Am I a tradwife if I look like one?

On the worrying intersection of homeschooling, domesticity, tradwifedom and children's autonomy.

NOTE: This piece is LONG, and it may not fit in an email - you may have to click on the actual piece to read it in full.

With the publishing of this piece, I’m re-activating Substack paid subs! I’m so glad to be back. Thank you for sticking around while I got my life back on track :)

Yes, I know, there have been a million hot takes and I’m not about to give one of my own. Not really.

What I want to do instead, is think a little more deeply about this phenomenon, or trend, and relate it to what I do.

The reason this matters to me, is because there is a trad wife-homeschooler overlap. And many in the homeschool community (if we can call it that!) are not speaking about it, because the homeschool community is often somewhat silent on anything potentially ‘divisive’ that is happening within it. Not me though! Hi!

A quick note: this piece mentions abusive behaviour that can sometimes take place in this sub-culture. Please take care of yourself while reading, or consider skipping it if it might cause you more harm than good.

classicsoulmates

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Is a trad wife the same as a SAHM?

I asked this question on IG, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so many DMs - the overwhelming majority saying HELL NO. Those two things might sometimes look the same, but they are in fact very different. Yes, technically a tradwife is a Stay at Home Mother in the sense she stays home to care for her family; but not all SAHMs are tradwives, and many of us have strong reactions to being conflated with tradwives.

I don’t think social media has made this easier to distinguish, because what has happened is that instagram and tik tok have essentially allowed tradwives to have a voice, to emerge and exist in the public eye in the first place - which not only conflicts with the idea of a “traditional” wife, but also almost makes tradwifery look like just another choice for women, another completely neutral, personal and harmless lifestyle.

In fact, some internet tradwives actually call it a lifestyle. They dress in cute floral dresses, do makeup, and happen to look a bit like Marilyn Monroe if she’d found God (and a man to provide for her).

Some, like Hannah Needleman or Nara Aziza, don’t actually ever say “tradwife”, but instead they imply it, which in some ways is even more disconcerting because these accounts are the ones that actively blur the lines between homeschool mother, SAHM and tradwife.

My initial reaction to tradwives was, Can we just stop obsessing over these people and live our own lives?

I didn’t really understand why people had issues with them, or why people even followed them. I didn’t get why anyone would want to BE them, or even just hate-follow them. Just move on!

Except that then I started thinking about the ways tradwifery is being packaged and sold. And when someone is out there selling women a so-called lifestyle, and especially when that lifestyle intersects heavily with homeschooling, I start to get curious.

For the purpose of this piece, I think it’s important to distinguish between internet tradwives, and what some might call traditional Christian wives. So, when I say tradwife I mean the social media/internet kind, and when I say traditional wife or traditional Christian wife I mean women who exist or marry into Christian patriarchy sub-cultures.

The first one is somewhat of a trend, emerging over blogs, and then social media, and would not exist without the online performative aspect. (Can you be a tradwife if you aren’t posting it online?)

The second is the actual precursor and underbelly of this trend. Traditional Christian wives are a product of fundamentalist Christian patriarchal sub-cultures, and they have existed for longer than the internet, and continue to exist in parallel with tradwives.

The online tradwive movement feeds off of the Christian patriarchy movement, and not always explicitly. But it’s important to note that the two are intimately related; there would be no tradwives without Christian patriarchy’s traditional wife. And yet, they are also distinct, because some tradwives might not fit the description of traditional Christian wives.

Both tradwives and traditional wives are often (but not always) homeschool mothers, too. And that’s where I start to wonder how much influence tradwives and Christian patriarchy are having in the homeschool and counter-cultural parenting communities.

phenomenal

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What is a traditional Christian wife?

(It has been pointed out to me that tradwife and traditional wife are actually a misnomers, and there is nothing actually very traditional, in a universal way, about either one - I’ll get to that!)

Both tradwives and traditional wives are defined as women who take on “traditional” (if by traditional we mean defined by white Christian patriarchy) gender roles within their relationship, family and community. I hesitate to use the word “choose” here, because while some women do choose, some are raised in a fundamentalist Christian subculture so completely devoid of choice, that the word and action simply cannot apply.

They believe in “complementarianism”, which Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure, describes as the belief that there are two genders of equal worth, but that should take on very different roles. Men and women complement each other, in other words, but can never take on the other’s roles. Although this theory claims both genders are equally important, in practice gender roles are so rigid, and the roles assigned to men are those of leadership, work outside the home, and generally associated with more power and worth, that often, as Klein chronicles in the many testimonies in her book, women are left wondering whether different doesn’t also mean less than.

Klein explains how this often translates in women being shunned for leadership roles, told they could not be too loud or opinionated or smart, could not tell men what to do, should not seek paid work outside the home. Complementarianism ensures the standards are different for both genders, and who is making decisions around what those standards are? Overwhelmingly, it is men. Although it claims that both genders are equally worthy, only one of those genders gets to call almost all of the shots.

Traditional wives are wives, but not necessarily mothers (although there is an expectation of impending motherhood). Perhaps they grew up being “stay at home daughters,” like Cait West depicts in her memoir Rift, because their family believed that women should not be allowed to go out into the world and either work or study, but instead wait at home, under the leadership of their father, for a suitable Christian husband. This sounds like 1850s Europe (and even then, many women had more freedom) but no, it is 2020s America.

Once she becomes a wife, she is supposed to be submissive to her husband and essentially forgo her needs and desires for the benefit of husband and children (of which they are expected to have many, in as rapid succession as the Head of Household (the husband) and God desires.) Her entire reason to exist is to serve her husband, family and community. Her place is very much in the home - and this isn’t me reading between the lines, it’s literally what many tik tok tradwives say, almost verbatim, and what sermons and books within the Christian patriarchy movement actively promote.

Does the man have a role? Yes, he does. He is the provider, and he makes all the decisions that regard himself and every member of his family. In her memoir The Well-trained Wife, Tia Levings talks about there being “an Umbrella of Authority: Christ over the husband over the wife over the children.” This comes from the teachings of Bill Gothard (and others), who is a fundamentalist Christian minister, founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), and who for many years preached to families the benefits of patriarchal family structure (some of these groups use the word “patriarchy” as a good thing! Sort of a messed up re-claiming of it, of sorts.), large families and, of course, homeschooling (using a very specific Christian curriculum).

If you haven’t watched Shiny Happy People, or read much about the Duggars, I highly recomment that deep dive. They are perhaps the original, public-facing, tradfamily, before the age of social media.

Traditional wifehood within this sub-culture, can be bleak. Women are subject to thousands of rules and behaviour codes, and so are their children (whom they are told to discipline in ways that are often closer to abuse than parenting). This is a culture where wives have no recourse should they happen to marry an abusive man, like Tia Levings did. She endured years of emotional and physical abuse, rape, undiagnosed PTSD, gaslighting and Church-sanctioned “spanking” at the hands of her husband. In some ways, she was also, at the same time, one of the first internet tradwives. She kept a blog where she wrote about her life, raising children and homeschooling, and mentioned none of the abuse, control and dehumanization.

And so the tradwife was born…

In some ways, Tia Leving’s blog about her life as a submissive wife and Christian homeschooling mother, was foreshadowing for the social media tradwives of today. Perhaps, much like Tia left out all the violence and abuse, some of these influencer tradwives are also only showing us part of the picture.

This is what she writes in The Well-Trained Wife, “But that’s the thing about puritanical high-control religion. All those God-rules had numbed the entire human experience. The good and the bad, the joy and the pain. The rules said there wasn’t more and I was wrong to thirst for it.”

So yes, in the most extreme sense, traditional wives are women who fulfill a role that is prescribed by men, and sanctioned by a patriarchal system that cannot truly be argued with, and is often hard to escape from. There is a massive overlap between traditional Christian wives and tradwives, to the extent that these principles are espoused by ALL traditional wives, and explicitly promoted by MANY online tradwives.

Importantly, not all tradwives explicitly talk about what they are doing online. Not all tradwives explicitly trace the throughline between what their life (and presumably, social media account) is about, and Cristian patriarchy. And that’s where things start to get complicated.

esteecwilliams

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So what’s a trad wife? And is there a tradwife spectrum?

In contrast to traditional Christian wives, tradwives are defined by Sophie Sykes and Veronika Hopner in a 2024 academic paper, as “communities of right-wing women who commercialize social media to commodify traditional heteronormative renditions of femininity that are equal parts ideology and aesthetic.”

The OG tradwife, Alena Kate Pettitt, albeit a conservative Christian, never had ambitions of social media prominence, and has said that the current trend “has become its own monster”, and distanced herself from some of the ways it is associated with the far-right and Christian patriarchy. By this definition, Pettitt isn’t really part of the current tradwife trend - so perhaps the movement is changing to reflect more extreme political and religious beliefs.

A few things stand out about Sykes’ and Hopner’s definition. One is that there is no tradwife without the online performance of tradwifery, according to this statement. Two, that the aesthetics are just as important as the ideology - and perhaps more insidious.

Before I go into these topics, I want to talk about who these trad wives acually are, and what their perfomance looks like. Some social media tradwives of today emphasise this is truly a choice. Some were not raised in extreme Christian families, and actively choose to become tradwives. They claim that being provided for is so much better than girl-bossing, they say they love domesticity and caring for children, and that conforming to gender norms is very much a win-win situation in their family.

We see them making absolutely everything from scratch, even things you’d think couldn’t be made. We see them talk about their many many children, about homesteading, about homeschooling, or about being a stay at home wife whose main role is to care for her husband.

And even within this social media sub-culture, there are differences: some are more overtly Christian and political, and others are not.

Some blur the lines between simply being a homeschooling mother, and being a tradwife. Some never mention religion, or mention it only in passing. I believe this is intentional, and insidious, because tradwifery stems from Christianity and so omitting religion almost entirely, or only mentioning it in passing, feels like a very calculated move rather than accidental.

It has some of us confused about what these women are doing, and in turn what we are seeing, and what we are actually doing. And whether what we are doing is somehow, inadvertently, mimicking these women and somehow promoting a fundamentalist Christian, right-wing agenda, without actually knowing it.

That, for me, is where is gets blurry and potentially insidious. Because it seems that some women who look like tradwives on the internet, are also traditional Christian wives, except it isn’t obvious to the onlooker (and also, how do we really know??). And so - are they somehow serving as a seemingly harmless gateway into tradwifery, via beige domesticity, slow childhood, homeschooling and making things from scratch (all things that taken in isolation, might be benign)?

And that’s how the aesthetic element comes in: are tradwives specific aesthetics almost a dogwhistle? Are they drawing us in with something that is apparently very surface level, and also looks kind of dreamy? Are we lured by the beauty, and blind to the ideology?

positive.anarchy

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Are they fooling us all?

Let me take a slightly abrupt, but relevant detour.

If you homeschool or home educate, have you ever asked yourself that perhaps it’s because you were unconsciously drawn in by the Christian right and are not, also inadvertendly, somehow helping them gain traction by also saying things like “beware of government schools” (which, btw, ARE open and accountable to the public), and “question everything” and “educational choice”?

Let me explain. In his State of the Union Speech in 2020, President Trump used the term “government schools” to make a point in support of “school choice.” How many times have you read a piece, or heard a homeschool parent say, or seen a post on social media that used this exact term?

One of its first usages was in fact by A. A. Hodge, a presbyterian theologian, in an 1887 essay, and it was used as a critique of secular education. Previously, others had used the term to bash the way education was being provided to the children of ex-enslaved people. In other words, this term has its roots in white supremacy and Christian fundamentalism. When we hear it in regular homeschool discourse, it should be a massive red flag.

Doug Phillips, founder of evangelical Christian organisation Vision Forum, is a proponent of the Christian patriarchy movement that promotes homeschooling and is upheld in turn by many homeschoolers, has also spoken and written extensively about the dangers of “government schools.”

The bashing of “government schools” has consistently been associated with the Christian right. When we see secular homeschool mothers making reels about this, they are not reclaiming this word, they are inadvertently pushing the very same agenda it has always embodied.

Even unschooling itself, at root a secular movement, was and continues to be associated with right-wing, libertarian ideas of government interference. Both John Taylor Gatto and John Holt have used the phrase “government schools,” and while they were not Christian fundamentalists, this terminology was and is.

Which leads me to think, are we inadvertedly strengthening extreme Christian subcultures when we use their very arguments to justify why we homeschool? When we talk about government schools, about “educational choice”, are we basically just unknowing pawns in their game?

I know this is an uncomfortable thought to have.

I know most of you reading this will be like, “But I homeschool for entirely different reasons!!”.

I’m with you. I do, too. But - I have also found myself occasionally thinking along the same lines as right-wing, conservative homeschoolers and then had to shake myself a little and recognise that although we *appear* to be doing the same thing, we’re actually not; and although we *appear* to be doing it for similar reasons, and some of the terminology we use is eerily similar, we are doing it for entirely different ones.

BUT WE’RE SOMETIMES DOING THE SAME THING!!

At least on the outside, it looks eerily similar. The perfomance of it can sometimes look exactly the same. (I guess this is a perfect illustration of the horse-shoe theory).

And in practice, as a homeschooler/unschooler, I am popularising a movement that is strongly associated with fundamentalist religious families. In some perhaps very indirect ways, I’m making it easier for them to do what they do, by doing what I do. I am sometimes repeating the same talking points (“socialisation” anyone? “educational choice” sound familiar?), I am sometimes inadvertently sharing a post or book that is underpinned by a conservative agenda, I have been known to (unknowingly) support homeschoolers who secretly want to destroy everything I stand for (hello 1000 hours outside!).

In fact, the reason I am able to unschool with minimum regulation is because of the Christian homeschoolers that pushed and continue to push hard for low to no regulation and strong parental rights (both things I have BIG issues with).

Tradwives are the surface-level cute and benign embodiment of this.

And truly - if you were out and about with your children, or if you scroll through your social media feed, would people be able to tell that you are a home educating parent, but NOT a tradwife?

toimarie

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Am I a trad wife?

Okay, back to ideology and aesthetics.

I stay home with my children. I have occasionally done some paid work, but mostly I have been caring for my children since my eldest’s birth. We homeschooled briefly when my children were very little, then began homeschooling again in 2020. Mostly I stayed home, even when my children were in school. I love caring for my children, and I love spending time with them. Yes, I would have had a bigger family if circumstances had allowed for it. I love making things, sewing, crocheting, and yes I have been known to bake and can things.

I believe strongly in the value of the home and domestic work. I love being home. I love not having to be beholden to capitalism and its gruelling schedules, even while I know this is a huge privilege. I love knowing that if and when I have more time, I could pick up some extra paid work. And yes, I was raised Catholic and probably carry a lot of religious baggage even now that we are secular.

But I am not a tradwife.

There is a difference between a stay-at-home parent and a trad wife, and we need to speak up about this in clearer terms because things often get murky. I can do all of the things above, and also reject gender norms and patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalistic systems. THAT, is when staying home, or going to work, or working from home, or whatever way you decide to pursue what you care about, becomes a choice.

In some ways though, I am similar to trad wives - and just hear me out. We both, in very different ways, are pushing back on a culture of girl-bossing and white feminism. Sure, they perhaps don’t name it, or call it something else (Feminism in general, in some cases), but I think Sarah Marshall puts her finger on it when she says in a podcast episode of You’re Wrong About, that the rise of trad wives might be a direct response to the era of the girl boss.

Girl bossing, and the whole Lean In movement (if we can call it a movement) embraces capitalism and seeks to essentially align itself with men and the economic and social systems they have built, the values they embrace - wealth, productivity, efficiency, career success. Tradwifery, in some ways, is a rejection of this. Women reject that they need to run themselves ragged by chasing financial gain and what society sees as success.. hence tradwives.

In some ways, I too rejected those things - except from a very different perspective, and my solution is rooted in very different principles - those of elevating the invisible work of caring for children, those of collective care and equality and justice. But eerily, these two ways of existing may look similar in real life.

After all, we both stay home. I came to it from a radicalization around oppression, and they come to it from a radicalization that is anti-government, anti-paid work for women, and rooted in Christian Patriarchy.

And yet here we are, both of us women who stay home and homeschool and bake stuff and crochet and shop at the local co-op.

How did this happen? How do I end up with trad wife content in my feed, when I am possibly one of the most left-wing people I know, and I in no way whatsoever submit to my husband or believe women belong in the home?

How do I end up in what looks like a pretty traditional household arrangement (my husband is the breadwinner, I do most of the caring, home educating, and cooking), that could potentially be mistaken for tradwifery?

I want to elevate domestic and care work because I believe it is valuable, no matter who performs it, and because it has been rendered invisible because women have historically performed it.

This is not what trad wives are doing: they are saying quite the opposite in fact. They are saying domestic work is women’s work, full stop. It matters, but only insofar as it serves a patriarchal construction of family. They are saying that gender roles are fixed and must be adhered to. That a woman’s place is in the home. That a man’s role is as a provider. That everybody’s role is to “glorify God”, whatever that means. That women must submit to men.

Some are explicit about this, and some are not - but essentially, they are all backed by these ideas.

Blurring the lines between SAHM and tradwife

There is real danger in conflating tradwifery with stay at home motherhood - sure, some women are doing both, but many of us are decisively NOT.

I write about elevating domesticity, and about the pitfalls of white feminism - but I don’t believe women’s place is one of submission.

As Zara Hanawalt writes in a piece for Vogue, the issue is not that some women are tradwives (although I would argue that is also an issue!), “The real issue is that the tradwife ideal is becoming conflated with stay-at-home motherhood, undoing some of the more nuanced, hard-earned understanding of domestic labor that has recently emerged.”

The tradwife movement is overshadowing a more intersectional movement to raise awareness about domestic labour, and about what Angela Garbes and others have named the devaluing of carework. The movement to elevate mothering (in all its many forms) as one of the most radical acts, is becoming dangerously muddled with the aesthetics of motherhood promoted by tradwives on the internet.

It has been well-documented for years, that tradwives are the (mostly white) face of something much more sinister. Not only do they (perhaps unintentionally?) erase women who choose domesticity as a form of legitiate and radical work, but they erase women and femmes of colour, immigrant women, and other marginalised people who carry out domestic and care work and who are at the root of the social movement to elevate mothering, by projecting an extremely white picture of what being a mother and wife looks like.

I am not the best person to speak on the whiteness of trad wives, but many others have. And while there are Black women and women of colour who are tradwives, I find it hard to put aside the documented fact that patriarchy goes hand in hand with white supremacy, no matter how hard the Christian right might try to “reclaim” the word and reject accusations of racism. That said, I think we should listen when women of colour tell us why they have made the choice they’ve made.

Go check out this piece, which goes deeper into why some Black women are embracing traditional wifehood, and also all three parts of Katherine Louise DeGroots Substack piece on tradwives, which i thought were really insightful.

beckybarnicomics

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So what are the social media trad wives actually doing?

Well, frankly, they are profiting and they are proselytizing. If we are honest with ourselves, they are working women performing tradwifery for an audience that is perhaps a blend of wannabes, cringe followers and well, men who want to take us back to a time that frankly never existed.

Can you be a trad wife and earn an income? I’d say that having a career is literally the opposite of traditional Christian wifehood. It defies the set gender roles inherent in Christian patriarchy. It defies the idea of complementarianism that is embedded in some evangelical and Mormon subcultures.

And so it begs the question: Is what we are seeing on social media only a spectacle of tradwifery? When the camera turns off, when the perfomance ends, are they even tradwives?

Some of them have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers. They do sponsorships, sell products online and are clearly very savvy creators and career women. They are entrepreneurs.

What to make of this? Are they selling tradwifery to the masses but not actually practicing it? Is it just a perfomance? Are they somehow doing two things at once: performing an idealized version of tradwifery in order to further a conservative political agenda, AND making money off of us while also not being tradwives themselves?

Or, have they somehow found a tradwife loophole, and because they are promoting this “lifestyle” they get away with breaking free of their gender role? Are their social media accounts actually a cry for help? The only way they get to make actual decisions, to express themselves? Perhaps for some tradwives, it’s a way out of invisibility and oblivion. A way to gain back power from a situation of oppression that they ostensibly agree to. In which case, do you really want to be a tradwife?!

All of this is possible at once, I think. And it’s messed up. And confusing, and misleading.

I don’t buy the “I’m just sharing my life online” argument. Sure, if you have a small account and you post when you feel like it - yes, that can absolutely be true. But if you have 10 million followers, you sure as hell are planning what and when to post, you probably have a good camera and are giving your posts and reels some serious thought, maybe even staging them. You are thinking hard about what to post because you are selling an image because you are making money off of it!! It is calculated.

Not to mention, expensive. Where are your many children when you’re filming for social media? How much privilege is involved in dressing up in fancy outfits and having the time to edit reels? How many people are working behind the scenes to help you, and remain unacknowledged? And how “trad” is all of this, really - the content creation, the invisible paid help, the selling online? If these influencers were actual traditional Christian wives, their husbands would not be okay with them working for pay. That is made very explicit within Christian Patriarchy.

Then there are the cosplaying tradwives

This is the murky water between tradwives and SAHMs who appear more “traditional”. Because tradwife has become an aesthetic, people love to cosplay it. They never say the word. They don’t explicitly talk about gender roles or domesticity or staying home. They barely mention religion (and also, most religious people are not in fact tradwives, so mentions of God are not always an indication.)

But online, these women still seem a lot like tradwives. I bet some of us follow a few women like this, and perhaps it hasn’t even occurred to us that they might be tradwives, or that they might be co-opting the tradwife aesthetic for social media traction, and at the same time acting as the gateway drug to tradwifery.

In other words, they are women who look a lot like internet tradwives, and who might act as a stepping stone in that direction, another ping on the algo. Do we worry about these people? Are WE these people? Do some of these women even know what they’re doing, or are they inadvertedly copying a tradwife-y aesthetic?

Are influencers who may or may not be tradwives, also partly complicit in creating an image of womanhood that is somehow promoting the tradwife image?

The underbelly of traditional wives that doesn’t make it to IG.

The reality of traditional Christian wives, without the income and visibility from millions of followers, is largely unknown and hidden.

I can’t help but think that the actual tradwives are the silent and silenced ones. The ones like Tia Levings, who kept up appearances on her blog, while enduring her real life as a traditional Christian wife.

This is the under-belly of tradwifery, and the pre-cursor to the polished, aesthetically pleasing version we now see online (and also, scarily, what the perfomance of tradwifery online is actually telling the rest of us we should be doing.) I call it the underbelly, but actually this is what tradwifery IS, ultimately, once you strip it of social media. Without social media, women wanting to be tradwives are actually being traditional Christian wives. And it’s not so pretty.

This is where we come to recognise that without a fundamentalist vision of Christianity, rooted in the inherent superiority of men over women, in hierarchical patriarchal structures and extremely restrictive and isolationist doctrine, we would have no construction of what a “traditional wife” is.

There would be no tradwifery without conservatism and oppression.

If you dig deep enough, the roots of tradwifery are toxic. They are firmly rooted in fundamentalist interpretations of “biblical” truth. There is no one coherent way to perform womanhood, because there appear to be so many different churches and although some things remain the same, others change based on which church or subculture or group (cult?) your family attends.

But there is a thread that runs through all the various interpretations of womanhood: your role is not a choice. It is in fact quite the opposite: your role, as a woman, is obedience.

While we sit here watching social media tradwives tell us they chose tradwifery, we are also ignoring that once you become a traditional wife all semblance of choice evaporates, by definition. You have a role, and a place.

And I suppose you *can* choose the ‘package deal’ of a traditional gender role. But is it really a choice if it becomes non-reversible?! Don’t we all know that consent hinges on the idea that we should be able to change our minds? To say stop, at any point? To come to ongoing consensual agreements rather than blindly follow just because we agreed to a specific deal?

The dominant systems in the US right now, are systems that oppress, discriminate and dominate. They are essentially right-wing systems: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism.

No trad wife will ever be a lefty, because no lefty will ever claim that submitting or being complicit with a system of oppression, is an actual life choice.

The texture of choice, is that we are able to break free, to change, to shift. Patriarchy is solid - you’re either under it, or you have to find a way to escape it. You don’t get to be whoever you want as a person, because it is prescriptive based solely on your identity as a woman.

I will give it to them that there is a degree of choice perhaps, but truly you are simply choosing a different master, a different authority to submit to. And choice is different to autonomy, different to freedom. Choice can exist as long as there is more than one thing to choose from (even if both those things massively suck), but that is not agency or autonomy. Autonomy is you’re able to create your own choices, and that is not what exists under patriarchy or any other system.

leilamadeline___

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Is the tradwife even traditional?

Caroline Sumlin writes about the illusion of tradwifery: “The illusion was the idea that being a wife and a stay-at-home mother was the key to my happiness as a woman; my greatest calling and honor as a woman of God. The illusion was in the presentation of wifehood and motherhood being the holy identity that God had given me, and that as soon as I answered this call, I would be complete. The illusion was allowing the rest of my desires, passions, and dreams to fall by the wayside in pursuit of the image I was being sold as the true expression of my feminity.”

She goes on to talk about the way “traditional” is not actually tradition. That, too, is something we’ve constructed and named as “trad” when there isn’t very much trad about it: “Saying that patriarchy is tradition is nearly equivalent to saying that racism is tradition. Nearly.”

In other words, are tradwives dressing up oppression as tradition?

Evangelical Christianity is relatively recent, and so is this version of wifehood. There is nothing traditional about it, even within white Christian circles.

If we should push back on anything, it would be the idea that tradwives are in any way “trad”, in any way taking us back to a past that actually existed. They are not. They are pandering to a relatively recent, far-right, Christian patriarchal agenda. Yes, the patriarchy is as old as time, AND IT IS A FORM OF OPPRESSION, not a tradition. Tradwifery is, perhaps, just a new iteration of a very old idea. Perhaps it is a new, desperate attempt to paint patriarchy as a traditional, benign, caring institution - when we should all know by now, that it is likely the first system of domination and therefore arguably the root of much of the violence, oppression and harm we see today.

angelagarbes

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Can we untangle home education from Christianity, conservatism and women’s roles as mothers and wives?

Something else I have in common with trad wives is distrust of institutions and government (although my main distrust is of corporations and capitalism, and conveniently trad wives don’t often go there - they need the sponsorship deals after all!).

I have to say that the anti-government rhetoric in the US has always made me extremly uncomfortable. Not because I grew up trusting the government - I did not. Growing up in Italy, we all knew politicians were crooks and corruption was rife. But we still held a belief that the government was (in theory) of the people and for the people, and therefore owed us things: healthcare, education, infrastructure, material support.

My anti-government sentiment comes from an understanding that the government should represent the people, and that we should fight for it to do so. I don’t homeschool my children because I’m anti-government, I unschool them because the education system as it exists right now, can often be oppressive of children as people.

Once again, on the surface, it looks like what I’m doing is what many right-wing Christian families are doing. The truth is a lot deeper than appearances, though. Because the more I’m involved in the homeschool community, the more I see that there really is no such thing. Homeschoolers and unschoolers are a wide spectrum, and can have almost nothing in common depending on where you sit on that spectrum. There is no one ‘community.’

I resent the way the media talks of homeschooling as if it’s a way trad wives shield and brainwash their children into conforming to gender roles, believing in conspiracy theories and espousing right-wing principles. Homeschooling CAN be that. It can be abusive, and weird, and neglectful, and all of the things. It can also be liberatory, nurturing, the best thing for a child; it can be the only safe choice, it can be the only way to preserve their humanity.

It is hard to believe home education can be all of the harmful things as well as all of the good things - but why is it so hard to recognise this? School, too, can be all of that. Parenting, too, can be all of that. Children can be traumatised by school, and by their parents, or can absolutely thrive in the school and family they find themselves in - and everything in between.

None of these things are *inherently* harmful, but often homeschooling becomes associated with right-wing Christianity, or extreme libertarianism, and it paints all of us with the same brush.

It doesn’t help that the vast majority of home educators are mothers. There are many structural reasons why that is the case, but often this contributes to the narrative that it is part of a woman’s role to stay at home and educate the children. Those of us who are mothers, and who homeschool, are often frustrated by the sacrifices involved - whether we give up on a career or extra income, or whether we struggle to balance work and home education, it can often feel like a really fraught choice.

Tradwives painting it as just the natural way of things, as a woman’s job and something we should be grateful for, miss part of the point: home education is not inherently women’s work. We end up doing it not because it’s our role, but because of the fundamentally still unequal forces that shape society and family life.

I am so grateful I get to unschool, AND I can talk about how the fact that it is still overwhelmingly women doing it, speaks to broader social issues and to the fact home education is not a large-scale, perfect solution. (Or, I could just stop complaining about my God-given role, and submit to it, I suppose *insert eyeroll*).

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What about the Trad Kids?

I feel like this needs to be a deep dive of its own. But I wanted to mention it because nobody is talking about the children of tradwives, or about the children in these fundamentalist Christian subcultures.

For the social media tradwives, I worry about the exploitation of children online, in order to aid in projecting an idyllic version of family. Because let’s face it, many tradwives are literally profiting off of their children being social media content.

I know enough about fundamentalist Christian patriarchy to know that abuse of children is normalised in many circles. This is part of the reason these families homeschool, and are instructed to participate as little as possible in public life. It’s uncomfortable to confront this, but many of us continue to be complicit in this abuse by pushing back on state regulation around homeschooling, and therefore enabling those who have something to hide. Lack of homeschool regulation and the parental rights movement are both far-right Christian homeschooler issues - the reason why the US has not ratified the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child, are these people.

I know there is more to this convo, and I’ve dealt with it in more complexity in this piece about homeschool regulation. Read it before you come at me!

Are the trad kids okay though? Those who managed to get out and tell us about it, are not.

Several books chronicle the trauma suffered by girls growing up under Christian patriarchy - many of these women carry it for the rest of their lives, even once they have escaped their subculture or church.

We should talk more about what the children of internet tradwives might be going through. It is well-documented that child-rearing practices under Christian patriarchy are anything but gentle. Babies are often blanket trained and parented very strictly (if not abusively). Extremely fixed gender roles are enforced. Daughters often feel controlled and constantly monitored.

In her book Rift, Cait West writes about how it didn’t even occur to her that she was an adult and free to leave home upon turning 18. She was so severely indoctrinated, so clueless about life in the world, that she saw no other choice but to stay and submit to her father.

We should also talk about the way child-bearing and child-rearing is conceived of as part of the fight against the encroachment of secular culture. Children are quite literally seen as arrows in a family’s quiver, as “an army they’re building for God,” writes Kathryn Joyce in her book Quiverfull.

Sure, there is probably a difference between children raised in strict, isolationist groups and the children of social media tradwives, but it’s hard to tell what the difference really is, since we really don’t know what the reality behind the camera really looks like.

As someone who cares about the rights of children, promoting a lifestyle that is so potentially harmful for children, that manipulates, isolates, and literally uses them as fodder in a metaphorical war, is super problematic to say the least.

Let’s not let Trad Wives own homeschooling

I feel so strongly that the progressive left needs to take back homeschooling and unschooling.

I think we need to reckon with the fact we are and have been very reliant on the political right for support around homeschooling. We owe a lot of the freedoms to them, in fact, in the US at least. This feels very uncomfortable.

But it needs to be reckoned with. And it can be changed.

I really do see the humanity in women who choose to be traditional wives, or internet tradwives. I see what they’re doing, and part of me understands why they’re doing it. I don’t love the ogling and hate-following that happens online.

And.. I do think that even if women have their own personal reasons for it, the underlying political current cannot be ignored. If we want to resist being a pawn in someone else’s game, we need to truly understand what we are taking part in as women, mothers, wives.

We need to look more closely, and also zoom out more, when we are writing, speaking or posting publicly as home educators who are progressive or left-wing. We need to be more explicit about the reasons we homeschool, check that the words we use are not actually right-wing dogwhistles; and I know this might be tough or uncomfortable for many - but I think we need to stop being so neutral and apolitical all the time because often, that just means we get lumped in with the loudest voices, and those voices right now seem to take us all down the same pipeline - towards the Christian right.

And lastly, I believe we need to be more explicit about home education and unschooling as a movement in support of children’s rights and collective liberation. Only then will we be able to positively link homeschooling to the rights of children rather than the power of parents. Ultimately, the wellbeing and autonomy of young people needs to come before ideology and aesthetics.

If you got to the end of this essay, THANK YOU for reading. And even if you didn’t, thank you anyway for being here. I’m going to be posting twice monthly going forward because I’ve realised I do better when I go deep and long and less frequent, than when I write more frequent, short posts.

I hope you will stick around, I love and appreciate each and every one of you!