Joyce Fegan: The TikTok 'tradwife' trend — a solution for stressed-out families?

So then "tradwife" trends. What's that got to do with workout videos, rapid recipes and make-up tutorials — the stuff our kids are ordinarily exposed to?

On the benign surface, the "tradwife" trend comes across as "fetish" content. People watch out of curiosity. It's typically young women, say early 20s, dressed in a 1950s vintage housewife's outfit with a blonde bob of freshly set curls. Not "emasculating" their husbands is a top priority, as is not "nagging" them and they keep a clean house, cook meals from scratch and lovingly lean into the blissful work of raising their children, essentially solo, because the man of the house is of course out of the house most of the waking hours of the day.

Any parent reading this might nod along and think: "Well someone needs to run the ship, while someone else brings home the bacon — so this makes perfect sense".

We've actually already baked the idea of the 'tradwife' into legislation and into a Constitution, and it has actually done the opposite of removing financial burdens and mental and psychological stressors from people's lives

In America, after the Great Depression, the government "stepped in to help families", writes Angela Garbes in her 2022 book Essential Labour: Mothering as Valuable Labour.

The New Deal was created, establishing an "American family wage". Here's the clincher — it was a "guaranteed minimum wage that would be enough to support a working husband, a housewife, and a couple of children".

It sounds awfully like Article 41.1 of our Constitution which states: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved".

Indeed she does give the State a support and indeed this support supports the common good.

But there's more: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

We have therefore already road tested the "tradwife" concept in America and here, and economic necessity, as the drafters of our Constitution so rightly pointed out, became quite the thing. 

Eighty-six years after the writing of Bunreacht na hÉireann, almost all households with children need to run on two salaries, and then in order for that to happen, there's the cost of childcare. And on top of that — the cost of housing

The "juggle struggle" or the career-care conundrum comes from the fact that we live in an economy that is based on a 9-to-5 job, whereas most preschools are closed by lunch and primary schools finish up shortly thereafter, and once you've given birth sure aren't you grand.

Melinda Gates wrote the following in TIME magazine at the height of the pandemic: "Instead of making it possible for US workers to be active parts of their families and the economy at the same time, our country has long operated on the wildly outdated assumption that we all have stay-at-home partners to handle the caregiving.

"This may be because so many of the people who set policy in this country are in precisely that position," she added.

There's another huge layer to this that Angela Garbes' book nails — we do not value care work. People talk about the "system being broken", but the system was never fixed in the first place. The career-care conundrum exists because the workplace is designed for you to work like you do not have a family, and raise a family like you don't work.

The "tradwife" trend is just a cosy camouflage that absolves wealthy industrialised nations from coughing up the money for paid leave and providing universal childcare.

And into that breach step women, in the main.

Also at the height of the pandemic, Reshma Saujani, social entrepreneur and founder of the wildly successful organisation Girls Who Code, found herself with a six-year-old to homeschool, a three-week-old to care for and a huge business to lead. She finally saw how her years of telling women to "lean in" were flawed. And so she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about women's unpaid labour, calling for a "Marshall Plan for Moms".

She then read the comments section.

"People on the left were saying: 'What about the dads?', and people on the right were saying: 'Well motherhood is a choice'." 

She realised that "motherhood was controversial".

To the commentators on the left first, the data shows it was women who predominantly did the homeschooling, but more than that they left the workforce in their hundreds of thousands. As of now, 1.1million American mothers have not returned to the workforce since the pandemic began.

To the commentators on the right — if motherhood is a choice and therefore undeserving of State or social support, who will birth your oncologist, who will rear and educate your accountant, and where will we get all the taxpayers to fund pensions?

Motherhood is both private and public work. But mostly, it's highly valuable labour that is conveniently not remunerated as such

And this is where second-wave feminism failed mothers — it made it clear that women should run from the home and their children as soon as they exit the labour ward. But what if all that early years care work was financially rewarded? What if all that fundamental early years care work was valued? And what if either partner, or solo parent, could actively choose to embrace that care work, knowing they'd be valued and remunerated accordingly?

And we currently have yet another generation of mothers who are not in paid employment, and instead do the essential work of running their homes, do the school drop-offs and collections, cook the meals, regulate tantrums, do the homework, navigate bedtime — and when all the work is done and the nest is empty, so too will their pension pot.

It is of great interest that "tradwife" trends now, on the back of the pandemic when high-profile privileged women started speaking up about the true cost of their unpaid labour, and at this very moment in time when there is a growing movement in America looking for paid leave for parents and universal childcare.

Reshma Saujani is right, motherhood is "controversial" because it involves valuable, unseen and essential labour that we've so far gotten away with not paying for. "Tradwife" also fails to address the village-less-ness of modern motherhood, and therefore isn't the answer, but remunerating and valuing care work is, be that of the "stay-at-home mum" or "working mother" kind. That would be radical.