Tradwife, what is it?
Dette innlegget er også tilgjengelig i: Norsk bokmål Русский Українська
There is a growing trend among young women to be a so-called traditional wife or tradwife as it is referred to. A tradwife is responsible for traditional female tasks in the home. Cleaning the house, cooking and looking after the children. Yes, just like the women we know from the 1950s and 60s. The question is why this trend now and what it really says about society.
Tradwife and trend
If we look at different trends and cultures throughout history, many of them are a form of protest. That’s also how I see the tradwife trend. The hippie culture of the 1960s is an example of such a protest that emerged. It was a protest against war, a protest against discrimination against people of color and a number of other elements. In many ways, the movement was a protest against the parents’ worldview. In music, we have seen new musical forms emerge, often radical ones with a dress code. A form of uniformity that is intended to make the musical form identify with something other than the existing.
Feminism is an ideology that fights for economic, political and social equality between the sexes. Feminists have fought a long battle to get to where we are today. Stone by stone, gender equality has improved. Tradwife is a form of protest against this feminism.
An illusion
The illusion that everything was better before is something many people can feel. One of these illusions is that everything was better when mom was home and kept the house in order. There may be a hint of truth in this. The house was neat, clean and tidy. Food was served when the husband came home from work. The children were looked after by the wife. The social contact these women had with other women was often with their neighbors’ wives. They drank coffee or tea together and talked about anything and everything.
In this society, there was also a lot of pressure on men. It’s easy to forget this pressure. His pressure was to earn enough money for his family to survive. The post-war period also saw an increase in consumption. Cars became commonplace in most families, as did TVs. Symbols of prosperity at the time. A prosperity the man had to provide through his income.
Through feminism, both women and men have been given a new everyday life. Women are moving from the kitchen and household chores to professional life. Earning enough money to live on has now become the responsibility of both men and women. Both men and women are also responsible for the daily chores in a home. The man takes a greater share of responsibility for the daily housework. Childcare is the responsibility of both parents.
Tradwife in a political perspective
Tradwife as a trend is not really a political movement. The illusion that everything was better before is not a political illusion. However, some of this coincides with political forces on the far right of our political landscape. The so-called traditional family values are some of what the MAGA movement in the US and similar forces in Poland, Hungary and other countries are based on.
Family values are that family matters most. At the end of the day, this is something that most people agree with, whether they are feminists or tradwife or neither. The difference is in the term traditional family values and just the term family values. Here is the distinction.
A big question, of course, is how someone will arrange the financial aspects of women staying at home. In today’s society, most families are dependent on two incomes. The vast majority will not be able to afford for women to stay at home as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Personally, I understand that some women or men want to spend more time with their children when they are young. But there’s a big difference between taking an extra year or two off and being a tradwife.