Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well.
So, just over a week ago, an Australian woman from the city of Brisbane
was viciously attacked online for daring to demonstrate that she
is a devoted wife and mother.
Brooke Smith shared her daily caretaking routine in the
Facebook group Mums Who Cook, Clean, And Organize, and my oh
my, did it cause a stir.
So much so that it was picked up by a number of media outlets,
including Australia’s The Today Show.
Now, the decidedly cruel tone of those TV hosts, and those who said
similar in response on Facebook, to what is really quite a normal
domestic arrangement in a household with multiple children is quite
confronting, especially when you consider what they left out of this
reporting.
Here is Brook’s full Facebook post
“I always make sure I don’t go to bed until everyone’s lunches are
packed, their clothes are set out for the next day — including my
husband’s — and the house is clean, dishwasher is on and load of
washing is on.
Sometimes it means I get to bed at 9, sometimes that
means I get to bed at midnight.
“I always get up early (4.30 with husband to make his breakfast and coffee),
to make time for me, have a hot coffee and do my hair,” she said.
“(I) get a little peace and quiet meditation/exercise in and do my face
for the day.
A happy mum equals happy household.
Do it even when you feel like not doing it, because you’ll
be happy for it the next day.”
Far from the subservient ditz the TV hosts and many of the Facebook
commenters depicted her as, Brooke is a woman whose
extraordinary organisation allows her to not only keep an efficient
household, but gives herself time to regroup, refresh, and remain
healthy and happy.
Speaking to news.com.au afterwards, Brook said of the rather cruel
reaction that if someone works hard in the sun all day as a tradie,
five or six days a week, which her husband does, and also after hours
to make their business work, which he also does by conducting MMA
classes, she thinks it is the least she can do, and he shouldn’t be
expected to come home and cook and clean.
Can somebody tell me how any of that is unreasonable?
That just sounds like even division of labour to me,
especially as Brooke helps out with the couple’s small business, and
breeds bulldogs, and that they have four children under the age of six.
So why that kind of animosity from the media, and most pointedly,
from other women?
Why are women telling her that she is somehow subservient to her husband, when they very
clearly have equal but different roles?
Well, I’ll give you two reasons; guilt, and jealousy.
There is nobody quite so good at tearing down women than other
women.
We’re always jockeying for status within the pack.
And
when confronted by a woman who not only makes time for herself,
her kids, her husband, helps run two family businesses, and manages
to look like this
the most insecure among us will most certainly lash out.
There have been four generations of women now who have
had drummed into them that the sure-fire way to female happiness
is to have a high flying career and a husband who does the housework.
Obviously that is not the case given the steady decline of
female happiness over the last few decades.
When faced with a woman who seems decidedly happy and
absolutely not oppressed by making different, more traditional
choices, those with fragile egos and low self-esteem simply can’t
take it.
And ironically, the most vicious critics of women who make
traditional choices are feminists, despite insisting constantly that
women should have a choice over everything in their lives, from their
careers to their reproductive functions.
The reaction to Brooke Smith is very similar to what has been playing
out in the media and on social media regarding another type of
traditional woman.
Enter the tradwife; women who are ditching the
stress and constraints of the 9 to 5 rat race, and choosing to live the
traditional life of a homemaker.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem particularly radical, there are plenty of
housewives other there.
However, the difference is these tradwives choose to place their
husbands’ needs and happiness before their own, entrust them all
the finances, and self-confessedly “submit” to them.
Now, while this is not my thing, this arrangement absolutely
works for them, and
there are plenty of testimonies out there from tradwives who say it
has vastly improved their lives, and their relationships with their
husbands.
This seemed to really come to light in January this year, when UK
Tradwife Alena Kate Pettitt, who runs a blog called the Darling
Academy, appeared on This Morning
Following this rather charming appearance, feminist journalists had a
bit of a freak out.
A number of articles appeared, expressing everything from mild concern to
outright disdain at the tradwife movement.
There was a bizarre urgency to the commentary, as if the authors of these articles
were desperate to paint these women as leading femalekind down
a path of misery and regression.
There were three common gripes in these reaction pieces.
Number one; that self-confessedly living like a 1950s
housewife involved reverting to all elements of the 1950s, many
of which were not the best for women.
Okay, first; Alena Pettitt was very clear in her
interview that the plan was not to totally revert back to the 50s, B
ROLL
Second, there is no point comparing tradwives and women who do
the domestic load to the 50s housewives that Betty Friedman wrote
about in The Feminine Mystique.
The problem there wasn’t that they were doing domestic labour all day, it was
that they didn’t have any kind of choice.
Businesses wouldn’t hire married women back then,
and if you got married, you had to quit.
It’s the lack of options that did everyone’s heads in.
Especially just after the war, when these same women, who
had realised their talents were very useful and meaningful outside
the home, were suddenly boxed back into the home and told
against their better instincts that the pinnacle of feminine happiness
was found in domestic work.
That has zero to do with the tradwife trend today,
and any feminist who says otherwise is a liar.
And a moron.
The second common gripe was the language tradwives use about
“submitting” to their husbands.
Well, Alena spoke to The Times about this, and clarified that they mean this
in the Christian sense of the word.
She says
“The Christian view of submit is not subservience.
It’s a clear division of labour.
I have to earn [my husband’s] trust.
It’s not about him overruling or him being overbearing.
Everybody serves someone they love.
You serve your children because you care for them.
You want to spoil them.”
She also said that there was no difference between her service in the
household and her husband’s service to her in going out to work, and
added that he submitted to her over matters of the home.
Again; that’s just complementarianism, the husband
is absolutely at the service of the wife and kids by working long
hours to provide 100% of the household funds.
The wife then does her share by managing the home and taking that
pressure off her husband, who already has the pressure of work.
None of that unreasonable or controversial.
People have been living like that for centuries, and still very much
do all over the world.
The third gripe is the fact that apparently, the alt-right has co-opted
the tradwife as a kind of gateway drug into white supremacy.
It’s that old leftist adage of EVERYONE WHO DISAGREES
WITH ME IS A WHITE SUPREMACIST!
The most notable piece of this commentary was an article by Julie
Ebner, who is an expert on the far-right, entitled “Trad Wives”: meet
the women radicalised into complete subservience to men”.
In this article, she details that amidst the unsavoury halls of reddit
and 4chan are a group of women who literally are throwing
themselves into subservience to men, right down to the point of
using the idea of putting their husband’s needs first to justify being in
a physically abusive relationship.
That’s bad.
According to Julie, the way these innocent looking tradwives open
the door to white supremacy is by encouraging women to have as
many white babies as possible.
They call it the white baby challenge.
Okay, Julie Ebner; we get it.
There are a lot of weird people on the internet.
But to use these strange and entirely fringe communities as an
example of the entirety of those who enjoy the tradwife lifestyle,
those who choose to live a simpler life, renouncing many of the
luxuries you can have on a double income, is just disingenuous.
The
alt-right does not have the monopoly on traditional family values, for
goodness sake.
Just sod off.
Considering how easily their arguments fall apart, why have feminists
persisted with this raging, rather panicked response to the tradwife?
Well, the problem is their whole feminist thing has been insisting
that squeezing women into male archetypes is the only path to
women’s happiness, and then blaming the fact that women are so
stressed out all the time on men and the patriarchy and structural
barriers and unconscious bias and all of those other vague terms.
Seeing the tradwife painted in a positive light demonstrates that
women don’t actually have to lead the feminist ideal life in order to
feel happy and be free.
As such, admitting the choice to stay home and put husband and family first is actually
a path to happiness and satisfaction would be admitting that feminism
was, on some levels, wrong.
And since modern feminism is based on a flimsy premise as it is,
given most of the battles they claim to be fighting have already been
fought and won, years ago, by women who worked a lot harder and
sacrificed a lot more, they can’t allow any chinks in the armour.
Hence the comparison to white supremacy and 1950’s absolutism
and insisting these women are somehow brainwashed or radicalised.
In addition to their ideological anxiety, there is also the guilt and
jealousy factor I mentioned earlier.
I don’t think I’m too far off in saying that the women who so frantically deride
tradwives do so at least in part because tradwives make them
feel inadequate.
There’s not a career woman alive who hasn’t at some point felt bad
about not spending enough time with her kids, or not making
enough time for her husband.
So, when confronted by women who are able to do both successfully and happily
in lieu of a career, a lot of career women see this as an affront to
their own efforts.
You could almost call it a severe case of fomo,
or fear of missing out.
The hypocrisy of course is that feminists have said over and over
again that it’s fine if women choose to live the life of a traditional
wife and mother.
Yet here is a movement of women who are doing just that, and instead of feminists applauding
them for living how they want to live, they’re saying they’re
somehow doing the wrong thing by feminism
It’s also ironic that fourth wave feminists generally accept and
celebrate every other kind of family lifestyle; single parent families,
same sex parents, throuples, trans parents, non-binary parents, all of
which are, by historical standards, very radical and out of left field,
and still are in most parts of the world…but they won’t accept the
lifestyle that men and women have been living for literally hundreds
of years?
Are you kidding me?
Also ironic is the fact that so many feminists go on about how
terrible it is that traditionally women’s work isn’t valued, and how
capitalism is bad because everyone’s worth is tied in with how much
money they make.
But, now here are women doing the most traditional of women’s
work, and not deriving their value from how much money they
make…and yet that’s bad?
The inconsistencies are astounding, but not surprising.
The animosity towards tradwives has proven, yet again, that
feminism is a movement driven by hypocrisy and double standards.
Choose whatever you want to do, women, so long as it’s a choice we
dictate.
Believe what you want to believe, ladies, so long as it’s what
we believe.
But, as we all know, self-awareness has never been the
strong suit of the fourth wave feminist.