The ‘Trad Wife’ longs for a time when women truly mattered

We boomer grannies grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting and accordingly hold the 1976 motion picture Baby Blue Marine in high regard, as the opening scene of that film begins with a Norman Rockwell painting that dissolves into action and then the action of its closing scene freezes into a Normal Rockwell Painting. Hence, the entire movie is sandwiched in between two paintings.

So much of the delightful daily life of the golden age of America in the 1950s was marvelously depicted on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post of the time. We saw ourselves in the movies of the time. We saw Music Man and The Long Hot Summer and recognized our town. No one questioned why Rosemary in Picnic joyously called the school principal to announce she was resigning her teaching job because she was getting married. Everyone understood that was a perfectly natural thing to do.

A delightful friend, the bubbly chairlady of Octogrannies Are Us, recalls our childhoods in the 1950s as a wonderful time. She is correct that we never heard of divorce, abortion, or queers. Our teachers were not sexual perverts, a single salary supported a family, children had a stay-at-home mom, and the whole family ate supper together every night. Rural high school boys’ absences were routinely excused for harvest time and for the opening day of squirrel season, and they had shotguns in their pickup’s gun rack in the school parking lot, and no one thought a thing about it.

Image: The W.H. Shumard family, 1955 (edited). CC BY 2.0.

We retired at night with the front door unlocked and the family car parked in the driveway with the keys in the ignition.

When asked the ubiquitous question—“Little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up?”—our answer was constant and unambiguous: “I want to be a mommy like my mommy!” We didn’t know then any of the steamy specifics involved, but we knew and embraced the general outline of our reality.

In that sane society, we children were treated as precious, even sacred, and we knew we were special. Men were trained to protect women, and women were taught to expect to be protected by men. Masculinity and femininity were understood as tropisms of nature whose fruit is families. Weddings were public celebrations because they were the ceremonial creation of families, the crucibles in which progeny are procreated and reared. Sexuality was enjoyed and revered, and its perversion was criminalized. Civilization was understood to be founded upon righteous sexuality.

In the sane society, man was the glory of God, woman the glory of man, and children the glory of woman. That’s why Shirly Jones, in her delightful song “Being in Love” in The Music Man, could proclaim of the man she would adore, “and I would like him to be more interested in me than in himself and more interested in us than in me.”

But today, things are different. Two generations of girls have been taught to seek a career rather than a life.

Mom and Dad both have full-time jobs. “Till death do us part” has been replaced by “until I change my mind.” Mom and Dad each know the other could divorce for any reason or no reason, and financial disaster for all would follow, and the children know that could happen at any time.

Traditional marriage has been swallowed by the partnership paradigm in which spouses are now called “partners,” reflecting equality with no one in charge. Chaos is deemed preferable to submission.

But for those of us of the Rockwell generation, submission was easy. Why? Because I adored my man, he adored me, and he was mine forever! Forever! Why forever? Not because of law; because of custom! A divorcee was an outcast, ruin, disaster. As some Loretta (or was it some Dolly) sang, “If you’ve been married, then you’re rated X!”

But that is gone with the wind.

But there is pushback. Today’s “Trad Wife” movement is an instinctive revulsion against delusion. The movement sees a growing number of women who intuitively recognize that their uniqueness in the universe is their blessed capacity for childbirth and that, in the workplace, whether the woman is the boss or a gofer, she is just another functionary abandoning her glorious reality as the vessel of life.

The Trad woman recognizes that her place is among masculine men. She understands that her role is the central one of homemaker in the traditional marriage.

What drives the Trad wife? The cognizance of delusion and the burning desire for reality.