Sympathy for the trad wives (I think, maybe, idk)
3/3
I previously wrote part one and part two, satirising the idea of the trad wife (you don’t need to have read them before this). When committing myself to this three part series, I wanted to commit to thinking about the trad wife phenomenon deeper than the low hanging fruit of a comedic take and think about how I personally feel about the trad wives themselves. Then I put it off for two weeks. I’m still not sure exactly how I feel, but I’m working it out here, not on the remix, but on the part three. I’m going to tell you right now this doesn’t have a particularly satisfying conclusion.
When I refer to trad wives, I am referring, not to women who are married and choose to live a traditional life, but to a specific subset of online content creators. As defined in the now famous Times article about Hannah Neeleman of the Ballerina Farm social media account:
‘Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity.’
Much of the response to that article was divided in their perception of Neeleman, with opinion largely split into two opposing camps. One side saw Neeleman as a victim of oppressive circumstances and an oppressive husband — she gave up her ballerina career to raise a family with her husband who manipulated circumstances to be able to ask her out in the first place, then ensured they got married before her desired timeline; she birthed eight children, all but one without pain relief; she frequently takes to bed for a week at a time, ill with exhaustion. The other side saw her, maybe not as a villain as such, but certainly as a perpetrator — she chose this husband and this life in line with her Mormon religious beliefs and she promotes this conservative and subservient lifestyle to millions of online followers.
While Neeleman has become the current trad wife poster child, thus it is difficult to discuss the trad wife phenomenon without reference to her, I don’t want to rehash these arguments about her specific situation. By now we’ve probably all read the Times piece (if you haven’t, it’s linked above) as well as a million think pieces debating the nitty gritty of Neeleman’s life (which you can find all over this platform). I just want to use this dichotomy as a jumping off point to work out my own feelings about the women behind the trad wife movement.
Personally, I have nothing to say about trad wives’ choice of lifestyle. Of course women should be able to be stay at home wives and mothers if they want to. Hell, they can be subservient to their husbands if they want to, that’s no skin off my nose. Far be it from me to kink shame.
Where things get stickier for me personally is in the advertising of that lifestyle and the proclamations that it is the ‘correct’ way of doing things; the influencing.
I don’t think online trad wife content is positive, as in I don’t think it adds to the collective good, and I think some of their ideas and beliefs are bad and harmful. But I feel much more conflicted about the actual women making the content.
There’s a particular phrase so pervasive in trad wife online content that it permeates every mockery or parody: I decided.
My husband wanted a sandwich so I decided to bake a loaf of bread.
My children were craving ice cream so I decided to make…
If I were any kind of analyst or even a person who seeks subtext, I might consider this repetition of I decided to be a subtle affirmation of the fact that they choose this life, emphasising that they are in control of their own decisions. As Neeleman said in her video in response to the above article: ‘[the article was] portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth.’
By portraying trad wives as victims, there is a danger of infantilising these women and, in doing so, simultaneously both denying them their agency and absolving them of responsibility. However, and I hate to resurrect this phrase, trad wives, like the rest of us, exist in the context of all in which they live.1 Most of the trad wives’ personal contexts seem to be that they are deeply embedded in communities which are very conservative and very christian, and have been their whole lives. And they seem to earnestly believe in and fear god and the afterlife consequences of their earthly choices. I was brought up in a context of non-american, labour-voting, cafeteria catholicism. As such, most trad wives exist in a religious context that I can’t relate to at all. Their mode of thinking and core fundamental beliefs about what reality even is, what things exist and what don’t, are just different to mine. I can’t imagine what it would be like to believe I have to live a certain way to avoid eternal damnation. If that was something I was genuinely worried about, and everyone around me told me, consistently over the course of my whole life, that the way to ensure access to heaven was to submit to patriarchy and proselytise to others, can I confidently say I wouldn’t do it? No, I can’t.
Of course there are varying degrees of harmful content that a trad wife can produce. Advocating for conversion therapy, or espousing beliefs that everyone who gets an abortion is evil, has the potential to cause real hurt and harm and is, in my opinion, unacceptable regardless of personal faith. But just displaying a life in which they are subservient to their husbands (as god wants or whatever), telling us that they defer to the man as the head of the household, and have as many children as god intends for them, sure it evokes frustration and derision and pity, but, idk, it’s… not any more directly harmful than a lot of other content we see on social media?
I feel similarly about content creators who get cosmetic procedures, directly or indirectly advertising these procedures to their audiences. (This is a much larger discussion but, in brief, I think the cosmetic procedure industry and the normalisation of and expectation of altering your appearance is bad for women in general; I understand why individual women get these procedures and I don’t think they are bad or wrong for doing it.) I follow a Californian lawyer on tiktok who rails against the patriarchy at any given opportunity and I believe she has genuinely feminist beliefs. I’ve noticed her appearance change in subtle ways more recently. She’s had lip filler (said so herself) and her face, I would postulate, has become less mobile and more smooth. This surprised me, I admit, as before getting any procedures at all, she was already maybe one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. But she was born, raised and lives in California, where standards of beauty are different and more demanding than those that I am used to, and where cosmetic procedures are far more common, normalised and expected, and she has more eyes on her online than I can even imagine. She, like a trad wife, lives an existence I can barely fathom.
Society is not heading the way of the trad wife. Despite their mass online following, they are not leading women into the home, without financial freedom or personal autonomy, or influencing them into the church. Society is heading far more in the direction of normalising cosmetic enhancements, considering them part of ‘self care’ and ‘ageing well’ and even being framed as an empowering, feminist choice. So does that mean I think online content normalising cosmetic procedures is more directly impactful and insidiously harmful than trad wife content? …Maybe?
Both Los Angeles-cosmetic-procedure influencers and rural-religious-trad-wife influencers are upholding and contributing to structures that are harmful to women, but they were also themselves raised in and influenced by those same structures, this being what led them to make content reinforcing said structures.
I don’t begrudge individual women who get cosmetic enhancements because how can you not feel bad about how you look existing the context in which we all do and in which we were all raised? So can I really begrudge the women who were raised in christianity and believe in god and are genuinely convinced that their lifestyles are righteous and virtuous? Should I think of the normalisation of both of these things as the same? As I’m writing this I’m starting to think yeah maybe ??
This is without even touching on content promoting mass consumption and content endorsing companies that abuse their workers and contribute to the destruction of the planet and content promoting unrealistic body standards and restrictive diets and what about all the men making outright misogynistic content and what about the racists and the homophobes and the transphobes and the godforsaken family vloggers exploiting their kids online?? I suppose what I’m saying is that trad wives are not a unique harm on social media.
I feel bad for the trad wives in the sense that I wish they could be free. Not free from their ‘horrible oppressive lives’ — which, yes, they did choose2 — but free from the fear of future punishment and free to live however they would choose absent that fear, whether they’d choose to be a stay at home mother or a ballerina or anything else. I also kind of wish they’d stop making the trad wife content, but that’s not gonna happen (💸💸💸).
This is the first time I’ve ever referenced this meme and I’m doing it in late August, lol.
Specifically in the case of Ballerina Farm, although Hannah Neeleman’s husband’s tactics were manipulative and I don’t like his behaviour, she chose her life. She had excellent prospects as a ballet dancer and chose to marry the billionaire heir. He didn’t lift her out of destitution. She made her life choices because of her wider context, but she did still choose.
Well said :)