Want to be a Tradwife? Go to College.

In defense of the "MRS" Degree

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Yesterday, a brand new 1,000-follower Twitter account who describes herself as “feminism’s worst nightmare” (I am unfortunately winning the Fell For It Again Award by engaging at all, but bear with me) went viral with the assertion that it’s dumb for conservatives to encourage women to go to college, because it’s wasting their prime fertile years on a useless degree that may actually deter men.

Yes, this person is just trying to get attention (and as I wrote about before, it’s only a matter of time before people like this start going full “I love Hitler” to fill the engagement quotient) and she probably doesn’t really believe this. To her credit, she genuinely doesn’t have a college degree, but that’s because she’s nineteen and currently spending her college years being an influencer (which is a job) and being the owner of something called “The Submissive Society,” which is supposedly launching soon but has the same name as a literal BDSM company. However, the reason I’m choosing to write about this is because Savanna is not the first person to say that college will ruin your marriage prospects, and plenty of people out there actually believe this.

Take, for example, a video I saw a couple years ago about strategies for how to snag a rich husband. Almost all of them involved working low-level service jobs where you might incidentally run into rich men, and none involved the only statistically proven way to increase your odds of marrying one: being in the same socioeconomic group. It has notes of “rich guys like to marry their kids’ nanny” discourse. It smacks of someone who has spent a great deal of time creating rich people in the Sims.

No hate to people who create rich Sims by the way, I literally created the Succession trailer in the Sims during peak 2020 lockdown insanity:

Could a depressed person do THIS?

Anyway, I can’t help but notice that people keep conveniently ignoring (or in Savanna’s case, downright discouraging) the only actually proven thing that will help them land a rich husband. If they can’t be born rich themselves, the most effective option is to attend a prestigious college. And if we’re including professional managerial class guys, or upper middle class guys, going to college at all is a good start.

Now, obviously there’s more to life than marrying rich, and you can be a SAHM without going to college. Having a stay-at-home spouse (typically a wife) is more common the less money you make and is associated with lower educational attainment. But that’s not an enviable position for most women. When women dream of being tradwives, they’re not envisioning staying home out of necessity because childcare would outweigh their salary, or because they have no marketable skills. They’re envisioning Nara Smith, Ballerina Farm, or all the other aspirational SAHM influencers who are, well, extremely rich (and it’s worth mentioning that both of those women are actually girlbosses with their own companies.) But let’s set the extreme examples aside for a moment. What if you just want to be a regular comfortable SAHM who goes on one family vacation per year, owns a nice home, lives in a nice area, and doesn’t have to worry about the price of beef tallow? My answer remains: your best option is to go to college.