In a Tortoiseshell
This is an excerpt from my R3 for WRI 155: Time’s Mirror. In the essay, I examine the “traditional wife,” or tradwife, movement, specifically the inconsistencies and disconnects that plague it. I argue that tradwives ultimately embody second-wave feminism: the idea that women can have it all. This is despite conflicting understandings of the movement’s relationship to feminism and tradwives’ presentations of gender and curation of their online personas.
Excerpt
In defense of their return to 1950s-style gender roles, tradwives consistently (if only implicitly) invoke choice feminism, or a woman’s right to make her own decisions, whether they conform to traditional notions of gender or not. However, choice feminism is inherently anachronistic to the 1950s, a period that did not allow for female agency. Similarly, being a successful influencer and a tradwife (i.e. creating an online persona based on the performance of a traditional female role) seem diametrically opposed. On a surface level, successful tradwife influencers promote traditional femininity and all its trappings: submission to male authority, modesty and chastity, motherhood and domesticity. A closer examination, though, reveals a different reality: because influencing is a job in its own right and generates an income, successful influencers don’t actually practice the traditional femininity they espouse; making money and financial independence contradicts it.
This disconnect between practice and reality reveals why there is such confusion in the tradwife community, the media, and scholarship regarding tradwives’ relationship to feminism. Some tradwives claim to exercise choice feminism while others declare themselves resolutely anti-feminist, even as they invoke choice feminism in their justifications and defenses of the movement. The media and scholars, then, are conflicted in their interpretations of tradwives’ attitudes towards feminism, tending to either oversimplify or misrepresent their perspectives. Regardless, successful tradwife influencers, even if unintentionally, publicly embody the idea that women can have it all. Thus, tradwives’ “new,” implied conceptualization of femininity is actually a return to ideas popularized by second-wave feminism and books like Joyce Gabriel and Bettye Baldwin’s Having It All: A Practical Guide to Managing a Home and Career (1981), or Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money… Even If You’re Starting With Nothing (1982) (Szalai 2015);
The intersection between the performance of gender and the performance of influencers allows tradwives to conceal this relationship. Judith Butler first introduced the theory of gender performance in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). They write that “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time… through a stylized repetition of acts” (179; emphasis mine), which mirrors the construction and maintenance of an online persona (such as that of a tradwife). Moore, Barbour, and Lee (2017) developed a framework for understanding this online persona, identifying five dimensions that characterize it. In describing the public dimension specifically, Moore et al. identifies how image-crafting and performance can become an embodied pattern, especially for online celebrities: “The public self is the ‘official’ version that the celebrity offers up to the world, a highly polished, scheduled and controlled version… A performed self… can quickly become a pattern of action which then becomes routine…” (4) (emphasis mine). Moore et al. also identified the performance of gender as a factor in the presentation of online persona: “To present a publicly mediated persona, we must perform our identity, our profession, our gender…” (4).
Combining the work of Butler, who focuses on gender, and Moore, who focuses on online persona, reveals an inextricable connection between gender as performance and influencing as performance. Tradwives’ particular performance of gender—with its emphasis on homemaking and traditional femininity—obfuscates the entrepreneurial, income-generating side of being an influencer. Such obfuscation is facilitated by tradwives’ curation, mediation, and control over their online personas. It enables them to conceal the inconsistencies in their presentations of traditional femininity, the contradictions between promoting homemaking and submission to men while working, earning an income, and making their own choices about their public identities and presentations.
Works Cited
Barbour, Kim, Katja Lee, and Christopher Moore. “Online persona research: An Instagram case study.” Persona Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 1-12.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.Szalai, Jennifer. “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All.’” The New York Times, January 2, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-complicated-origins-of-having-it-all.html
Author Commentary / Katriona Page
My first idea was to write about Mormons, specifically Mormon Doomsday Preppers. However, when I realized an astonishingly large amount of scholarship already existed on this particular niche of survivalists, I started searching for a different topic. Somehow, my investigation led me from Mormon Doomsday Preppers to tradwives (there is actually some crossover between the two communities, with both rejecting certain aspects of modern life).
Fortunately, because tradwives are a relatively new phenomenon, there was much to be explored. There were only a few scholarly articles on the subject and endless fascinating primary source material. The data and evidence collection was by far my favorite part of the writing process. I delved deep into the tradwife community, watching their videos, reading their blogs, and perusing their merch. Equally fascinating was the online response, which ran the gamut from outraged—The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, etc.—to celebratory (mainly just Reddit commentators). Tradwives were a polarizing group, inspiring much public discourse. It was the ideal moment to enter the conversation.
However, after watching too many Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm (two popular tradwife content creators) videos to count, I ran into an issue. I had identified a few major, overarching themes or inconsistencies, including the media vs. tradwives’ portrayal of the movement, choice feminism vs. anti-feminism, and content creation as a form of work, but I was finding it incredibly difficult to tie them together. In my first draft, I essentially wrote three disjointed mini essays. Thus, my primary focus during the revision process was identifying the link. I knew it was there somewhere; I just had to “unearth” it. At many points, I second-guessed myself, questioning if I was forcing a connection when there simply wasn’t one. However, I’m glad I persisted, because I think the final result does effectively demonstrate a relationship. Overall, this paper was a crucial lesson in what it means to truly make an argument rather than just compiling and regurgitating information.
Editor Commentary / Jordan Fraser Angel
Although it can certainly be challenging for Writing Seminar students to stake out an original claim in a crowded field of accomplished scholars, in this paper Katriona does something even more impressive: her intervention covers a topic with little existing scholarly discourse, making incisive claims about a subject with few established certainties. Katriona does this intentionally, calling it “the ideal moment to enter the conversation.” Showing inventiveness by researching “a relatively new phenomenon,” Katriona demonstrates how to be an active, contemporary scholar.
In this excerpt, Katriona combines several strategies of intervention. First, she pairs two historical eras, contrasting our present moment with the 1950s, a time period which tradwives claim to emulate. This allows her to establish a tension between tradwife values and the complex anachronisms inherent in their lifestyle. She then goes on to identify contradictions and “confusion” regarding how tradwives are discussed, both by the self-proclaimed tradwives and by the media. It is through this opening which Katriona creates for herself that her intervention truly shines. Later, she strengthens her argument by linking it to the broader scholarly conversation, and she does so in an inventive way, associating a celebrated scholar of gender, Judith Butler, with a lesser-known study of online personas. In this way, she displays how reorganizing the scholarly conversation can be an excellent way of intervening within it.
Indeed, Katriona herself comments on how centering intriguing connections and novel linkages is at the heart of her intervention. In her reflection, she explains that she started with “three disjointed mini essays,” which eventually evolved to “demonstrate a relationship” between tradwives, choice feminism, and online gendered personas. Again and again, Katriona triangulates between many different components, resulting in an original and well-supported understanding of the tradwife sphere.
In particular, Katriona reads tradwives against the grain (to borrow from the language of close reading) to demonstrate how they are, in many ways, the opposite of what they claim to be. Doing this requires flexible and creative thinking, imagining alternative explanations than what initially appears to be true. Katriona highlights this process of inventive intervention through the phrase “disconnect between practice and reality,” and through the opposition of the “surface level” and a “closer examination.” The artist Paul Klee, in his book The Inward Vision, noted that “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” (Oxford Essential Quotations, Oxford University Press). This quotation explains how creativity and inventive interventions are entwined. To create means to envision a more true—possibly a more real—reality. Katriona’s paper is an excellent example of how academic writing, too, is an act of creation. Through her intervention, she identifies an “obfuscation” and dispels it, allowing readers to see more distinctly the world that she analyzes.
