“I've tried to represent the eternal woman with flowers and long hair.”
-Yves Saint Laurent
“No e-girls!
-Nicholas Fuentes
The word “trad” and more particularly, “tradwife” has hit girl YouTube after a long sojourn on instagram. As yappers (girls) are wont to do, the deepest level of exposition on this is mostly an aesthetic criticism of individual “trad larpers” and at best, their various hypocrisies, grifts, and weird *ideologies*. On a good day, attempts are made to understand how these sundry tradwives are grappling with the same monoculture problems of this post modern world as, well, everyone else.
But that's enough fancy words. Ideology. Post-modernity. Globalism. Neurosis. Gender dynamics. What does any of this even mean? And what does it mean, to be a trad?
It's always curious to me to watch a Twitter conceived Frankenstein such as trad break into the normie-sphere. Which really means, to garner enough traction to speedrun through several distillations across multiple social media platforms. At which point, a commentator will use therapy words to handwave it all away as mental illness.
It makes sense really. An aesthetic trend like trad, serving several looks, is usually a thinly veiled grift (link in the bio!). And when it is also ideological, as fashion and furniture almost always turn out to be, there's a good chance it's going to be outted as maladaptive by a zoomer, eventually.
Twitter is not the first place I would hear the word nor would it be the last. It is where it first solidified in my mind something I wanted to be, traditional.
“Do you want to be a co-host on my trad podcast?” “Well I'm not a married mother…” “OH that won't work then…” “I could talk about being a single trad woman who is seeking a trad life?” “Hmmm”
A conversation like this is among my first memories of using the word. You can see my understanding was a trad woman as a married woman, likely a young mother, and if not a young mother, one with many children. A trad woman baked bread, homeschooled the kids, and gave birth at home. To be single, is to not be a trad. However I quickly countered with the concept that you could be an unmarried trad. I wasn't sure what that meant, but in my murky and limited view, it was something like not going to college, and not being a slut.
A second revolution I had in my concept of the word was on a first date with a trad catholic. While knowing the buzzwords at this point, early 2019 around a tradcath, such as “the Latin mass” the reason for a distinction, in front of the oldest Christian church (trad trad) was completely lost on me.
“I see this egirl on Twitter calling herself a trad. So I wanted to see for myself if this girl is really trad.” “And?” “Well I had never heard anyone but a traditional Catholic call themselves a trad until getting on Twitter. We've been calling ourselves trads since the 80’s.” “Really?” “Yes. And now I see people like you, not quite agnostic and not quite protestant calling themselves trads. And you're wearing bell bottoms. Trad girls I know don't wear pants.”
Ah. Caught with my pants down (or on?). In previous iterations of this word, a trad wouldn't be an agnostic or a protestant. What was I? A nanny who rotted on Twitter, went on dates, wore pants. Nothing particularly distinctive about this. Going to college or being a slut wouldn't factor into this concept. A trad didn't just reject things, like leftism, want to be married, have sexually conservative ethics, or “follow alt right politics”. A trad was a part of something very old, in this formulation. A trad rejected enlightenment values, the French revolution, and mysteriously enough, Vatican 2.
But what had been the catalyst for the desire to join with such people on Twitter, hashing out in daily discourse what it means to be trad, essentially, what new identity are we forming? We know what we are fighting against, the breakdown of the family, of culture, our people, and of our government broadly. Trad wasn't particularly about a sundress per se but it wasn't exactly *not* about a sundress. As Dave Green has pointed out in a series of excellent essays, dissident right, formally broadly thrown under the umbrella of alt-right, in 2016, was never a coalition united for anything particularly. It was hardly even united, hardly a coalition, but generally a bucket of people rejecting the left/right paradigm. And usually democracy in particular. And always skeptical of the religion of the day, secularism.
And trad was a word bandied about as a sort of ideological big tent identity. In fact, when I conjure up for myself an image of the original tradwife, it only brings to mind women with blonde viking avatars baking rather dry looking swastika pie.
It hardly brings to mind Lauren Southern. With the resurgence of the word as a popular strawman, Mary Harrington writes a piece on the dangers of being a tradwife, with Lauren as the central protagonist of the essay. It brings to mind the protestant rejoinder to the Roman Catholic Church, “an institution that was neither holy nor Roman nor even a church”.
I scrunch my eyes up and try to remember Lauren Southern, a tomboy activist who legally changed her gender to male in a sort of buzzfeed shock journalism stunt as a tradwife. Who to my memory, married an Asian who worked for the federal government after falling pregnant. Fair enough? Skimming the article, we discover what's been happening with her since 2018 (no she did not die in Nick Fuentes’ great e-girl holocaust). Her husband told her to quit her job, making her financially dependent on him, after the birth of their son. Ok, trad… Maybe? Are normal men cheering the mother of their children on as they film documentaries in South Africa?
At the bottom of things, Lauren became a stay at home mom. And married. And subsequently divorced. She fit the original concept my mind had concocted of a tradwife in 2016. A wife with a child. But if a wife with a child, who quits her job during postpartum is a tradwife, did the term really contain any meaningful distinction to begin with?
And I'm sure it would blow some incel's mind knee deep in documenting the wrongs of “modern” women on Twitter dot com, but a stay at home mom is not a concept unknown to the broader culture. How did we end up here?
Again, we find the topic treated similarly to “Catholic” “traditional Catholic” should be a “but I repeat myself” level of meme. And tradwife, in this context, is similar. A “wife wife”. Here one must pause to beg the question, “at the bottom of this, are we watching social autists reinvent being relatively normal?”
In the case of Lauren Southern, I pity her. Her downfall, if anything, was in not being “trad” enough. A spunky girl who says wrong think on the internet like one of the boys, who travels to dangerous places exposing the truth as a career journalist. Who is thrown to the wolves, made famous, notorious enough to be banned by several countries. And finally, by all appearances, targeted by the feds. At least we can say once and for all, she isn't a racist.
But she internalized the og concept of tradwife, a girl who marries and has a baby. Undoubtedly the pressures from the many “redpilled” men she worked among informed her decision to marry in a fever. To embody what a woman in this vague coalition against the “modern world” is conceived of as being.
But anyone can have a baby. And nearly everyone does, even though we neglect to hit that sweet 2.1 replacement rate as a collective. And someone has to take care of that baby. And call me an optimist, but I do not even think it is uncommon for that person to be the child's mother, and for that child's mother to stay out of South Africa.
But before the swastika pies, Lauren Southern's radfem arc, the sundress, or the more ideologically substantial revival of Orthodoxy and the Latin mass in America… for me, there was Laura Ingalls.
And Louisa May Alcott, like Laura, a feminist in her own day. And LM Montgomery. Martha Finlay, even Jane Austen. The books of girlhood that usually did culminate in a marriage, and my girlhood notions of this as a final acheivement (specifically family life and motherhood) perhaps can be forgiven as youthful hubris. Books about the lives of girls, from dreamers like Anne Shirley, to tomboys like Jo March, and yappers like Lizzie Bennet, all culminate in marriages. But the substance or their lives was that of growing in character, in wisdom, depth and ability. Stories of virtue and realizations, good deeds, and the many mistakes one must make along the way.
Looking back, before I aspired to being a tradwife, I was inspired by children's books, and books about early womanhood. Growing up stories. And they all involve the woman's hero arc, albeit, much sweeter, sillier, yappier, and ultimately detailed, and contemplative, than the masculine counterparts. Sure beautiful long dresses were certainly involved, dancing, suitors, errors in love, foolish idealism, friendships and jobs even. And most certainly they always married.
Such books better serve women in aspiring to “trad” than any get ready with me, dress haul, or sour dough hack. And trad in the sense of, being a real person, with authentic interests, skills, hobbies, beliefs, manners, and a taste for adventure.
I'm aware this feels a bit tangential. But I'm wanting to hint at the nostalgia, something tangible, solid, at the bottom for the search for a real American tradwife.
Trad is a reaction to the financial instability of our times, in a world where both parents work of necessity, and the children go to school, the tradwife creates culture and experiences for her family.
It's a reaction to how truly undervalued many mothers feel, and seeks to elevate the maternal back to a level that is sacred.
Trad is a reaction to the sexualization of women, which ironically seems to always fail as women apparently cannot be un-sexualized (see reactions to evie magazine's latest merch). However, it is still an attempt to return a modest and feminine icon to the modern world, a world characterized by spandex and the eternal urge to be ever thinner and bikini ready.
It is also a sign of our increased health consciousness, in a world full of rapeseed oils, one is comforted by the Madonna like image of the tradwife hanging over the hearth preparing say, cereal she's made from hand milled flour.
And at a deeper level, it speaks for itself. “Return”, “we must go back”, and “reject modernity” are slogans often attached to the image of the tradwife.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this is how trad really became most deeply symbolized by tradwife. It is the aesthetic and person of the woman who became the icon for the idea. The image of the woman, and the woman herself is deeply political. Who the woman is, how she looks, and whay she does is the embodiment of a cultural movement. That's how it always is and always will be.
And as the Virgin and Mother Mary embodies the church, so the tradwife is a shifting vignette for a shifting “dissident right”, a coalition more defined by what it rejects than what it embraces. And so the tradwife is herself a vascilating character, popping up in different ways and in manifold iterations, but unified in what she rejects- modernity.
Woman represents her husband and reflects his image and ideals. So does the tradwife her anonymous conglomerate of internet autists.
But I still believe in what first drew me to her, which was, to embody something like heroic dissent, and all that entails, in a world that increasingly is dehumazing to men and women alike. The authentic desire behind the calico skirts to do real things, to make real things, to have real beliefs.
And while her internet visage may be as shifty and grifty as the men who created her,
Still there's something about her.
> Books about the lives of girls, from dreamers like Anne Shirley, to tomboys like Jo March, and yappers like Lizzie Bennet, all culminate in marriages.
Also, the Book of Revelation in which there is the wedding of the Lamb. After a stage in which we feel too grown-up to read "everyone gets married at the end" books, we will come full circle to where we began, because life is a comedy after all.