Am I an Accidental Trad Wife?

An interesting question if there were any. Certainly a very current one as I examine my life, trying to re-build my professional career after a 16 months sabbatical break which although salutary and wonderful in many respects, has undoubtedly set me back some years in terms of self-confidence, self-agency and a sense of mastery, but also in the simple terms of financial independence from my husband. The impact is felt in the amount of domestic and emotional work I am willing to undertake in the home in order to compensate for my perceived lack of monetary contribution, and also in a pervasive feeling of guilt preventing me from cultivating my personal interests and creativity as I work towards re-establishing my practice: some things are easy to do such as undertaking more training, others less so, like writing, reading or painting.

These considerations have been rumbling at the back of my mind for a while, but they have been put into sharp focus as I read Sharon Blackie’s excellent Substack article on The New Christian Right’s War Against Women (check it out, it is clear-sighted, delightfully punchy and great fun to read too) and found myself suddenly hit by intense feelings of shame when confronted with Blackie’s assumptions around modern womanhood. The Woman she described, autonomous, self-assured, comfortable in her power and with her choices, had nothing to do with me. Even more worryingly, it led me to question whether I was contributing, in my current diminished circumstances, to undermining women’s rights and women’s place in our society by my lack of active presence, by my inability to embody my beliefs? In other words, was I encouraging the patriarchal, misogynistic viewpoint? Re-reading and re-watching the Handmaid’s Tale sent a chill through my very core.

I want to shout it loud and clear: the “home maker” is a fallacy. An illusion. A deception. An invention. Women have never stayed at home to watch the children and cook the dinners. Women have gone out to work: they have foraged in the forests, laboured in the fields, toiled in the factories. And if wealthy enough not to need to go out to work (on account of their husband’s wealth, for the subjugation of women to men is much older than the “home maker” myth), they have been wealthy enough to employ nannies and governesses and cooks and maids (also working women I may point out), or to send their children off to boarding schools. The advent of the “home maker” as the most common model of female role is no more than 100 years old, and yet she has grabbed the imagination and the psyches of men and women in a dual mirage of rampant capitalism and male ego fragility, once again proving how short our memories are. As Margaret Atwood rightfully said, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, but women are afraid men will kill them.”

And of course, for women themselves, it is a tempting illusion, a poisoned gift. It is a trap, a golden cage, a promise of comfort and safety, a powerful numbing drug. If religion is indeed the opium of the people, home making is a particularly potent variation on the theme. And the price to pay is very high: beyond the obvious loss of autonomy and surrender to the mercy and control of another, there is a loss of sense of worth, a loss of individual power, a loss of self-regard and an effective loss of status in society. I believe I am not the only one to have slid unaware and trusting into the web, although I do hope there are less and less. Whether others caught on the sticky strands realise the nature of the trap and the numbing power of the sting is another question. In fact, I have no doubt my husband himself wasn’t aware he was setting the trap, duped into certain assumptions about his own role and place in society by the persuasiveness of the message and the force of the culture that transmitted it. He wanted to help, and I allowed myself to accept it. Generosity and kindness are double-edged swords, especially when the recipient, such as myself, is not robust enough to protect their integrity.

But to come back to the original question, am I an accidental trad wife? I may well generate some of the aesthetic, and every day let my body get through the motions, but I certainly don’t adhere to the ethos. More so, I vehemently reject the possibility and actively engage with attitudes and behaviours I hope will some day allow me to open the door of the golden cage (such as giving myself permission to spend three hours crafting this article!). The most difficult hurdle to overcome will most likely be to accept that I will never be an equal financial partner in the relationship, but that I don’t need to work myself into the ground trying to “compensate” or live in permanent anguish at illusory shortcomings. The most difficult hurdle to overcome will be to persuade myself to believe that my contributions are valuable even if they exist entirely outside a world where money is the ultimate arbiter of everything.

And so I will finish by reminding myself of Philip Pullman’s Alkahest in the Rose Field, the universal solvent that dissolves meaning, community and imagination: a force powered by money and made of indifference, greed and dogma.