The truth about trad wives

Or how I didn't spend hours on white nationalist dating sites so people could think this is a cutesy trend

Happy Saturday everyone! The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and I’m writing about far-right subcultures on the weekend. Do I need to get a life? Potentially…

This morning I was reading The Times and came across a feature titled I swapped my career for life as a traditional wife (for a week) by the journalist Harriet Walker. The article shows her living trad for a week, cooking and cleaning, get her hair done, while her husband takes a break from school pick-up.

It’s one of many comments I have seen in recent weeks about the rise of tradwifery, referred to in this article as a “new social media trend” and I guess if more than a decade old means new, then that is one way to describe it? The chat has been focused on the aesthetics of tradtok, the long frilly dresses and the “choice” of women to turn their back on feminism and its demands to “have/do it all”, and go back to traditional values which oh just so happen to be female submission and subservience to male authority. Take that feminism! Women didn’t like you after all!

But trad culture is not a new social media trend, it is not about frilly dresses, and it’s not about exhausted women wistfully looking at stay-at-home-motherhood (as if being a mum is not exhausting in itself). It is a subculture with its roots firmly in the far right - a subculture built on white baby challenges, natalism, and the normalisation of male superiority, with violent consequences.

When I first started researching the trad wife subculture for my book Bodies Under Siege, I came across a meme that compared a feminist with a trad wife. The feminist was chubby from eating ready meals, and wore so much fake tan “she looked Mexican”, and had casual sex but only with “black men”. In contrast, the trad wife has a “light tan” from all the time she spends outside on the homestead, “loves her natural face and only wears light make-up”, she “loves her family, race and country in that order’” and is “knowledgeable about her European roots”. This is the crucial bit: trad wifedom is racialised as much as it is sexualised. Its roots are in a white supremacist culture where the perfect woman is white, pregnant, and domestic.

With the meme as my starting point, I looked into the world of Ayla Stewart - the OG trad influencer whose social media account Wife With A Purpose won her international fame in far-right circles. Stewart was so prominent, that she was one of the few women invited to speak at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, where thousands of far-right and neo-Nazi activists marched with flaming tiki torches, and where the anti-fascist Heather Heyer was killed by a man ramming the counter-protest with his car. Stewart had pulled out prior to the event due to security concerns.

Through her Instagram posts, the Wife With A Purpose showcased a picture-perfect trad lifestyle: soft focus shots of Stewart with her six children, all healthy and outdoorsy. But she really became prominent when she launched her “white baby challenge”, exhorting her followers to try and have as many white babies as she had.

The challenge was a response to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory: the false notion popular on the far right that a “white genocide” is happening, with white people in the Global North being replaced by migrant people from the Global South, with feminists aiding replacement by repressing the white birth rate through abortion and contraception. Far right terrorists talk about the “birth rates” and women’s “selfish individualism” as fuelling this non-existent genocide. In contrast, white women can show their commitment to their race by unselfishly having as many children as possible – and unselfishly giving up their rights and being ruled by their husbands.

Stewart’s challenge took off - I saw women in trad circles saying they would be having six babies which is “above replacement rates”.

Trad wife culture got its own matchmaking service when one white supremacist woman realised “Whites could need a Europid-only dating site to bring awakened White men and women together to build families and make White babies”. The white nationalist dating site promoted “traditional gender roles, new modesty and femininity for the ladies, neo-patriarchic [sic] structures, homesteading, inter-generational lifestyle, building of White communities and pro-White business, refusing degeneracy to rediscover wholesome values and practices.” It declared that its members "follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game. Wisely.”

When I was doing research on this website, men outnumbered women 10 to one on the site, with many demanding trad wives to live on the homestead.

The links between tradwifery and white supremacy/Great replacement conspiracy are one part of the picture, when it comes to showing how this subculture is rooted in the far right. The second is in the normalisation of domestic and sexual abuse.

To understand this, we need to dig a little bit into women’s position in the fascistic notion of the natural order.

In fascism, the natural order is the founding notion that humans are governed by nature - not society or rationality - with fascism determined to rollback human progress and return humanity to its natural state. And it just so happens that this natural state is one where women, black and global majority people are inferior, white men are superior, and LGBTIQ people don’t exist.

In this natural order, women are subservient to the patriarchal authority of the husband, father, and - let’s call it what it is - Fuhrer. A woman’s purpose is to be a wife and a mother. And in that purpose, she is designated as male property. Her role is to be the womb of the nation, producing white babies for the white race.

What this translates to in the far-right trad wife culture is the demand that women are totally subservient to their husbands. This means that they have to have sex when he wants. It means if she transgresses, he can “discipline” her. Trad wife forums discuss how discipline can involve spanking, even with a cane, making the wife stand alone in the corner, and writing lines. And it means women cannot have any financial control - not only do they not work, but they do not have money of their own. Domestic abuse, in other words.

This treatment of women meets a key far-right aim. This is a political movement that wants to get rid of any protections for women against domestic abuse - look at Putin’s laws, and Trump’s changes to domestic abuse definitions when he was in office. Far right activists in Europe worked hard to prevent the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, and the far-right Vox Party had in its plan for Spain an end to the gender-based violence laws. They want the state out of the home, and that includes any legal rights for women not to be raped or beaten by their husbands.

This aim is played out in trad culture, where women are actively encouraged to redefine violence as discipline, coerced sex into being pleasing, and financial abuse as restoring men’s masculine power. In this latter point, trad wife culture overlaps with a growing emphasis in wellness culture: the power of the pure masculine and pure feminine, and the need for men’s masculinity to be shored up at all times.

In my research, I have spoken to women who went trad when joining the far-right, who described the loss of their self-esteem. “It made me really miserable,” one woman told me. “I would hear men say that women were like children.”

(that point is crucial when we want to understand the importance of men “disciplining” their wives, and the patriarchal authority in the home)

Nothing convinced me more of the far right violence associated with the trad movement than when I wrote about this issue for the Guardian last year. Two months after publication, the article was shared by far right influencers on Twitter and the abuse I received ended up with fake porn accounts being set up with my email address under the name “commie slut”. But please! Tell me again how this is a cute social media trend!

The other aspect I want to mention is abortion and contraception, both of which are not acceptable in trad land. Abortion and contraception are, after all, fuelling “white genocide”, but they are also symbolic of women’s rights to self-determination. Women cannot have true freedom and true liberation without control of their own fertility. In a world where women are subservient to men – the property of men – they therefore cannot be liberated, and cannot have bodily autonomy.

Again, there is a worrying cross-over here between trad and wellness culture, with increasing numbers of wellness influencers urging women away from contraception.

So how does it work? How does the far-right succeed in selling women a lifestyle that makes them vulnerable to abuse and financial control?

I have copied the following from my book, because I spent ages perfecting my argument there, and it makes sense just to share it direct, than rehash it:

The far-right trad movement tells women that they can give up the stresses and strains of progressive, modern society which demands women ‘have it all’ and instead be worshipped and adored as the sacred womb. It positions feminism as harmful to women’s happiness and portrays feminists as sluts who have lots of abortions, suffer from bad skin and hair, and are unhealthy and unhappy.

[…]

It’s easy to see how the far right’s adoration and applause promised to white women are incredibly potent and attractive. Who doesn’t want to be celebrated simply for existing? Who doesn’t want to be a goddess, especially when the alternative is working nine to five at a boring office or factory job, dating annoying men, and having to juggle work, family, and a million other responsibilities? Who doesn’t want to be applauded, adored, and revered? To be an ideal woman in the far right you don’t have to fight or work or engage in difficult conversations – you get to be special just by having a functioning womb. You simply have to be, because your value exists solely by virtue of having a female body.

[…]

The far right promises white women a privileged position in its movement. But the reality of being a revered body is that you are nothing more than a body – a reproductive vessel to exploit. As such, women hold a double role in the far right. Yes, they get to be the white goddess. But they also exist as objects which are only as valuable as their reproductive potential. The more I looked into the position of women in the far right, the more I was reminded of an Elizabeth Wurtzel quote: “He puts her on a pedestal and she goes down on it.”

So, to sum up.

Comments about the trad wife “new social media trend” (not new! more than a decade old!) that fail to understand its far-right roots and its links to white male supremacy are not only ignorant, they are dangerous. Living trad isn’t about baking pies in a frilly apron. It’s about white baby challenges, women being disciplined with “swats”, and white nationalism. That was not Walker’s experience, thankfully, as she lived trad for a week. But it is the reality.

(To learn more about trad wives, please read Julia Ebner’s excellent Going Dark)

Obligatory book plug

Like this post? You’ll love my book which has a WHOLE CHAPTER on trad wife life.

You can buy it direct from Verso with 20% off, or from all good bookshops.

Buy it now

What I’m loving

On Monday I’ll be publishing my first investigation with openDemocracy, which has been part of a pan-European effort to expose a global anti-abortion network.

You can read three of my European partners’ articles in Sweden, Poland and Croatia.

Anti-abortion international under the tutelage of the Kremlin. We are disclosing the emails of the group in which Ordo Iuris operates, by Klementyna Suchanow in Onet.

Secret Russian campaign behind meetings between Tidö politicians and Christian extremists, by Joakim Medin and Eigil Soderen in ETC

And in Croatia’s Novosti by Hrvoje Simicevic

Also a shout out to Martin Williams in openDemocracy on councils’ use of bailiffs:

Local councils call bailiffs over debts of just £3

What I’m writing

You’ll find out on Monday!

What I’m reading

I’ve been reading loads lately.

I finished The Variations by Patrick Langley which was just superb.

We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets, trans Emma Rault

Sugar, Baby by Celine Saintclare

The things we do to our friends, by Heather Darwent

Jaded by Ela Lee

None of this is true, by Lisa Jewell

I think that’s it?

Also reading books for work but can’t talk about that!

What I’m watching

I finally FINALLY finished Sex and the City. Also watched Slow Horses which is soooo good, even when you love the books, the tv series does not disappoint.

Well, as I was writing it started to pour down with rain, but now the sun is out again. Thanks for reading and remember: don’t fall for the trad wives trap!

Ciao ciao