‘There is No Singular Selfhood’: What Trad Wives Have Taught Me About Defining Womanhood

By Sarah O’Sullivan

Deep into an Instagram scroll, I wait patiently for the punchline in the video ‘Five ways to serve your husband’. I realise as I watch that there may be no punchline here at all, just genuine advice. Cook for him. Raise his children. Dress to respect him. Never nag. Obey him. I am on trad wife social media again.

What is a trad wife? Short for ‘traditional wife,’ it is an online movement that romanticises traditional gender roles: women care for the home and children while men act as the breadwinners. There are varying degrees of extremity within the community.

Commenters are often quick to point out that this is technically in line with feminist ideals. Feminism in its current form stands for equality regardless of gender and granting everyone the right to do what they want with their lives, whether that is working, staying home, having children, remaining childless or whatever else. Still, it is gender equality on a technicality.

Ballerina Farm is a trad wife account that was recently in the news. Hannah Neeleman lives in a farmhouse with her husband and eight children, where she runs the home and makes videos. She bakes fresh bread, plays with her children, cooks and cleans.

The attention came after she competed in a beauty pageant barely two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. A video showed her newborn baby followed by Hannah exercising and preparing for the pageant. Backlash stemmed from the perception that she was playing up simultaneous patriarchal ideals, birthing a child and competing in a beauty pageant one after the other.

I see the conflict I feel play out in the comments. Someone said, ‘Girl you just had a baby, stop’. Someone else responded, ‘So? It’s her life and she worked hard; she can do what she wants.’ I see both sides, but it does not sit well with me.

Social media was made with the intention of allowing users to post what they do. The formula has now been reversed: people are doing what they post. The image leads the action, instead of the other way around. There is a self-consciousness to that existence; I see it in every perfect smile during a TikTok dance, every camera flip to capture a reaction. We are trying to see ourselves from the outside.

Social media as a virtual society gave us a chance to build the world from the ground up. Here, we could create a space free from sexism and racism and prevent prejudices that exist in the real world. That is not what happened.

In the same way that the world informs culture, culture informs the world. In her book You Play The Girl, Carina Chocano writes that the way women were perceived in cinema in the early 21st century, as one-dimensional roles supporting male protagonists, informed the way women were perceived in society. She notes that even the strong girls, the disruptors who broke the mould, are shown as cold, humourless, friendless and celibate. It is impossible, it seems, to be strong and interesting, tough and loveable, independent and loved. She writes: ‘It wasn’t just the movies. It was everything, everywhere. It was the sublimated sexism that mutated every experience but that we weren’t allowed to notice or acknowledge.’

It is true that as part of this sublimated sexism, a woman’s place in society is still debated today, much as we try to ignore it. Trad wives are an overt example, but they do not exist in a vacuum.

As it becomes clear that there is an undercurrent of misogyny ruminating online with the likes of Andrew Tate and alpha male podcasts, I realise trad wife content seems sinister because it feels like the call is coming from inside the house. But this is not the only corner of the internet telling women who to be. It is happening everywhere.

Online, we reduce our identity to one-dimensional characters like those seen in fiction. Think of girl dinner, girl math. It is the attempt to define yourself as fox pretty or bunny pretty, it is questioning whether you are a clean girl or a chill girl. It is trying everything to be ‘that girl’. In an effort to connect, we flatten our differences to present our most surface-level commonalities.

When viewing the world through a phone screen, we see people present a singular identity and it begs the question, ‘Who am I?’. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther confronts this question with a fig tree she sees in her mind. Each long branch holds a ripe fig that presents a different path she could take in life: being a mother and wife, living as a poet, and other outlandish, ambitious possibilities.

She writes: ‘I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.’

Plath, through Esther, knew that regardless of what she did, she would be defined in finite terms. The decision required to confirm her identity was final, and so it paralysed her. She felt she could not pick one path without forsaking the rest.

Part of the conflict, I believe, between trad wives and modern feminism is the limiting definition of self. Wife and mother are important identities, but not complete ones. They do not erase your history, passions, quirks and flaws. They do not eclipse your selfhood.

Of course, Greta Gerwig said it best through the character of Jo March: ‘I just feel like women – they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for, I’m so sick of it.’

Perhaps in response to being told who we are, women have taken it upon themselves to do the defining, but it doesn’t need to be so strict. We have cast ourselves as Sylvia, choosing identities carefully as though they will singularly define us.

We can be Jo, who knows one label is not enough to contain all that a person is, who knows women can be smart and resourceful and emotional and funny and strong.

We don’t need to cast ourselves as women in fiction, reduced to our most surface-level traits. We are not made to be easily understood. Our identities are complex and layered and fluid and when I see trad wife content now, I think, I am so sick of people saying this is all a woman is fit for.

I’m so sick of it.