“My daughter wants to be a tradwife.” My friend sat across from me at dinner not too long ago and described how her daughter, a high school senior at the time, had zero college ambitions. Social media had taken care of that — her daughter had become an avid follower of the tradwife aesthetic, and my friend was not happy about it.
Lately, tradwife influencers are distancing themselves from the conservative label. (For those unfamiliar, “tradwife” is short for “traditional wife.”) First, influencer Nara Smith rebuked the label this past summer, arguing on the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast that it was a “bizarre” projection. More recently, influencer Bernadine Bluntly began chronicling her divorce, from both the brand and her husband, to whom she now owes child support. As high-profile, impossibly young tradwife influencers revise the conversations they started, I can’t help but to hope that it’s not too late for their devout Gen Z followers.
I have long believed that my friends who are raising teenage daughters are right to be concerned about this movement, which glorifies and glamorizes traditional family roles. If only tradwifery were just a social media aesthetic — and not an actual choice with profound implications for most women.
I know firsthand how quickly life can fall off the rails. I was a child who watched it happen to my mother.
When my mother had me at 17 years old, she was a traditional wife in every sense of the word. She didn’t have one penny to her name and depended entirely on my father, only 20 at the time. I was born in 1980, a few weeks after my mother graduated from high school. They had a shotgun wedding — the type of arrangement thrown together in haste because a baby is on the way.
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Teen pregnancy was exceptionally common in the ’80s and ’90s, and shotgun weddings were not unusual at the time, either. These were choices people commonly made nearly half a century ago.
What I wish for the young tradwife followers on the brink of making decisions that cannot easily be undone is what I would have wanted for my own mother: a crystal ball or at least a front-row seat at an IMAX movie featuring the next 30 years of her life. She chose to marry and bear children before taking the time to decide what her own life could be on her own terms.
I had that front-row seat when I was a kid. I wish Gen Z women could see a fraction of what I saw growing up, what time did to my parents’ young marriage.
Twelve years after saying, “I do,” they were done with each other. Dad got a new apartment, and Mom kept the one I grew up in. Money was impossibly tight. I was a preteen when I watched my mother, a very young woman without an education or well-paying job, crumble under the weight of her new reality.
When my parents separated, Mom had to figure out her new role, and she had to figure it out fast.
In my family, the devastating effects of giving up your power to marriage and child-rearing, without a plan in place or skills to rely on, were multigenerational. It was the same story for my grandmothers — one of whom stayed with a husband she couldn’t stomach, just because she had no other options — and many other women in my family. And in each case, their tradwife-dom went straight to hell in a handbasket. Some of them have died penniless. The rest are tied to marriages or partnerships they don’t want to be in.
My mother, having gotten lucky with finding work and a new love, is the lone exception in my family.
Still, I’ll never forget Mom’s first, and last, stable job — as an employee for the United States Postal Service. She passed the test with flying colors. But a few days into the job, she came home crying. The hours were long, the work was back-breaking and management was condescending. While she spoke to a friend on the phone about her day, tears streaming down her cheeks, I took a walk to our local McDonald’s and bought her a burger and fries with my babysitting money. I felt powerless to help her.
Landing that job was hard-won. I know Mom was terrified about her lack of options. She eventually found her footing, but she retired after 15 or so years. The physical demands became too much.
My mother, like all women in her position, did the best she could with what she had. But I remember the choice she faced between gas and groceries. I remember the credit card debt she accrued so that she could buy clothes for her children. I remember her anxiety and fear over each unexpected bill that came in. I remember, more than anything, the endless fights she had with my father over money. Those fights did not relent until after I graduated college and became my own problem.
The fact that some popular tradwife influencers are no longer able to ignore the serious consequences in giving up personal power and independence is a complicated victory. It’s a terrifying thing to have to shift gears when there are bills to pay and mouths to feed, and I would not wish this reality on anyone. But if there’s anything to be gained from this evolving moment, it’s the hope that Gen Z continues to pay attention.
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Christina Wyman is a teacher living in Michigan and a USA Today-bestselling author. Her upcoming novel, “Mean,” is a middle grade story about what happens when a mean girl takes a prank too far.
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