I recently learned about this movement called being a ‘tradwife.’ A friend of mine mentioned a week ago that she’s going to be ‘trad’, but I was unaware that being ‘trad’ isn’t slang particular to her, but a movement involving wives wanting to be homemakers and put their husbands first. I really dislike slang, so I’m going to refer to this movement as the traditional wife movement in my blog.
According to Today.com, the traditional wife movement is “composed largely of Christian, conservative millennial and Gen Z women who are leaning out of the workforce and into homemaking.” It is characterized by 1950s inspired clothing and hairstyles, as well as clearly defined gender roles.
The motivation to be a traditional wife is driven by a desire to have strong families and happy marriages, and to emphasize the importance of home.
The article by Today was really inspiring to me because it’s amazing to realize that my generation is pushing back against our culture’s general dislike of marriage and traditional roles in a way that’s inspiring more men and women to build homes and families. Sigmund Freud wrote that family is “the germ-cell of civilization” and in the article for Today, Noam Shpancer echoes this idea, saying that “humans need structure and clarity to function well,” as an explanation for the movement’s popularity.
I found it quite entertaining and insulting that Mr. Schpancer explained away women wanting to be housewives by belittling them, implying that these women don’t have the maturity, discipline, or ability to tolerate ambivalence and uncertainty to handle the “obvious benefits” of freedom. Black women were also belittled in the article, where it was claimed that their responsibility for keeping families together and their longing for families was enough for black women to submit to a traditional marriage.
I honestly found this article quite insulting to any woman who wants a husband and a family, regardless of whether she works outside of the home or not. It’s made clear that for the sake of avoiding the abuses suffered in 1950 within marriages, these days marriage is just not worth the risk, and that promoting marriage is the same as promoting a risky situation.
Men are the number one protectors of women, whether they are fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or strangers. Historically this is true, today this is true. It is unusually cruel to presume that no good men exist, that no man could make a good husband or avoid being abusive, when in fact the opposite is true and that only the existence of good men could even create such a movement in the first place.
Typically the claim is that women are abused by men, when a) abuse can go both ways (as the world discovered when Amber Heard's terrible acting hit courts in 2022) and b) that good men exist and are more common than popularly suspected.
It is truly the wife of a good man who can advocate for a traditional marriage, and it’s encouraging to see this movement among young people for the widespread support and encouragement of young men and families.