beyond "tradwife," part one

exposing the flaws in neo-traditionalist gender ideology

A Young Mother Sewing, Mary Cassatt,1900. Cassatt, contemporary of 19th century female social reformers, uses triangular composition common with Renaissance portraits of the Madonna and Child to confer her subject great dignity and importance despite the mundanity of the activity. 

Let me begin this essay by saying that I don’t have any problem with “tradwives,” if by “tradwives,” we mean women whose family model basically conforms to the midcentury breadwinner/homemaker ideal, who are socially conservative, openly Christian, and happy to inhabit the particular aesthetic common to that lifestyle. By that definition, I myself fit the bill. Many of my best friends fit the bill. Enough ink has been spilled criticizing our choices to dye the world black.

That said, certain aspects of the “tradwife” movement as an online phenomenon and growing ideological program raise my suspicions. There exists an online “tradwife” sphere—not to be confused with the aesthetic projects of influencers like Nara Smith or Ballerina Farm, but rather with women whose presentations are overtly ideological. This sphere has emerged as the feminine counterpart to the Red Pill movement—a secular and religious mix of male supremacists who claim that unchecked female power is the singular cause of society’s problems. Tradwives often adopt these manosphere truisms as self-evident, rebranding and promoting them under the guise of idyllic, complementary gender roles, particularly through more feminine-coded platforms like Instagram. Alarmingly, this ideology is seeping into real life, as many well-intentioned, scrupulous men and women, who instinctively reject mainstream leftism, now accept its stark opposition without question.

Why does this matter? Because truth matters, first and foremost. The desire for truth — conformity with the logic of Creation — is etched into our hearts by nature. In a postmodern, post-truth communication environment, those who make the loudest and most unyielding claims on the truth, against the relativist hemming and hawing, can superficially fulfill that desire in even the most earnest observer. But being anti-left doesn’t make the right right. The inverse of an evil claim isn’t necessarily a good claim. However reliable that heuristic might seem, reflexive reactionaries run the risk of taking the same shape of the evil they purport to oppose.

Falsity is not just intellectually, but often physically and spiritually damaging. I’ve seen women who take these ideas very seriously compromise their life to fulfill the sexual wants and emotional demands of husbands who regard their wives as spiritual and intellectual inferiors. Even the darling of the “trad Catholic” movement, Father Chad Ripperger says as much: that traditionalist communities often have problems with sins of a sexual nature, which flow directly from spiritual pride. Reflexive apologia for male license often results in abuse, the concealment of abuse, and the perpetuation of abuse in such communities.

One seemingly immutable feature of online discourse is that when priors are poked, even gently, those who hold them automatically tend to presume bad faith in their counterparts and revert to ad hominem disparagement. On the right, “feminist” has become an insult that shuts down the concerns of even conservative women who simply mean to articulate the unique vulnerabilities of women in relation to men. Flippancy protects the program, but leaves many questions unanswered. This has been bothering me about gender discourse for quite some time, probably because my previous online behavior is at least partially indicted by my own critique. 

With this project, I want to be fair to feminists and meninists, while demonstrating the error in the false dichotomy of gender they present as the appropriate answer to the choose-your-own-adventure Meat Lego (to borrow a phrase from

Mary Harrington

) narrative of modern progressivism. I want to shine light on the deeper assumptions in order to clarify my own thoughts and, hopefully, ease the mental anguish of some of my readers who find themselves similarly politically homeless in light of the ongoing gender-based polarization. Many of you, like me, have expressed misgivings about the “trad” enterprise, but bristle against the liberal-feminist, ledger-keeping critique of men and marriage that does not account for authentic sexual difference in biology, psychology, preference, and disposition – or, for that matter, love. 

Emily Stimpson Chapman

recently posted a series of essays on the “Heresies of the Manosphere” that I found particularly helpful in finding my footing despite the absolute chaos of the discourse. Inspired by her, I wanted to curate a more specifically political, though not exhaustive, list of claims that buttress the neotraditionalist gender ideological program. These are the runaway historical and theological assumptions that have led to memes like “repeal the 19th” and the attitude that women have no appropriate place in public life becoming mainstream on the right. For the sake of truth and dignity, I don’t think it’s appropriate to take these for granted or accept them without interrogation. I’ve taken them seriously; the steelman precedes the contradiction. They include:

1. Feminism (all waves) has only ever been a baseless conspiracy against men to free women from the bounds of God’s created order, a la Satanic rebellion.

2. Women’s education and work in the formal remunerative economy is disruptive and unnecessary. It depresses male wages and makes women less capable wives and mothers. 

3. Men are mostly harmless creatures who have suffered a bad public relations campaign at the hands of feminists. The proper female orientation toward men is blanket submissiveness, “sweetness,” rather than suspicion.

4. Modern women are uniquely miserable, and by “living traditionally” they can free themselves to experience true happiness. 19th century bourgeois domesticity is the apotheosis of “tradition.”

5. Women are too emotional to participate in public life. Repeal the 19th! Women are natural liberals, and all political problems are a consequence of female suffrage.

6. Divorce only happens because women are selfish, and we know this because they file more often than men do.

7. Outsourcing childcare – or housework – will damage your children. You have a moral duty to do it yourself, exclusively. Employing help is a sign of moral weakness.

Please enjoy this first installment in the series to come. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

CLAIM #1: Feminism (all waves) has only ever been a baseless conspiracy against men to free women from the bounds of God’s created order, a la Satanic rebellion.

STEELMAN: Feminism is an ideology that fundamentally contradicts a divinely ordained, hierarchical order between men and women. This contradiction is not just a political or social issue, but a deeply moral and theological rebellion with serious consequences for society's spiritual and structural integrity. Feminism is not merely a movement for gender equality, but a coordinated attack on traditional gender roles and the moral framework that they support. This hierarchy and the rebellion against it is reflected in Genesis, and mirrors Satan’s attempt to overthrow God’s authority, leading to chaos, social disorder, and a rejection of God's purpose for humanity. Feminism’s first wave (focused on suffrage and legal rights), the second wave (focused on reproductive rights, workplace equality, and sexual liberation), and the third wave (focused on intersectionality and gender fluidity) are connected by the same monolithic philosophy of rebellion. One leads invariably to the next in a pure, logical sequence; there were no possible alternative endings to Susan B. Anthony’s story than Bruce Jenner's.

SED CONTRA:

By reducing complexity, monocausal explanation can feel like logical elegance. The “all waves” thesis of feminism takes for granted two oversimplifications of reality. The first is historical (feminism as a monolith), and the second is theological (rigid patriarchy as divine design). 

Feminism as monolith

Feminism is not a monolith, historically, theologically, or politically. In order to pretend that’s true, modern rightists rely, ironically, on a particular kind of second wave revisionism which erased the Christian motivation behind the social activism of conservative women in the 18th and 19th centuries, overshadowing theirs with the legacy of their most liberal peers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This revisionism, especially as it pertains to Mary Wollstonecraft, is well-documented by

Erika Bachiochi

in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. In addition to dismissing the individuals themselves, the monolith explanation also requires a counterfactual, dismissive attitude toward the social ills that inspired early feminists, liberal and conservative, who are imagined to have overstated these evils in service of politics. 

Detailed statistical data on issues like sexual abuse, domestic violence, and alcoholism from this period are sparse due to the lack of systematic recording and the social taboos surrounding these topics at the time. So we must rely on literary and journalistic canonical sources. If only men can be taken seriously, then we can take Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Benjamin Disraeli, and countless other respectable intellectuals of the time as evidence. All agreed that the industrial poor lived in "squalid hovels, without a spark of hope, with their life slowly being ground down by the relentless machinery of industry" (Disraeli, Sybil). 

In school, we do not typically learn names like Hannah More, Elizabeth Fry, Isabella Graham, and Frances Willard. These women, like many of their contemporaries, would not have called themselves feminists by today’s standards and bore no resemblance to the feminists of the 20th century who advocated for “free love” and abortion. But yet they advocated the dignity of humanity through legal protections and charitable institutions dedicated to women and children, who often bore the brunt of the social ills brought about through industrialization. They are identified as “feminists” on the basis of the specific subjects of their activism. Erasing them from the historical record in favor of liberals and pretending that the world prior to their influence was some patriarchal utopia is ignorant at best, or otherwise extremely dishonest.

These women categorically did not call for a radical overhaul of social structures but instead worked within existing norms to confront legitimate evil. They extolled the complementarity of men and women and hoped that an increase of virtue on both parts would lead to a more peaceful and prosperous society. 

Elizabeth Fry, a devout Quaker, was instrumental in the 1823 Gaols Act, which mandated i) sex segregated prisons, ii) female warders for female prisoners across the whole of the then British Empire, and iii) introduced regular visits to prisoners by chaplains. 

Isabella Graham, a pious Scottish Anglican, founded the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, the Orphan Asylum Society, the Society for Promoting Industry among the Poor, and the first Sunday School for Ignorant Adults in New York. She also aided in organizing the first missionary society and the first monthly missionary prayer meeting in the city. She was the first president of the Magdalen Society of New-York, systematically visited the inmates of the hospital, and the sick female convicts in the state prison. She distributed Bibles to hundreds of families, believing that cultivating piety and Christian morality was the key to lifting widows, prostitutes, and the destitute out of poverty.

Temperance has been retconned as an inordinate display of fussiness and prudery by henpecking women, but we have forgotten the seriously detrimental effects that alcohol abuse had on cities after the industrial revolution. At the time, alcohol abuse and the licentious behavior that followed had become a real problem everywhere. In cities like London, the "Gin Craze" (roughly 1720–1751) was infamous, as cheap gin led to extreme public drunkenness, health problems, and moral decay. In the U.S., whiskey was similarly abundant, especially in frontier regions. Alcohol consumption was often integrated into daily life and was viewed as a way to deal with poverty, stress, and harsh living conditions, particularly among working-class men. Alcohol abuse also played a role in the exploitation of women through prostitution, particularly in urban centers. Drunkenness often led men to exploit vulnerable women, including their wives. Many women turned to prostitution out of economic desperation, exacerbated by the alcohol abuse of male breadwinners. In the United States, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded by Frances Willard, an American Methodist, in 1874, became one of the most influential organizations advocating for prohibition. 

There must certainly be a middle ground for analyzing the work of early feminists without either dismissiveness or unqualified admiration. The policies they inspired are certainly not beyond reproach. It is often argued that prohibition went too far, eventually leading to the expansion of both organized crime and the federal government. Still, it wasn’t without its successes. Alcohol consumption dropped by 30-50% during Prohibition, contributing to reductions in alcohol-related diseases and deaths. Deaths from liver cirrhosis fell by nearly 50%, and alcohol-related hospital admissions dropped by as much as 80%. Alcohol-related arrests and public drunkenness decreased by more than 50% in many urban areas. Family budgets were less strained by alcohol purchases, contributing to increased family stability. Most importantly, even despite a temporary uptick in alcoholic consumption during the rebellious roaring twenties, cultural norms around consumption changed for the better, forever.

If their projects had a uniting thesis, it was certainly not that women should abandon their families in order to mimic depraved male norms sexually and professionally. It was that depravity destroys families, and because families are an essential good, depravity itself should be moderated through great personal and public effort. Their activism was rooted in Christian doctrine and aimed at preserving or restoring societal values, often in ways that affirmed women’s traditional roles as mothers while expanding their rights and opportunities for virtue.

Rigid Patriarchy as Divine Design

Now for the theological assumption: the neotraditionalists conceive of rigid patriarchy and blanket female submission as essential to divine design. While it is true that physical differences in strength are baked into the cake of creation, they tend to take this as supporting evidence for a false equivalence between men and Christ (perfect) and women and the church (broken), citing Paul’s directive to the Ephesians that wives to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ. Submission, it is said, is unilateral enabling of the man’s will, regardless of the woman’s, whether through “the martial debt,” or any other decision. The woman’s duty is silence and service, in spite of any misgiving. Popular tradwife account “The Mountain Housewife” reflects this notion in her admonition to women to make themselves available to their husbands “whatever, wherever, whenever.” The content of the male desire, whether it is prudential or appropriate, is no object whatsoever.

These types also like to throw around the etymology of the word “virtue,” virtus, which comes from the Latin vir, meaning "man" in the sense of "adult male" or "person of strength or courage." Originally, virtus was defined by qualities characteristic of manliness, such as bravery, strength, and leadership, particularly in a military or civic sense. Superimposed on the modern context, they take this to mean that women are unequally capable, or uniquely incapable, of excellence. In reality, as words and concepts do over time and through the Christianization of the world, the concept evolved beyond just physical or martial strength to encompass a broader range of moral qualities, such as justice, temperance, prudence, and wisdom, which apply to both men and women. 

I am a Catholic, and as a Catholic, we submit to the intellectual authority of the Church on these issues. Many of the gender essentialist right think they do, too, and a cursory glance of the Biblical passages, voids of context and exegesis, could plausibly confirm them. But formal exegesis tells a different story. Chapman already did the work on this, so I will direct you to her:

When you know that God speaks to us through Sacred Tradition, as well as through Sacred Scripture, you’re not beholden to some particular pastor, priest, or YouTuber, who, for example, interprets Ephesians 5:22 (“Wives be subject to your husband, as to the Lord”) to mean that the wife owes slavish obedience to her husband or that submission is a one-way street. It’s not their subjective opinion on what that passage means that matters. It’s the Church’s authoritative opinion. It’s she who has the power to bind and loose and she who has the authority to judge the Holy Spirit’s meaning.

And what [the Church] says on the matter is that “whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the ‘subjection’ is not one-sided but mutual,” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 24). The Church likewise teaches that “Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife,” and warns against “a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships,” (Familiaris Consortio, 25).

From a perspective that takes physical dominance and etymology as evidence of unilateral spiritual superiority, God designed humanity in a particular way that might make feminine lowliness plausible. But ironically, when traditionalist ideologues accept either of these narratives–that men are collectively, inherently better than women by design and utility– they come into agreement, once again, with the very second and third wave feminists who, unlike their forebears, attempted to vitiate the reality of female biology in service of poorly-conceived equality.

Concluding notes

My critique of neo-traditionalist gender ideology does not arise from a rejection of traditional values themselves, but from a recognition of the dangers inherent in oversimplification and ideological rigidity. The truth is not found in blindly opposing feminism or uncritically embracing a narrow interpretation of patriarchy. Instead, we must navigate the complexities of history, theology, and human relationships with intellectual honesty and humility. It is possible to affirm the complementarity of men and women, the goodness of family life, and the importance of tradition, without succumbing to reactionary dogmas that distort both history and faith.

The "tradwife" movement has its merits in mentally freeing some women from the notion that they must perform exactly as men do in the commercial economy in order to be a legitimate person. But at its very worst, it embraces a version of femininity that minimizes women's potential for virtue. This vision requires adherents to ignore the rich diversity of Christian, female social reformers, flattening their contributions into a monolithic view that undermines the very truth it seeks to uphold. By failing to account for the real spiritual and psychological harm caused by abusive interpretations of submission, it also risks perpetuating cycles of suffering. What is needed is not a retreat to an imagined past, but a renewal of our commitment to truth, love, and mutual respect—values that should inform both feminism and traditionalism alike.

As we continue to explore these ideas, let us keep in mind that the dignity of every person, male or female, is paramount, and that any ideology that compromises that dignity is not only flawed, but dangerous.