The art of the happy tradwife

The American tradwife is no submissive slave. Instead, she is voluntarily following a great American tradition that will optimize her happiness and that of her children.

We’re nearing April 19, the date of the Battle of Lexington/Concord of 1775. That battle was memorialized in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” with its marvelous opening stanza:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Fifteen months later the American Declaration of Independence trumpeted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as divine rights of all mankind. That marked the moment when pursuing happiness became recognized in human affairs as an endowment by the Holy One.

Now, surely, the pursuit of happiness is a quite personal and unique endeavor that will lead different supplicants in quite different directions. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that today, notwithstanding feminism’s dominance today, there persist numerous women of various ages and stations who have thrown in their lot with the “tradwife” movement. Why? Because their own pursuit of happiness propels them in that direction.

Image by AI.

Today, while some feminist activists seek to destroy marriage, the tradwoman, having become aware that marriage is the surest path to her happiness, also realizes that the fulfillment found as a tradwife restores her to her rightful place of political power in society.

The tradwoman and the feminist strike competing stances in a common pursuit, both sharing a central goal: Each seeks to acquire political influence as the CEO of a preeminent enterprise. The feminist may seek to be the CEO of Ford or Harvard, whereas the tradwoman may seek to become CEO and central political power of the world’s most important enterprise, the family home.

Is this a “Back to the Future” movement? Certainly not. In the past, the traditional wife’s role was not entirely voluntary, for society had imposed it from time immemorial as an expectation of the wife (recall Home Economics in school). Today, however, becoming a tradwife is 100% voluntary, with many practitioners insisting it is a personal choice and one that provides a life personally fulfilling.

Naturally, the big bugaboo of today’s feminist detractors of tradwives is the tradwife’s traditional submission to the husband, the third promise of the tradwife’s wedding vow to “Love, Honor, and Obey.”

Because of emanations feminists imagine they perceive in the penumbras of the word “obey,” they claim that a trad wedding merely celebrates female servitude. However, were you to tell that to a tradhusband, you’re absolutely guaranteed to elicit gasps, snorts, misty eyes, and hearty guffaws, for the husband knows that the “little woman” is no servant, and is not to be treated as one.

They know that Kipling was right when he said, “when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other’s tale—the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” This eternal truth applies to males whether among Cro-Magnon in a forest glade, worker bees high up on a girder, blue collars at happy hour, or starchy white collars in a C-suite.

Recall C.S. Lewis’s anecdote of neighborhood encounters: If your kid batted a ball through a neighbor’s kitchen window and you knocked on the front door to apologize and arrange reparations, would you prefer that your knock be answered by the husband or by the wife?

The most elemental difference between the tradwoman and the feminist career woman lies in their relative bargaining power in marriage. Since the feminist’s principal inducement to a forever bond is cash flow, the best she can get in exchange is “I’ll give it a shot” or “Until I change my mind.” But the tradwoman exchanges “Love, Honor & Obey” for “Provide and Protect.” That is, the tradwife gains a tradhusband in the bargain, a bargain that grows legs and has strings attached.

Despite the feminist having entered with good faith into the blessed state, soon enough mere reality intrudes upon the feminist imagination, and she learns that (1) motherhood is an 18-year, full-time job, (2) the available time and energy for any activity is finite, and (3) the human sojourn here is temporary. She also learns that her trad husband may have limited respect for that first job, since it brings in no money.

But the tradwoman knows well that a tradwife requires a tradhusband, and she winnows the run of the stream with penetrating interrogatories fraught with daunting responsibility: Will he gladly give me children? Will he provide? Will he protect? Can I housebreak him?

And it is in that final interrogatory that we glimpse the truest role of tradwife submission: A subtle female stratagem for the capture of the elusive male heart.