"Traditional" Wife = "White Supremacy"

I am struck by the insistence on creating a new word to describe someone who does something that wives have traditionally, i.e. always, done. Calling them "tradwives" rather than "wives" is of a piece with the 1984 tendency to describe English Socialism as "Ingsoc," or for that matter the move to describe men as "cishet males." What we would have simply called a "wife" when I was a boy now must be described as a "cishet female tradwife," if you believe this nonsense.

Of course it is also the case that these women are white supremacists, because naturally that is the narrative to forward for the NYT. I'm sure there are white supremacist wives out there, although I imagine they are far fewer in number than the NYT imagines them to be. For every one you can find with a YouTube show that has troubling undertones, I'll bet that a fair-minded study would find ten thousand that are just really traditional wives.

Indeed, 'traditional wife' isn't an unhealthy role, and the argument that it is sort-of only for whites is not going to help other communities. Stable marriages are of great value in developing wealth across generations, as should be expected given the virtues that are needed in order to be successful at a stable marriage; and increasing wealth across generations is how you finally end the cycles of poverty and dysfunction. If anything we should be pushing people to develop the right virtues and to nurture their marriages, not trying to stigmatize a model that works for at least some subset of married couples.

UPDATE: A better invocation, although with the same social justice goals: using the Catholic act of contrition as a model for apologies.

12 comments:

Texan99 said...

I was with you until you got to the transition from traditional wife to stable marriage, which I couldn't follow.

Tom said...

Huh. That makes sense to me. Where's the disconnect for you?

Also, this is of a piece with noting that parents reading to their children gives their children an unfair advantage when compared with the children of parents who don't read to them. So, stop reading to your kids, fascists!

Naturally, we can never recommend the practices of the successful to the unsuccessful, but instead only stigmatize and tear down the successful to make them equal to the unsuccessful.

Grim said...

It's a model that works for some people. For those for whom it works, we should let them at it. For those for whom it might work, it'd be better if they didn't think it was inauthentic for them because it was 'too white.'

GraniteDad said...

Just because the NYT doesn’t like them doesn’t make them good. “Traditional wife” is the term they take for themselves. It’s not pressed upon them. I liken it to “paleo” conservatives, who are trying to claim a mantle that isn’t theirs, as though they are the true conservatives and all others are a false offshoot. All of my interactions with/ observations of “tradwives” have had a strong “whites are best” bent to it. I’m not a fan.

Elise said...

I also found the transition from "traditional wife" to "stable marriage" jarring. It is possible to have a stable marriage where the wife's activities are not traditional; it's possible to have an unstable marriage where the wife's activities are. (I seem to remember, quite a while back, a discussion somewhere, perhaps at Villainous Company, about divorce rates rising prior to the women's movement taking hold.)

If you get married, stay married; if you have children, don't do it out of wedlock: those are good rules for developing wealth across generations. How married people divide up the work, money, child-raising, etc., is up to them. If what we now call "traditional" roles work for the couple, fine; if not, fine.

Women, like men, come with a variety of interests, abilities, goals, needs, backgrounds, and social environments. One size does not fit all of either.

Grim said...

That is not in dispute, Elise. Indeed, that understanding is exactly why I wrote, in the original post, "a model that works for at least some subset of married couples" rather than "the only model that works."

GraniteDad:

I don't doubt that you can dig up some white supremacists extolling traditional marriage if you want to do so. I think the decision to draw attention to them, and the decision to paint them as the face of traditional marriage, is nevertheless worthy of criticism.

Nobody likes white supremacists except themselves, and this page has been critical of them from its very first post in 2003. All the same, there just aren't that many of them. We hear about them a whole lot more than they merit, and always in ways that are meant to paint with a much broader brush than is justified.

This article, for example, isn't really only critical of the white supremacist wives it puts front and center. It's critical of this whole model of marriage when you read closely. It just uses the white supremacist frame to make sure that the reader is in the right mindset for the slam on traditional marriages it delivers. It's the same sort of trick that people sometimes pull by talking about Hitler having been a fan of vegetarianism or animal rights. It's not wrong, but it's also a pretty unfair frame for a discussion of the virtues of vegetarianism or animal rights.

Tom said...

It is possible to have a stable marriage where the wife's activities are not traditional; it's possible to have an unstable marriage where the wife's activities are.

Ah, I see. I didn't take it the same way.

Texan99 said...

Tom, I know many non-traditional but stable marriages, including my own of 35 years, and I have known many traditional marriages that didn't survive. I'm not persuaded of the connection between the two.

Elise said...

I was reacting to Tom reacting to Tex. Which is one reason I don't comment very often - I'm awfully reactive these days. :+)

Grim said...

Well, you're welcome to react here all you'd like. I'm always glad to see you.

Elise said...

Thanks, Grim.

Tom said...

Thanks, Tex. I didn't take the two as necessarily connected (i.e., you must have this relationship to have a stable marriage), but simply as one way of doing things, as Grim mentioned. However, I can see your points. There's no particular reason I made the assumptions I did when I read it.