#My So-Called TradWife Life: ELLE asked me to live like a 'stay-at-home girlfriend' for a week. It didn’t go well

[brightgnosis]

[The] Submission and simplicity [of Slow Living and the #TradWife movements] can be most attractive during times of duress. People have historically glommed on to charismatic religions when it feels like the world is changing in ways that make it feel unfamiliar—and they crave something, anything, steady. It makes sense, too, that some of the women who become followers of religious sects that preach the gospel of biblical womanhood may be escaping some form of personal or familial trauma. To give up control can feel very much like achieving it.

But there are so many ways to find the sort of steadiness that these accounts, biblical or otherwise, seem to offer. If nonbelievers are attracted to them because they seem to promise a life where you get to stop scrambling to do it all, where there’s actually time to do things like bake a cake, or make clothing you like, or just be with your children without an agenda—that doesn’t mean you should become a #tradwife. It just means that we’ve normalized the substitution of women’s labor for a functioning social safety net, and still organize society as if every family has an adult who doesn’t work outside the home, when that’s not the reality for 80 percent of American families.

That also doesn’t mean feminism has failed us. It means that legislatures largely controlled and influenced by men—many of whom believe in some version of biblical womanhood—have worked really hard to make a life of submission this attractive, and a life of agency this hard. They’ve rolled back reproductive rights, of course, but they’ve also stood in the way of the sort of childcare reform that would make parenting easier—not just for working moms, but for all parents. They’ve busted unions and suppressed the sort of labor protections that would put boundaries on the workday. They’ve ensured we’re the only developed country in the world without mandatory paid family leave. And it’s all very purposeful, if rarely articulated.

From 'My So-Called #TradWife Life: ELLE asked me to live like a “stay-at-home girlfriend” for a week. It didn’t go well', published 2023; Anne Helen (My Ko-Fi Here)

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