I think OP made it fairly clear what they are talking about, and it isn’t what is the social media def. I don’t think they are Instagraming this. From this very thread:
The "Tradwife" lifestyle: Does anyone else find this appealing, or have personal experience with it?
I’m unclear on the distinction you are making (really asking).
It seems a thin line.
I don’t disagree, based on that post – but if that’s what the OP is talking about, the “Tradwife Lifestyle” isn’t necessarily the same thing (which the OP may or may not have realized).
I live in the heartland of “tradwife” lifestyle. It is a very real thing and I doubt many of them are trying to pump their thumbs-up on instafacetok. I wish people would listen to the podcast I linked above and elsewhere. It is very real.
. oh nm. .
Let me simplify:
- “Traditional wives” – particularly as described by the OP in post #19 – women raised in a conservative, religious cultural group, who take on that role because of social and religious norms in their community. Frequently, their style of dress, complete subservience to their husbands, large families, lack of education, etc. seem like something out of the 19th century.
- “Tradwives” are, AFAIK, a social media thing which influencers use to get people to follow their Instagram or TikTok posts about a fairy-tale mid-century romanticized version of domestic life. They don’t seem to be driven by religious norms, so much as walking away from working life for something different (as well as finding a niche for a social media following).
Once again, “traditional wives” in extremely conservative Christian groups =/= “tradwives” on social media. Both are real things, but they are not the same thing.
Yet I think what the OP is about is Tradwives in the definition of your definition of traditional wives, not the social media construct, which seems pretty clear from the actual OP.
What @needscoffee said. Also OP did clarify later that it is the “traditional wives” that they were talking about. Not the social media crap.
The big difference seems to be, at least to me, that in many of these cases, it’s not a mutual decision, and leans in the husband’s direction if not entirely his.
Again, I don’t disagree. The OP’s use of “Tradwife lifestyle” in their title muddies the water, because what they are actually describing (particularly in post #19, where they clarified things) is women in conservative religious groups, not the social media trend. The women that the OP describes would probably describe themselves as “traditional wives,” but I doubt that they, themselves, would use the term “tradwife” (if they had even heard of it).
Glad we are all on the same page now.
All my posts above are about this definition. Not the social media “tradwife” definition. We have a lot of the “traditional wife” types around here and it is disturbing and a bit scary. Listen to the podcast I linked above for plenty of reasons why that is true.
She defined what she was talking about very clearly in her OP.
So…“tradwives” are a group that TikTok what the first group does? Is it that they glorify it but don’t live it?
ISTM the two are the same…one just posts about it. Otherwise, how are they different?
I just looked up tradwife on wikipedia, and it is VERY obvious that that is not what OP is talking about. But I have learned what “tradwife” means in the social media world.
That doesn’t make the title (and her use of “tradwife” in the body of the OP, as well) any less likely to muddy the water.
My guess might be that the OP had heard the term “tradwife,” thought that it was just a newer or slang term for “traditional wife,” and went with it, not realizing that it it’s kind of a different thing.
The former group is, AIUI, nearly always members of extremely conservative religious groups, and are raised in that lifestyle (i.e., their mothers, their grandmothers, their aunts, etc., were all also traditional wives). Most of the conversation here is likely about conservative Christian groups, but my understanding is that there are conservative Jewish and Muslim groups with similar expectations on gender roles.
The latter group, AIUI, are women who apparently did not grow up in such a household/community, are probably well-educated, but decided to adopt traditional gender roles once they were in adulthood, possibly due to dissatisfaction with living in the working world. And, at least in some cases, they do have non-domestic “jobs”: curating their social media accounts with lovely, idealized posts about their lifestyles.
I think we are at a point we can agree on what OP meant and can discuss their initial questions, true?
Life is scary.
My anecdotal experience is most people do not want to have responsibility. They’d rather let someone else make decisions. If it all goes to shit it isn’t their fault since someone else made the decisions. It’s more comfortable to sit back and just go for the ride even if it means a loss of choice.
The trope for this is a couple trying to decide where to go to dinner. Neither wants to be responsible for a bad choice so that stupid, common discussion occurs. (At least it is good material for a lot of comedians.)
I’m still confused by how what exactly the OP views tradwife to be. But either way they poisoned the well by basically saying they are by definition unhappy marriages so not sure how to respond to that. Also according to a lot of research and polls women are more unhappy today than they were 35 years ago.
I think that has a lot more to do with income inequality and inaccurate (or, incomplete at least) reporting than anything else. 35 years ago would be the end of the 80s. So fewer women working full time in addition to being a full time homemaker. Now, with incomes for the top few percent being so far beyond the rest of the working class (see countless threads) there’s a feeling (with much argument) that it’s impossible to live such a middle/upper-middle class lifestyle without two incomes.
So yeah, if in the 80s, you could be a full time homemaker and mother, without ALSO having to work full or part time, you’d probably be happier. I’d also like to see such research and polls broken out by economic class and race, because, well, I’m suspicious, but I bet the biggest change would be in working-class whites in terms of “happiness”. Anyway, my opinions are equally IMHO, so, what have you.
In more direct terms of addressing the OP though, my wife makes substantially more money than I do, working in STEM for that matter, while I’m more the liberal arts type, so I don’t have any direct attraction to any version of the traditional wife or tradwife either!
But, speaking to the more commonly discussed variants in-thread, I have numerous anecdotal experiences. Growing up in southern NM in the 80s, I had a large number of classmates in public schools who were children of immigrants, and in situations I would probably have defined as working poor. Their fathers (generally) worked extremely hard at various skilled and semi-skilled labor, and their moms raised the big familes, kept order, cooked, and often had small side hustles (some of the best green chile tamales you could imagine came from a classmates mom who sold them out of a van near school).
Many of the girls wanted more (and nearing unity in the Honors and AP classes I took), but there were also plenty who felt that the highlight of their lives was finding a handsome, Catholic boy who would love them, get married right out of high school, and raise a passel of kids of their own just like mom.
Sorry, had to add a break there. I just deleted about a page’s worth of another sad anecdotal story about a friend of mine from 25ish years ago that fell for a girl from a sheltered, religious household and how they rushed into marriage and it ruined both of their lives because of misplaced assumptions from both about said traditional roles and responsibilities, because it was too much and too painful.
Let’s just say that there is SO much built into those assumptions, covering every facet of a relationship to sex, the role (or banishment) of sexual desire, desire for children, what responsibilities each gender should have and how hard it can be to meet them when you aren’t rich that outside of small, very structured communities, it can all come crashing down when any party involved starts to break from that programming. And the blame, dear FSM, the blame, the anger, the regrets, and later, the guilt.
So back to the OP - I am sure, even in this day and age, there are plenty of people who find traditional gender roles in a marriage attractive. But it either requires a lot of effort and mutual understanding (rare, but by no means impossible), or it requires some legal, social, or other rigid structure to enforce it if such understanding and effort is no longer mutual.
And to me, most of the modern interpretations of the traditional wife lean heavily into the latter - once the contract is made, there is no backing out no matter how bad the situation gets. And taking into account the social underpinnings of that structure, it’s almost always the female of the traditional pair that are bound, but not protected by the structure.