From tradwife to radwife: abandoning perfection in favour of the ‘good enough' life

The Guardian

12 hours ago

Most mornings, I'm woken at 6am by my alarm (the baby crawling on to my head). I stretch, go downstairs, fill a bowl with iced water and, the theme of Transformers playing in the background, write my journal (a list of emails-I-forgot-to-reply-to). I drink hot water with cider vinegar to regulate my blood sugar levels, followed by tea using the baby's leftover milk. Dragging a chilled jade gua sha spoon across my face in an attempt to reverse the ageing process, I then make my young sons' porridge. While they eat, I plunge my face into the iced water until I can't breathe, and begin my three-step routine (two La Roche-Posay serums followed by SPF). Some mornings, I run. Others, I cry into a coffee, albeit one made with organic milk, before taking a mushroom gummy to take the edge off the day. My partner and I divide childcare dropoffs – we're late for both and broadly OK with that – and each have one day a week with the youngest.
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This is my routine. You might think it's elaborate and weirdly specific, and you'd be right. Yet we live in an age of routines shared online, often in pursuit of some sort of personal optimisation – I'm aiming for somewhere between writing 2,500 words before breakfast (Anthony Trollope) and 5am cold plunge (fitness guru Ashton Hall). And however elaborate my morning seems to you, to me, it is nothing compared with the pernicious routine of the tradwife.
For the uninitiated: the tradwife is a married woman, usually conservative and/or Christian, usually white (though not always), of the belief that her place is in the home. She is feminine, usually kempt, often dressed like Betty Draper, but increasingly workout gear in neutral tones too. Though at home, she is not a stay-at-home mother, rather someone who performs as if she is, documenting her life in dizzying, up-close fashion for us to wonder: who's doing the potty training?
The tradwife is not new: in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft described these sorts of women as birds 'confined to their cages [with] nothing to do but plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty'. But in recent years she has rebranded, growing from traditional role to niche subculture, to full-blown digital movement (her current incarnation is the Maha – Make America Healthy Again – mom, who wangs on about her distrust of vaccines and suncream to camera in head-to-toe florals). Historically, tradwives earned nothing. These days some out-earn their husband through shilling products, presumably to pay for a small team of helpers to do the actual childcare.
Last week, I watched Nara Smith, a 25-year-old, South African-German mother-of-three make pannacotta from scratch in a Ferragamo dress. It would be impressive were she and her peers not so clearly sidestepping a traditional career for one that involved packaging their cookie-baking for the algorithm.
I am not the first wrung-out mother to take umbrage with this sort of performance. Yet as the cost of living crisis squeezes us ever tighter, the fantasy of escaping into being a wife and mother becomes more vivid. I am, after all, a hard worker, a mediocre baker and a realistic mother whose life is a delicate balance between task and failure, app-reliance and guilt. One colleague describes me as 'frazzled but focused'. So I prefer the term radwife.
To be a radwife, you don't need to be married. I'm not. Perhaps you saw children as a choice, not a mandate, or came to them slightly late (mid to late 30s), like me. You're not afraid of giving them plain pasta four nights in a row provided they brush their teeth. You batch cook where possible, bribe your children when possible, and buy fish locally (though largely to offset the amount of parcels coming through the door). You miss deadlines for work, lose sleep over ultra-processed food (UPF), and are overly familiar with the unsung heroics involved in 'leaving the office early' to get the kids. But you can also use a drill, a lawnmower and always finish the veg box. Of course, this is often in tandem with a rad dad or partner, who shares the same tensions, childcare and anxieties.
What else? The radwife is aware of trends, would never wear an elasticated waist (unless it's her Adidas Firebird tracksuit – she burned her Lucy & Yak dungarees once the youngest started nursery), but always, always chooses comfort. Her heels are a bridge to her former life, and though she rarely wears them now, she'll never get rid. Other radwife-ish things: baseball caps, a fringe (it's that or botox), one wildly unsensible coat on principle. To unwind, she reads cookbooks like novels, Grazia at the doctor's and the LRB on the loo. She reads the Booker shortlist, though she's a sucker for covers with interesting typefaces. For her holiday, she has packed Ocean Vuong, but will quietly leaf through self-help book of the moment The Let Them Theory when no one is looking. It's with some discomfort that she watched a version of herself in Amandaland (Amanda) and The White Lotus 3 (Laurie) – it's not uncommon for the radwife to be divorced.
The tradwife caused a major stir globally; not surprising, perhaps, given that it is largely a fantasy role which hinges on personal wealth, and is almost totally removed from the maternal ideal it promotes (it's also, in part, why Meghan Markle's With Love Netflix series, with its unnecessary pretzel decanting, feels so ill-timed). I'm not bothered by the perfectionism this movement peddles – wake up, it's Instagram! – but I am by the way it impinges on normal life. When did making fish pie from scratch once a week become trad-coded? The difference is, tradwives idealise this stuff – the radwife strives to go beyond it.
It's precisely this tension that makes the radwife a perfectly imperfect parent, what developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott called a 'good enough mother'. So you might forget to put sunscreen on your children sometimes – at least they're wearing secondhand clothes from Vinted. You make socially conscious non-judgmental parenting decisions which prioritise your sanity over their sugar intake. We need conflicts 'in order to survive painful choices', says Ora Dresner, president of the British Psychoanalytic Association. There will not be a perfect decision and parenthood is defined – just like life – by ambivalence. We will see, inevitably, the good and the bad in every choice we make, 'but we should not see conflict as a negative concept; that unless you are absolutely certain about your choice, you are failing'.
'On the contrary,' Dresner says, 'the ability to be aware of these often painful feelings is essential if the mother is to find the way that works best for her.' The reality is, it's OK to feel bored by your children, but utterly lost without them. It's OK to want to go to work, to drinks – but also OK to want to rush home to do phonics. 'We as partners, friends and society must be aware of this and support mothers to feel validated as they try to find their way,' adds Dresner.
Rad is short for radical. But maybe it's about being radically normal. Most mothers I know suffer from what I call 'churnout': burnout from trying to shift back and forth at speed between modes (partner, worker, mother). Writer Frankie Graddon of the Mumish substack talks about the ambient threat of 'The Call' at work (a sick child) and the guilt of 'beige dinners'. This might sound a little obvious. But we live in delicate times. Only the bravest among us are off social media, despite the fact that we know, on some level, that it is full of 'false messages that others are doing far better', says Dresner. 'I don't think it's possible to find the perfect balance or perfect choice. But to be able to observe our conflicts, and to some extent tolerate them, might offer a degree of freedom from internal and societal pressures, and what social media drives in us,' she says.
Ideally, we wouldn't shapeshift so much. Ideally, we would live in a world in which there were time and resources to allow for parents to work less, or more flexibly, without barely scraping together the nursery fees. Four-day weeks. Cheaper, subsidised childcare. Instead, capitalism has taken the notion of empowerment and turned it into a world in which all hands must be on deck for the profit motive.
For some women, it's a form of feminism that means that if you're not a high-flying earner, then who are you really? As Rosanna, a 35-year-old film producer and mother of two, tells me: 'As much as I value the role of mother, I would feel 'less than' if I didn't work – and I've certainly struggled with that feeling when out of work or looking for work.'
Certainly, many tradwives are more interested in marketing than mothering. But if big business is responsible for the idea of putting a career first (see Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and 'girl bossing', a mid-2010s movement that became a byword for pseudo-woke corporate feminism) and trad-wifing feels like a cop-out, something in the middle seems like a reasonable reaction. Rosanna loves parenting and loves working, but still feels that 'capitalism sucks and rams this idea that unless you're earning a living and acquiring status, you are not quite valued'.
The other day, I was chatting to my friend Jo, who is a parent of two. She said that, initially, 'motherhood shook me apart, identity wise, and I clung on to work as something to define me. But now I work to provide – and fulfil myself. I don't need the workplace in the same way I once did.'
Taking this metaphorical step away from work – from the churn of the machine – is not a betrayal of the 1970s feminist fantasy. That dream was co-opted, used to sell a life that only meant something if it was dedicated to corporations. When I'm scraping porridge off the pan, and I'm late for work, I think about the tradwife and wonder if she too burnt the porridge. Probably. But at least I'm OK with it.
Lighting assistant: Declan Slattery. Styling assistant: Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Natalie Stokes at Carol Hayes Management using Tatcha
Main photo Red gingham dress: £200, Anthropologie. Sandals, £109, Dune London. Necklace, £118, Astley Clarke. Bow earrings, £38, Anthropologie. Trug, £37.95, The Worm That Turned. Aprons and gloves, stylist's own
Above photosPink floral dress: £49.99, New Look. Aprons and gloves: stylist's own. Green quilted jacket: £155, Whistles. All other clothes writer's own. Cycle helmet loan: cyclespirit.com