On Tradwifery, pt. I

Or, there's a little fascist inside all of us and mine lives in my womb. Apparently.

Several months ago, I was confronted with a problem. I found myself deep in an internet tradwife content black hole and I kept thinking a phrase over and over, which was: “This is Nazi shit.”

Now, I unfortunately know more than the average person about the Nazis, so I am not prone to the ‘calling everything and everyone a Nazi’ hyperbole. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something inherently Third Reich-ian about these videos of thin, floral frock-wearing women making pie crusts and talking about their sexy farmer husbands.

We arrived at Gender and the Holocaust Week in the course I was teaching, and everything clicked into place when I encountered the image below.

If you stuck these smiling Aryans in a Hobby Lobby and Magnolia Home for Target-decorated farmhouse (and replaced the Nazi black eagle with an American bald one) it wouldn’t look out of place on Instagram.

Tradwifery is a spectrum, with one end full of gentle, blushing brides cosplaying as Cinderella and the other full of flannel-bedecked doomsday preppers debating the best way to homeschool children after everyone’s moved into a bunker. There are also many iterations of the tradwife — the Christian, the neopagan, the January 6th-er — but a unifying feature, as far as I can tell, is the belief that women should dedicate their lives to the primary purpose of serving as stewards for another generation. Because of this divinely-ordained mission, they are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers of the modern world and the best defense against this is by retreating into strict gender roles. If tradwives are not given adequate protection then not only are their lives endangered, so are the lives of potential future children, which is the most important contribution they can make to the world. They can buy this protection with their servitude.

You know who else thought this? Yes. Those guys.

In fact, from 1939 to 1944 a German woman in the Third Reich could literally earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal in motherhood, determined primarily based on whether she was behaving according to social expectations of her, and whether she had given birth enough times to qualify. To earn a gold medal, a woman needed to have provided the Reich with a minimum of eight ‘pure’ German children.

During the Nazi period, women’s willing non-participation in economic and cultural life outside of unflinchingly supporting the Party and her family was framed as the highest virtue. Her value as a person was judged in relation to these things only, with motherhood touted as a necessary, sacred duty.

One of the ways in which these expectations were reinforced was through relentless propaganda campaigns that only ever depicted women as mothers or future mothers, frequently using imagery reminiscent of traditional Christian Madonna and child motifs.

Do you see what I mean?

In doing this, the Nazis very clearly articulated the relationship between German motherhood and ‘true’ divinity, helping to buttress the belief that the Nazi project was all carried out in pursuit of a mystical, esoteric understanding of the world, which included their insistence on particular gender roles. To worship the German mother as a beatific, tender-hearted figure leading the Reich’s children to victory was to connect her to many centuries of sacred mothers, almost none of whom are known for anything but the sacrifice of their own bodies and hearts.

This, of course, ignores the cruel behavior of German women who did work outside the home — in the bureacratic apparatus, for example, or as camp guards — and the behavior of mothers who cheerfully supported the murder of millions of children. Just so long as they were somebody else’s children.

Part of the Nazis’ whole motherhood thing was the belief that European society writ broadly had strayed too far from their collective roots. In essence, getting women back to being mothers first and people second was actually a corrective measure taken to avoid further catastrophe. This is basically the exact same argument being used by contemporary tradwives, who conceptualize their movement as being regressive on purpose. They do not see themselves as separate from the modern world (hence all the TikToks) but as crusaders hoping to restore us all to the proper balance between having autonomy and giving birth while baking a quiche. To them, those scales should really be tipping in the quiche’s direction.

Is her pot roast… floating?

Here’s why it freaks me out, though.

It’s not the men wanting women to do this stuff, because we all know what’s going on there. It’s the women wanting women to do this stuff. Becoming a tradwife requires acquiescing to the idea that women’s lives have been routinely minimized and forgotten throughout history because their social restriction was justified. It entails saving someone the effort of dragging you into the kitchen because you’re offering your hand to them willingly.

It is also a bizarrely ahistorical movement, particularly in its framing of ‘traditional’ femininity and gender roles. For instance, women (married, single, mothers, childless) of any non-ruling economic class have always worked outside the home. In fact, poor women were far more likely to work in someone else’s house, care for someone else’s children, wash someone else’s laundry, bake someone else’s cakes, than they were to be able to do so for their own family. Farmer’s wives definitely didn’t dress in gauzy ballgowns because they were too busy shoveling hundreds of pounds of literal poop and slaughtering pigs with their very muscular, decidedly non-ballerina-esque arms. Even the shiny, smiley femininity of the 1950s housewife was manufactured through the consumption of enough booze, amphetamines, and barbiturates to down a rhinoceros.

Ultimately, what rankles is basically just the fervent belief on the part of tradwives that it is possible to return somewhere that mostly never existed in the first place, except in Nazi propaganda.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually thoroughly enjoy many of the activities touted by members of this community: I am a deft hand with a sewing needle, bake a mean loaf of crusty bread, have cultivated a beautiful herb garden, and last year I spent too long picking out a pair of oven mitts that really spoke to me. But worry not! I’d make a terrible tradwife, largely because I’m the kind of person who’d write stuff like this.