Why the Trad Wife Phenomenon is Progress
And why the time is up for old feminist narratives in the 21st century
Welcome to Dr Eliza Filby’s Newsletter,
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In this week’s edition:
Why the Trad Wife Phenomenon is in fact a sign of progress
Why the future of music is like an art gallery
Why apprentices are doing better than grads
A YouTube conversation you are going to want to watch
Why the Trad Wife Phenomenon is Progress
Why time is up for feminist assumptions in the 21st century
Mindless scrolling, according to people in the know, is often a form of avoidance. If so, nowhere is that more true than in the current popularity with ‘trad wives’, with their perfected curated tales of female domesticity and financial dependence on men, we endlessly watch with fascination, fury, and yes, maybe envy, of the apparent simplicity of their lives. The gender rules are clear. But just as it’s avoidance, it is also confronting. Trad wives are helping us face up to the challenges and confusions of modern gender relations.
Is it any surprise that in an era when couples are each slogging away with little let-up, modern women find ourselves fantasising, albeit momentarily, about a life dominated by female domesticity and financial dependency on men? The trad wife trend, far from a regressive throwback, raises vital questions about the limitations of modern feminism and the limitations of modern couple dynamics in today’s harsh economic climate.
Take the case of Hannah Neeleman, the face behind the Instagram-famous Ballerina Farm. To her millions of followers, she’s living the dream—juggling motherhood, farming, and marital bliss in a picturesque setting. But a recent Sunday Times profile hinted at a darker side, with accusations that her husband controls her life. The internet erupted. Aha, we knew it. Domesticity was a cage, male dominance and manipulation is the reality. Hannah in fact has little freedom and lots of regrets (the kind our mothers’ generation talk about).
In reality, the Neeleman case had started a different debate: was she a victim of a modern-day patriarchy, or was this simply her choice? Neeleman quickly denied the claims about her husband, but the debate rages on. And it’s clear: whether you see her as a Stepford Wife or an empowered woman living on her terms, the trad wife phenomenon holds a mirror up to our own struggles; where is the liberation that feminists told us would come with greater sexual and economic freedom? In the brutal age of app dating and an economy when the prices for the big things in life – home, childcare, education – are rising, we need a reassessment.
For many of us who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, life came with a confusing mix of messages. Women were told we could be pioneers—leaders in education, career, and life. Despite the chronic misogyny that prevailed in culture and society in the 1990s, meritocracy and social mobility took on a distinctly feminised flavour when we were young. And it came with a historical impetus, as if our mothers and grandmothers were whispering in our ears: ‘Do what we couldn’t.’
Millennials grew up in a culture where female independence was marketed, heralded, and glamourised but alongside a fantasy of perfect companionship. Unlike many of our forebears, most of us have been saved from the religious and societal expectations of a young marriage or any marriage at all. Instead, we have been raised on the idea that once we have found ourselves, we need (ideally soonish) to find someone else. Although the ideal of sexual and emotional companionship came about in the 1960s, it was only fully realised in the 1990s as women gained more autonomy over their bodies and finances. This was not the Disney fairy tale of a Prince Charming but frankly something even more fantastical: the heteronormative ideal in which a man embodied the best bits of traditional masculinity (stable and secure) and modern manhood (a sensitive, progressive type with a growth mindset, who wanted kids). Even though society (and frankly, mothers) weren’t raising men for this reality.
In the stereotypical millennial script, companionship is a union of two individuals in which you are both supposed to reach your potential while remaining equal and raising well-adjusted kids. Spot the inherent contradictions there. And we needed to do this while navigating spiralling house prices, mounting childcare costs, income pressures and economic fluctuations (and global pandemics). I don’t need to tell you how unobtainable all this is (and has been). On the one hand, millennial women have a greater sense of self, while on the other, they have raised expectations of coupledom – and all this in a society where just under half of marriages end in divorce, dual incomes are the norm, and the traditional foundations of masculinity have been upended.
There is an additional pressure here, too: we must achieve all this on a schedule. Most millennial women are terrorised by time. Not just daily, with an iCalendar dictator, but by the timing of the really big things in life. It comes from being overeducated and groomed in the cult of perfectionism. We were the generation that was told, don’t get pregnant too early. But we were also told don’t leave it too late. We were warned don’t get married too young but also don’t get left on the shelf. For some women in certain professions, this also means ensuring that your career ladder is in sync with your fertile years. Since the 1990s, we have allowed a corporate culture to develop where women are almost encouraged to think that they need to get to a certain point in their career before they can have children. This is madness and fuels a culture where egg freezing is sold as a job perk.
When it comes to having children, financial considerations permeate every element of a woman’s decision, from career breaks to pension contributions. It divides mothers when they go back to work, too. The ability of women to work post-motherhood is increasingly tied not just to their partner’s support but also to the availability of Grandma to help with childcare.
Nor is it any coincidence that in an era when economic forces feel beyond our control, we tend to focus inward. Self-help in the millennial era has been about contorting ourselves into these conflicting and impossible frameworks, keeping ourselves in check and on time: hacks, tricks, podcasts, apps, memoirs and manifestos to help us realise who we are, how to meet our significant other, how to nail that promotion, how to navigate our twenties, how to achieve the perfect body, how to self-regulate everything – our REM sleep, steps, calories, hormonal cycle, social media consumption.
Enter the trad wife fantasy into this maelstrom of frustration and pressure. In a world where dual incomes are the norm, where relationships are stretched by economic pressures, and where “having it all” feels more like “doing it all,” the idea of stepping back and embracing a traditional domestic role frankly feels like a relief—even if just for a moment or a scroll on a screen. It’s not that women are rejecting feminism, but many are beginning to ask: is this grind really freedom?
Part of the appeal of the trad wife life lies in its critique of the feminist ideal. Economic forces are squeezing us from every side—spiralling costs of living, stagnant wages, housing crises—and a self-actualising culture that has convinced us that the only way to survive is to optimise every waking moment.
It’s not that we all want to become trad wives, nor that we have become ignorant of the historic inequalities in this set-up, but we are using these examples of traditional femininity to pose important questions about our own freedom and challenges in the 21st century. And that takes our mindset from quiet frustration to fundamental upending of the economic and structural obstacles in the way of genuine gender equality in the home and at work. And that, I would say, in some small way, is progress.
Interview with ipaper’s Vicky Spratt
I sat down with the brilliant Vicky Spratt, journalist at the i and author of Tenants, to discuss my book, millennial financial challenges, and how it has upended gender relations. Click on the image below to watch.
The Reading Room
The CEO of Sony Music was interviewed by Bloomberg and it makes for a fascinating watch. From CDs, to Napster, from iTunes to streaming and now AI….What’s the future of music creation and consumption? The past, apparently. Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Beatles….. the buying up of back catalogues has gathered pace in the last few years. The trend is clear, music is becoming more and more like Renaissance art where the Great Masters are purchased, revered and new creators struggle for attention and value. More to the point, at Sony they have Rob Stringer, a Gen X Brit, who is very committed to ‘creativity’ he tells us. I’m sure that’s true but he also let’s slip that the real money now is to be made in live events (especially involving dead artists whose catalogues Sony owns)…..
When I say ‘mental health crisis amongst the young’ are you someone who rolls their eyes? Or maybe you are a fan of Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book and think smartphones should be banned entirely for under 16s to save Gen Alpha from what Gen Z had to endure in their teenage years? Either way, I’d recommend you listen to this interview with economist Danny Blanchflower who has crunched the numbers across the world and gives a fascinating and worrying insight into the impact of smartphones on young people’s mental health over the last ten years and its impact on our society, the workforce and happiness.
I was speaking to one company last week who told me that while the graduate recruits are struggling to integrate, the apprentices are finding it much easier to adapt to the world of work. Perhaps this has always been the case, but there may also be another reason; the critical Covid cohort (those that were mid-teens in 2020) are still making it’s way through the graduate workforce. The new apprentices appear less anxious and more grounded perhaps because the Covid disruption hit them at a younger age. One of the most important shifts is the rise of degree apprenticeships and returning rise in Gen Z working part time jobs. This is largely down to rising tuition costs but also increasing wages (and the cost of living crisis). Few recognise it but the skills earned in these early working years are also key to building resilience, confidence and frankly the one thing we all need to be better at in the AI age: interpersonal skills. With this in mind I have been reading with great interest how one of the most important things you can do as a parent is to get your kid working in the home, doing regular chores, (ideally without being asked and without being paid). It is linked to greater competence and success later in life and so is regularly working in your teens too. The homework can wait.
Round Up
In the last week I’ve delivered three speeches in three different countries….. the first in a massive auditorium in Madrid.
Busiest week of the year…. I then delivered two multi-generational workshops, one in tech, another in financial services based on my course materials. One of the most valuable things I do is separate workshops with each generational cohort (Gen Z, millennials, Gen X) and present the findings to the board, partners or c-suite. If this is something that you think might interest your business, take a look at what we offer.
Two things struck me this week; firstly, the lack of time that millennial managers have to properly nurture and train their Gen Z recruits and the overwhelming workload they do to compensate. It is causing intense frustration and resentment. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it’ is a burden that goes unrewarded and unnoticed and frankly, is a business risk.
Secondly, I’m seeing a blurring, blundering and one-sided view about what the ‘contract’ between employer and employee now means in the 21st century. As LinkedIn posts attest, companies and HR departments are bending over backwards to support, endorse, accommodate every aspect of the employees’ experience, needs, desires at a HR level. Great, but where does this personalisation end? More importantly, this rarely translates at a managerial/day to day level for the employee where the practicalities of the day job dominate and they very often do not feel supported, recognised, heard; this is especially true for Gen X women with eldercare responsibilities or Gen Z with mental health issues. Moreover, very little is being said upfront about the flexible and reciprocal nature of this contract and what is actually expected of the employee from tech etiquette to yes, days in the office.
In next week’s issue: what parents need to know about AI and why the danger is no longer social media, why personalisation is about to feel the exact opposite, and what I think about the most anticipated budget in 30 years…..
It’s half term but alas I’m 48 hrs in LA presenting at a mega conference on a mega stage, back on Thursday for the mega-budget, commenting on the implications for inheritance and the inheritocracy.
In the age of information overload, thanks for taking the time to read.
Eliza
Brilliant post. Thank you. Such an important conversation.