Not a Trad Wife

It took a while before the Trad Wife label made it into my consciousness. Much of popular culture tends to bypass me, and I think it was one of my children who first brought it to my attention. Curious, I then had to look it up. My immediate reaction was not positive, but there was no blog post about it at that time, because I needed to come to terms with it all. This was mainly because on some superficial level, my life and those glossy social media Trad Wives were kind of the same. I knew they weren't, but I truly didn't have words to explain the difference. 

The library to the rescue!

A while back, I came across the concept of Radical Homemakers. this sounded promising based on what I read, so I put the book of the same title on hold. And waited and waited and waited, until yesterday when it finally arrived at me library. And while I've just started reading it, I think this is my answer. From the introduction:

"Some of the Radical Homemakers I came to know professed a strong spiritual faith. Others did not. If there was one unifying belief among them, it was to question all the assumptions in our consumer culture that have us convinced that a family cannot survive without a dual income. They were fluent at the mental exercise of rethinking the 'givens' of our society and coming to the following conclusions: nobody (who matters) cares what (or if) you drive; housing does not have to cost more than a single moderate income can afford [Please note that this was published in 2010. I'm not entirely sure that this statement holds true 15 years later. I blame greedy corporations.] It is okay to accept help from family and friends, to let go of the perceived ideal of independence and strive instead for interdependence." (p. 17, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes)

"In addition, the happiest among them were successful at setting realistic expectations for themselves. They did not live in impeccable clean houses on manicured estates. They saw their homes as living systems and accepted the flux, flow, dirt, and chaos that are a natural part of that. They were masters at redefining pleasure not as something that should be bought in the consumer marketplace, but as something that could be created, no matter how much or how little money they had in their pockets. And above all, they were fearless. They did not let themselves be bullied by the conventional ideals regarding money, status, or material possessions. These families did not see their homes as a refuge from the world. Rather each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.

Home is where the great change will begin. It is not where it ends. Once we feel sufficiently proficient with our domestic skills, few of us will be content to simply practice them to the end of our days. Many of us will strive for more, to bring more beauty to the world, to bring about greater societal change, to make life better for our neighbors, to contribute our creative powers to the building of a new, brighter, sustainable and happier future. That is precisely the great work we should all be tackling. If we start by focusing our energies on our domestic lives, we will do more than reduce our ecological impact and help create a living for all. We will craft a safe, nurturing place from which this great creative work can happen." (p. 18)

Unlike the Trad Wife-thing, which focuses on looking impressive and is extremely inwardly focused (except for selling swag), Radical Homemaking focuses outward. Our safe base looks for others to invite in. It is cooperation rather than the competition of the Trad Wives movement. Instead of a wife working her fingers to the bone to serve her patriarchal husband, a Radical Homemaker works with her entire family to look outward to serving the greater community. 

It was one of those purely serendipitous moments that earlier today, before cracking open the previous quoted book, that I was reading another library hold that had arrived, The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking by Laurel Robertson. (This I had reserved because it promised a doable rye bread recipe that didn't require fifty different ingredients. It looks promising.) Anyway, in the introduction, I came across this:

"Much of what gives traditional communities their special character and form has to do with the way they go about meeting basic life needs. In the past, to get crops harvested, wheat ground, or a well dug and maintained, people had to come together in respectful cooperation, suspending for the moment any private grievances they might be nursing. Often, they even managed to get some fun out of what they were doing -- enough, even, to lay some of the grievances to rest. It was in the course of carrying out all that work -- the 'bread labor' of which Leo Tolstoy was so enamored -- that the essential values of a particular society got hammered out and then transmitted to the young people growing up and working in its midst.

Until quite recently, this has been true for families as well as communities. Just about everything people ate, wore, slept under and sat on was produced at home. Everyone took part in the producing and everyone knew he or she was needed. It was in work carried out together that relationships deepened and values were handed on. Kitchens, gardens, woodshops -- loud to talk over -- are ideal places to exchange confidences as well as acquire skills. There's no more effective situation to impart ' the way we do things here' than in the throes of a specific job -- no better place to show the patience to see out a task, or the good humor and ingenuity to set things right when they go awry.

In today's world, the home tends not to be as productive a place as it once was. We take jobs elsewhere, earn money, buy things and bring them home to use. If we want our families to benefit from work undertaken together, we have deliberately to set up situations where that can happen." (pp. 24-25)

Radical homemaking returns the act... and art... of production back to the home. This is what I was searching for when confronted by the very superficial homemaking espoused by the trad wives. It is not just one person working their fingers to the bone, but a completely different view of what living together looks like. I have been saying for years that part of the problems we see with our children as a society... the anxiety, the depression, the lack of interest in life... is a direct result of having taken meaningful work away from them. And now that so much of our society depends on people only making and spending money, we are seeing those same symptoms in the broader society as well, with very much the same cause. We have given up meaning for ease and instant gratification. We have traded cooperation and community for isolation and independence. And we are suffering as a result.