I Would Have Been a Trad Wife Influencer
What I Learned from Michelle Duggar About the Power of a Fundie Wife
There’s a line in my book I think of every time I come across #tradwife content on social media. The therapist I saw after my escape was helping me see how I’d been my family’s PR manager for years.
Christian wives kept their husband’s secrets and they protected their family’s appearance.”
I come from the Michelle Duggar model of fundamentalist influencers, reinforced with this cherry-picked scripture so it couldn’t be argued with:
These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God. — Titus 2: 4-8
There was a group of women in my church who belonged to Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles (the IBLP), the same cult-group that the Duggar family was a part of, although in 1996, they weren’t on TV yet. These women became my mentors and assimilated me into their special belief system, which at the same time was spreading across the country congregant to congregant, evangelical-style. I disagree with suggestions the so-called “trad wife movement” is fringe: it’s been spreading in America’s white evangelical churches for decades and is now a hallmark of MAGA. They just don’t all get on Instagram and hawk an illustrated version of their lifestyle.
If I’d had social media available to me in the early 2000’s, I’d undoubtedly be using the hashtag, posting photos of my canning, gardening, homeopathy, baking, quiverful-in-a-dress aesthetic. I’d be doing in public exactly what I was doing in private: spit-shining shit to protect my husband’s secrets and my family’s appearance, so I wouldn’t bring shame on the word of God. The stakes didn’t come any higher than that. My heels could feel the flickering flames of hell. Suddenly housework becomes esteemed and important.
What is a trad wife?
From Wiki:
A tradwife (a neologism for traditional wife or traditional housewife),[1][2][3] in recent Western culture, typically denotes a woman who believes in and practices traditional sex roles and marriages. Many tradwives believe that they do not sacrifice women's rights by choosing to take a homemaking role within their marriage. Some may choose to leave careers to focus instead on meeting their family's needs in the home.
Side note—sometimes it’s difficult, as a complex trauma survivor of this lifestyle and church-sanctioned domestic abuse, to realize today there are wikipedia pages and hashtags openly describing our secrets. Take, for example, one of the results of this traditional power structure + submission + disobedience: Christian Domestic Discipline.
And…
But if they can talk about it, so can I.
The reality isn’t what they lead with. Instead, the trad wives, most of whom probably don’t get spanked and who all seem to embrace a certain amount of privilege while they toss out reckless platitudes, sell with illustrations and carefully curated imagery sprinkled with shame as manipulation.
The trad wives take ordinary cultural elements and desires, such as motherhood and staying home to raise one’s children, and fetishize it, elevating it to a heavenly calling that renders anyone outside of their homey-warm glow as less-than at best, bound for hell at worst. They pit ridiculous and fictional opposites against each other, revealing the fundamentalist binaries of their worldview.
You either want motherhood as your sole career OR you hate children.
You either want to submit to your husband OR you’re a dangerous part of the downfall of society.
Like most of Christian Fundamentalism, they reach out and evangelize women, using the “desires of their heart” to exploit them. Today’s trad wife doesn’t look like Michelle Duggar or my Gothard Fundie Mentors. She looks like a pretty young mash up of Marilyn Monroe and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
She may not even be married yet, like in the case of the Love To Be Feminine account, which has nearly 100k followers on IG. She may wear sexy baby clothes or cosplay in prairie getups, twirling around her house like an aproned homesteader who never gets dirty, but she’s got all the same Fascinating Womanhood hallmarks we were taught in the 90s fundie culture through the IBLP, The Excellent Wife, and Created To Be His Helpmeet. (see my videos)
But you know what’s under all this cloyingly sweet aesthetic? The ugly power structure throughout patriarchy known as the Umbrella of Authority: men on top, women without a voice unless it’s in compliance with the system, and the darkest shadow of them all…women teaching the women to perpetuate and perpetrate, because the only power they have is to find validation and expression through others buying into their program.
Sound like an MLM pyramid scheme? A cult? Slavery? The Handmaid’s Tale? That’s because it is. The influencer inmates have forgotten what life is like out here and they’re very busy protecting their pretty prisons while voting in leaders that want you to live this way too.
Trad wives benefit from this power structure.
One thing I’ve learned from living on both sides is the incredible privilege it is to be able to stay home and raise your children, especially in a society that under-educates, denies village-style resourcing, won’t offer universal paid leave or childcare. It’s one thing to know this in your mind; another to experience it in your bones.
For all the harm that came to me and mine through Christian Fundamentalism, one beautiful benefit it gave me was ten years at home with my babies. Disallowed to work outside the home, vote, socialize much, and host of other ordinary things my mentors said I could skip to have more children. I loved motherhood and wanted each of my children—even if I saw wisdom in spacing them out. But according to the Duggars and my mentors, spacing my pregnancies meant I was choosing against God and the fruit of my womb. It was a trade I’d be making, without any compromise or in-between, and the trad wife mantras haven’t changed.
But the truth is, even if I’d wanted birth control, child care, and a career, I couldn’t have had it. I don’t have a college education and I didn’t have access to any of those other options. In addition to home being “my highest call,” “traditional,” “biblical,” and “valued,” staying home was also safe and necessary. Through a series of groomed choices in evangelicism, home was about the only place I was qualified to be.
So, I saw the benefit of promoting a single-income lifestyle, embracing voluntary poverty and simplicity, traditional values, gardening, homesteading, canning, homeschooling, used clothing, etc. And I wanted my children’s childhood to be happy and nurturing, my husband’s mental state to remain calm, and to uphold the word of God. I would have done this with the same ethos I bring to my work now: an attention to warmth and kindness, research, visual aesthetics, and reason backed with experience. I would have been complicit in converting future perpetuators and perpetrators to the trad wife lifestyle. I would have made pretty memes.
Submissive women have funny-ish jokes about living under rule:
The man may be the head of the household. But the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head whichever way she pleases. — Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding
I’ve heard Michelle say it, my mentors all said it, I said it too. By being excellent wives at the submissive game, we were able to steer our men and families in the way they should go. So why not steer society too? American culture is vast enough to hold the trad wife ambition; the four walls of our home was not.
Tell the truth now.
I’m thankful I didn’t have social media back then and that during my most vulnerable years, I wasn’t able to reach so many hundreds of thousands seeking affirmation and validation for my views. I tried—back when blogging was brand-new I built a lifestyle blog that earned an average of 60k hits a day.
But I lived the truth behind the scenes of that painterly, literary, shit-shined aesthetic. For every good and beautiful truth about eating wholesome meals, using cloth diapers, and reading aloud to children, there’s a shadow of control, shame, and self-denial to the point of annihilation. There’s good reason why the Duggar’s didn’t tell the truth of the trad lifestyle on TV, and why there’s a record-breaking documentary (I’m in it) exposing the truth of it: Shiny Happy People.
Truth is the only antidote for sugar-coated poison. I wrote the truth, which is often hard, gritty, ugly, and raw, in my memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy, A Well-Trained Wife.
I also support the work of truth-tellers who approach the load of trad content in unique ways, like comedian and creator Ashely Taylor @AsheleyTaylove
And writers such as Kelsey McGinnis @kelseykmcginnis and Marissa Burt
who have an excellent series on Instagram about today’s trad wives.
I was part of the market hungry for trad wife content once. I am also the kind of savvy content creator who would’ve tried to use it to help me keep secrets and maintain appearances. When the rod of correction and the flickering flames of hell are waiting behind closed doors, and when the only glory and love to be found exists within suffering, it can feel like the fight of your life. You’ll do anything to keep your ego, children, and family alive.
Listen to the ruffled rage of the trad wives long enough and soon you’ll recognize their desperation.
Read more of my personal experiences as a trad wife here.
Book Office Hours with me here.
Have you seen the BBC documentary called Stacey stays over. The presenter, Stacy Dooley stays with various unusual people and one episode is a trad wife. I have to say I was happy that the couple were Americans who had moved to the UK, rather than a home grown trad wife. They even said the Vicar in the church didn't agree. It's easy to watch on youtube
Oh my goodness, I thought the first blond influencer was a parody. What is sad is once women are deep into this paradigm and they are unhappy is that they blame themselves, not the overly restricted lifestyle that obliterates their sense of self.
When I watched the Iowa 2024 Caucus, and saw the interviews of the happy Fundamentalists, I was saddened. I worried about the brain washing in the families behind closed doors. I was also saddened since what I saw was a very different Iowa than what I grew up in, in the 1950s and 1960s.
And yes, we need to seriously take this Fundi part of our country very seriously, since they feel the whole nation should be under this very rigid belief structure