Being a Tradwife Sounds Boring as Hell

The Problem That Has No Name gets a squad of new cheerleaders on TikTok

The Stepford Wives (1975)/ Palomar Pictures/ Columbia Pictures

I’ve been seeing a lot of tradwife discourse on social media lately, and it’s been driving me a little nuts. 

Tradwife– “traditional wife”-- describes the lifestyle of a married woman who does not earn money outside of the house and whose primary job is to stay home and cook, clean, raise the children, and otherwise manage the household, which is financed entirely by the earnings of a male breadwinner. She does not deign to consider her own career; her highest purpose is homemaking, and from her sparkling dream kitchen will not entertain the possibility that her choices could backfire. 

“Tradwife” content rarely shows the unvarnished reality of actual full-time mothers and homemakers; the women promoting this lifestyle are almost always young, thin, beautiful, often but not always white, wearing a full face of makeup, and they spend their days apparently baking cakes and teaching colorful homeschool lessons with their beautiful, well-behaved children. The message is: stressed, frazzled, lost career women in your early 20’s, join us, step into your full potential as a woman, never have to work again, and all you’ll need to give up is your financial independence and your identity, and submit entirely to providing your husband with a beautiful home and babies, babies, babies. And men: isn’t this what you want?

I can see the appeal of tradwifery as presented on TikTok, Instagram, and on a very poorly written and edited conservative ladymag I recently discovered called “Evie.” In the version the young and impressionable are being fed, to stay home with kids is to live a life of serenity and leisure. It’s a privilege. Really, any woman who can do it, should. But it falls apart under some light scrutiny. 

First of all, tradwifery is a bad bet, purely by the numbers. Plenty of women over the age of thirty have refuted some of the most glaring problems with this promise– despite the fact that the unpaid labor of motherhood is essential, tradwifery is an economically foolish bet because it is unpaid. Unless you and your husband come to a radical agreement wherein you receive deposits from his paycheck into an IRA or 401K in your name to financially compensate your labor, you will emerge from your homemaking career having earned zero dollars. 

Research shows that any woman leaving the workforce for any period of time after having children will substantially impact her future earning potential beyond any money they could save on childcare in the short term. Leaving the workforce permanently (or never entering it in the first place) renders her completely financially dependent on her husband, who might do something shitty like divorce her or die. A woman with a several-years-long gap in her resume will have difficulty re-entering the workforce. A woman who never had a job or developed any skills employers consider marketable faces near-impossible odds. To be a tradwife is, economically speaking, to spend your life savings to build a dream home in a floodplain. 

I haven’t seen much talk about another reason that young women should think twice before they buy into the tradwife lifestyle: you might absolutely hate it.

Staying home and taking care of kids and cooking and cleaning is boring and repetitive. It is a job. It’s hard. It requires effort and labor. If it’s the wrong job for you, you’re going to find it very fucking terrible and probably boring as hell, like becomming an accountant if you hate Microsoft Excel. You might even hate it sometimes if it’s the right job for you. The notion that all or even most women would be happy doing this one job is one of the stupidest thoughts I’ve ever entertained. 

When I was 15, I received a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique for Christmas, because I’d asked for it. I didn’t know anything about second-wave feminism, nor did I have any idea what the subject matter of the book was. I had heard it mentioned as part of a throwaway joke in a movie I’d seen at a sleepover, in the context of being an essential feminist text. 

The only thing I knew about feminism at the time was that my mom called herself a feminist, and that when I read the chapter on birth control in the confirmation text book I was issued at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, I got annoyed at the audacity of a male virgin-run organization dictating the health care decisions of fertile women. 

But I dutifully read The Feminine Mystique cover-to-cover anyway, like a baby, with no lived experience to help me relate to the plight of Friedan’s subjects– privileged American housewives of the 1950’s who were finding that being confined by default to the role of homemaker was bumming a lot of them out. They’d done everything right– trying hard in school, going to a decent college, meeting an upwardly mobile man, marrying him, and spending the rest of their soft bright years birthing and caring for children, cleaning the house over and over, day drinking and/or zonked out on quaaludes. These women didn’t have anything to worry about, but then again- they didn’t have anything to worry about. And they were as unhappy as kittens in cages. 

We only have part time child care; I am the child care for the other part of the time during the week. I’m also very pregnant; third trimester heaviness and fatigue has set in much sooner with this one than it did with my first. I also have a full-time job, which means that on the weekdays that I am home with my daughter, I wake up early and work, and stay up late and work, so that I can get my work done, pregnantly.

I find myself looking forward to the times I can steal away to get some writing done. When I go several days in a row without being productive, I start to feel myself sink into mild ennui. When I’m done working, I look forward to hanging out with my daughter. When I put my daughter to bed or drop her off with her caregiver, I look forward to working. The circle of life. 

My husband also has a full-time job, but has less flexibility than I do, which means that it’s my schedule that bends to the limitations of our child care provider. If it’s a holiday or unexpected sick day, figuring out how to handle our bright (needy) two-year-old is on me. I take her during the awkward gap time between when standard childcare hours end and the standard workday ends.

Sometimes I’m able to sneak in 15 minutes here and there when she hyperfixates on things two year olds hyperfixate on, like coloring an entire sheet of paper purple or watching the Daniel Tiger potty episode. When she naps, I clean, otherwise our home would devolve into hoarder’s nest chaos. When my husband gets home from work, the first thing he does is “tag in” to either take her on a walk or play with her, so that I can take a few minutes to decompress. I used to derive a lot of joy from cooking dinner (some aspects of tradwifery are fun); now, by the end of the day, I’m too tired or work is too urgent, and so Josh usually takes care of both prep and clean up. We don’t have family nearby to shovel pass her off to from time to time; it’s just us. 

When I'm on kid duty all day, I’m not putting on makeup and frilly aprons and doing my hair (my daughter cries when I pull it back into a ponytail, so the only way to avoid a tantrum at the moment is to wear it down). I’m doing the bare minimum required to leave the house without somebody calling the police or CPS over my appearance. I’m not floating around the kitchen baking fruit pies. I’m not coming up with toddler-friendly ways to have my child help me scrub the bathroom grout. I’m trying to understand the rules of whatever weird little game she wants to play, hounding her about potty training, taking her to the park, packing snacks, unpacking snacks, trying to convince her to eat lunch, trying to prevent her from hurting herself. I’m doing laundry and wiping up mysterious sticky spots that appear on the linoleum. I’m taking dishes out of the cupboard, putting food on the dishes, putting the dishes in front of the child, trying to convince her to eat the food, giving up, washing her hands and face, eating her leftover food.

This isn’t to say that I have it as bad or worse than anybody else. It’s not a contest. I’m familiar with the daily challenges and responsibilities trying to work while also being the primary caregiver for a small kid, of trying to keep up with the demands of a house when I share said house with a person whose main contribution is filling its walls with innocent laughter and spreading chaos and destruction on everything the light touches. I used to feel like trying to do both was making me subpar at both; I now see that without both, I’d be incomplete.

Like many American mothers, I’ve entertained the thought of quitting my job. I’ve thought about it glancingly, in the same way I’ve thought about other things I’m not going to do in the near term, like go to graduate school or read Ulysses or learn to play Settlers of Cattan or get caught up on the show Grey’s Anatomy. When my thought experiment tries to formulate what a typical morning as Suzy Homemaker would look for me, nothing materializes. Is there a universe where the job of stay at home parent could possibly bring me fulfillment? What if everything was always taken care of financially and I never had to worry about needing anything? Would that make me happy? No. I’d be so bored! I love my daughter and I’ll love my second child when she gets here, but loving something doesn’t mean that hanging out with them 24/7 provides the mental stimulation necessary to feel like a complete person. 

Of course being a homemaker is legitimate work. It is a very specific type of work that can provide fulfillment to a very specific type of person, like any job. It’s necessary work that must be done in order for many homes (and the economy at large) to function. But is it fair to say that if one doesn’t find it fulfilling, there’s something wrong with her? Or that any woman stressed out by her shitty corporate job would find tradwifery to be a relief? That quitting one’s job in order to stay home and look after children will be a good and mentally stimulating move? That most people wouldn’t be Betty Friedan-style bored out of her mind if their main company for most of their waking hours was a person who can’t wipe their own butt and whose primary mode of communication was to shout out the names of various snacks? 

Imagine if there were a TikTok tradwife-like push directed toward young, unfulfilled men. Let’s call it “tradfarming.” It’d be a little corner of Instagram and, I don’t know, Reddit, where men in their mid-twenties, all of whom look like Chris Hemsworth, would show how much happier every man’s life would be if he quit his job working in an office and devoted himself full-time to the art of pleasure farming the family’s food supply while his wife works outside of the home earning money to pay the mortgage day care bills.

These tradfarmers would only showcase moments harvested from the most camera-friendly parts of farming– picking a heavy red tomato directly off the vine, using a pocket knife to cut off a slice, and letting the juice dribble into his chin stubble as he took a bite. Being greeted by a trio of cotton-white lambs at the door of the pen. Riding a horse shirtless across a field at sunset. Counting baby chicks. A time-elapse video of their gut rehab of the barn, from totally cheugy to a literal interpretation of modern farmhouse style. Wearing impeccable fashion, natch.

Be a man; quit your job and farm and look hot doing it, would be the message of tradfarming influencers. We’d never see the viscid carnage left by an owl that had gotten access to the chicken roost, or watched the farmer slip and land hand-and-butt-first in a pile of cow shit, or have the eggplants beset by dreaded black and white striped Colorado potato beetles. We’d never see chicken butchering day. We’d never witness the drudgery of hand-thinning a row of carrot seedlings, weeding, the backbreaking work of harvesting everything by hand (the traditional way!) or carving up the carcass of a steer. Tradfarmers, like tradwives, would always be clean, happy, and sexy. Never covered in blood or shit. 

For signal boost purposes, we’d have a small army of female podcasters in what would be known as the “womanosphere” releasing episode after episode of content directed at men, telling them that unless they acted more like “traditional men” they’d die alone with their Playstations. When a contingent of men would counter that they were actually happy being single with their Playstations, the womanosphere would tell them that they were lying. 

It’s all very silly. Eventually we’ll learn if the tradwife trend is a coordinated misinformation campaign by some sort of digital Phyllis Schlafly-like entity or an accident of the world’s stupidest people cosplaying a Disneyland version of domestic labor because it gets them attention. But in the meantime, if you’re a woman daydreaming about quitting your job to embrace the quiet of home life, consider the fact that you might find it intolerably boring. Because much of it is. Betty Friedan wrote a whole book about it.