Trad Wives, Submission, and Staying Unhappy

“It is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others].” - Beauvoir

I am certain the Instagram algorithm is trolling me. I open the app, hoping to come across that British brother-sister duo who choreograph songs as pretend background singers, and instead I’m greeted by a woman showing off the outfit she bought with her “dress allowance,” money given to her by her husband to spend on clothing.

Yes, this is the Trad Wife phenomenon, the public reemergence of glossy gender roles in which women perform permanent domestic labor while their husbands work outside the home. To varying degrees, decisions about disciplines, sex, and finances are the auspices of the man.

Instead of presenting this form of life as degrading and humiliating (women are given an allowance?!) we are fed manicured images of a new kind of freedom. We, women, are told that feminism has sold us a lie. We were promised the moon and instead we got overworked and underpaid. We traded baking sourdough for excel sheets and daycare. It was a bad trade, and we should reclaim what is rightfully ours – domesticity.

What in the Anne Sexton is going on here?

Now, if you lived through any form of evangelicalism you’re likely shocked by this development. Evangelical women know all about imbibing theologies that justify domestic abuse in emotional, physical, and economic forms through the biographies of women like Elisabeth Eliot, who we later (and unsurprisingly) learned suffered intensely as a result. The idea that Trad Wife life promises to eliminate suffering is utterly baffling to me, as fellow raised-evangelical Laura Robinson pointed out in this insightful piece about Elliot’s terrifying marriages. Even the Bible, not a paragon of feminist virtue knows that submission to men is a curse.

I was listening to What’s Left of Philosophy where Manon Garcia points out that the whole business is a grift. Social media creation is a job that produces revenue and these are business women who are removing themselves from the sphere of domestic labor in order to produce the propaganda of domestic labor. We may also wonder how much husbands are involved in filming these domestic films, effectively becoming the employees of their Trad Wives.

But I find this new turn towards the propaganda of domestic submission fascinating for another reason. We are no longer talking about suffering that comes within the crucible of dying towards yourself as part of submitting in a Christ-like partnership. Of course, these women censor domestic violence, the horror of having sex when you don’t want to (and rape), and the psychological weight of denying one’s desires. Instead, we get something closer to a labor contract. Or sex work. Take your pick, depending on your scruples.

Monica Hesse at the Washington Post was the first person who helped me make this connection. She noticed the Trad Wife phenomenon wife popping up in other places, namely the “marry a rich husband” turn, in which young women were setting themselves up to marry rich, older men, thereby securing the futures they wanted without the costly, backbreaking decades of labor in-between. It was a shortcut to a desired future, using patriarchy to get where you wanted to be.

Hesse I think rightly names that in the midst of this mess is a desire for leisure, for something beyond the striving, endless, grinding labor that dictates human existence. “What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism” she muses, “— specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline?”

The exception I take with Hesse is that I have little interest in what she calls “feminine leisure.” I don’t especially want to brush my hair one hundred times a day nor do I desire to stretch out into a thirty-part skin care routine. I would, however, like time to write, and I would like to write when I am not exhausted as I am doing now, which is, frankly, the only time I write.

Choosing Submission?
The promise of the Trad Wife phenomenon is happiness, contentment, and freedom. To me, it is ludicrous that a woman with any knowledge of history, any access to statistics, any working knowledge of at least a handful of men would entrust to a man a contract of this scope and with this little recourse for correction.

But giving the benefit of the huge doubt, how can we understand women who say they have chosen their submission in this way? And does this life actually make women happy? (Sans Anne Sexton, of course.)

Here I’m turning to Manon Garcia’s We Are Not Born Submissive to try and understand what is going on. Garcia narrates Beauvoir’s The Second Sex where we discover “being a woman is different from being a man not because there is an essential difference between human males and human females but because men and women are not situated in the same way in society and thus cannot exert their freedom in the same way.” Society prescribes certain ways of life that exert themselves on women, and those particular ways of life define what it means to be a woman. “Our being always already had a meaning and a norm.”

One of the Trad Wife responses I see floating around is “well, let her do what she wants. That’s feminism, right?” I’ve seen this on Trad Wife content itself. A woman, once again twirling in a dress, writes a long caption explaining that her husband believed it was his duty to give her the life she wanted. If she wanted to stay at home and do their laundry, then he should make that happen. Feminism!

But the gift of feminism is to examine why women believe that they can freely desire a life of submission while assuming this form of life is not only desirable but natural. Feminists like me will say - desire itself is created. Garcia gives this example: when a mechanic is a passenger in my car and notices a problem it’s not because he’s naturally better at noticing car troubles. He’s been trained to listen for a certain rattle under the dashboard. In the same way, I am not naturally better at organizing children’s schedules, but I am trained to do so by literally every school, activity, doctor, and sport’s team who direct communication to me first, despite both parents’ number being listed on every form. It would be no surprise to imagine, “wow, I’m naturally very good at this,” even to derive pleasure from feeling good about my ability to do this well, long before I can articulate the question “do I like this?”

What is a woman? Whatever the masculine world constructs my life to be. Women’s entire lives are shaped this way, and they are constructed generationally. An example: I was talking to a woman who had complained to her mother-in-law about her husband’s inattention to the messiness of their home. The MIL laughed and said that men were naturally less attentive to house care. In reality, the MIL had raised her son to see it as a woman’s natural response to be attentive to the home, thereby passing along the expectation that this is women’s work. The pattern repeated itself in her daughter-in-law’s home.

Per the example above, heterosexual relationships are the primary locus of submission because of the vast array of socially formed labor women take up, including objectifying sexual relations, which girls learn are there purview as soon as they hit puberty, take place in the intimacy of these relationships. Girls go from having unproblematic relationships to our bodies to quickly realizing there is something dangerous and menacing about our flesh, and that danger also endangers us, and this relation outweighs all other relations to our bodies.

But what are we to make of chosen submission? Is submission a choice? Garcia brings into conversation the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen who discusses the ways in which “individuals adapt their preferences and the evaluation of their wellbeing to the situation in which they find themselves.” She offers her study of women in rural Indian, who because of extreme food deprivation, convince themselves they have virtually no nutritional needs. In other words, the women report they are well – they believe they are fine - eating virtually nothing. They have adapted their preference even though their preference is objectively harmful (everyone has the same basic nutritional needs).

This gets us back to the labor contract analogy. Trad wife propaganda promises stability, financial well-being, and emotional wellness. The most gut-wrenching version I witnessed was a Black woman who said that, after years of “fighting her place” in her marriage she was ready to submit to her husband and for their marriage “to heal.” Adaptive preferences, indeed.

Staying Unhappy
The promise of Trad Wife life, in the stay-at-home-girlfriend version to the homeschooling mom of twelve with the immaculate kitchen is happiness. Clearly these promises cannot be fulfilled. The husband becomes disabled and can’t work, is an alcoholic, develops a mental illness, is abusive, leaves the marriage, cheats – there are countless scenarios that threaten this possibility. And imagine what happens if illness or disability befalls the wife. These are white, upper-middle class, ableist dreams, deeply entrenched in a wide variety of supremacist ideologies. But even at its most attainable, the happiness promised is an adaptive preference, women who are formed by a patriarchal world to perform in certain ways and then call this happiness.  

Sara Ahmed, the incredible feminist theorist, is suspicious of happiness. “It is a loop,” she writes, “we are directed by what is in front of us; what is in front of us depends on how we are directed. And it is here we can think of how happiness is itself understood as a path.” Ahmed describes women’s lives as trapped in a kind of gender fatalism. Girls will be girls. Your wedding will be the happiest day of your life. There is a way; these are directives. If you want happiness, follow the path. You feel pressed, pressured. Do this or you will not be happy:

“Maybe then, maybe then, if you start going in the right direction you experience a relief of pressure. You feel a lessening, a reduction or removal of pressure, as when a hand that was holding you down is gradually withdrawn. You might go faster as your passage is eased. Eventually you are going that way of your own accord. When you no longer have to be pushed, in order to proceed in that direction, you do not experience yourself as having been pushed.”

This is, as we know, also the domain of boys, of trans people, of queer people. You should play sports because we want you to avoid being called soft, so you can make friends. You can’t wear dresses because others will make fun of you, will ostracize you. A queer life will be a hard life and we want your happiness. Ahmed writes, “not to want your children to be unhappy can mean in translation: not to want them to deviate from the well- trodden paths.”

In her “Feminist Killjoy Manifesto” in Living a Feminist Life Ahmed offer us this as a guiding meditation:

We must stay unhappy with this world. The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, some of which I discussed in chapter 2 (see also Ahmed 2010). Happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods. As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely, “It is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others].” Not to agree to stay in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is wished for. To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon.

We don’t want to be a part of a world, Ahmed writes, that assigns people like us as killjoys because we resist it. We pronounce our judgment on this project. And with Ahmed, “I am willing to cause unhappiness.”