is what counts. Not how many points you can score on each other.

Yup!; 1/21/20, 5:55 PM
Seeing Red said...: How typical that people who disagree with her viewpoint try to shame her by saying that the phrase "TradWife" is somehow claimed by White Supremacists. My response to that would be "And.....?"

My response is how insular/provincial/insulting.; 1/21/20, 5:57 PM
Quaestor said...: john writes: Since when is chastity a "wifely quality"?

It has been a sensible quality in a bride until quite recently, and it will be again, sooner or later. Either the West will discard the degenerate morals of the last half-century or the West will be discarded by Islam.

Chastity could not nor has it ever been a wifely quality. The moral virtue Aunty Trump and Mark O seem to espouse is rightly known as fidelity, faithfulness. Even before our primate ancestors began to contribute more to the reproductive equation than simply gametes, males have devoted much time and energy to securing exclusive sexual access to females. When sex became a contractural relationship, the value of fidelity increased profoundly.; 1/21/20, 6:26 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: Just to be clear, I was being facetious. My wife does the laundry and cooking (or else our clothes would be ink-stained and we'd never have a vegetable) and I do the house cleaning. Because I'm obsessive and have higher standards. We were both heavily involved in raising the kids. Double-teaming the little bastards was highly effective.; 1/21/20, 7:26 PM
n.n said...: #TooManyLabels #SoJudgmental; 1/21/20, 7:42 PM
n.n said...: Color supremacy? Diversity, really? Never go full pro-phoice. Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. We're not children anymore. Reconcile.; 1/21/20, 7:49 PM
Lee Moore said...: A wonderfuly clueless BBC article about career women and divorce :

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-promoted-women-are-more-likely-to-divorce

which - wholly predictably - cannot fathom why a wife's career success puts more stress on the marriage, than does a husband's.

Rickne points out that, even in egalitarian countries like Sweden, women still tend to marry older men who start out having more money than them, harking back to traditional “prince in the fairytale” narratives that “try and teach us to find as successful a husband as possible”.

Yup, it's not biology that tells women to marry up, it's old fairytales.

I see that Youtube has put this classic romp through progressive Scandinavian science-denial behind an age wall :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4; 1/21/20, 8:29 PM
stlcdr said...: Blogger Wince said...

A single dude has to work a paying job and do the housework.

1/21/20, 4:10 PM

Actually gets to the crux of the matter. When women experience something that men have had to face every freaking day, it’s a world wide crisis.

(Obviously, this is a generalization, but the old feminism gravy train wants to speak for everyone. Ironically, the women who would speak out against the crap, don’t because they have stuff to do, getting with life).; 1/22/20, 7:43 AM
JAORE said...: If a couple decides THIS is how our marriage works, leave them alone. A u-tube video does nothing to compel you to follow suit. If your chosen way of living is so fragile that it collapses due to that video, rethink your choice.

FWIW, my marriage is trad+ when it comes to handling spiders in the house and snakes in the yard.; 1/22/20, 8:34 AM