THE TRAD WIFE - SHE’S NOT JUST MAKING DINNER

Why the “Trad Wife” Debate Says More About Us Than It Does About Her

I was at a party recently when a woman told us that her daughter wanted to be a “trad wife.”

“It sickens me,” she said.  Across the room, a friend caught my eye.  You know that look.

I myself had been what they call a stay-at-home mother so I think she was waiting to see if I’d jump in being the outspoken woman that I am, lol. 

I’ll be honest, I don’t particularly love the word, Trad Wife, but only because I think attaching the word traditional to almost any woman gives me the willies as women are far too multilayered to be reduced to any job description involving an apron, and that is simply my opinion.

But what made the conversation especially interesting was that this woman's daughter was hardly languishing helplessly beside a pan of cinnamon buns or basting a pot roast all day.  She was ambitious.  She was also building an Instagram following and clearly becoming an influencer.  In other words she was apparently a trad wife with a marketing department.  But then suddenly I wondered, what are we even mad about?

Because haven’t we all seen a plethora of this version of a woman before?

Long before Instagram, Martha Stewart essentially monetized domestic life on a scale nobody had ever imagined and yes, I did mention to the party guest that Martha was what would have been considered a Trad Wife.

Originally, she had worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street, left it, started a catering business from her home, wrote Entertaining, built magazines and television shows around cooking, gardening, homemaking and entertaining and eventually created a gigantic business empire. Apparently, nobody told Martha that arranging peonies wasn't ambitious.  And yes, she did go to prison too but that wasn’t for making cinnamon buns.

Then there’s our Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten, who worked in Washington on nuclear-energy budgets during the Ford and Carter administrations before eventually realizing that life wasn't for her, but buying a specialty food shop in the Hamptons and building an extraordinary career around something she actually loved: food, hospitality and gathering people around a table, was for her.  I find that magnificent.  Imagine leaving nuclear policy to make roast chicken and somehow becoming more powerful.

Then there was Julia Child, who went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in the mornings and rushed home afterward to prepare elaborate lunches for her husband Paul during his two-hour embassy lunch break.  And if you’ve read a few books on Julia, you’ll come to find that eating a roast chicken at lunch wasn’t all they were squeezing in together. Oooo, la, la!

Frankly, Julia was onto something.  Then along came Nigella Lawson, who practically reclaimed the phrase Domestic Goddess as sensuality, pleasure, creativity and comfort.

Nigella herself has written beautifully about our alienation from domestic life and the pleasure of reclaiming some of it. And perhaps that is the part of this conversation we're missing.

Maybe domesticity touches something much deeper in us, that home is emotional.

Think about it.  A simmering pot on the stove, someone baking bread, fresh fragrant flowers on the table, a child walking through the door and knowing somebody is there, Sunday dinners, candles, music playing while somebody cooks, the smell of something delicious cooking or baking in the oven and people lingering around a table long after the plates have been cleared.

These things aren't merely chores, a to-do list, or a list of goals to achieve.  Maybe it all represents something deeper, like belonging, or safety, beauty, ritual, abundance, love and sensuality.

When my husband became a firefighter, with unusual hours and the sleep requirements that came with them, we made the decision together that I would stay home with our children.  I had been attending college for media and communications and then I changed direction.

And here comes my deeply unfeminist confession….I fricken loved it!  

But here's the funny part.  I wasn't “just” home.  While raising two pretty terrific human beings, I was also writing, published books, wrote opinion columns, wrote a food column, taught at college, was a parent speaker hired at schools, I created women's conferences, and produced events.  I just didn’t really talk about it at a cocktail party leading many to assume, I was just sitting by my stove all day.

Instead, I turned pieces of my domestic life into work that could teach, entertain and help other people through both the beautiful seasons and the brutal ones.  I grew phenomenally where I was planted and then I shared what I created in my recipes, my gift of hospitality and entertaining, my love for creating great gatherings, my deep thoughts and kitchen table wisdom over washing dishes and vacuuming that I put into my writing, my columns and my books.

And yet, even now, every once in a while, someone will still look at me and ask:

“Um…so…what do you get up to today?”

What do I get up to?  Well, Barb, between loads of laundry I've apparently been running a small intellectual underground.

Recently someone asked me something along those lines that was quite condescending and, because I am strangely terrible at remembering my own résumé, I sort of shrugged it off.  But then my friend jumped into the conversation.

“You wrote a BOOK, for God's sake, Tara.”  Oh, right…a few, actually and with more to come.

Another woman once came onto my personal Facebook page and dismissed me as nothing but “aspirational.”  For a while I was confused by that word she used on me, but even more by the sheer disrespect at feeling angry at a wonderful night I was having with my family.

For the record, the word aspiration is literally the desire to create something better be it a better life, a better home, a better relationship or a better version of ourselves…and by goodness, I’ve aspired to do all those things!  So…thank you?  I'll take it.  I didn’t just think I was aspirational, I lived it and then wrote the book. 

But all of this has made me curious about something much bigger:

Why do we care so much about what other women are doing? I mean really?

Why does another woman's decision to stay home bother somebody who doesn't want to stay home?

Why does a career woman bother someone who chose motherhood?

Why does a woman who loves beautiful things sometimes get dismissed as superficial?

Why does ambition make one woman admirable and another woman “too much”?

Why does domesticity sometimes get interpreted as weakness?

And why the hell do any of us feel we need to explain ourselves at all?

Sometimes it is ideology or maybe sometimes we see another woman's life through the lens of our own history and assume that because a particular arrangement would make us miserable, it must surely make her miserable too.

Maybe though…and this is where it gets uncomfortable, maybe, just maybe, another person's choice touches an unlived part of ourselves.

Not necessarily jealousy, though it can certainly veer into that, but maybe it is more of a longing.

And longing is far more interesting, maybe the woman baking bread at two in the afternoon represents something we don't actually want literally, but emotionally.

Maybe she represents more time or a beautiful table represents care and simplicity.  Maybe Ina cooking for Jeffrey represents intimacy, Martha puttering around a garden represents Queen energy and possibly Nigella licking chocolate from a spoon represents pleasure in more ways than one. 

And this is where I think women need a new kind of liberation.

Liberation from having to justify the life that makes us come alive.  Because wasn't that supposed to be the whole point of the feminist movement?  That our ancestors fought for us to have choices?  Like if a woman wants to become surgeon, then can’t that be a hell yes girl you go?  And if a woman wants six children and chickens, shouldn’t she also get a hell yes, you go girl?

If she wants to run a corporation, magnificent.  If she wants to make sourdough on Instagram and somehow earn $400,000 doing it, I would personally like the link to her course.

If she wants children and a career and a garden and a lover and a passport and a book manuscript sitting on her kitchen counter, she is allowed to want the whole damn enchilada, right?

And she is allowed to change her mind.  Because perhaps the most dangerous idea we can give a woman isn't that she should stay home or that she should go to work.

It is that somebody else knows what her life should look like. 

And maybe we could also retire that dreadful little word “just.”  Just a mother, just a wife, just a teacher, just working part-time, just running a little business, just writing, or just raising humans.

Because the truth is there are women under the radar doing extraordinary things all around us that will never fit neatly onto LinkedIn. There is emotional labor that has no salary, creativity that never receives an award and wisdom that doesn't come with letters after someone's name.

There are also women holding families together, starting companies at kitchen tables, caring for aging parents, writing books at midnight, rebuilding after divorce, raising children, volunteering, mentoring, cooking, earning, dreaming, creating and beginning again. 

You cannot possibly know the whole story of another woman's life from the little piece of it she happens to show you.  And maybe that is the real lesson I took away from that party.

When somebody tells me what another woman has chosen for her life, perhaps our job isn't to approve or disapprove.  Perhaps the better question is, is she free?  Is she happy and fulfilled? Is she in alignment with the true life of her soul? 

And perhaps the great irony of the “trad wife” controversy is that there is something surprisingly modern about a woman saying, this is my life. I know what matters to me and I'm going to build it accordingly.

So maybe instead of asking women, “What do you get up to?” with that faintly pitiful expression, we could ask a far more interesting question:

“What are you creating these days?”  Because every woman is creating something be it a company, a family, a community, a second act, a peaceful life or a completely new identity.

Martha Stewart turned homemaking into an empire, Ina Garten left nuclear budgets for a food shop and ultimately built a beloved global brand, Julia Child turned the pleasure of French cooking into an entirely new chapter of American food culture and Nigella Lawson reminded us that feeding people can be sensual, comforting, creative and gloriously pleasurable.

And millions of women whose names we'll never know, have created lives of enormous meaning without ever being asked a single question at a cocktail party because…she just stays home with the kids. 

Maybe we don't need another debate about the Trad Wife or a Fire Wife. Maybe we just need to stop reducing women to any one role and judging her for her happy choices and the happy life she is building.  Because underneath all these labels is something much more interesting, a complex, multilayered woman (a woman of many colors as Dolly told us) with gifts, history, dreams, ideas and her own reasons for her own choices.

And if she wants to make cinnamon buns, post her food pictures on Instagram and make a spectacular beef bourguignon, while she's at it?  For God’s sakes people, "just" let the woman cook. P.S. I don't like the word "let" either.