Have you ever been so obsessed with one topic that you just cannot shut up about it? Like to the point where all of your friends and family, and even your therapist are sick of you talking about it, even though they agree with you?

That’s where I am right now with tradwives.

On the off chance you don’t know what a tradwife is, let me give you a description with as little of my personal bias as I can. A tradwife is a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles.

To be clear, I am not talking about homemakers. I am not talking about people who enjoy home crafts, cooking, cleaning, or domestic tasks. I enjoy these things myself. I think most of us enjoy home crafting to some degree, no matter our gender.

And to be clear, I don’t care if a woman chooses to be a tradwife. If she and her family can afford for her to stay home, that’s her life. None of my business. That’s the whole point of feminism, after all. She chose to stay home, I chose to have a career and neither one of us can choose our medical care in several states.

Wait, that last one doesn’t sound right. We’ll circle back to that.

No, what I’m mostly upset about are tradwife influencers. People like Mrs. Midwest, Girl Defined, and Paul and Morgan.

I have a complicated relationship with traditional gender roles. For those of you who don’t know, I was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wrote all about it here. I was a tradwife for years.

And I mean that in the literal sense. I believed that my place was in the home taking care of my family. I was also a pro-life conservative Mormon woman who thought I was straight and had a lot of guilt over my love of playing cards. I had a lot of guilt over a lot of things.

Maybe that’s why I put up with my first partner being mentally, physically, and sexually abusive. I thought that I deserved it because I was dumb enough to have a baby with him.

And obviously, I’m not the only woman who went through that. Hell, my mom went through it. My aunt went through it. My grandmother went through it twice.

I just do not believe that a relationship is healthy when both people don’t see each other as equal. I have lived it. I’ve seen other women live it. I’ve frequently seen women say that God calls us to be Christian wives even if our husbands are not doing their part. Even if a man is beating us, cheating on us, or abusing us, God wants us to try to make it work.

I call bullshit on that.

I crawled out of that. It was hard. I’m still healing from that. And now, I’m watching all these young women run right into the trap I escaped. Worse, they’re trying to drag other women along with them.

Now, I’m going to generalize a bit with this next part. I am not saying that all tradwives are like this. I am saying that the vast majority of tradwife influencers are like this. And again, that’s who I’m mad at.

Tradwife influencers are against every single thing that I’ve built my life around. They sure wouldn’t be working a full-time job like I do. They never seem to be big readers, so I’m guessing they’re not really into sci-fi or speculative fiction. At least, the high-profile ones I see on social media aren’t ever reading anything but the KJV Bible. They seem to be pretty sure that positive affirmations are too close to witchcraft to be trusted, so my tarot-reading self would be an affront to them. They are anti-choice, anti-birth control. Many of them are super racist and xenophobic, too. And I assume I don’t need to tell you what they think of the LGBTQ+ community.

Most of these influencers don’t even have pets.

And yet, there are two things that I do have in common with most tradwife influencers. I am married to a man and I am a Christian.

This brings me to the first reason why I am so angry at tradwives. They have taken the two things in my life that give me the most support and peace, and they’ve turned them into nightmares.

My husband and I have been married for nine years now. Our relationship is a comfort to me. I have a best friend who lives with me, and who will share the burdens that life puts on us. Having a steady long-term relationship should be part of your support system. Your partner should truly be your partner, and they should make your life easier. They should make your life better.

Likewise, I get a lot of comfort from my faith. I understand that this isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. I know plenty of other people who have deconstructed who do not want a relationship with any religion and that is more than valid. The point is, that my faith makes my life better. My partner makes my life better.

So here is the thing that tradwives do that bothers me the most. They have taken two things that are very good for me in my personal life, and they’ve twisted them. They say first that everyone has to have those things, it’s non-negotiable. Then they say that these things shouldn’t make you happy. Your partner doesn’t have to make you happy. Your relationship with your deity shouldn’t make you happy. If you’re expecting that sort of relationship with your spouse or with God, you’re wrong for that. In the world of a tradwife, you as the wife are there to support your husband, he is not there to support you outside of financially. Your faith isn’t supposed to lead you to good things or a better understanding of yourself and the world you live in.

I reject that. I reject the thought that God doesn’t want me to be happy. I reject the notion that I am meant to be a helpmate to my husband and not expect that same help and support in return. I frankly reject anything that isn’t a net positive in my life. I reject that not just for myself, but for the next generation.

And here is the point that I want to get to. So many of these tradwife influencers are younger than me. These are younger millennials and Zoomers who were happy crying and dancing in the streets when Roe V. Wade was overturned.

So, what the hell happened here?

I am not going to claim that I’ve been leading the charge for female empowerment. I had to fight for my liberation, but I didn’t have anything to do with societal liberation.

But I think that we, as elder Millennials and Gen X, let go of something. We inherited a world that didn’t have as many barriers for women as those before us. There are still some, but not as many. I was born into a world where I could have an abortion, have a credit card, own property, have a bank account, and get a no-fault divorce. My mother was not. Any woman born before 1974 was not.

I feel like we got distracted. We didn’t get lazy, that’s not fair. But we got distracted trying to survive and we forgot about these battles. Maybe because just providing for our families has gotten so hard. Maybe because we’ve seen so much violence in our lifetimes. Maybe it’s hard to worry about whether or not we’re still treated as equals when there’s another school shooting every week and it feels like WWIII is gonna break out if one more country bats an eyelash weird. Maybe it’s because we thought we had our rights on lock, so we could keep moving forward.

Whatever the reason, we dropped the ball. And we’ve got to pick it back up again.

Now, I’m not telling you to go off on these tradwives on social. What I’m suggesting is that we don’t engage with them at all. Don’t give them attention. Understand that anyone can be a homemaker, but nobody has to be. And if you know a young woman who’s going down this road, check in on her with compassion. Don’t judge, but do give her the support she needs. And vote for politicians who will fight for gender equality. Write to your politicians, call them, and attend protests. Don’t believe that we are safe because the rise of the tradwives means that we are not.

These constricting, dehumanizing rules don’t belong in the world our mothers and grandmothers fought to give us, and they don’t belong in the world we’re giving our daughters.

In conclusion, let me leave you with this. I’m a Christian, but I’m also a witch. As such, I like the Wicca rede. As it harms none, do what you will. If tradwives weren’t harming anyone, I would not be upset about what they’re doing. But the way they prop up and romanticize these dangerous, self-hating ways of life is hurting people. And we have got to be loud enough denouncing it to drown them out.

If you want to learn more about this phenomenon, please check out Fundie Fridays on Youtube. It’s a great place to learn about dangerous fundamentalism.

Don’t forget, Nova starts on February 5th. And you can get book one of Station 86 for free right now on Smashwords.

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