Based on former-Mormon Alyssa “I Gave Up Eternal Life for Coffee” Grenfell’s videos that’s not entirely true. Apparently, there is a lot of time and effort spent programming girls to be wives and mothers for all eternity. Including glorifying being a clown-car for babies.
The "Tradwife" lifestyle: Does anyone else find this appealing, or have personal experience with it?
Funny - one of the YouTube channels I follow is a woman from a conservative/traditional Sephardic Jewish family. Keeps strict kosher, wears clothing that strictly adheres to modesty, you never see even a strand of her hair, does a LOT of cooking, cleaning, etc. to keep a kosher household, devoutly religious… and her day job is being a doctor. I’ll also note that, among other things, her husband helps out by doing things like some of the grocery shopping and is apparently useful around the home in other ways (you don’t know much about him, and she never shows anyone’s face on video). In many, many ways she’s a “traditional” wife… but she’s not restricted in that role. She’s a highly educated professional with a career.
As opposed to a woman kept ignorant and given no choice, like in the FLDS (and, to a lesser extent, in the regular Mormons), or in some other similar situation where the woman being utterly submissive is part of the program.
As opposed to someone on YouTube cosplaying June Cleaver and showing an impossible image of perfection (because a real home with kids is going to be full of chaos and calamity from time to time). A YT “tradwife” has a career - her YT channel. She’s not just a tradwife and what she shows is a distortion of that “ideal”.
All of those might be described as “tradwife”. They are not all equally healthy.
Yes, this.
There’s a meme I’ve seen a few times over the years, that says the 40-hour work week was predicated on the notion that the person working would have someone else (usually a wife, of course) staying at home to cook, take care of the kids, clean, do the shopping, and all that. The problem is, these days a single-income family like that is largely impossible for most people.
But I could see, if one partner had a high enough income, opting for such a “traditional” relationship. Why add extra stress to everyone’s lives if you don’t have to?
Where this breaks down in the “TradWife” social meme is all the extra baggage, the “ME MAN, Me Rule Woman!” nonsense.
TIL what Tradwife lifestyle is (not the misread thread title “Tradewife lifestyle”, which conjured up something totally different).
Note that in many Near Eastern societies, it’s common for the men to do all the shopping - not so much to help, but rather to prevent their wives from leaving the house.
Anyway, there are plenty of Modern Orthodox women like your example out there, but there are also many, many Jewish families that are at least as “traditional” as any Christians or Muslims.
Just to muddy the waters further: while such a lifestyle is common for women in certain Jewish communities that could be considered conservative, it’s not especially popular among Conservative Jews.
No. There are also celibate and same-sex religious communities. This particular thing is part of the reviving White Christian Nationalist movement. Even the Amish and Mennonites are not identical to this. They evolved in the 16th century as religious reforms, and adhere to archaic standards – the tradwife thing is modern and has fascist roots. Kinder Kuchen Kirche (although today I learned that this was a phrase popularized by Kaiser Wilhelm II, not Hitler).
I am not imagining that the religious basis is nearly as strong as the desire for these males to be in control of women and make them exist to serve men. Religion is the cover.
This is what the whole thing is. Nothing but a sexual fetish. Part of their fetish is cultural dominance - i.e. this is the only acceptable sexual fetish, all others are marginal. Another part is that it’s difficult to practice in its complete form (nonworking wife, etc), so it’s something of a status marker too.
I’m still confused, honestly.
This, too. I mean, if people are tied to unhappy marriages, that’s bad. But I’ve known traditional wives (in the traditional sense, i think the whole “tradwive” phrase may be a red herring) who seemed pretty happy.
I was VERY confused at the beginning of this thread. I thought it was about TradEwife. So I thought it was about wife swapping or something. I had never heard of the term Tradwife. I guess meaning Traditional Wife.
I do not find it appealing at all. My wife and I are partners in making both our lives better.
Men as a whole aren’t sharing in homemaking to the same extent women as a whole are sharing in breadwining. And men who do try share more run into obstacles like being penalized for taking time away from work (granted women are too), having their masculinity constantly called into question, and petty stuff like schools, daycares, etc ignoring their own paperwork and always automatically trying to reach the mother first.
Until the OP tells us we won’t know what they meant.
The confusion started with the title of the thread. IMO
I thought the “Reform-Conservative-Orthodox” spectrum was more of an Ashkenazi thing and the Sephardic are different, but overall more conservative-with-a-small-c or orthodox-with-a-small-o.
And sure, there are Jewish folks who are bordering on cult (or actually over the border) with regard to their norms and gender roles.
And finally - the woman and family I refer to are not “Near Eastern”, they’re Canadian.
None of this matches up to my experience (as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints) except the part about no premarital counseling, which yeah, fair, and which I also don’t like. It’s a bit hard to get numbers, but this Pew Research study from 2014 shows us as having the least divorced members of any mainstream religious group. (I realize this is not exactly the same as the divorce rate, and I also realize that there are other studies that show a much higher divorce rate. But I’ve never seen anyone say that we had the highest! Do you have a cite?)
I also do not see members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints putting more emphasis on the wedding than any other Americans I know, and in most cases significantly less. A lot of them have potlucks or otherwise homemade receptions at the church (in an all-purpose hall that also hosts basketball games, though usually not at the same time). To be fair there is a lot of rhetoric about “marrying in the temple” and so on, so maybe that’s what you’re referring to? I agree there is a good deal of somewhat concerning messaging of “if you marry in the temple, everything’s going to be okay.” But there’s also a lot of messaging about becoming more Christlike, from a very early age, that I think tends to help a lot even though it’s not specifically marriage-focused. And, as @Broomstick says, there is definitely quite a bit of programming of girls to be wives and mothers (and to a lesser but still substantial extent) boys to be husbands and fathers.
I mean. That’s got to be the case from sheer numbers. How many people do you know who have 5 or more children period who aren’t Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, whether or not there is any crime involved? I’m not sure I know any!
On the OP, though – at least in my experience, girls/women in my religion weren’t actually expected or taught to be submissive and empty-headed the way this Tradwife thing seems to indicate. I know a lot of very strong-minded women in my church!
I think there is some conflation of the mainstream Mormons with the FLDS crowd, some groups of the latter definitely leaning towards women being utterly submissive. That’s partly due to small, isolated communities being dominated/run by a skeevy jerk (see Warren Jeffs) and partly due to the community/sect’s beliefs.
Mainstream Mormons are just… more mainstream. They have their unique quirks, of course, but that’s true of any religion. While the church does seem to promote very traditional gender roles they don’t seem to have much problem with people who diverge from them, either. Well, at least not if said person is a heterosexual. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that the Mormon church does not approve of homosexuality. Neither do a lot of other religions.
Again:
Tradwife,
Traditional wife,
Religious Traditional(whichever religion)wife,
are 3 different distinctions.
I’m not sure what the OP wanted to know or if they were just asking for stories, anecdotes or life experiences.
Or just asking what everyone was thinking. But, about which group?
We don’t know til they enlighten us.
(I personally answered with my own experience. Probably wrong on its face. Just sayin’)
Large families aren’t uncommon at all among fundamentalist Christian families, either. The Duggar family, of “19 Kids and Counting” fame, are one example.
There is also a movement among some fundamentalist Christians: the Quiverfull movement, in which having large numbers of children, and not using any form of birth control, is encouraged, as they not only see children as a blessing from God, which should be eagerly received, but believe that it’s important to do their part to fill the world with deveout Christians.
Where i grew up, all the really large families were Irish Catholics. And i know Orthodox Jews with very large families, too.
Often meaning the older girls get their own childhoods drained into caring for the younger siblings
Thuis pretty much is a perfect description of Mesa AZ LDS.
Of course, there are hints that things are not always rosey inside the houses. The 40 year old wife/neighbor on one side ran off with a 18 year old guy she met on World of Warcraft, and the teen girl on the other side got pregnant in HS. The teachings clearly did not take. 
In Wisconsin, the Catholics, though to be honest most stopped at 4. The largest family I knew (7) was a “good” Lutheran (not the evil Missouri Synod).