Your Granny’s Lifestyle wasn’t Dangerous, Actually

“Tradwives” are nothing new. It’s just what women have done for generations, harmlessly and often happily.

By Sarah:

All across this country there are women well over the age of 80 who raised families in Ireland, some time ago. In the 70s in Ireland over a third of women had four or more children, but having seven eight or even nine was common. These women likely budgeted a wage that never stretched far enough, kept a kitchen going through winters without most conveniences we take for granted, fixed clothes, and ran households like a logistics operation without a diary, an app, or a day off.

Every bit of food got eaten, every part of an animal got used, meals were always made from scratch. These women, now very elderly, have no idea what a “trad wife” is.

They would however, recognise the job description immediately, because they did it, and in a huge amount of cases would happily tell you that they enjoyed at least some elements of it. They weren’t making a statement. This was raising a family, and this was simply how it was done.

Nobody thought anyone needed to be warned off it, because domestic competence in a woman wasn’t some kind of political statement. Nobody suggests it was all rosy, but there was (albeit mostly amongst women themselves) a quiet respect for the manner in which other women cleverly ran their households, who made the best bread, who was able to have seven children scrubbed and well turned out in a tiny house. I remember my own mother in the eighties marveling at a neighbour who told her she scrubbed her bathrooms every day. Every SINGLE day my mother noted. Where does she get the energy from?

Fast forward two generations, and a young American woman in a nice kitchen films herself doing the same things that used to be part of that same day to day life. Bread, cleaning, a vegetable patch; ultimately a romanticisation of a life we were told to run screaming and roaring away from, and suddenly it isn’t just content. It’s a dangerous gender stereotype. Not a niche interest in an internet awash with hobbies, but something apparently significant enough to require commentary, and a government campaign. The bread hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that someone, somewhere, has decided this particular woman’s choice is the one that needs some good old fashioned irish governmental nose poking.

We’ve watched a similar concept before, and it had a much friendlier reception the first time round. A few years ago an Essex woman with a spray bottle and a nice chatty voice became one of the most followed people doing precisely nothing except cleaning her own house on camera.

Mrs Hinch didn’t invent an ideology, didn’t claim to be reviving anything, didn’t position herself against other woman’s choices. She filmed herself wiping down a hob and talking to her followers like a friend would, and it turned out an enormous number of women found that genuinely soothing to watch — the repetition of it and the sense of a small corner of the world being brought under control, the calmness it gave people, particularly those with mental health difficulties.

They proved it wasn’t a fringe taste with their attention and their wallets: the products she liked sold out within days, entire supermarket aisles were cleared, and an industry of copycat cleaning content sprang up in her wake. Nobody ran a campaign then warning women that watching too much cleaning content might lead them to enjoy cleaning.

We were content to let millions of women watch a stranger over-clean her toilet in peace. And we did that because she was glamourising something that’s required, its not a lifestyle its just the day to day cleaning, she wasn’t potentially disrupting the fabric of society, women would still make the right life choices, they’d just have cleaner sinks. It was a hobby, not a comment on society.

We extend the same courtesy to fitness influencers and wellness influencers every day without comment. Nobody watching a woman post her 5am gym routine assumes she’s issuing a referendum on women who sleep in. We understand instinctively that a woman filming her own personal day to day habits is just that — her own habits, on display, for anyone who finds them useful or interesting or simply pleasant to watch.

We’ve decided, as a culture, that this is fine, right up until the habit on display is a woman enjoying her own home and choosing a different paced, different priority life. When that happens, suddenly the same behaviour that was a lifestyle niche a moment ago becomes, apparently, a threat.

We are constantly reminded, by the same institutions now nervous about homemade stew, that they are unambiguously in favour of choice. Choice is the entire foundation of the modern basis on which us women now live our lives. A woman’s right to decide is now paramount; what her own days look like, her own career, her own household, her own body, free from anyone else’s judgment. Fine by me (to a point) and I think most people can get on board with that, but its fake.

Its only if the choices you make fit the vision someone else has for how a woman should live her life, that’s not progress. That’s just a different flavour of authoritarian bullshit.

What is abundantly clear by the Governments plans to warn us of the dangerous gender stereotypes being displayed by tradwives is this; if I want to grow vegetables in a raised bed I built myself, keep a clean house without shame about liking it clean, iron the sheets because I find it strangely calming after a week in work, and bake bread for my own children because they like it warm, why exactly does that require a public information campaign warning women off it?

What, precisely, is the danger being flagged, and to whom? That I might enjoy it? That other women might watch me enjoying it and think it looks appealing, or worse might try it themselves? If choice is genuinely sacred, then my choice to like domestic order or cooking or ‘making daddy a sandwich’ is exactly as sacred as anyone else’s choice not to, except its not is it?

Its backward and a bit sad, and the attitude is that it is somehow ‘anti progress’ and any woman participating in that type of backward misogynistic lifestyle is obviously not informed enough, and must be patronisingly told why more work, less kids, less time at home and more time away from any kids you do have is the true utopia we must all work towards. Clearly, we have a state body determined to quietly rank one choice above the other while insisting, always, that it isn’t in the business of ranking women’s choices at all.

Why is there no state-funded campaign gently informing the thirty-nine-year-old woman on partnership track that fertility does not negotiate around billable hours, and that “I’ll have a baby at forty-five once I’ve made enough career progress” That is a plan built on a fantasy that the prevailing culture around women, fertility and motherhood has lied to her bare faced about.

That genuinely difficult conversation involving biology, timelines, and years nobody gets back once they’re spent goes conspicuously unsaid, because it’s uncomfortable, because it risks sounding like it’s telling ambitious women what to do with their bodies and their careers, and because the people who’d need to fund that campaign would rather not have the argument. Fair enough, perhaps it’s a difficult topic, but then have the integrity to stay out of the choices women can make completely, and leave the bread alone too.

Most women, including the ones running practices, sitting on boards, standing in courtrooms, and building companies, have a trad wife somewhere in them, whether they’d ever use the phrase or not. It’s the instinct that finds real, unembarrassed satisfaction in a clean kitchen, or an immaculately organised kitchen cabinet, and really feels entirely content only when the house and family are all happy and content, not because anyone is forcing the issue, not because feminism failed her, but because competence feels good wherever a person finds it, whether that’s managing the company accounts or getting a week’s washing done and folded before anyone else is awake.

That’s why Mrs Hinch was so popular, and why millions of women sit down to watch trad wife content online, its honest preference. It’s the same instinct that makes some women get their charge from a spreadsheet, some from a sales call, and some from a beautifully organised hot press. Pretending that one of those three needs correcting while the other two are celebrated is its own form of condescension — the assumption that a woman filming herself enjoying domestic life surely hasn’t thought it through properly, while a woman filming herself doing A 5AM jog is simply living her best life and needs no further comment.

Your granny didn’t need permission for any of it, and she certainly didn’t need a warning. Nobody sat her down to explain that enjoying a well-kept house might be setting women back. Her life was difficult, and there is no doubt that women’s lives have improved since, but the instinct she had, entirely unremarkable in her own time, is the same one showing up in an expensive apron on your phone now, just better lit and with a following. The bread is the same bread. The only thing that’s actually changed is that the Irish state has decided this particular version of a woman’s choice is the one that the government needs to help us with. The truth is, your granny didn’t need the government to save her, and neither do you.

SR.