SOMETIME IN MY daughter’s first year, I briefly considered buying an apron. After my partner had returned to full-time paid work, my days with my baby took on the rhythms and demands of a job – when he left in the morning, my workday began. Life as a mother brought indescribable joy and pleasure as well as an enormous amount of (messy) work to do in the house. An apron seemed like a practical kind of uniform. Then, on Instagram, I stumbled across a tradwife influencer promoting the benefits of donning such a garment, and I reconsidered: what had seemed like a practical idea was now tainted by the disturbing ideology of an online movement. I opted instead for a singlet and shorts that I was happy to be covered with food and dishwater and breastmilk.

Though broad, the tradwife trend generally promotes so-called ‘traditional’ family structures and advocates for women adopting ‘traditional’ roles as housewives. A key part of tradwife rhetoric is usually that this role be performed in service of one’s husband and children, though primarily the former (they are tradwives, not tradmothers): make his home a sanctuary, treat him like a king and so on. The movement has been described as a spectrum, though many prominent tradwives on social media are on the wildly conservative end of it. Their aesthetic tends to range from homesteading or self-sufficient lifestyles to 1950s housewife kitsch to flag-bearing patriotism. Tradwives promote ideals from ultra-Christian values to nationalism to white supremacist natalism. But explicit anti-feminism is usually a common thread, with tradwives often claiming, in essence, that ‘feminism has gone too far’ and pointing at a generalised notion of it as the cause of their dilemmas. They ask: why can’t we just be housewives? Why doesn’t society value homemaking and the joys of running a household?

Feminism, they say, has taken this away from them, forcing women – especially mothers – into the market economy and away from the home. This is not only an oversimplification of feminist movements (there is a rich legacy of feminist advocacy for mothers and in support of valuing care and household labour) but is also misdirected. For example, tradwives offer little critique of the economic, political and ideological forces that shape the experiences of mothering in neoliberal capitalist contexts, which is now often burdened by the well-documented ‘second shift’ – the necessary mental, physical and emotional domestic work that women typically perform outside time spent in paid labour. Crucially, tradwives’ anti-feminism also fails to acknowledge the many social and economic conditions that led to the creation of the ‘housewife’, including the development of capitalist economies via rapid industrialisation and the stark division between ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ labour that came with it. Instead, tradwives deem this highly particular and historically located experience of mothering totally natural or God-ordained.

Not surprisingly, the tradwife movement has been broadly criticised for its conservative sentiments. I agree with these assessments – while tradwives are right that mothering, care and the conventionally feminine labour that occurs in the home are devalued both culturally and economically, their logic in responding to this problem is deeply misguided. But much of the discussion in response to the trend also, I think, tends to miss the point. Because if we look closely, we can see that the central concerns of the tradwife movement are indeed feminist concerns – even if tradwives don’t recognise them as such.

THE HOME HAS always occupied an awkward place in feminist thought and politics. The US philosopher and socialist feminist Iris Marion Young notes this in a 2005 essay, describing the home as representing ‘deeply ambivalent values’ for women and feminism. The home, as we well know, can be a site of violence, abuse, drudgery, isolation and spiritual poverty for women. These negative values are further complicated by experiences of social and economic class, race, ability and so on. They are also intensified by social and economic disruption and crises, such as war and political conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the current housing and cost-of-living crises. In these circumstances, rates of domestic violence, time poverty and the volume of unpaid reproductive labour and care all increase to the detriment of women’s freedom and wellbeing. Yet the home can (sometimes simultaneously) be a site of comfort, retreat, joy, autonomy and personal flourishing – because of these potential positives, Young writes that she is ‘not ready to toss the idea of home out of the larder of feminist values’.

The home is also – for most women, especially mothers – the site of domestic work: the labour of ‘social reproduction’ that sustains life and living. This includes the deeply embodied acts of gestating, birthing, nurturing and caring for children as well as the daily tasks of cooking, cleaning, shopping, tidying, organising, planning, creating and maintaining social relations, managing household resources, and so on and on and on. This reproductive labour takes an enormous amount of energy, time, skill, thought and emotion, and many women find it meaningful and satisfying. But the poor conditions of this labour (unpaid, largely unsupported and often with an overwhelming workload) can render it exhausting and unsustainable.

Feminists have long pointed out the devaluation of reproductive labour and mothering in patriarchal cultures and capitalist economies (though it has been considered a blind spot of liberal and, in a contemporary context, ‘lean-in’ or ‘girlboss’ feminist politics). The 1970s Marxist-feminist Wages for Housework campaign, for example, responded to these concerns by demanding state remuneration for the reproductive labour performed by women in the home. Today, women in heterosexual relationships continue to perform more unpaid household labour than men, even if both partners are in full-time paid employment.

Tradwives are, in essence, pointing out these same problems – they want just one job, and for it to be valued. But they respond to these real feminist concerns with a troubling and flawed solution – and, notably, not through forward movement but through an attempted return to the highly mythologised and romanticised notion of the 1950s housewife. While tradwives claim to be recognising and celebrating the positive value of women’s work in the home, they inadvertently perpetuate the problems they seek to address.

AS A SCHOLAR interested in ecofeminist philosophy, I’ve been wondering what the Australian philosopher Val Plumwood might have made of the tradwife movement. Plumwood was a prominent environmentalist and feminist known especially for her contributions to ecofeminist philosophy. She was a key figure in intellectual circles within Sydney and Canberra that challenged anthropomorphism and made significant contributions to the development of political ecology and environmental philosophy in Australia and abroad. She also famously survived being attacked by a saltwater crocodile – including being ‘death rolled’ three times – in Kakadu National Park in 1985. This experience of becoming prey came to deeply shape her philosophical work, and she detailed the experience in her (posthumously published) book Eye of the Crocodile.

Plumwood – who took her name from the Plumwood tree (Eucryphia moorei), which grows on Plumwood Mountain, where she and her then husband took residence in the 1970s – is still considered one of the world’s pre-eminent ecofeminist thinkers. Ecofeminism, generally, recognises a connection between the oppression of both women and ‘nature’. While the field is diverse, ecofeminists typically argue that because women are associated with nature, and – importantly – because nature is conceptualised in negative terms in Western thought and culture, women are exploited and degraded as the natural world is exploited and degraded. Plumwood described this partly as a process of ‘backgrounding’, writing in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature that, constructed as ‘nature’, women ‘provide the environment and conditions against which male “achievement” takes place, but what they do is not itself accounted as achievement’. This experience is complicated by factors including economic or social class and race, and is compounded for marginalised women who are considered via capitalist and colonial logics to be ‘closer to nature’.

But ecofeminism also observes and often celebrates parallels between the life-giving and sustaining capacities of women and the natural world. Making such connections is notably fraught: there is a long and damaging legacy in the West of linking ‘woman’ with ‘nature’ in ways that control and limit women – even when the connection is considered virtuous – because it positions women as inferior to men. And, importantly, the woman-nature connection prominent in Western, patriarchal thought has been constructed by men espousing theories about women – not by women speaking in and on our own terms.

But Plumwood argued, significantly, that denying any connection between women and nature was similarly problematic. She warned against tendencies in some feminist discourse to distance women from the bodily, natural, earthly position to which we had been relegated. This, Plumwood pointed out, simply maintained a hierarchical logic – dominant in almost all aspects of Western culture – where categories such as ‘masculine’, ‘culture’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ are positioned above the denigrated categories of ‘feminine’, ‘nature’, ‘body’ and ‘earth’. Such logic is not only hierarchical but constructs a dualism, whereby each term in a pair (culture/nature and so on) exists through the exclusion of the other. Plumwood called feminist positions that reproduced this logic – through arguing for women’s equality with men in the existing culture – an ‘uncritical strategy of equality’.

Plumwood’s ‘critical ecofeminism’ set itself apart from other ecofeminist ideas that were emerging (especially in popular cultural and political movements) in the 1970s and 1980s when she was writing the now classic Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. These positions adopted what she described as an ‘uncritical strategy of reversal’, where the association between women and nature was celebrated to the exclusion of women’s connection to the category of culture and its correlates (such as reason or the liberal ideals of autonomy and freedom). In doing so, these ecofeminists simply flipped the hierarchy, with ‘nature’ and ‘feminine’ now on top, keeping the same logic intact. This was troublesome, Plumwood argued, because it maintained underlying logics that perpetuate systems of domination – what she called the ‘master model’. Instead, she advocated overcoming such dualisms via an anti-dualist strategy (which underpinned her approach to critical ecofeminism) that recognised a connection between women and nature that did not deny women’s capacity to participate in what is deemed culture. In such a formulation, nature and culture are not dualistically opposed but categories that depend on, and are deeply interconnected with, the other.

While terms like nature and culture (as well as public and private and so on) are slippery and imprecise, they offer a useful framework for making sense of experiences of the home, and Plumwood’s ideas are helpful when thinking about the tradwife trend. We could argue, for example, that tradwives maintain a dualistic logic that sets women’s domestic role up against any activity that occurs outside the home – a kind of nature/culture dualism, where the domestic labour and care that occurs in the home is represented by the category of nature, and women’s other roles or identity are represented by the category of culture. Tradwives valorise women’s domestic labour and care roles at the exclusion of women’s participation in what we might consider ‘culture’ (except, perhaps, the cultural activity of being an online influencer). In this sense, even though they attribute positive value to women’s role in the home, they remain in a dualistic logic while also maintaining the overarching ‘master model’, where woman is subordinate and subservient to man but the depth of his dependence on her is denied. Housework, therefore, essentially remains backgrounded – performed as a means to her husband’s achievement. In this sense, tradwives also fail to properly acknowledge the ambivalence and complexities of mothering and reproductive labour, which can be both rewarding and exhausting, profound and mundane, joyful and dissatisfying. Instead, they dogmatically preach the virtues of homemaking and service to family.

But, on the other hand, many of their critics tend to downplay the joy and meaning that tradwives describe in performing reproductive labour and care – inadvertently minimising maternal desire and the pleasures that might be found in the home. This also falls into the problematic nature/culture dualism trap that Plumwood sought to avoid and contributes to the backgrounding of domestic labour. While some might shirk the idea of finding meaning or pleasure in this labour, denying it any positive potential has significant philosophical implications. For example, the activities of this labour, including housework and care, force us to engage with the rhythms of life and the natural processes of death, decay and renewal – a vastly different temporality to that of capitalist production. The denial or denigration of the life-sustaining practices that women have conventionally tended to thus risks perpetuating problematic ideals, such as those underpinning capitalist exploitation.

The issues with the tradwife trend remain extensive, but we shouldn’t dismiss the root of its concerns. While it is easy to offer a knee-jerk reaction to its disturbing aspects, this essentially mirrors the simplistic logic of the movement, which is itself highly reactionary. Instead, critical ecofeminism could help us consider the complex philosophical, political and economic conditions that have led so many women to find the tradwife trend so alluring.

Image by Oberholster Venita, courtesy of Pixabay