Posted on 01/12/2024 10:01:39 AM PST by george76
For women who have observed the unhappy zero-sum battle of the sexes, many feel that the modern world, for all its promises, has failed them..
Hannah Neeleman, a Utah-based cattle farmer and mother of eight, is perhaps the most popular Instagram “tradwife” — a growing category of social media influencers who reject the not-so-traditional 9-to-5 workforce in favor of homeschooling their children, homemaking, or running a family business. Though her content is entirely wholesome, she (and other tradwife accounts) are not without controversy.
In the case of Ballerina Farm, followers recently uncovered that Daniel Neeleman, Hannah’s husband, is the son of the founder and former CEO of JetBlue, whose estimated net worth is $400 million.
Her kitchen stove, prominently featured in many of Hannah’s videos where she bakes sourdough bread, farm-raised beef, and other dishes, costs a minimum of $20,000. For those who laud their simple lifestyle as cattle farmers, many felt blindsided by the wealth enabling their smooth transition to homesteading. Afterall, starting a farm requires many high-cost purchases on the front end from the land, equipment, and animals, forcing many farmers into perpetual debt.
Yet Hannah and other tradwife accounts will easily maintain their prominence going into 2024. For many women, who increasingly report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” and disillusionment with the “girlboss” lifestyle, these influencers offer an idyllic alternative to urban life. They are illuminating a deeper hunger among women, especially among Generation Z.
A quick search on Google Trends shows that the term “tradwife” gained popularity in 2018 but peaked in 2020 as the pandemic accelerated women’s return to the home. Instead of being confined to religious or ultra-wealthy women, the tradwife movement entered mainstream discussions. It offered women the chance to reclaim the ingredients of happiness — faith, family, community, and meaningful work — back from the career-focused model they grew up with.
Popular online accounts (explored here and here) tend to show women who don the clothes and lifestyle that they perceive women in a previous era embodied: shirtwaist dresses, aprons, a rejection of formal work outside the home, and a heavy emphasis on homemaking and care for children.
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.
It’s worth considering why Gen Z women, who have the most professional opportunities and fewest barriers to education, work, and politics, would flock in large numbers to tradwife influencers. No doubt the online accounts are more intense in their expressions of femininity, homemaking, or anti-feminist sentiment than the average follower, but then, this is always the case with influencers.
For Gen Z women who have observed the unhappy zero-sum game that is the battle of the sexes, many feel that the modern world, for all its promises, has failed them. They’re looking for an older, and truer, model for how to live a good life. Or, as Carmel Richardson said, “There are too many elders who give bad advice about marriage and family. I am trying to become the matriarch I want to see in the world.”
Similarly, it’s worth asking why this movement provokes many others to mockery or disgust. As one influencer said, “What if their husband leaves them? Then how will they support themselves?” For women who grew up observing the impact of no-fault divorce, family breakdown, the sexual revolution, and the rigid careerism of the 1990s, it seems as though their plan for survival is to depend on no one, especially a man, to provide for them.
The exhaustion and subsequent disenchantment this has produced in Gen Z is enough to spark a counterrevolution.
The harm is not borne equally, either. As both Aaron Renn and Mary Harrington have pointed out, the current workforce has meant that for elite or upper-class women to work, they require other women, who would rather stay home with their own children, to serve as nannies and daycare workers just to make ends meet. Many tradwife accounts encourage women, insofar as they can, to return to their own homes and release poorer women from the expectation of handling their child care, cooking, or cleaning.
Notably, a Refinery29 article recognized this appeal for minority women: “Traditional marriage is the key to Black women’s liberation from being overworked, economic insecurity, and the stress of trying to survive in a world hostile to our survival and existence.” Implicit in the tradwife model, of course, is the financial and ideological support of a husband. It requires husband and wife to work together in distinct roles toward a shared vision — one that ideally allows each the margin to flourish in their given space. In this way, tradwives represent a sort of anti-fragility that, in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is not merely resilient in the face of difficulty, but grows stronger because of it.
At their best, tradwives require more of the men around them. Rather than trying to replace the men in their lives (father, husband, perhaps employer) when they fail, such tradwives hold them accountable to provide, protect, and grow within the family. Few things could sound scarier to a woman who has been failed by a man she thought she could trust through divorce, unfaithfulness, or abandonment. Nonetheless, many women are realizing that the happiness they desire requires reliance upon a husband and other family members to succeed.
Whether it’s a corporate girlie, an academic, or a tradwife, each dreams of and relies upon a wealthy patron to support the lifestyle she wants to live. While some tradwives denounce all work “outside the home,” many run small businesses, write or blog, and contrary to the Luddite stereotype, manage savvy social media influencer accounts. They take the time and flexibility that their lifestyle offers and seek creative uses of their time that bless their family, their community, and the causes they care about.
Certainly, some aspects of the tradwife movement range from alt-right pagan beliefs to unrealistic forms of live-action role-play. At the heart of it, however, is a positive attempt by many women to embrace marriage and motherhood.
Countercultural movements tend to overcorrect to provide the next generation of women with a moderate option between the two ideological extremes of careerism and the rejection of all “paid work.” For Gen Z, the result may be that women receive the flexibility and support to pursue a family and work amenable to their goals and the demands of each season.
The modern world didn’t fail them.
Their belief in modern feminism did.
Finally, something resembling a counterattack in the cultural wars.
“The kind you don’t take home to mother.”
Less a counterattack than a come-to-Jesus moment, I think. :-)
And I mean that with all due reverance.
Either their Dad wasn't present in the home or was making enough money to pay to have their cars and homes repaired.
Society SHOULD encourage young women to marry and have children and then start careers if they desire them once the children are older. If their goal is to have a family they really should prioritize this in the 20s, NOT their career.
Young women need to realize, that, like or not, your window to have a family is limited.. your window to work, is not.
Feminists (which really aren’t feminists truthfully) are feeding them abject lies. If your goal is to have a family and children, then this should be a priority in your younger years, not your career. There are always years to work and earn, the number of years you have to have children are limited.
How many women will be chameleon trad wife?
Transformation doesn’t happen usually overnight.
There will be a day when our civilization realizes the internet made the generations stupider, not smarter.
Fair
I believe we can thank Trannies for this crack in the left-political-feminist foundation.
They have literally made a mockery of women and old-school feminism. In our 21st century cultural revolution, as the freak show becomes a human tragedy, and radicals scream even louder, many normal people simply turn-off, or actively look for alternatives.
Bruce Jenner, take a bow!
On the flip side, they have zillions of quality how-to YouTube videos. Heck, I’m a super advanced DIYer, and I use them.
Ya, Daughter uses how-to You Tube, SIL....not so much.....
The Baby Boom. That was a trend. Soldiers returned from World War II and they witnessed terrible devastation in Europe and Asia. So they were ready to return home to get married and raise large families.
The human race has a lot of experience at the boy-girl thing, forming families, raising children and living a balanced, fulfilling life.
The modernist chaos — centered basically on selfishness, hedonism, ego gratification, and sexual promiscuity in all flavors — is nothing new. It is a complex of bad ideas that has broken out in many places from time to time. The current pied pipers of depravity wanted to sell the idea that birth control, the abortion license, and the welfare state made moral corruption safe, and they set out to embrace every ancient vice as fulfilling. They sought to invert the eternal moral standards, mock virtue, and exalt sin. And it was all a lie.
In the long run, lies will out. On my optimistic days, I have thought that the counterrevolution has been underway for some time. Perhaps our biggest problem is that government, the schools, and many of the churches have been coopted by the Enemy. We have a huge job of rebuilding to do. The biggest fault line is between those who have children and those who don’t — and those who don’t are desperate to get their hands on other people’s children.
I’m 70. My wife loves to say, in a southern hick voice, “My man can fix anything.” For the most part she’s right. And since my career was in IT, that includes new tech. But I’m not anything special. I’m a boomer. Most of us were taught how to rebuild a transmission, fix a lawn mower, fix leaky plumbing or reconnect the wires to the nuclear reactor correctly, etc.
Her younger female friends call me a renaissance man.🤣
the problem today, thanks to the open border cheap labor express neoCON scum, is that you have to be rich to have a stay at home wife/mother. The average family needs 2 incomes to get by. Esp. now thanks to traitor Joe’s inflation.
The feminist plan to focus on your career and screw hot guys in your 20s, then settle down with a “nice guy” in your 30s is failing.
Mostly because the nice guys are starting to resist being used as plan Bs, and rightly so.
MY first house cost me $25,250.
SHE HAS A $20,000 STOVE???????????
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