Feminist Attempts to Destroy ‘Trad Wife’ Trend
The “trad wife” trend is really no different from other trends in that it is not actually a portrayal of unaltered reality.
Unfortunately, this deviation from truth allows skeptics to mock the underlying values while deriding the trend, which lets them conveniently conflate the two. So today, it’s time to dissect an article for Vogue by a cosmopolitan Parisian, Monica Ainley.
It’s wrong immediately out of the gate.
“Monica Ainley couldn’t get over the online ‘trad wife’ phenomenon – a return to starkly defined gender roles: wives quietly and contentedly keep house while husbands control the purse strings.” This lifestyle is not based on husbands controlling “the purse strings.” In fact, a true traditional wife, as explained in the Bible (Proverbs 31 is devoted to her — ironic, considering that modern leftists think that Christianity has no room for women), is fully in control of her entire household, often including the budget.
But it does not get better from there.
Ainley starts her writing by saying that she was fully on board with the feminist ideal of “choice” for women, but she’s going to make an exception in this case. She describes what she calls a “gut-flipping repulsion” toward what she describes as women practicing patriarchal relationship norms. She reports that all her friends feel the same, but manages a moment of self-awareness when she asks, “Should we really feel threatened by a niche group of self-promoting, flower-arranging, bread-baking homesteaders?”
She notices her double standard, but she is out to prove that she’s right, anyway. “Surely behind every trad wife is the influence of some outdated patriarchal value system.”
“What woman – what person, for that matter – would choose to play second fiddle to their partner if given another option?” she inquired. If we take a look at the truth underlying the trend, not the veneer of the trend itself, we could easily point out that being a wife isn’t “playing second fiddle” to anyone. In the framework of the actual, original, ideal wife referenced in the Bible in Proverbs 31, this is clearly not the case in the Biblical ideal: The wife in the Bible is praised overtly for doing her own thing, working on her own terms, investing her own money, making her own family better and stronger and more prepared day-to-day. Her husband, on the other hand, is only mentioned twice!
To further assess this lifestyle, Ainley chooses to actually try living the trad-wife life, and for that, we can commend her (although she is simply giving her nanny a few days off from taking care of her children).
So how does it go? It’s hard to tell if she’s genuine in her analysis.
She would probably tell you that she’s a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and that this lifestyle wasn’t anywhere near what she’d ever had in mind for her life. Nothing wrong with recognizing that any sufficiently large paradigm shift can easily take even the strongest person for a loop.
But it’s pretty clear that her kids, ages 3 and 16 months, are unfamiliar with her. She’s not used to dealing with them, either; not used to their moods or needs, and not used to disciplining them. She successfully cooks and bakes, and feels satisfaction doing those things, but is always so focused on how she’s feeling and how she’s handling things. She manages to forestall putting her kids first the whole 72-ish hours she’s forced to be around them exclusively. She also observes her world is “getting very small,” which she, of course, regards as bad.
If we’re going to have a conversation about “trad” wives, let’s not go off TikTok trends that paint a skewed and often flawed picture of marriage and motherhood. Instead, let’s go off the original traditional role model of a wife, the “virtuous wife” of Proverbs 31.
We will find that the virtuous wife is not a cowed, crouching, silent flower trapped in the kitchen so the men can smoke in front of the fire — this, too, is a perversion of the wife’s role — not that leftists would admit this. They do love the straw man because they never put up a fight. The truth is that, in the Bible, as in real life (not TikTok, nor some feminists’ fevered imagination), wives are held up as cherished members of their families, not second fiddles.
Wives are forces for good, the necks that turn the heads, and strong community members in their own right. Not second-rate men, but first-rate women. Monica Ainley would likely clutch her pearls to learn this truth.
