Jennifer Horgan: Trad wife movement exposes the fiction of true gender equality

They have received predictable criticism from ‘woke’ feminists like me who maintain the oft-derided opinion that a life, any life, shouldn’t be defined by one’s genitalia. But they are regarded as a light news story by most, a bit of harmless fun. I find this reaction fascinating given our decades-long journey through the many choppy waves of feminism.

It’s possibly because trad wives have never really left our collective conscience. Their ‘appeal’ comes from their omnipresence, their familiarity, even now. It’s tiring to work against the grain all the time. It would be nice to give in.

I still live with the ghost of a trad wife myself. She is an acidic houseguest. And God, do I fail in her estimations. As a woman who doesn’t like to cook, I am an out and out failure. I don’t iron my bedclothes either. I kill things in pots and across flowerbeds. I am a black-fingered menace.

Do other women live with the ghost of a trad wife too? Do men who live with women? Yes, they do — and that is why we don’t take their explosion on social media all that seriously. Sure, we’re well used to them.

It’s interesting to measure our response to the trad wife movement in relation to an imagined movement coming from the opposite direction. What if, let’s say, one was to begin a movement directly contrasting the trad wife? Let’s call it the ‘mod wife’ movement.

The mod wife

What would a mod wife do? Well, she, I imagine, would be the opposite of the trad. In shorthand, she would be like a trad husband. She would refuse all responsibilities within the home, refusing to play any part in looking after her own children, preparing meals, or cleaning. She would make absolutely no effort with her appearance, never dreaming of altering or enhancing it. She would turn up for dinner and sex.

How do you think that would go down? How would the media present such a complete pendulum shift into the past, but with women rather than men adopting the (thankfully, at least partially) discarded trad husband role? I suspect, if the topic were discussed on RTÉ, the husbands would be interviewed with a great deal of concern for their wellbeing.

How do you manage? Oliver Callan might ask the poor unfortunate man on air. What a trial to share a home with such an abomination, who won’t lift a finger in the home.

It’s funny how in this whole explosion of trad wives online, and it is an explosion, we never hear from their husbands. The husband’s reaction is assumed. They’re only delighted with themselves we think in our subconscious, with their full tummies and satisfied libidos. The pieces just sort of fit. All is as it should be.

The public response to a mod wife would not be so light or trivial; the tone would get less tickled, less pink. And that tells us absolutely everything we need to know about gender equality: it’s a fiction.

The mod wife has never existed. She would never be allowed to exist. Any trace of her spells marital and social disaster. Research shows that heterosexual marriages with a female breadwinner are more likely to end in divorce, and even in that scenario I’m sure the female breadwinner does more than her fair share around the house.

Has there ever been a cultural approximation of the mod wife? In sci-fi wherein the domestic setting is removed. Does that count?

The mod wife has never existed. The trad wife has, among the middle classes at least, as has the complementary trad husband. These spectres still hold sway in our collective conscience, and they are not set to be erased by their opposites any time soon.

Modern marriages are tough because the division of labour is fuzzy. It varies from couple to couple and it still very much favours men. Of course, there is more balance now and people would support a woman living with a layabout husband now too, but it is still anything but straightforward, because the ghost of the trad wife, embedded deep in our collective psyche, never left. 

She lies in our beds, patters barefoot about our kitchens making homemade shortbread. She is still there when we fawn over men for cooking or babysitting their own children. But any hint of the mod wife, the trad wife’s demonic doppelganger, and men are treated like hurt little bunnies, trapped in a cage.

I don’t think that double standard will ever go away, hence the attractiveness of the trad wife, or at least the depiction of her as pretty benign, or pretty, benign, and unthreatening. At least the trad wife set-up is simple and familiar; from a distance, which can look like fairness.

Maybe AI will sort us out. All couples will employ a ‘wife bot’ someday, and equality will finally be ours. Alexa is certainly moving us in that direction.

Besides AI, we could also look to the only country that has come close to remedying this rot in society: Iceland, the top of the pops on the gender equality index. They have at least nodded in the direction of the mod wife, not just once but twice. 

First in 1975 when an estimated 90% of Icelandic women refused to work, either inside or beyond the home for a day, outpacing the breadwinning mod wife by not even bringing home the bacon. And then they went again in 2023, when prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir took the day off too.

Iceland is as good as it gets, having topped the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index 14 years in a row, and yet they are far from gender perfect.

In fact, just how uninclined we are towards true gender equality shows in the backlash against Icelandic women; 48 years after their first rebellion, they are still having to go on strike. The second campaign was called ‘You call this equality?’. 

There is still as much as a 21% gender pay gap in certain industries in Iceland, according to the World Economic Forum, and 40% of Icelandic women experience gender-based and sexual violence in their lifetime.

This same injustice is revealed in how we respond to trad wives in general, and to the Irish iteration promoted by the Natural Women’s Council, who I mentioned last week. We let it slide. We find it harmless, amusing, or both. We fail to see it as a very real and a sinister push against gender equality.

I shudder. Bring on the mod wives I say, or failing that, put me down for a wife bot. I could really do with one.