Posted on 03/15/2023 1:58:43 PM PDT by george76
It started with young women half-joking about being angry with the feminist movement for “liberating” women so they now have to get up to go to work to pay their own bills.
The BBC made a skit off the back of this complaint that, while meant as a joke, ended up being a perfect way that described how many women felt about their “liberation.” They say the left can’t meme, but this skit proves they can do so ironically.
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Then a trend on TikTok began emerging that gained traction very quickly. It was women simply posting their daily lives as traditional housewives. They cooked, they cleaned, they looked nice for their breadwinning husband, and they took care of the children during the day.
It’s a trend being called “tradwife.”
As you can see in some of the TikToks, there are quite a bit of aesthetic choices taken from the 1950s, from the hairstyles to the manner of dress.
You know in the western world of the modern day, this wasn’t going to fly with many, many people, namely women. The reasons are varied. Some are wives who don’t want their husbands to see a woman doing something that would make them look bad or set “unrealistic expectations” about their marriage while some called this TikTok content a “kink.”
But for feminists, this trend is dangerous because it invites a return to the sexism and racism of old. As Fox News reported, various mainstream publications have now jumped on the trend, attempting to discredit and excoriate it as evil:
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according to the young women who .. may accept the “ultra-traditional” role that the woman’s place is in the home, they aren’t saying that other women need to follow their lead. They just chose this for themselves, especially after work/life balance became hard to maintain in the post-COVID age.
However, the media is acting as if this is a contagion that needs to be suppressed and destroyed ASAP. People on TikTok are going after these women as if they were social pariahs, denouncing and belittling them at every turn.
While I won’t deny that there are some performative aspects to this growing TikTok trend, as I suspect everything on TikTok to be at least a little theatrical, I don’t see these women looking down on others for not being like them. Moreover, I don’t see them spreading or endorsing any kind of evil. There are bad apples in every tree, but I haven’t seen enough to convince me this is the breeding ground of racism and bigotry like some have claimed.
The question I have to ask is why these people are reacting so negatively to this traditional wife trend.
The answers are nuanced from group to group, but they all share the common thread of being threatened by these women. Why are these women so threatening?
Because men, for the most part, love the idea of a traditional wife, and for many young women, being in a committed relationship is one of their heart’s greatest desires. If they find out that this is what men like, then they’ll begin the process of making themselves into more traditional women.
And more traditional women don’t really have too much time for feminist ideals, and women who don’t have time for feminist ideals don’t tend to be easily swayed to advocate for certain political policies. It’s definitely a lot harder to instill those political positions into their children as well.
When the mainstream left and its feminist allies say there’s a danger…that’s the danger.
At the end of the day, the choice to be a traditional housewife or a working woman is up to the individual. Every choice has its pros and its cons and each person handles these aspects differently.
But there is no denying that traditionalism when it comes to homemaking has a particular magic to it that seems fulfilling. Men love being breadwinners and having loving, caring wives. Women want to feel safe, provided for, and admired. The nuclear family scratches all of these itches and traditionalism seems to intensify the validation for a growing number of women.
Exactly. Sewing machine patents expired in the 1880s so by the mid-1890s, you could get a generic “Kenmore” type sewing machine from Sears for $7-14 (portable vs treadle cabinet), so 2-3 weeks pay for a manual laborer.
You don’t need to tell me, and someone else has already told the poster I was quoting.
now we just need the boys to follow and become trad-husbands...you know, breadwinner, breeder, fixes things at home...
The answer is to move. If the place you live is too expensive move to a cheaper area. Yes, been there done that.
“There were sewing machines 100 to 150 years ago”
Not with motors and they probably were very expensive. They were human/treadle powered
At this point they would just replace women who drop out with more illegal immigration, further stagnating wages.
Close the border, start deportation and as wages rise, more women will go part time or go home entirely.
When women enterer the work force, it immediately began the devaluation of all all labor by increasing the supply, and has given us the world we live in today where it takes two salaries to have the things that one salary provided many years ago. That’s basic economics.
Subsequently, were all women to leave the workforce, it would double the value of labor, and there would be no room or use for all the useless social engineering filler jobs corporate America is infested with today. The demand for workers would shift to jobs that add real value and production.
Productivity, meaning the actual production of goods and service per worker, would nearly double as well.
If that exit happened en mass, and woman returned to the levels and roles thy filled in my parents generation, after some initial chaos, adjustments in priorities would happen, and our civilization would thrive, exponentially.
And nearly everyone would be happier.
Trade wife? Plumber? HVAC? This has possibilities.
Most men want their wives to work and bring home an income.
It's been that way for 40-plus years.
Most men would run the other way, if a woman said she wanted to be a traditional wife.
Same here. It's been that way since the 1980's, at least.
My wife quit the workforce with the birth of our first child. Couldn't imagine raising five children without her at home.
I am good with women going either the career route or the traditional route. They should have the right to choose.
Where my hackles go up is when they change their mind AFTER the vows, a few years into the marriage. You know, once the house has been purchased and maybe a kid has already been born.
It is bad either way.
Our bad was my wife who had a degree in interior design, who managed her family owned lighting store, who had it all arranged to have a nursery at the store arbitrarily decided that she wanted to be a stay at home mom. I made about 60% of our income. Her staying at home meant selling the house and moving into a really not good neighborhood, going down to one vehicle and a bunch of other draconian cost cutting measures that I wasn’t thrilled about and she somehow didn’t think were necessary. You see, all I had to do was ask my boss for a double-my-salary raise and if he didn’t give me one, find another job that paid twice as much. That’s all.
Well, the good Lord intervened. Before my son was born her father, who owned the store, announced he was divorcing her mom and, because he didn’t want my wife to be caught in the crossfire, he fired her. So she got unemployment for a while and then when that was about to run out a friend asked if, since she was “stuck at home anyway” could she watch her baby as well? Before you could say “entrepreneur” my wife was running an in-home day care and making more than she had been at her other job. Crisis solved.
But when a wife tells you she wants to be a stay a home mom before the marriage, has kids, and THEN decides she wants to have a career...that can be marriage ending.
Forget the “Daddy Day Care” and “Mr. Mom” crap. Unless she has serious earning potential, that ain’t happening. My son is going through a bit of this. His wife had a double major in psychology and criminology, magnum cum laude, and at one point wanted to get into the FBI, but discovered that wasn’t going to happen. After a few years doing administrative work, staying home with the baby full time seemed like a good deal. Fast forward five years. They are still living in an apartment because houses are stupid expensive and even with one good salary a $350K house (average for this area and hard to find right now) would be a stretch. She is stir-crazy and wants to get a job. Oh, and she’s pregnant. Yep, these aren’t emotional discussions at all...oh no...
Housework was hard work back then.
Men have always been that way.
When working and taking on responsibility is the only way to “get” a woman, that’s what they do.
Women have always, and will always be the single driver of men’s motivation.
When there are none, or vanishingly small chances, of getting a woman who will be loyal, and respect you for your work and responsible behavior, there is no motivation for either.
Women control it all. They could change it any time they wanted to.
37 years or so ago, I asked a girl to marry me. Before saying yes she asked if she could be a stay at home mom when the time came even though she had better career potential than I did at the time.
Of course I said yes. It was challenging at times, tough at others but we have no regrets.
It’s the way it should be.
They won’t, until they have motivation to do so.
ONLY women can give them that.
This is an excellent and relevant point.
Then get a smaller house.
My income is just a bit over median yet we did it. We lost all equity in the last recession and had to move to get a job since I also lost my job. Essentially we started over.
Smaller house in a higher cost area.
You do what you need to for what’s important.
Back in college, an economics professor told us that, when more households became two-income, the disposable income increased per household, which led to an increase in the cost of living, to the point where all households had to become two-income.
With that said, for generations, many wives in lower-income families worked outside the home. They worked in factories and cleaned houses and cared for other people's children. The middle-income and upper-income wives, who never had to work, were the ones who started talking about "liberation." They probably weren't thinking of the back-breaking work that lower-income wives wished they didn't have to do.
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