Where Are All The Middle-Aged Tradwives?
Clue one: nobody is "hiding" them.
This week, writer Jessica Valenti took to social media to ask: where are all the 47-year-old tradwives? Her answer? They’re all living on the streets LIKE DOGS because they’ve been traded up for newer models and, without a career on which to fall back, were left destitute. Take that, Ballerina Farm! Mic drop.
The Internet replied in basically two ways: either confirming that tradwives are gullible losers (who presumably deserve everything bad that happens to them) and are usually if not always abandoned by their husbands in middle age, or that all the older tradwives are living such joyous, perfect lives that they don’t have “time” to talk about it online. (Get into some immodest-bikini-at-the-splash pad discourse on Twitter, however, and suddenly the free time materializes!)
In order to understand who is correct here (and spoiler: it’s neither) we should understand what a tradwife is. I don’t think Valenti actually knows (heck, I don’t think anyone knows) because if your definition of a “tradwife” is someone who makes tradwife content, and calls themselves a tradwife, then a lot of tradwives are basically actresses playing a role, and the easy answer for why there aren’t any older ones is because younger actresses get more work. Would so many people tune into Ballerina Farm’s content if she was dowdy and over fifty? I’m sure some people would, but she wouldn’t be as popular. For that matter, where are all the happy childless, single, fifty-year-old ladies of NYC? I haven’t seen a single popular influencer who fit this profile—only hot and young ones, curiously!—therefore, their mature counterparts must all be wearing grippy socks in the psych ward and stroking animatronic cats, right?
But I don’t think that’s what Valenti means. She is too smart to believe that there is no good explanation for the dearth of older tradwife influencers. I think she means “conservative stay-at-home moms who did not prioritize a career.” And it’s odd to so confidently declare that “they” are “hiding” these women (Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” line comes to mind) because there is plenty of data available about them, and how often they are actually being abandoned.
