From Nara Smith to Gwen The Milkmaid, tradwives make up some of the biggest influencers on social media – but why are we so invested in their lives?
“But the home and the family and the body of the woman herself has never really been a place to escape from capitalism,” says Rachel O’Dwyer, a lecturer in Digital Cultures at Dublin’s NCAD who spoke on the topic at this year’s transmediale festival in Berlin. “It was always ground zero, the place where the good feelings for the good life and capitalism were shored up and set afloat.”
See also:
What is considered “political”?
Cultural coercion and the question of choice
Culture war: meat and masculinity
The Politics of Kitchen Design
As the viewer, there’s an obvious allure to this lobotomised vision of domesticity for the same reason that we obsess over the interior lives of the rich and famous. We know it’s unrealistic but it’s also a soothing way to tap out of our own less-than-satisfactory lives for the same reason you might tune into an ASMR video or watch an ambient show on Netflix.
Can it be online rubbernecking if it’s intentionally performative? 🤔 I watched the bagel making video the article linked and found myself repelled by the POV even though it shouldn’t be weird to make your partner a nice anniversary meal. I think I was dumbfounded at the idea she’d drag herself out of bed early, heavily pregnant, and make bagels *and* cream cheese from scratch. I can even get the bagels if they don’t have a bakery nearby — grocery store bagels suck — but the cream cheese??? Let yourself sleep in, girl. He’ll love the bagels just as much at 11am as 9am.
I think it lands with me because I have made cream cheese from scratch — but because I wanted to, not because my husband expected me to. And, I have since recognized that I was trying way too hard on the handmade foods, and I could save my energy. In fact, my husband has encouraged me to prioritize my interests and free time over spending a ton of time cooking. When I cook something complicated, it’s my choice.
Eleanor Janega lays out the underlying misunderstanding (and misinformation) of tradwife thinking:
The tradwife movement is particularly tragic not only because it lends credence to those who want to define womanhood as a biological state that necessitates childbearing, but because of the idea that women working outside the home is modern and bourgeois. Most women until the 19th century held jobs such as farm workers or specialist artisans, though they were generally expected to see to the children and home when they returned from work. The idea that women had no business outside the home not only erases working-class women but was also a short-lived one that peaked in the later Victorian and early Edwardian eras.
Calls for a ‘return’ to a non-existent past are seductive precisely because it did not exist.
See also:
Women’s voices, women’s choices
How momfluencers affect the value society puts on care work
The Burden of Dinner and Learning to Say No
History and fascist speak
Trojan tweets
