The Algorithmic Housewife: Tradwife Culture, Freedom and Feminism

A few years ago, my elderly neighbor, who was like a grandma to me, told me about her life. She was a mom to 5 boys, well boys to her, as they were as old as my dad at that point. She would give me the occasional life advice when we met in our yard and bring home made Halloween treats for my boys every year.

One thing Rosemary would also do was to check in on me once in a while and make sure to admonish me if I was not making time to go vote in the local or national elections, “It’s your voice and your duty in this civic engagement.” She would sound exasperated as she would speak to me from across my kitchen island.

From her, I learned a lot about American life, and most importantly, about the lives of women. She would tell me that women in the 50’s and 60’s would go to colleges where they would major in Home Economics.

As a legitimate academic field Home Economics broadly had courses on nutrition, education, sewing, knitting, consumer science, family studies, etc. But this discipline had emerged from the cultural traditions and went on to reinforce domestic expectations of the times.

Home Economics prepared a woman for the pivotal and default role of her life – cooking, cleaning and childcare. Basically, even in schools, girls were attending lessons where they were being taught how to be a good housewife. Read the article HERE.

Some of the more independent women of those times went on to become secretaries or clerical workers and marry a little later than their home maker friends.

My grandma was married at age 10 in 1946. Overnight she became a homemaker and went on to have 10 children out of whom 8 survived. She never took finance or project management lessons, but boy, did she raise that army well.

Historically, the role of man and woman has been evolving across the past few generations. In the early 20th century, when wars happened and men were sent to the front lines, women had to go to factories and start working.

Society saw changes with the women’s suffrage movement where women won the vote for the first time. And then there was the 1968 Miss America protest, where women placed bras and other items they associated with women’s oppression into a “Freedom Trash Can” and burned them.

Of course, cigarette companies took advantage of these movements to sell women freedom as something “aspirational”. Corporate America learned to monetize the idea of liberation by putting a cigarette on the lips of a woman. Whether it actually furthered the cause of liberation is another story.

A few years ago, when I stumbled upon this 1950’s guide to be a great wife, I chuckled to myself. I wrote about it because I didn’t want this historical artifact to get lost in the world of our digital debris. Also, more because I wanted us to remember how our own mothers and grandmothers lived.

The times were different, and women didn’t have a global map of what they could be doing with their autonomy and their individual freedom of expression. They didn’t have social media at their fingertips to know there many different ways life could be lived.

But, I’m not sure if I would have survived that rigor. On the other hand, my poor husband would have had a simpler life.

More recently, the Trad wife trend on Tiktok kept people hooked. A couple of years ago, on Twitter, I had seen a lady making Coca-cola from scratch in her kitchen. Nara Smith went viral quickly on Tiktok and became one of the most recognizable faces associated with the tradwife aesthetic. Of course, she has repeatedly denied considering herself to being a role model for the label.

The 1950s housewife was sold an idealized domestic life through a cultural manual. The 2020s tradwife is selling an idealized domestic life through an algorithm. Once, it was your responsibility to make your husband happy. Now, it is your responsibility to make your life look aesthetically beautiful.

Jokes apart, there’s nothing wrong in wanting a loving family, children, slower living and meaningful domestic work.

If that’s what you feel like you were born to do, more power to you. If you think you’re making a choice to do this, on your own and that thought empowers you, God bless you.

But to label it as a trend and confuse a generation of young minds via algorithms is a problem. There is a difference between choosing a traditional life and being taught that a traditional life is the only respectable life.

And here is the contradiction. Some of the most visible and commercially successful tradwife influencers are not economically dependent homemakers at all. They are entrepreneurs. They monetize our eye balls and attention via the internet and generate revenue through sponsorships, affiliate links, books, courses, products and personal branding merchandise.

The prairie dress, sourdough, homemade butter, immaculate farmhouse, barefoot children, “husband comes home and dinner is ready” you see on screen is a well curated social media content package.

On Tiktok, I see previous Trad wives coming in the dozens, imploring young women to reconsider jumping on this trend and marrying early to their “prince in shining armor.”

As the Tiktok user @lifetaketwo says in her video, “It never bothered me once that my financial security was dependent on that man being in love with me. I never realized that him liking me or not liking me or finding me sexy or attractive or interesting determined whether I could buy my child food to eat. Why didn’t I have a backup plan is what is she asking herself. Educate your daughters as much as you educate your sons.”

And that’s the part that the immaculate farmhouse doesn’t show you. The trad wife trend might be dying down as a social media obsession, but some teen influencers seem to try to revive it by glamorizing the trad wife aesthetic. And I’m terrified of these new “role models”.

My question is, “If the 1950’s housewife had been a content creator, would she have curated her reality this way and eventually curated her own memory of it — to feel happy and content about how her life truly was?”

Would she have looked past the exhaustion to turn domestic labor into a spectacular spectacle?

A traditional wife’s life can be filled with years of manipulation, control and subjugation. She might live years without the power of the purse, and if her partner or she chooses to walk away from the marriage, leaving can become an extraordinarily difficult proposition especially with no money or career prospects.

See, whether or not my grandma wanted it that way, I don’t know. I don’t want to ask that question to her or Rosemary that might take away from the identity they have built all their lives. And make them question anything about their past.

I have so much respect for Rosemary and my grandma. They had lived in a world where women were taught to organize their lives around their husbands. Yet they were strong matriarchs who showed the way to the future to their families and their communities.

As a society, we need to ask ourselves, “If a social arrangement like traditional homemaking is genuinely fulfilling and freely chosen, why should anyone be afraid of a woman’s right to leave it?”

Freedom is the most priceless commodity for any human. And when we see cigarette companies and social media giants commoditizing the idea of freedom, one in the name of smoking and one in the name of domestic submission, we will need to stand up and say enough.

The freedom isn’t in choosing the kitchen or the corner office.

The freedom is in knowing you can choose either.

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Observations, Opinions, and Cultural Critique

Cultural Essays from a Life Lived Between Worlds