RHONE: The trad wife trend is both fun and unsettling

I learned about the trad wife trend last year when a friend, on the cusp between Gen X and millennial, told me about these beautiful women who make videos of themselves cleaning the house, cooking elaborate meals or playing with their kids. All of these tasks are accomplished while the women are dressed in stylish clothing and wearing a full face of makeup.

These trad wives, aka traditional wives, post content on social media platforms designed to celebrate the strict gender roles of yesteryear in 30-second clips that make the job of maintaining a home and raising children look not just inviting but easy. Sometimes that trip back in time is bolstered by religious and political commentary.

My favorite trad wife to watch is Nara Smith, a model who is married to a Mormon model/actor. Smith doesn’t claim to be part of the trad wife trend but she is one of the most mentioned content creators whenever the topic of trad wives comes up.

I am shocked and awed watching her make things like flaming hot Cheetos, bubble gum and hot dogs from scratch. She creates these meals and snacks with vague references to the number of hours required to prepare them and zero insight into how she manages to cook entire meals without getting a splash or splatter of food on her designer outfits.

No matter what she is doing, Smith is always camera ready but that’s not a big reach for a professional model. I wanted to know what it was like for other women who are embracing the trad wife life. When I Googled “trad wives in Georgia,” a few women popped up.

One woman who lives in Atlanta and recently left a job at Google to pursue the trad wife life, was not available for an interview. Another woman, Carly McCurry, 30, who spent five years teaching before deciding to stay at home last year when her daughter was born, agreed to chat with me.

McCurry doesn’t consider herself a trad wife but she has posted editorial content on the topic and is supportive of the trend. “I think it is an overall positive as long as you can understand that it is a very polished view of staying at home,” McCurry said when we talked by phone.

Among her friends, all college-educated women married to college-educated men, it has been a growing choice to not work outside the home and to focus on raising their children, McCurry said. Months after discovering that her newborn slept a lot, McCurry used her hours of free time to launch a digital publication, The Cute North Georgian , which offers curated experiences for locals in the area.

When she and her husband made the lifestyle change from two incomes to one, it meant sacrificing vacations and restaurant meals, she said, “but it is sacrifice with a lowercase s.” McCurry said she and her friends fall in the middle to upper middle class income ranges. The decision for her to stay at home was an economic stopgap — the best daycares in Habersham County would have consumed half her salary, she said — and something she and her husband wanted.

If anything, the boom in trad wife content has made it easier for women to make the choice to stay at home while still earning money, McCurry said. And it has helped ease pressure on millennials who have no desire to be part of the “girlboss” movement that took hold in the ’90s and pushed young women to adopt a hustle mentality.

I get that. These are the parts of the trad wife trend I support as well. What gives me pause is the unsettling feeling that the trend has also offered a convenient avenue for opportunists to push a singular view of what American families should be.

Trad wives don’t exist in isolation. They have taken root at a time when women’s reproductive rights are under attack. It is a moment when we have a vice-presidential candidate who once proposed limiting the voting rights of anyone without children.

Co-opting the trad wife trend to elevate certain ideologies shifts our focus from continuing to push for policies that allow all women to have choices. It distracts us from closely examining how American society has failed women both in and outside of the workplace.

On the surface, the trad wife movement is fun entertainment. On a deeper level, it feels like an alarm bell signaling that many women have lost faith in the possibility of a more egalitarian society.

Rather than fighting to change systemic issues such as the limited support for working families and persistent gender inequality — factors that are often at play in a woman’s decision to work or not work — we buy into an ideal that feels easier, simpler and less stressful, at least on social media.

But as Jane O’Reilly wrote in a 1972 essay for Ms. Magazine, women are not as far apart as they may think they are. “In the end, we are all housewives, the natural people to turn to when there is something unpleasant, inconvenient or inconclusive to be done,” O’Reilly wrote. “It will not do for women who have jobs to pretend that society’s ills will be cured if all women are gainfully employed.”

Or conversely, if all women stayed at home with their kids.

If the trad wife trend helps women who want to stay home with their children feel more empowered to do so, that’s a good thing. But we can’t allow the trend to force a return to the past.

We must continue to challenge oppressive structures and support gender equality for all women because true liberation can’t be traded for homemade flaming hot Cheetos.

Read more on the Real Life blog ( www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/ ) and find Nedra on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn ) and X ( @nrhoneajc ) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com .

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