I am currently homeschooling and delivered my third at home, and try to cook healthy food. My gardening has yielded one jalapeño and a few grape tomatoes this whole summer. I currently do a little paid work, but it is invisible, so I probably appear pretty tradwifey.
On the rare occasion once someone asks how I got into these things, my honest answer is that when we moved to our city, we providentially landed in a group of friends who were pretty crunchy in a way that was attractive to us – and now we are in the great position of being the crunchiest among our non-crunchy friends and the most mainstream among the crunchy group ☺️ I don’t cloth diaper, but I also don’t use disposable ziploc bags. I homeschool, but I have zero interest in Latin for our curriculum. It makes sense to me and I don’t really care what other people think 🤷🏻♀️
Love this Becca! Thanks for sharing your experience. This is exactly what I mean about social media flattening nuanced and individual decisions into a “this or that” binary.
Yeah, the label "tradwife" has always made me cringe even though...I guess I am one? I'm really not into labels on motherhood though. Isn't it enough to just say, "I'm a mom" and live that out in the way that makes sense to your family?
YES to changing your mind/making decisions as life comes! That is the realest, what so many of us are (actually) doing. My paid work has been fluid over the years (sometimes none, sometimes some); I had my first two babies in a hospital and the last at home; we sent our kids to school for two years and are dipping into homeschooling this fall. It's all so much more complex than any term can capture. I loved reading about your parents' choices in parenting/living. We need more content like that!
Regarding online "trad wife" influencers, I (still) don't have much to say, as I don't really follow any. I will say that their existence doesn't really bother me. Maybe this is informed by the fact that I have a close friend who has an online presence in this lane and her life absolutely is just a beautiful as her IG makes it seem. She is simply artistic, committed to her values, and ambitious. I'm sure it's informed by my sense of the harms a (mainstream) feminist worldview has done to women - meaning I'm happy to see pushback in the form of valuing the work of home + children, however imperfect/staged/guilt-inducing it may be.
Thanks for linking to my thoughts and continuing the conversation!
Thanks Amber! I loved your piece and really appreciated the way you framed the conversation.
I do completely agree about the harms mainstream feminism has done to generations of women and children, and I also appreciate that the tradwives honour the value of motherhood and the life of the home. I just feel like there is a line that gets crossed regarding the way the private life of the home is turned into a product to be consumed by the public. I remain unconvinced that this is healthy for either those creating the content, or for those consuming it.
I’m sure there is unhealth there, absolutely. I think *I* remain unconvinced that that’s not just a problem with the Internet/social media in general. We are being sold stories, identities, aspirations all the time. To lay the blame on women who are caretaking and homemaking and who have also figured out how to make money in this interesting new way doesn’t quite sit right with me, I don’t think.
All so interesting and to be clear I’m not speaking with an argumentative spirit, just a curious one!❤️
I totally agree that it’s a problem with the social media space in general. I don’t mean to single out tradwives, and give everyone else a pass. Pretty much all influencers give me the ick for the exact same reason. Mommy influencers of all kinds are guilty of using their kids for content, often in a way that is arguably a violation of their children’s privacy. The reason I mentioned it in my piece was that it seems incongruous to me to place a high value on domestic life, and then to kind of invite the public to consume that life. Obviously, not everyone who makes money on social media does this, there are plenty of ways you can use social media to sell your knowledge or skills or services. I also have seen homemaking accounts who are very careful about sharing their kids and intimate details of their lives, but who are still active in that space. Idk, I might be over reacting and over thinking it.
“The reason I mentioned it in my piece was that it seems incongruous to me to place a high value on domestic life, and then to kind of invite the public to consume that life” — that’s a great thought and also makes sense, but I guess I wonder if there’s a different way to think about what those women are doing. There was never an option to do that in the past. If women are able to show the beauty of domestic/care work, use their creativity, and bring in money for their family, it seems like a win to me (with some obvious ways it could be problematic, but not something to outright dismiss).
I wonder if there’s grief (and therefore defensiveness) behind some of this criticism. (A whole other convo and one I’m thinking of writing about, again😅)
Mm yes I wonder. That’s an interesting question. I am going to have to ponder on this some more. Please do write more about it, I always enjoy reading your thoughts.
To clarify tho, I have no issue at all with women utilizing social media/the internet to generate income for themselves and their families and to enable them to also be present at home. It’s a really smart thing to do. There just is something specifically about influencers and influencer culture that bugs me.
I follow exactly one person who is an influencer, and she is incredibly authentic. Does she make me feel depressed about my life sometimes? Yes, lol. But to me that’s an issue with me (and social media literacy). Maybe because I haven’t seen more/gross ones that’s part of why I’m not more bothered by it🤷🏼♀️
Also, a friend (Annelise, who commented here too) told me about the book Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. I haven’t read the whole thing but overall, I haven’t found her perspective compelling.
Back when I was on Instagram, I’d hate how I’d find a nice homemaking account, only to be blasted nonstop with “SIGN UP FOR MY $150 HOMEMAKING BUNDLE ACT NOW!!!!!”
Yes, and the constant affiliate links for a million supplements and protein powders. So annoying. Also I don’t know where they find the time, my mum was so busy that going to the dentist was “a break” for her, lord knows she wouldn’t have had time to run a social media account.
I have a friend whom I like quite well when we spend time face to face but whose online persona comes off as very tradwifey and performative. It makes me so uneasy that I just muted her posts so as to not feel the conflicting "ick" with an otherwise fine friendship.
Yeah, it’s super weird when someone you know has an online persona that doesn’t quite “fit” with their irl life. I’ve had that experience too. Very strange.
I am uncomfortable with the wide sweeping labels about feminism and equally wide sweeping labels and assumptions about the trad wives. What about us feel the need to constantly denigrate or make moral judgments about others choices? I had one child, my best friend had 5. I was an executive at a global company, her a sahm. , I was the one who gardened and home cooked meals, her not so much. Her kids loved being at my house, mine at hers. Can we not enjoy the love of a family however it looks? My dad loved to cook and bake, my mom happy to let him while she taught adult christian classes. There are millions of ways to do family so what makes me or you so wise we know what is best for everyone? The hard reality is life always shifts unexpectedly and what one thought was the right and only path can quickly change.
I love reading about the polarity between the tradwife and work-out-of-the-home mom. So many interesting points to be made and it could really turn into a book if one were so inclined. Here are some of my thoughts. Monetizing your social media shows that you are, indeed, interested in earning an income out of desire or necessity. Women are not sharing the personal intimate details of their lives for free. I always wonder, would they be this person if no one were watching? Who would I be if no one were watching? The practicality of the aesthetic to someone who lives a similar trad wife life, but also needs to make money, I know that this life isn't so minimalist and perfect. I have chickens, they are messy as hell. My eggs regularly have poop on them. I don't have toddlers or preschoolers but I do home educate. If you think young children are messy, wait until they are older. Mess x 100. But more than the inconsistencies I see with the tradwife movement, I think the reality is, that women are creators. We should do every woman a favor and be honest--we are here to support our families with inspiration that is a true reflection of who we are. Women want, and deserve, to be paid for their work. It's more important to "Forget about the labels and pursue a life that is consistent with your values and principles," like you said. Is the tradwife movement supportive of women achieving this goal, I do not think so.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, there really is a so much that could be said about this topic. I have so much sympathy with women who are trying to reintegrate some kind of paid work with the life of the home/family, this used to be the norm prior to the Industrial Revolution. I’m trying to figure out a sustainable way of doing that myself. But I don’t like influencer culture and the way it commodifies relationships that ought to be private.
I appreciated this! It can sometimes be really weird to resemble (by just the number of children, homeschooling and wanting land) these “tradwife” women. But like you say here, so much of this for our family has been strictly practical. The gardening and hunting has been motivated by so many food intolerances and not being able to afford to buy that quality. I learned how to make bread because it was cheaper than GF bread, and the home cooking is just a matter of economy. But the outward similarities make it tricky to pinpoint what feels icky about the whole culture, because there’s nothing that’s wrong with any of these things.
Thanks Annelise. Yea, it’s hard to be automatically put into a certain box by people and have assumptions made about you, especially when you’re just trying to make the most sensible decisions you can for your family. My parents dealt with a lot of that I think.
Right, there is nothing wrong with any of the tradwife things, and lots of them are good things. It’s the way it’s packaged up and presented as a lifestyle or identity online that bothers me. It makes it look like something that’s actually really different from the reality of what that life is like, unless you have a tonne of money and can actually outsource lots of things/have hired help.
Part of it for me is honestly just the performance aspect, whether or not we admit that's what it is online. We were at a church for a bit where I spent time with a mom who checked all the boxes of kind of off-grid and crunchy homeschool family, but it was purely for economy and practicality (not aesthetics at all) and partly because they just also found so much pleasure in it all. That church also had a popular Christian Homestead Mom (at least on Instagram) who I met, and I always felt bad about how weird I felt when briefly talking with her or observing her family aesthetic. Maybe the whole lifestyle brings her a lot of pleasure, too, and worked for her family! But the whole *look* and publicly visible part just has you wondering the whole time who the person even is and why they do what they do for all to see in the most beautiful ways. (Anyways, I decided at the beginning of this year I can't handle the visuals of Instagram so maybe this is partly a Me Problem. haha)
Right! Exactly this. I genuinely thought tradwives were just engaging in some extended performance art for quite a long time…I just assumed everyone knew that this wasn’t actually how people with large families really lived. Economy and practicality were my mothers watchwords lol, I told her about Instagram tradwives and she couldn’t understand where they found the time to make videos of themselves.
I totally agree with what you said about the very visible *look* making it hard to know what is real and what is for content.
I realised how corrosive Instagram is a few years ago, I used to be really into yoga and wanted to become a yoga teacher so I set up an Instagram account and started sharing pictures and videos of me doing yoga. I wasn’t very successful, I had maybe 1,500 followers, but even so it became its own beast. Suddenly I was more concerned with how a pose looked than how it felt. I started gravitating towards poses that were more impressive in a photo. My ego craved the likes and the comments. It was the opposite of what my yoga practice was for. But like you say, maybe it’s just a me problem.
Tradwife influencers=everything is beautiful and organic and artisanal. Real tradwives=25% beautiful, organic, and artisanal; 75% cleaning out your local Costco.
By far the best take on this entire tradwife discussion! Right now it is viewed very black and white. This however gives it all the nuance that it deserves, because 'the reality is more complex.
Lovely article. I think you summed it up well. Each family makes their own decisions based on their circumstances and values.
I’m a SAHM and my house looks anything but idyllic: however, we enjoy having land with gardens and animals and homeschooling our kids - even though it’s hard!
I am also 1 of 6 kids, homeschooled and my siblings were homebirthed. We had chickens and gardens and the occasional pet lamb. That's what you do when you have 8 mouths to feed! My mum would have been called a tradwife these days, but given the internet was barely even a thing back then, she was just my mum! Social media is a strange beast.
Your childhood sounds very like mine! I loved the having the orphaned lambs to raise, mucking out the chickens I was less of a fan of. Yes, i can’t even imagine how huge the grocery bills would’ve been if my mum didn’t grow some of her own veg etc 🤣
Social media is very weird, influencer culture genuinely disturbs me. I don’t feel like I quite articulated exactly why but it’s a no from me.
It was my job to feed the chickens every morning and collect the eggs. I'm not sure who cleaned out the coop, probably my dad. I had to clean out the rabbit and guinea pig hutches but they were shared pets so that's pretty fair lol. Influencer culture is very weird. I quit having personal social media several years ago. I'm still on the fence on if substack counts as social media! I do have a youtube channel I produce with my husband (and content creation is a huuuuuge amount of work), but not in an influencer kind of way. I never mention my family or personal life, it's not about that. People who have their kids in their videos as 'characters' in their 'shows' - that just doesn't sit right with me at all.
I don’t count Substack as social media, although it is starting to resemble a SM more and more lately.
Ooh I will check out your YouTube, we only have a tiny garden presently, but we are hoping to get an allotment soon and I have dreams of growing lots of veg next year.
Yeah I really don’t like people using their children as props for content, I feel like it’s also a huge privacy issue, especially when they’re sharing loads of personal info like birthdays (often time of birth as well), full names of their kids etc.
I quit my job (creative but low paying) to stay at home with my babies and always assumed I would go back to work after they started school. It makes me laugh to remember how judgmental I was towards the moms that decided to lean into the trad wife ideal; homemaking, homeschooling and the like. Couldn’t they see how old fashioned and oppressed they were?! I was horrified to learn that some stayed home because “my husband doesn’t want me to work outside the home”. As a Gen X kid of two working parents, of course I would go to college and work. To stay at home raising kids and baking cookies was for those other women; those who were foolish enough to get married young (or accidentally pregnant), those women who actually believed all that traditional religious nonsense about wives submitting to their husbands, blah blah blah. I was a smart, sexually liberated woman! Trad life was not for me!
Of course motherhood changes all of us and I leaned into that trad homemaker role for a bit, much to my chagrin. I saw other mom friends who did return to their careers or started blogs or became “dealers”; for candles, stationery, crap jewelry, overpriced kitchen accessories (looking at you, Pampered Chef). I still wonder, why is it not enough to just be a SAHM? Why do we feel the need to monetize that choice, or even to lean into it so hard (why yes, I must churn my own butter, sew every piece of clothing, forage for salad greens in the back yard while homeschooling my children) as if to justify our existence? The joke is on my 25yo self because I really enjoy a lot of traditional homemaking things, I have trusted my husband to keep us financially stable, and I regret never seeking out a faith community that might have given me valuable support.
I really enjoyed your essay. It was a delightful discovery tucked into my Substack feed which is usually heavy on difficult topics. I’m not on IG because why do I need more examples of how everyone else is doing life so much better than me?
Thank you so much for your kind words Jane. I’m so glad this piece resonated with you. And thank you for sharing your own experience ♥️ nothing in my life has ever felt more worthwhile than being a mother to my girls, and despite the sleepless nights and endless repetitive tasks, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
My mom was a teacher for 14 years before she quit her career to raise me after my adoption. Then we adopted my brother. Mom stayed at home with us until I was in fourth grade. Then she taught half time with another teacher.
After a few years, the other teacher retired and mom taught full time for several years. Even with dad’s help, working full time while managing a household proved detrimental in the long run. While the extra money was nice, it wasn’t worth the toll on the family. My mom has never been into posting on social media, so no hashtag tradwife to see here.
💯, thanks for writing!
I am currently homeschooling and delivered my third at home, and try to cook healthy food. My gardening has yielded one jalapeño and a few grape tomatoes this whole summer. I currently do a little paid work, but it is invisible, so I probably appear pretty tradwifey.
On the rare occasion once someone asks how I got into these things, my honest answer is that when we moved to our city, we providentially landed in a group of friends who were pretty crunchy in a way that was attractive to us – and now we are in the great position of being the crunchiest among our non-crunchy friends and the most mainstream among the crunchy group ☺️ I don’t cloth diaper, but I also don’t use disposable ziploc bags. I homeschool, but I have zero interest in Latin for our curriculum. It makes sense to me and I don’t really care what other people think 🤷🏻♀️
Love this Becca! Thanks for sharing your experience. This is exactly what I mean about social media flattening nuanced and individual decisions into a “this or that” binary.
I just want to quote this whole essay! So great, Becca!
"Forget about the labels and pursue a life that is consistent with your values and principles."
Amen!
Thank you so much for your kind words Katie. So glad you enjoyed this piece x
Yeah, the label "tradwife" has always made me cringe even though...I guess I am one? I'm really not into labels on motherhood though. Isn't it enough to just say, "I'm a mom" and live that out in the way that makes sense to your family?
100%
This was excellent and clear 🫶🏻
Thank you Helen, this really means a lot
YES to changing your mind/making decisions as life comes! That is the realest, what so many of us are (actually) doing. My paid work has been fluid over the years (sometimes none, sometimes some); I had my first two babies in a hospital and the last at home; we sent our kids to school for two years and are dipping into homeschooling this fall. It's all so much more complex than any term can capture. I loved reading about your parents' choices in parenting/living. We need more content like that!
Regarding online "trad wife" influencers, I (still) don't have much to say, as I don't really follow any. I will say that their existence doesn't really bother me. Maybe this is informed by the fact that I have a close friend who has an online presence in this lane and her life absolutely is just a beautiful as her IG makes it seem. She is simply artistic, committed to her values, and ambitious. I'm sure it's informed by my sense of the harms a (mainstream) feminist worldview has done to women - meaning I'm happy to see pushback in the form of valuing the work of home + children, however imperfect/staged/guilt-inducing it may be.
Thanks for linking to my thoughts and continuing the conversation!
Thanks Amber! I loved your piece and really appreciated the way you framed the conversation.
I do completely agree about the harms mainstream feminism has done to generations of women and children, and I also appreciate that the tradwives honour the value of motherhood and the life of the home. I just feel like there is a line that gets crossed regarding the way the private life of the home is turned into a product to be consumed by the public. I remain unconvinced that this is healthy for either those creating the content, or for those consuming it.
I’m sure there is unhealth there, absolutely. I think *I* remain unconvinced that that’s not just a problem with the Internet/social media in general. We are being sold stories, identities, aspirations all the time. To lay the blame on women who are caretaking and homemaking and who have also figured out how to make money in this interesting new way doesn’t quite sit right with me, I don’t think.
All so interesting and to be clear I’m not speaking with an argumentative spirit, just a curious one!❤️
I totally agree that it’s a problem with the social media space in general. I don’t mean to single out tradwives, and give everyone else a pass. Pretty much all influencers give me the ick for the exact same reason. Mommy influencers of all kinds are guilty of using their kids for content, often in a way that is arguably a violation of their children’s privacy. The reason I mentioned it in my piece was that it seems incongruous to me to place a high value on domestic life, and then to kind of invite the public to consume that life. Obviously, not everyone who makes money on social media does this, there are plenty of ways you can use social media to sell your knowledge or skills or services. I also have seen homemaking accounts who are very careful about sharing their kids and intimate details of their lives, but who are still active in that space. Idk, I might be over reacting and over thinking it.
Yes yes, ok, that makes sense!
“The reason I mentioned it in my piece was that it seems incongruous to me to place a high value on domestic life, and then to kind of invite the public to consume that life” — that’s a great thought and also makes sense, but I guess I wonder if there’s a different way to think about what those women are doing. There was never an option to do that in the past. If women are able to show the beauty of domestic/care work, use their creativity, and bring in money for their family, it seems like a win to me (with some obvious ways it could be problematic, but not something to outright dismiss).
I wonder if there’s grief (and therefore defensiveness) behind some of this criticism. (A whole other convo and one I’m thinking of writing about, again😅)
Mm yes I wonder. That’s an interesting question. I am going to have to ponder on this some more. Please do write more about it, I always enjoy reading your thoughts.
To clarify tho, I have no issue at all with women utilizing social media/the internet to generate income for themselves and their families and to enable them to also be present at home. It’s a really smart thing to do. There just is something specifically about influencers and influencer culture that bugs me.
I follow exactly one person who is an influencer, and she is incredibly authentic. Does she make me feel depressed about my life sometimes? Yes, lol. But to me that’s an issue with me (and social media literacy). Maybe because I haven’t seen more/gross ones that’s part of why I’m not more bothered by it🤷🏼♀️
Also, a friend (Annelise, who commented here too) told me about the book Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. I haven’t read the whole thing but overall, I haven’t found her perspective compelling.
Back when I was on Instagram, I’d hate how I’d find a nice homemaking account, only to be blasted nonstop with “SIGN UP FOR MY $150 HOMEMAKING BUNDLE ACT NOW!!!!!”
Yes, and the constant affiliate links for a million supplements and protein powders. So annoying. Also I don’t know where they find the time, my mum was so busy that going to the dentist was “a break” for her, lord knows she wouldn’t have had time to run a social media account.
Me going for my weekly iron infusions as a mini-vacation. 🤣
My prenatal visits = opportunity for a nap on the exam table while waiting for the OB. Oh, she’s running behind? That’s 100% fine by me…
I have a friend whom I like quite well when we spend time face to face but whose online persona comes off as very tradwifey and performative. It makes me so uneasy that I just muted her posts so as to not feel the conflicting "ick" with an otherwise fine friendship.
Yeah, it’s super weird when someone you know has an online persona that doesn’t quite “fit” with their irl life. I’ve had that experience too. Very strange.
I am uncomfortable with the wide sweeping labels about feminism and equally wide sweeping labels and assumptions about the trad wives. What about us feel the need to constantly denigrate or make moral judgments about others choices? I had one child, my best friend had 5. I was an executive at a global company, her a sahm. , I was the one who gardened and home cooked meals, her not so much. Her kids loved being at my house, mine at hers. Can we not enjoy the love of a family however it looks? My dad loved to cook and bake, my mom happy to let him while she taught adult christian classes. There are millions of ways to do family so what makes me or you so wise we know what is best for everyone? The hard reality is life always shifts unexpectedly and what one thought was the right and only path can quickly change.
“The hard reality is life always shifts unexpectedly and what one thought was the right and only path can quickly change”
YES 🙌
Thanks for sharing your own story of navigating these (often tricky) decisions.
I love reading about the polarity between the tradwife and work-out-of-the-home mom. So many interesting points to be made and it could really turn into a book if one were so inclined. Here are some of my thoughts. Monetizing your social media shows that you are, indeed, interested in earning an income out of desire or necessity. Women are not sharing the personal intimate details of their lives for free. I always wonder, would they be this person if no one were watching? Who would I be if no one were watching? The practicality of the aesthetic to someone who lives a similar trad wife life, but also needs to make money, I know that this life isn't so minimalist and perfect. I have chickens, they are messy as hell. My eggs regularly have poop on them. I don't have toddlers or preschoolers but I do home educate. If you think young children are messy, wait until they are older. Mess x 100. But more than the inconsistencies I see with the tradwife movement, I think the reality is, that women are creators. We should do every woman a favor and be honest--we are here to support our families with inspiration that is a true reflection of who we are. Women want, and deserve, to be paid for their work. It's more important to "Forget about the labels and pursue a life that is consistent with your values and principles," like you said. Is the tradwife movement supportive of women achieving this goal, I do not think so.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, there really is a so much that could be said about this topic. I have so much sympathy with women who are trying to reintegrate some kind of paid work with the life of the home/family, this used to be the norm prior to the Industrial Revolution. I’m trying to figure out a sustainable way of doing that myself. But I don’t like influencer culture and the way it commodifies relationships that ought to be private.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m right there with you.
I appreciated this! It can sometimes be really weird to resemble (by just the number of children, homeschooling and wanting land) these “tradwife” women. But like you say here, so much of this for our family has been strictly practical. The gardening and hunting has been motivated by so many food intolerances and not being able to afford to buy that quality. I learned how to make bread because it was cheaper than GF bread, and the home cooking is just a matter of economy. But the outward similarities make it tricky to pinpoint what feels icky about the whole culture, because there’s nothing that’s wrong with any of these things.
Thanks Annelise. Yea, it’s hard to be automatically put into a certain box by people and have assumptions made about you, especially when you’re just trying to make the most sensible decisions you can for your family. My parents dealt with a lot of that I think.
Right, there is nothing wrong with any of the tradwife things, and lots of them are good things. It’s the way it’s packaged up and presented as a lifestyle or identity online that bothers me. It makes it look like something that’s actually really different from the reality of what that life is like, unless you have a tonne of money and can actually outsource lots of things/have hired help.
Part of it for me is honestly just the performance aspect, whether or not we admit that's what it is online. We were at a church for a bit where I spent time with a mom who checked all the boxes of kind of off-grid and crunchy homeschool family, but it was purely for economy and practicality (not aesthetics at all) and partly because they just also found so much pleasure in it all. That church also had a popular Christian Homestead Mom (at least on Instagram) who I met, and I always felt bad about how weird I felt when briefly talking with her or observing her family aesthetic. Maybe the whole lifestyle brings her a lot of pleasure, too, and worked for her family! But the whole *look* and publicly visible part just has you wondering the whole time who the person even is and why they do what they do for all to see in the most beautiful ways. (Anyways, I decided at the beginning of this year I can't handle the visuals of Instagram so maybe this is partly a Me Problem. haha)
Right! Exactly this. I genuinely thought tradwives were just engaging in some extended performance art for quite a long time…I just assumed everyone knew that this wasn’t actually how people with large families really lived. Economy and practicality were my mothers watchwords lol, I told her about Instagram tradwives and she couldn’t understand where they found the time to make videos of themselves.
I totally agree with what you said about the very visible *look* making it hard to know what is real and what is for content.
I realised how corrosive Instagram is a few years ago, I used to be really into yoga and wanted to become a yoga teacher so I set up an Instagram account and started sharing pictures and videos of me doing yoga. I wasn’t very successful, I had maybe 1,500 followers, but even so it became its own beast. Suddenly I was more concerned with how a pose looked than how it felt. I started gravitating towards poses that were more impressive in a photo. My ego craved the likes and the comments. It was the opposite of what my yoga practice was for. But like you say, maybe it’s just a me problem.
Tradwife influencers=everything is beautiful and organic and artisanal. Real tradwives=25% beautiful, organic, and artisanal; 75% cleaning out your local Costco.
Ahh the Costco trips 😅 Fond memories.
By far the best take on this entire tradwife discussion! Right now it is viewed very black and white. This however gives it all the nuance that it deserves, because 'the reality is more complex.
Lovely article. I think you summed it up well. Each family makes their own decisions based on their circumstances and values.
I’m a SAHM and my house looks anything but idyllic: however, we enjoy having land with gardens and animals and homeschooling our kids - even though it’s hard!
Thank you! Yes, it drives me nuts how some of these influencers make homestead life look so idyllic…it’s such hard work!
I am also 1 of 6 kids, homeschooled and my siblings were homebirthed. We had chickens and gardens and the occasional pet lamb. That's what you do when you have 8 mouths to feed! My mum would have been called a tradwife these days, but given the internet was barely even a thing back then, she was just my mum! Social media is a strange beast.
Your childhood sounds very like mine! I loved the having the orphaned lambs to raise, mucking out the chickens I was less of a fan of. Yes, i can’t even imagine how huge the grocery bills would’ve been if my mum didn’t grow some of her own veg etc 🤣
Social media is very weird, influencer culture genuinely disturbs me. I don’t feel like I quite articulated exactly why but it’s a no from me.
It was my job to feed the chickens every morning and collect the eggs. I'm not sure who cleaned out the coop, probably my dad. I had to clean out the rabbit and guinea pig hutches but they were shared pets so that's pretty fair lol. Influencer culture is very weird. I quit having personal social media several years ago. I'm still on the fence on if substack counts as social media! I do have a youtube channel I produce with my husband (and content creation is a huuuuuge amount of work), but not in an influencer kind of way. I never mention my family or personal life, it's not about that. People who have their kids in their videos as 'characters' in their 'shows' - that just doesn't sit right with me at all.
I don’t count Substack as social media, although it is starting to resemble a SM more and more lately.
Ooh I will check out your YouTube, we only have a tiny garden presently, but we are hoping to get an allotment soon and I have dreams of growing lots of veg next year.
Yeah I really don’t like people using their children as props for content, I feel like it’s also a huge privacy issue, especially when they’re sharing loads of personal info like birthdays (often time of birth as well), full names of their kids etc.
I quit my job (creative but low paying) to stay at home with my babies and always assumed I would go back to work after they started school. It makes me laugh to remember how judgmental I was towards the moms that decided to lean into the trad wife ideal; homemaking, homeschooling and the like. Couldn’t they see how old fashioned and oppressed they were?! I was horrified to learn that some stayed home because “my husband doesn’t want me to work outside the home”. As a Gen X kid of two working parents, of course I would go to college and work. To stay at home raising kids and baking cookies was for those other women; those who were foolish enough to get married young (or accidentally pregnant), those women who actually believed all that traditional religious nonsense about wives submitting to their husbands, blah blah blah. I was a smart, sexually liberated woman! Trad life was not for me!
Of course motherhood changes all of us and I leaned into that trad homemaker role for a bit, much to my chagrin. I saw other mom friends who did return to their careers or started blogs or became “dealers”; for candles, stationery, crap jewelry, overpriced kitchen accessories (looking at you, Pampered Chef). I still wonder, why is it not enough to just be a SAHM? Why do we feel the need to monetize that choice, or even to lean into it so hard (why yes, I must churn my own butter, sew every piece of clothing, forage for salad greens in the back yard while homeschooling my children) as if to justify our existence? The joke is on my 25yo self because I really enjoy a lot of traditional homemaking things, I have trusted my husband to keep us financially stable, and I regret never seeking out a faith community that might have given me valuable support.
I really enjoyed your essay. It was a delightful discovery tucked into my Substack feed which is usually heavy on difficult topics. I’m not on IG because why do I need more examples of how everyone else is doing life so much better than me?
Thank you so much for your kind words Jane. I’m so glad this piece resonated with you. And thank you for sharing your own experience ♥️ nothing in my life has ever felt more worthwhile than being a mother to my girls, and despite the sleepless nights and endless repetitive tasks, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
My mom was a teacher for 14 years before she quit her career to raise me after my adoption. Then we adopted my brother. Mom stayed at home with us until I was in fourth grade. Then she taught half time with another teacher.
After a few years, the other teacher retired and mom taught full time for several years. Even with dad’s help, working full time while managing a household proved detrimental in the long run. While the extra money was nice, it wasn’t worth the toll on the family. My mom has never been into posting on social media, so no hashtag tradwife to see here.
My mum wasn’t. She encouraged me not to be. I chose different. No regrets.