The Dark Side of the Tradwife Movement

How GOP Policies are Forcing Women into Submission and Putting Lives at Risk

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Josh and Amanda Zurawski thought they had the American Dream going for them; they’d gotten married a year earlier and bought a beautiful Austin, Texas home with views of a lake and golf course. And Amanda was pregnant; they were looking forward to their first child.

And then they ran afoul of the tradwife obsession that motivates the Texas Republican Party.

Amanda’s fetus wasn’t viable, and would have to be removed or it could kill her.

But when Amanda went to the hospital, she was turned away because a bundle of cells in the fetus were twitching in a way that the anti-abortion tradwife movement calls a “fetal heartbeat,” and a physician in Texas who performs an abortion when there’s a “heartbeat” faces 91 years in prison.

Three days later she was literally dying, having gone into sepsis, and was just hours away from dying when the hospital finally relented and removed the “baby,” to use Sam Alito’s language from the Dobbs decision. It ruined her reproductive system, so now if she wants to have children she’ll have to resort to an expensive, invasive, and extremely painful IVF procedure or adopt.  

While many in the anti-abortion movement argue that they’re just trying to “save (unborn) lives,” their behavior exposes a much more sinister aspect to their motivation. Their real goal is to disempower women and elevate the role and power of men in the home, the workplace, and in politics.

The argument these Republicans make is that American women should become traditional wives, or tradwives, devoted to serving their husbands’ every need, setting aside their life’s goals for housekeeping and child rearing, and living a life of economic and political impotence.

Right at the top here, let’s stipulate that there’s nothing wrong with a woman wanting to become a tradwife. It’s a lifestyle with a long history that goes all the way back to women’s roles specified in the Bible.

There’s an entire tradwife movement that’s been growing across the conservative social media world, including a major presence on Reddit and Facebook.

My mother was a tradwife — she stayed home and raised 4 boys (and then two grandchildren) for most of her life — and appeared to love the life she and my dad had. It was her choice, not something my father had imposed on her.

And that’s the key: choice.

It’s one thing to argue that American society is and should be accepting of a wide variety of lifestyles for men and women, from academia to a working life to being a tradwife; it’s another thing altogether to reorganize society so one of those lifestyles is imposed on people by the force of law.

And that’s exactly what the GOP is trying to do.

From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America,” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” the billionaire has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women.

JD Vance has similarly pushed the tradwife meme, arguing that:

“I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

That “single” job is the key; he’s not talking about economic advancement in the middle class but, rather, pitching the idea that dad should work and mom should stay home and cook, clean, and attend to the kids.

Some Republicans will openly say they just want to return America to the Leave It To Beaver world of June Cleaver, the happy homemaker of 1960s TV. What they don’t like to point out, though, is that in the 1960s most women didn’t have much of a choice.

When Republicans say that your grandmother stayed with your grandfather and should be your role model, they fail to point out that women three generations ago really had few choices unless they were independently wealthy.

Employers could refuse to hire women because of their gender as recently as 1964; home sellers and real estate agents could refuse to sell a house to women up until 1974; it wasn’t until 1988 that the law said landlords could no longer refuse to rent to women. Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized until 1993.

When Louise and I got married in 1972, she couldn’t get a credit card or sign a mortgage without the signature of me, her brother, or her father. She couldn’t serve on a jury, get a no-fault divorce, or enroll in an Ivy League college. And if she’d had an unwanted pregnancy, she’d be out of luck until 1973’s Roe v Wade decision.

In twenty states, Republicans have succeeded in removing from women one of the most important options that allow them to stay in the workplace: abortion of an accidental or unwanted pregnancy. Now they’re going after birth control. And their war on DEI is just another aspect of their war on women, as white women are the main beneficiaries of the DEI programs Republicans are demanding that corporations end.

Republicans are even working hard on ending no-fault divorce: as JD Vance said, women should stay home and serve their husbands even when those men are physically or emotionally abusive.

They ignore the reality of an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws, a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Republican legislators are also pushing back hard against equal-pay-for-equal-work laws, again arguing that women shouldn’t be on the job in the first place.

Motivations for pushing women into tradwife roles vary within the GOP:
— Some are men who want submissive wives.
— Others are white supremacists who think tradwifery will produce more white babies (the movement is largely confined to white conservatives).
— Many, like Vance, argue or imply that women in the workplace drive down wages by competing with men for jobs.

The bottom line is that tradwifery should be an option for women (and men, for that matter: I was a stay-at-home dad for almost two years while Louise ran one of our businesses).

But it shouldn’t be the only option.