Working moms are a hot topic right now, as the debate over the tradwife vs. the girl boss intensifies.
But what is a tradwife? Is she necessarily a stay-at-home mom? And can she pull in an income too? Indeed, is it an outright requirement that she pulls her weight financially?
So much has and should be written about the elusive tradwife. While technically nothing but a corny internet term, the tradwife does represent a cultural phenomenon that deserves a closer look. However broadly she may be defined, the tradwife exists as a repudiation of the feminist notion of success and femininity defined by independence and career.
Yet the “trad” dream is out of reach for too many families. The two-income trap is increasingly hard to escape. Parents both “have to” earn a full-time income in order to make ends meet, even though at least one parent’s income is spent almost entirely on childcare, after school activities, and the higher grocery bills that come with eating on the go more often.
Yet one parent quitting the workforce isn’t that easy. Yes, it may be easier than many realize, but often the loss of perceived financial stability that comes from two streams of full-time income with benefits is too prohibitive for families to take the leap.
Rather than dismiss the financial concerns of already cash-strapped Americans, we can offer an alternative option – the work-from-home tradwife.
The work-from-home revolution that occurred during the COVID-19 lockdown is receding. Still, there are far more from-home options now than there were pre-2020. These options are invaluable to the working mom. They allow her to eliminate water-cooler gossip and traffic-jammed commutes. She can fold laundry during the corporate meetings that could have been an email. She can pump for her baby on her couch rather than in an office bathroom. She can easily take her middle schooler to the 5:30 p.m. soccer game because she’s not driving home for 30 minutes after she clocks out of the office. And when childcare costs do arise for work-from-home moms, they are naturally far lower than those which office moms incur.
But those in the boomer generation don’t seem to like this. For them, working from home is an oxymoron, for they view work as something you do outside your home, while your home is a place where you are entitled to leisure. That mentality only sowed resentment in the generation’s non-working mothers for whom the home was anything but a place of ease and relaxation. (I wonder if this is why boomer women often exhibit an especially vicious form of bitter and man-hating feminism?) As a result, young people with remote jobs are continually dismissed and ridiculed by the older generation. They can’t seem to understand why a 20-something wouldn’t want to spend his life in a cubicle earning some money to spend during a couple days on the weekend. The only reason one wouldn’t, they imagine, is because of laziness.
While perhaps still not the ideal situation, the work-from-home mom is in a small way returning to the most traditional system of them all, one where both parents contribute to the financial state of the family, but the father takes on the larger role in order that the mother is as free as possible to do the nurturing and the child-bearing at which she is naturally best. Back in the day, mothers who did no work were those who were wealthy and non-agrarian. It’s generally a good thing that purely stay-at-home moms can exist in the middle class today. But it certainly isn’t the only way to construct a traditional family.
This is not to say that a mother working 50 hours a week while also breastfeeding and pregnant is at all traditional, or even slightly good. It is to assert that there are ways for mothers to financially contribute during a period of national economic hardship without giving up their most important roles as present mothers in their homes. Nevertheless, old and outdated notions of what “work” must look like are keeping certain industries that could easily move virtual from doing so.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Pexels
