“Where Are the Trad Wives Over 50?” They're Busy Living the Life You Want

“Where are the trad wives over 50?” That’s the viral feminist “Gotcha.” The idea is that it’s easy to start out starry-eyed about embracing the role of a traditional woman, but real life teaches you that it’s a fatal error : Long before trad wives hit mid-century, they’ve been divorced and discarded by their husbands, or they’ve otherwise clued in to the fact that it was a big mistake to pour their talents into making a home for their families and to depend on a man to pay the bills. Those who started off as trad wives have by now ended up like everybody else of their age and sex: lonely, embittered cat ladies. Whoops! I meant to say, independent women who have seen the error of their ways and realized how risky and soul-killing it is to live for others. “Daisy” makes the case on X: “I was a ‘trad wife’, At that time, we didn’t have a special name for it ... it was just called being a ‘wife.’ ... this process destroyed me, it broke me to pieces. It made me sick and helpless. Y[o]u think that if you sacrifice enough ... someone will stand by you, but that doesn’t happen. Young girls, become deeply selfish; do it for the sake of us older women who didn’t know any better.” Fact check: Au contraire. The real reason you don’t see any trad wives over 50? We have better things to do than film ourselves straining yogurt. There may not be mature married women demonstrating our cheese-making skills online, but if what you mean by a trad wife is someone who has lived a traditional married woman’s life ( staying home when our children were young , mastering wicked cooking skills, sitting out the struggle for financial independence because we trust our husbands, and defining ourselves not by our work in the cash economy but by our roles as wives to our husbands, mothers of our children, and creators of homes for the people we love), well then, there are plenty of us over 50. We have better things to do than film ourselves straining yogurt. And yes, Jessica Valenti , “the average middle-aged trad wife” does have a life that’s appealing to young women. So much so that the main complaint we hear from our children and their friends is that they wish it were easier for them to find someone and have the kind of family they were raised in. Like Daisy, my aunt was also a trad wife back when it was just called being a wife. She married at the height of the 1950s fetish for domesticity and traditional gender roles. A brilliant math major, she knew better than to let her dates at Vanderbilt clue in to how smart she was. But then she met my uncle, who wasn’t intimidated by her intelligence. She helped put him through medical school and took care of everything around the house to free him up for a demanding career. She quit her job after the second baby came, but eventually did bookkeeping for my uncle’s surgical practice and for a number of volunteer organizations. My aunt is a widow now, and of course she aches for her husband, but she is surrounded by her five wonderful grown-up children and by grandchildren and great-grandchildren I’ve lost count of. And she has no regrets about what she did for love. I grew up in a very different time. As one of my cousins said about what we were taught when we were growing up in the 1970s about the role of a traditional wife, “All that was over.” We girls were being raised and educated to have careers just like the boys. Only I didn’t want it to be over for me. I wanted a big Catholic family like my aunt’s. I didn’t want my children to come home in the afternoon to a dark and empty house. My ambition was to fall hard for a wonderful man, marry him, have lots of kids, and be the heart of a warm, happy family. As I told my future mother-in-law, to her shock and horror, I wanted to be a housewife: What could be more satisfying than to make a world for the man I loved to live in? I didn’t want my children to come home in the afternoon to a dark and empty house. From one angle, that’s not how it played out. I didn’t get the big homeschooling Catholic family I wanted. I was able to have just one son (and one miscarriage), and it worked better for us to send him to school. But my son and his wife are finally providing the big Catholic family I always wanted. At far less trouble to me! And I did end up having a career, though not the one I was clearly made for, insofar as our talents and our passions destine us for a particular path in life. But giving up that vocation and betting all my chips on my family (the decision that vindicates my claim to be a trad wife) is something I do not regret. I finished up my Ph.D. in English while my husband was in law school. Studies in Philology offered to publish my dissertation, and I was a pretty good candidate for a tenure-track job. But I didn’t even apply: I didn’t want to spend my prime childbearing years trying to get tenure. Considered from one angle, that was a huge mistake: The big family I sacrificed my career for didn’t happen. I ended up having to go to work and having a career after all, but not the one I had chosen. And now that I know more about the world of work, tenure-track professor looks like one of the easiest jobs to combine with being a hands-on mother. But in reality it was the very opposite of a mistake: I was deciding that my identity would be wife, mother, and homemaker, rather than teacher, scholar, and intellectual. I’ve had a pretty high-powered career with (at one point) a six-figure salary and a window office on Capitol Hill in D.C. But I also got to be at home with my son until he started kindergarten, I learned lots of trad wife skills (including how to make yogurt and sourdough bread), and when I authored a couple of books and was asked to give talks to young women, I told them that my career was light as a feather weighed in the balance with my family: They should ignore Sheryl Sandberg’s “ Lean In ” advice, follow “Lean In to Love” instead, and pursue fulfillment in “the feminine genius.” To this day, it’s a principle with me that the people I love come first, day in and day out. If I’m planning to write all day or get a lot of freelance editing done but my son calls and asks if I can watch my little grandsons, I say yes if I possibly can. And late in life, I’m making it a discipline to regularly remind myself that I was created to be my husband’s helpmeet, not the other way around. There’s certainly more adventure and romance in rushing to the aid of his projects than in nagging him for additional help with the housework and resenting it if he doesn’t do it quickly enough. In any case, it happens that he’s got the far more important job. He’s a teacher at a Catholic boys’ school, so his work product is eternal. My best friend from high school made the same choice I did. She used to write wickedly funny short stories, and she tried journalism and law school but didn’t really like either. Her embittered divorced mother tried to talk her out of a traditional woman’s life. Marriage and children didn’t happen for her right away, and she had lots of adventures: teaching English in Japan, climbing Mount Fuji, seeing the Great Wall of China. Now she says the only thing missing from those memories is that her kids weren’t there with her. She’s got seven of them: practicing law, writing novels, nannying in Paris, learning to fly helicopters, teaching, park ranging, and still in college, respectively. Young women say it’s hard being home these days because it’s difficult to find other families doing the same thing. But honestly, if there was a nadir for housewifery, it was the nineties. The neighborhoods had been emptied out when feminism and divorce sent women into the workplace, and homeschooling was just picking up. But I did manage to find a few kindred spirits. None of us wishes we had picked option 2. Including Kim, a brilliant and incredibly high-energy 1986 UVA grad who could have had a fascinating and prestigious career, but opted instead to marry right out of college, homeschooled five children, and never worked for a paycheck until her youngest was headed for college, at which point she parlayed her volunteer work for a nonprofit into a full-time job as the “administrator” there. Of all of us, Kim’s cooking and crafting skills are truly on a level with Hannah Neeleman’s of Ballerina Farm : She makes her own liqueurs and candies, gives us all boxes of the most fabulous peanut (and cashew) brittle at Christmas, and has us over to learn how to make Ukrainian Easter eggs. Considering that she never took her husband’s name, she may not exactly be a traditional trad wife (insofar as there is any such thing), but she has put her family before herself at every turn of her life. Lisa and her lawyer husband sent their children to parish schools and then single-sex Catholic high schools. She stayed home and did volunteer work at her church and the kids’ schools until her oldest started high school, then taught kindergarten at a Catholic school and cared for her very difficult aging mother. She and her semiretired husband now spend three months of the year at their beach house, to which their three grown children and their families have standing invitations. All of us “playgroup moms,” as I still think of us, are serious about entertaining. We figure there’s nothing like a party for nurturing adult friendships and building memories around the milestones in our children’s lives. And we don’t usually do potlucks, because it’s kind of cool how, as G. K. Chesterton said , “there will always be some difference between the Browns entertaining the Robinsons and the Robinsons entertaining the Browns.” Lisa’s parties are particularly elegant, with truly exquisite hors d’oeuvres, and they’re lots of fun, with toasts and party games. We’re not all blissfully happy all the time. In fact, we’ve all had our hearts broken. And some breaks are much worse than others. That’s the risk of betting everything on loving a person . You are putting your heart into the hands of another human being who, like you, is a sinner and mortal: Your husband and children won’t always love you back the way you wish they would and, worse, you could lose them at any time; none of us is going to live forever in this world. There is no pain to be compared to the loss of someone you have poured your life into loving. Whereas if you pour everything you have into yourself, you have nothing to lose. (Except for your soul.) None of us wishes we had picked option 2. We’re all happy (not in the sense of having a great day every day, or sometimes even a bearable one). Happy as in “ the pursuit of happiness ” in the Declaration of Independence: We’ve pursued good lives, and we have found what we were looking for.