I'm not disposed to think harshly of the tradwife movement, even though it is full of Millennials and Zoomers who are glamorizing an era they never lived. Those Millennials tend not to acknowledge the many serious problems facing wives in that era and may not even be aware existed. It was a time when wives often couldn't have a bank account, or at least a credit card of their own, couldn't take out a mortgage, and lived in circumstances when their husbands do do bad things to them with impunity.
So, why am I less concerned about them?
Homemaking Can Make Sense For Most Wives Some Of The Time
For all that current norms make clear that it shouldn't be women's fate or obligation, the reality is that a very large share of all adult American women will spend a few to a great many years of their lives as full time homemakers in a married couple.
Raising kids is a tough job. It's hard to do when both parents work. And, trying to have both parents equally share money earning and parenting responsibilities equally, rather than having them specialize their roles in the family, isn't always the best option.
Indeed, a family where a wife is a homemaker is most likely to happen these days in college educated couples, because they're the only ones who can afford to do so.
One of the important reasons we have a legally recognized institution of marriage at all is so that mothers of young children (there are exceptions to this pattern but it is the predominant one) can feel secure and have legal protections for their well-being if they take the economic risks associated with being a homemaker within a couple for a while.
The Economic Prosperity Of The Era Being Glamorized Was Nice.
Plenty of folks on both the left and on the right politically are nostalgic for the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. This economic prosperity made this family structure a viable possibility for most people, because you could afford to raise multiple children, and own a home and car, on one man's income then, even if you had only a high school education and a rank and file worker job.
There insurmountable reasons that we can't restore the sources of that prosperity
Some of the economic circumstances that made that happen can't be restored, others can. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was a global economic manufacturing powerhouse that created lots of demand at businesses for workers who didn't have to be very educated, intellectually talented, or skilled, which was fortunately, because high school diplomas were almost as rare as college degrees are today.
In part, this was a product of the fact that World War II was fought in the rest of the world in Europe and Asia, and that war destroyed the civilian manufacturing industry, while apart from a single day at Pearl Harbor, World War II was not fought in U.S. territory leaving it unscathed. And, World War II had also established a massive industrial base that was used to conduct the war effort of the United States and its allies in the places where World War II was being fought which could be swiftly converted to civilian production when the war was over. Everyone else with the money to buy goods was outsourcing their manufacturing to the U.S. while they were rebuilding a post-war society from the rubble that the war left behind. This economic situation can't be restored.
There are now countries with manufacturing economies all over the world. Some of these countries that got started on a low wage, lightly regulated model to undercut U.S. factories that were more expensive, like Mexico, China, Vietnam and Thailand. There are also other countries with strong manufacturing economies like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, that have much higher wages and much greater regulation but have managed to master labor-management relations better than the U.S. did and automated their operations sufficiently to make up for their higher labor and compliance costs. The U.S. manufacturing industry has followed the high wages and automation path of Germany, South Korea, and Japan, but has done so only successfully enough to keep domestic manufacturing output more or less flat with fewer workers, and a declining share of goods sold domestically manufactured. The U.S. imports a lot of the manufactured goods that it consumes from these countries, because they've developed a competitive advantage compared to the U.S. in this part of their economies.
The favorability of the 1950s and 1960s for less educated workers was also a product of the fact that manufacturing technology was still pretty primitive. There was very little automation and lots of rote manual labor that was required. Since then, manufacturing has become much more automated, and factory work now requires skilled technicians who usually have at least associate's degrees, if not more education, to run the machines that do the rote work that used to be done with manual labor. It is a transition that has been made possible because a vastly larger share of the U.S. adult population is better educated now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. This is another economic situation can't be restored.
But, other parts of the 1950s and 1960s era of economic prosperity may be possible to restore. Lots of people don't know it, but that era was also dominated by pervasive and powerful unions who went on strike a lot, and had very high taxes on the most affluent taxpayers, which were invested in infrastructure, education, and other long term public sector investments that made our society more prosperous.
Our modern economy relies not just on having lots of people who show up to work and do their jobs, but also on the intellectual knowledge, skills, and talents of those workers. Modern technologies require those intellectual aptitudes at a level required to be sufficiently productive, and a much smaller share of the population has those aptitudes, than the share of the population that was suitable for manufacturing work in the economy of the 1950s and 1960s.
Even in countries that have used public policy to be more equitable than the current U.S. economy, a productivity divide still exists in their workforces to a similar degree to the U.S. But, those countries use taxes and social welfare programs run by the government more heavily than the U.S. to equalize outcomes.
A Society With Stable Marriages Into Which Most Children Are Born Isn't Unattractive.
While some of the legal and economic and social forces that kept the divorce rate low then were and are problematic, it is also true that divorce rates were very low, and out of wedlock birth rates were also very low (at least in the early part of this time frame for everyone, and in the later part of this time frame for everyone but black families with fathers who were not high school graduates).
Nobody feels warm fuzzy feelings about divorces, even when they are the lesser evil for a married couple, and nobody wishes that a larger share of children were born to single mothers from couples that couldn't manage to stick together.
In East Asia, they have stable marriages and few out of wedlock births at the cost of few marriages that are often late in life, record low numbers of births overall, and multigenerational caretaking pressures in marriage that lots of women aren't willing to tolerate, so it isn't impossible even though it has high hidden costs.
In Northern Europe, they have unstable marriages, often late in life, and lots of out of wedlock births, made possible by strong social safety nets, and low but not quite as low birth rates overall, and more personal freedom and individual actualization.
Neither leading approach in the world to organizing marriage and parenting at the societal level in the developed world is without its drawbacks.
In the U.S., we have ended up with a system that charts a third way with an intense marriage divide associated with socio-economic class and education. U.S. marriages are almost as solid as they were in the 1960s and out of wedlock births are rare among college graduates, but marriages are increasingly uncommon and fragile when they happen among people with no college education, and couples with no college education who eventually marry, on average, have kids first, and marry a few years later.
The reason for the divide is counterintuitive and isn't one that college educated feminists would applaud or acknowledge. The marriages of college educated women in the U.S. are solid, and their children tend to be born after these women marry, because the lifetime career earning penalty for leaving the workforce to be a homemaker when and if a wife tries to return to her pre-parenthood career, is much steeper for college educated women in administrative and professional careers than it is for women without college educations whose careers don't require lots of uninterrupted experience to maximize one's earnings.
A woman who is a doctor or a lawyer who takes six years out of the work force to raise children when they are little may end up making half or less of the salary that they would have been making at the same age if they'd not had children and continued working in that time period. In contrast, a woman who is a waitress or day care worker or receptionist or CNA is going to make about the same income when they return to the workforce after six years at home taking care of their children as their peers who didn't have kids and worked continuously at the same job the whole time do. Meanwhile, a professional doctor or lawyer husband who continues to work uninterrupted while his wife stays at home with the kids will see his income increase substantially over six years, while a husband who is a plumber or CNA or truck driver who has stayed in the work force for those six years will still be earning about the same amount as he did six years earlier adjusted only for inflation. And, the high school only educated husband is likely to have significant bouts of lengthy unemployment from time to time during which he will be an economic burden on his family which creates a powerful economic incentive for his working wife to divorce him, while a college educated husband is likely to have uninterrupted prosperity and find new, decent paying employment fairly swiftly if he loses his job for some reason.
As a result, in a college educated couple, wives who have been homemakers for a few years become much more economically dependent upon their husbands than wives in college educated couples who aren't nearly so economically dependent upon their husbands and will periodically have husbands who are economically dependent upon them. Economic dependency is the biggest part of the glue that keeps college educated couples together with kids born in wedlock, that is absent in working class couples, although better social and interpersonal skills among college educated couples, and cultural norms about marriage and parenting the emerge from peer pressures when the economic incentives work the way that they usually do for people like you, may play a modest secondary role in this divide as well.
The economic dependency of wives with many children with their husband in an economy where few occupations and jobs were open to women and those that were available didn't pay well drove the stability and frequency of marriage and of having children within marriage in the 1950s and 1960s as well, as much as legal formalities like the availability of divorces only based upon fault and ill-developed systems for reliably obtaining child support and alimony in the event of a divorce.
Now, this doesn't mean that all college educated women end up being "tradwives". Lots of Millennials and Zoomers buck tradition and just don't have kids at all and never leave the workplace and never become economically dependent upon their husbands or partners. Some of them do become homemakers and become somewhat economically dependent upon their husbands. But, even then, their college educations mean that they can still make much better money if they return to the workforce than women in the 1950s and 1960s did. Birth control and abortion mean that modern homemakers are likely to have one or two kids, rather than three or four or five of them, also making it easier to return to the workforce sooner. Divorce is now available on a no-fault basis, and child support and alimony awards are a lot more predictable and collectible so long as your ex-husband has a decent income, which college educated men generally do (and if a college educated man willfully earns less to spite his wife's ability to get child support and alimony from him, modern legal doctrines punish him severely). Wives and ex-wives today have more economic rights of their own than they did in the 1950s and 1960s in practical reality at least. And, wives today have much strong institutional and cultural support than wives in the 1950s and 1960s did if a husband is abusive towards his family.
In short, while college educated wives still have enough economic dependency on their husbands to make waiting to have kids until marriage worth it, and to make staying married worthwhile, unlike wives in the 1950s and 1960s, their economic dependency and legal status is not so low that they need to stay married even when their situation is horrible.
And, lets face it. Unless your marriage was unimaginably horrible, divorce is not a desirable thing for anyone even if it may be, on balance in someone's opinion, the best available option.
It is the exception and not the norm for a divorced person to not rant emotionally about that experience. Shuttling kids between households under the usual shared parenting arrangement is complicated, cumbersome, takes more social skills to manage than parenting while married to your co-parent did, and leaves both resulting household for the children poorer because the large and very real economies of scale that come from living in a single household are lost and because the parents have lots the benefits that having specialized parenting v. higher income employment did. Sometimes stepparents, and prospective stepparents, really are evil towards their stepchildren and that isn't good for the kids. And, often, divorced couples with shared children have to return to the courthouse multiple times because they can't agree on how to handle inevitable changes in the parents' employment and living situations and as the children grow up and have different needs. Single motherhood is a recipe for poverty and hardship and a missing male role model for a child, even though an absent father can make living and parenting a lot more conflict-free than an involved father who the mother doesn't want as a spouse.
Trusting Your Spouse Doesn't Make You A Bad Person And Presents Less Risk Now Than It Used To.
Certainly, there is also nothing so horrible about being a woman who is an idealist who loves and trusts her husband so much that she has faith that their husband won't abuse their relationship in which she is trying her best to reciprocate by treating him well.
The actual reality is that people are often blind to the darker potentials for mishaps in their own personal lives than they are in the lives of others from which they have more distance.
But a little hope and trust and idealism isn't morally blameworthy. And, in any case, for better or for worse, modern day tradwives who cultivate marriages along these lines still have more institutional protections for themselves against abuses of their relationship with their husbands than their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s did if things do go wrong, a discussed above.
Women have more rights now which makes the relationship less of a risk if it doesn't go well even if many tradwives don't realize how much better they have it than wives did in the 1950s and 1960s and take their protections for granted. If a pregnancy threatens to lock a woman into a bad relationship and dependency for many years to come, she can unilaterally get an abortion in many states to prevent that, something that was not an option back then.
Many Tradwives don't Acknowledge That Their Lifestyle Is Only Possible With Privilege
If anything, the most prominent and outspoken tradwives of today can be faulted most for their failure to acknowledge the economic privileges that they personally as individuals enjoy which makes this lifestyle possible for them, when it isn't possible for others who aren't so lucky.
This lifestyle is only possible if your husband is very economically successful in a way that is very stable and sustainable. Their failure to recognize that this isn't a lifestyle that is economically feasible for most people in their generation, whether their less privileged peers would want to emulate them or not, can be a problem.
The problem is that their message can lead to economic ruin and hardship and unhappy traps for women in tradwive styles couples if the husband is not so economically prosperous and secure. The "tradwife for all" ideal can unfairly shame and denigrate husbands and potential husbands who are good partners interpersonally in a relationship, but aren't quiet so economically elite.
If you have a solid income that is economically stable, you are a desirable husband to someone who is interested in the tradwife lifestyle. But if you don't make all that much money and have an education and career that leaves you with bouts of unemployment or an unsteady income, you and your wife need to be a two career couple to make your family work economically, and that isn't a good fit to the tradwife model.
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