The modern lives of wives
What is the state of the wife? Not the state of your wife, necessarily, but of wifedom itself, the whole Harpic-scented project.
We are living through a golden age of wife content. Of trad wives, of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. A Reddit thread for followers of Laura Doyle's The Surrendered Wife and the "empowered wife" coaching programme (short version: wives, relinquish control) sees women in turmoil. One user, announcing that she is leaving the community, encourages her fellow wives to combine Doyle's lessons with "some more modern twists like [TikTok-fuelled dating trend] black cat theory or ["feminine energy" YouTuber] Margarita Nazarenko". Wives are being pulled apart and put back together, in sometimes Picasso-like forms.
It's a contradiction we see daily with our trad-wife influencers, who perform fertility and homemaking and submission for millions of followers, many of whom read it as provocation, thus increasing clicks and shovelling cash and power back into the trad wife's apron. Both trad wives' content and the critical content they inspire in feminist commenters drives tensions, particularly between women who work and wives who stay at home, ignoring the facts that the content creation the online trad wives do is a legitimate business, and that, rather than being two distinct sets of women, these are people whose lives frequently overlap and merge.
The second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has been a ratings hit. A twist came when one wife went live to tell viewers that she and other wives had been "soft swinging" (swinging, allegedly, without sex), a confession that upset their particular balance of devout Mormonism and hot-wife content, but deliciously. Again, a wife here must be two things at once. She's both a committed wife and hot TikTok girlie, she's a business bitch and the world's best mum, she's devoted to God and devoted to clicks, a pile of contradictions stacked precariously on top of each other in the shape of a woman.
A generation earlier, women fought successfully to be allowed to work, but the next round of that fight — for mothers to work, too — remains, if not quite unexamined then still, I'd argue, unwon. Of UK women in employment, 36% work part-time, compared with 14% of men, largely due to caregiving responsibilities at home. In this light, performative wifeliness looks like an escape hatch. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom told the magazine Mother Jones: "Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies. When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men." The cultural obsession with the trad wife and its satellite archetypes will remain, she believes, "so long as there's a threat". Tighten your wedding rings girls, we're in for a ride. — The Observer
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