Return of the Tradwife

It wasn’t fun while it lasted. Call it a grand social experiment, wherein women were seduced by the likes of Friedrich Engels into believing that they could enhance their conjugal bliss by having careers. That is, by ceasing to depend on a perfidious male for support and sustenance.

We have recently opined on what has been called the Stay-at-Home-Girlfriend, a traditional wife in all but name. That is, a traditional wife without the public ceremony of commitment.

Now, those clever Gen Zers have invented a new term, a new way to be a wife. It’s called a tradwife. Why they need to mess up the language is beyond me. Because a tradwife is just a wife by another name.

In principle, by the lame reasoning of said generation, it is better to be a tradwife than to be a girlboss. Nothing is quite as androgynous as a girlboss. Unless perhaps a badass girlboss.

Strangely, contemporary English language usage makes the phrase “badass girlboss” perfectly intelligible. And yet, it does not allow for a “goodass girlboss.” 

The ways of language usage are mysterious. In some part they function like a free market. As for why we have badass girlbosses and not goodass girlbosses, the reason must lie in the linguistic anomaly-- you can say that you want something badly but you will never say that you want something goodly.

In any event the generation that was too lazy to pronounce the word, charisma, reduced it to rizz. Thankfully they did not reduce it to gizz.

Now Gen Z is returning women to more traditional roles, as wives and mothers. It does not want to call them wives, so it invented the term tradwives, shorthand for traditional wives-- though one suspects that most Gen Zers do not know it.

So, we ask ourselves, does this signal the failure of modern feminism? The notion that an independent, autonomous self-sufficient, self-defining woman would have a wondrously happy marriage-- promised first by Engels-- seems to have been disproved by experience.

We suspect that too many Gen Zers grew up in broken homes. Most were raised by single mothers. And, however capable their mothers were-- and many have been very competent-- they do not want to visit the same treatment on their children. And most especially, they do not want to be alone.

Despite all of the feminist indoctrination, Gen Z women might well be tired of being used for sex and then being discarded. After all, in the old days, when sex was quaintly considered to consummate a marriage, women engaged in it after, not before, a man had made a commitment, in public and presumably forever.

This feels slightly more respectful than the hookup culture where modern liberated women drop to their knees to service males they barely know.

Somehow or other, feminists considered this a sign of liberation. In truth, it was a sign of regression, and disrespect.

These women were independent, autonomous and self-sufficient. In time that often meant, being alone.

Nearly a century and a half ago French sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested that married couples would do best if they divided household labor. It made sense that two independent, autonomous and self-sufficient spouses would engage in constant fighting and squabbling over who does which household chore. 

Given that version of marital bond, more than a few couples have either broken apart or not bothered to bond at all.

But then there is another observation, made by Emma Posey Waters  at The Federalist, via the Independent Women’s Forum.

Waters suggests that the pandemic contributed to the restoration of traditional wifery. You will easily recall that when offices shut down during the Covid pandemic, more than a few serious and unserious thinkers declared that work-at-home was the new black. Women who were not obliged to come to the office would have more time for family and would still be able to maintain their positions in their offices.

In fact, given the fact that any woman who chose to be a housewife and mother would be showered with feminist contempt, most women insisted that they wanted to be wives, mothers and executives.

But then, the more women stayed home, the more they discovered that this severely proscribed activity was far better than feminists were saying. 

And then, along came Covid and the work-at-home movement. Waters explains:

Instead of finding the home stuffy, boring, or trivial, many women found greater purpose and satisfaction than they previously imagined. Initially, the pandemic gave women the ultimate “permission slip” to explore the domestic realm (stay inside to stay alive). Later, popular and aesthetically pleasing tradwife accounts gave women the encouragement they needed to combat the outspoken expectations that all women, even mothers, ought to rejoin the 9-to-5 workforce.

So, women spent more time at home and liked spending more time at home. They bonded with other women in the neighborhood, at school functions or even when out shopping.

Despite what they had learned in Women’s Studies, they did not feel like slaves or even domestic chattel. They enjoyed having more time with their children. And they might even have noticed that when they helped produce a structured home environment, their children did better.

Call it another instance of unintended consequences. Perhaps, contemporary feminism had outlived its usefulness, or, should we say, its shelf life. More and more women were discovering that the feminist life plan was consigning them to solitude and even misery. When they were not striving to be stay-at-home girlfriends, they were becoming tradwives.

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