Motherhood, "trad wives," and what's "elevated"—the classism that binds us
There's no liberation in social class stratification
I grew up in poverty, raised by a single teen mom on welfare. My grandparents raised her and her seven siblings in a small 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house with no basement, in Northern Ontario. I’ve heard stories of my grandfather (my father figure who helped raise me) robbing a fur store, spending some time in jail, and forcing his 9- and 10-year-old sons to siphon gas so they could use it for their family’s furnace.
The stresses of poverty often co-mingle with abuse. I say “co-mingle” because it can be unclear what is caused by what. Does the trauma of abuse lead to a life of poverty? Does poverty cause abuse? I’m not sure if our family history has one particular inciting incident to explain our poverty or trauma, I just know we experienced them simultaneously and I can’t separate them in my mind.
When I see or smell spaces, clothing, or foods that remind me of my upbringing, I feel sad and icky at best and in fight-or-flight mode at worst. When I strive to design my home and life to be so far from the resemblance of my childhood, it’s an act of therapy for me. I’m telling my vulnerable self who vividly remembers (some call this an “inner child”) that “we” are safe now. I don’t want to remember.
I don’t feel ashamed about my origins and background. However, in my teens and 20s, not old enough to have a secure sense of self, I did feel shame, as if my ignorance of any higher-class culture made me dirty or stupid. This carried even into my 30s, past when I discovered social justice. I glommed onto the style of the upper class, learning it like a language I could speak to talk my way into spaces foreign to me—social capital.
My upper-class mentors were my mother’s youngest sister and her sister-in-law. They wore clothes from Esprit, Club Monaco, Calvin Klein, and Roots. They wore Birkenstock Gizah sandals and bought fancy cosmetics with beautiful packaging. They renovated their homes. My aunt picked out custom upholstery fabric for her sofa. The brands they coveted included Bang & Olfsen, Bvlgari, Mercedes-Benz. Their class status and the status to which they aspired were like far-off countries I could visit in the summer and during Spring break. The food was better, the grey days seemed sunnier, and as soon as I could I vowed to live where living was somehow… elevated. On a higher plane. Right?
“Elevated.” Hmmm.
It’s the new lingo used to sell food, clothing, and interior design—the conspicuous consumption that signals our economic class, and therefore our worth as humans in a capitalist culture.
“Elevated” is the new “classy.”
Even when used to describe a levelling up of one’s habits, mindset, or lifestyle, it’s an inherently classist project, since one has to have a base level of security before one can have the luxury of spending their time “better.” The lower you are on the economic ladder, the more your time and thoughts are occupied by mere survival.
We should be embarrassed at this point to want to separate ourselves from the survival class and working class as if their plight isn’t also our plight. We are all owned by the 1%. We all work for them. And we don’t get paid according to the value we produce; we get paid the amount we’re willing to settle for. We produce so much value with our work, and most of it goes to the top 1% of wealth hoarders. They could redistribute it to all of the people who work at every level of employment, but they don’t.
The reason we tolerate this is because, collectively, we can’t bring ourselves to demonize something we aspire to. In our daily lives, our work hustle is powered by the fantasy that if we work hard enough, we can make it to a fantasy level of wealth. If you’re in a lower income bracket, your fantasy level might be $200,000/year, and that doesn’t seem incredible or criminal to you because so many people do make that much per year. If you’re in a higher income bracket, your fantasy level of income is something like $5-20 million per year. And it seems attainable because you know people are making that. Then, others hustle to become billionaires, which they believe is attainable, I guess. After all, Sara Blakely went from selling printers or copy machines door-to-door to creating the Spanx empire, with not a lot of money to her name.
No one wants to dismantle the machinery that would make their fantasy a reality, and that includes dismantling the fantasy by recognizing it as a fantasy. Everyone wants to believe they’re the exception of the people around them and they can make their fantasy a true hero’s journey story. And fair enough, because this is a true story for some of us.
The problem is that it can’t be a true story for everyone. It’s economically impossible for everyone to be ultra-wealthy, just as it is impossible for everyone who plays the lottery to win it. To be ultra-wealthy necessarily requires a lower class: the working class who will never win the lottery, even if they end up spending $50,000 in tickets over their lifetime. And in order to feel okay about that in our consciences, we need to believe that the working class is inherently inferior—not as clever, not as hard-working, not as moral, not as attractive, and that they choose this fate just as much as they choose to spend $50,000 playing the lottery instead of doing something else with their money. And, therefore, they belong in places where we don’t have to see them, because they’re born yucky and that’s just the way the world works.
But it’s income inequality that creates the yuckiness to begin with, and then it reproduces itself. Poverty creates exhaustion, poor health, missing teeth, pained posture, and less elaborate and fashionable grooming styles. We decide we don’t want to be around this unrelatable yuckiness, so we don’t employ these people, so they don’t accumulate wealth, and so they and their children take on this less “elevated” appearance.
Or, we don’t welcome them into our social circles even when they are in school with us or at work with us. So, they don’t accumulate the same social capital, the same networking benefits, and therefore the same safety net during rough economic times or during personal crises.
This is why, even when “higher education” is free, some people from lower classes won’t seek out “an education” because they don’t see people like themselves in those spaces, therefore, they don’t feel like they’d be welcome or like they’d understand the cultural languages being traded in those spaces. So, they self-select out. The upper-class propaganda story here is that these people have the option of getting “an education,” but they choose not to because they’re “stupid” or “lazy” when, in reality, most people would succumb in the same way to the same feeling of ostracization. (Pretty much the only people who are super resilient to social ostracization and not fitting in are autistics like me.).
(I put “education” in quotation marks to signify a specific idea of “education” is being referenced and not, say, education (without quotation marks). To be educated is simply to know things. But white upper-class culture uses this innocuous-sounding word—a righteous word, even—to refer to a formal process where we exchange financial and cultural capital for the “right” things to know currently, because this innocuous/righteous coded language lets us get away with our ritualized class inequality. It naturalizes the inequality by making it seem like there’s only one natural and normal way to be educated and if you’re not educated, well, you simply can’t be allowed to be in certain places in charge of certain things. While this is true for some things (I’d sure like my heart surgeon to be formally accredited!), it’s not true for all things. Some things we can learn independently, from reading books, from thinking, and from doing. And while there will be gaps in self-directed knowledge acquisition, in reality, everyone has gaps. I can’t believe how many “well-educated” people don’t understand systems theory or the logic of power structures. Meanwhile, others would balk at how I feel like my knowledge of Freud and his theories is as complete as it needs to be simply by knowing he was essentially a giant self-stroking penis. How I made it this far without ever studying Freud is a mystery to me, but it goes to show we never know exactly what anyone learned or remembers from their time in “higher education.”)
What does this have to do with motherhood and “trad wives”? I’m getting there.
Some of us work in jobs that aren’t crucial to the economy or to humanity, and yet they’re still seen as more desirable jobs to have, even if they don’t pay as much. If a sanitation worker makes more than a graphic designer, which job would you rather have? What if you lost your sense of smell from having had Covid-19? Would you want to be a sanitation worker over a graphic designer?
Most people who are neurotypical would rather be a graphic designer. Most neurotypical people are wired to want social belonging because it’s safest, evolutionarily speaking. But being a sanitation worker is not a cool thing to talk about at parties. It’s not the “right” job to have in certain social spaces. It’s not cool, it’s not glamourous. It doesn’t help you get belonging in the social spaces where power is held. It’s a “working class” job.
So many people have jobs where, if those jobs were eliminated from the entire planet, nothing much would happen. We simply wouldn’t have a specific style of shoe, or a certain advertising campaign never would have happened, or our phone wouldn’t be able to do this cool thing it now does, or we’d know less about how horny nuns were in France in the 1600s. (For context, I once knew someone who was getting their PhD in French dildo poetry and they were dating someone who was getting their PhD in clowning theory. So, that’s a thing you can do with your life if you want.)
We absolutely are not making money based purely on the practical or monetary value we produce.
We also make money based on:
who we’re making rich
what fancy things our fancy friends want to do, and then which jobs they made up so they could work with their friends
how cool our job is
how much we had to invest in formal education to get the job
We saw who the essential workers were in the pandemic. But despite needing these people for us all to function, they continue making minimum wage or not much more.
The most essential workers—mothers—worked for free. They left their jobs to become full-time teachers and carers of children because their partners made more money in their jobs, so they got to keep them.
Mothering has never had enough social status to be seen as worthy of a wage. Despite being literally the most essential job if we don’t want our species to die out or our economy to collapse, it’s not seen as being so essential that it’s a job worth incentivizing.
Many women, therefore, have opted out. They can’t afford to have kids. They can’t afford to not have financial independence and they can’t easily have both, because they can’t access affordable child care.
What this can look like, from the outside, is women eschewing motherhood because it’s “icky”. It’s low-class. It’s not cool. It’s not fancy.
Feminism gets blamed for churning out a generation of power-hungry lesbots who don’t need no men… or babies. When, really, it’s our patriarchal-capitalist culture that has made motherhood too difficult.
Pushing back on this trend, and misappropriating blame, “trad wives” are popping up on social media, glamorizing even the most unnecessary (due to modernization) homemaking tasks, like butter churning. Performative moms have been around in some incarnations for generations. When I was a young Mormon stay-at-home mom, they were typically Mormon or in other ways fundamentalist Christian “mommy bloggers” like Stephanie Neilson from The NieNie Dialogues or Ree Drummond from The Pioneer Woman (I couldn’t find a good representative post from the time before this became a whole… company).
There’s more to Trad Wives than class protest, which I’ll explain in a moment. But first, Trad Wives are typically American, and America is a land of lore. America invests in “the American Dream,” a rags-to-riches story, and in the white nuclear family-as-backbone-of-America story. There are stories and images within those stories that we romanticize:
the couple who meet in high school (in the fantasy version, he’s the football quarterback and she’s the head cheerleader and they become prom king and queen), then get married and have 2-3 children and have a happy marriage for 75 years;
the always-been-a-good-girl woman who is her “Daddy’s Little Girl,” and he walks her down the aisle at her wedding in her big fancy white Cinderella gown, and he gives her away to “her” new man who “better take good care of her;”
the good girl who tames and domesticates the bad boy and gets him to marry her, and having daughters reforms him even more, and he remains the sexy bad boy who’s loyal to “his girls,” and she must be a “real woman” somehow for landing and keeping him and that’s why she deserves her high social status; or,
the couple who “break the land” building a homestead, doing everything from scratch because they want to live independently, cleaving only to their god, so they have a bazoodle of children who they homeschool and those kids grow up wanting to live on the same land because they love their family so much and honour their parents who are the best, strongest parents in the world who keep going in faith even after they lost two of their children to illness or accident.
There’s nothing wrong with aspects of these stories, as individual occurrences in people’s lives. The problem is the way they’re reproduced and promoted across our culture to the point of being propaganda because little else can get through. America is made of more diversity than this.
Many people’s real lives end up contradicting these select few stories. These stories can’t play out in everyone’s lives because the systems around us don’t support the stories. The stories aren’t safe to live out for women or people of colour or queer people.
As media showcases more diversity from the reality that is America, people who saw themselves reflected in the traditional stories feel threatened, as if their stories are not cool anymore. They don’t have the same social capital they always did.
The more diversity we showcase, the more those Americans feel like the power or social caché they had by looking like an American Dream success story is lost.
Enter: The Trad Wife brand. These women, like Mormon mom of 8 and Mrs. World Pageant competitor Ballerina Farm, create content to “elevate” being a wife and mom. Some feel like the lifestyle has been downgraded in social capital (they’re correct), so they’re capitalizing on everyone’s longing for simpler times (without wars, pandemics, housing insecurity, extreme inflation, and income inequality) by showing us how happy they are with their simpler lives. (As for Mormons, the church literally asks them to create this content to be a “light unto the world” because the church understands that they’re losing power and caché and they want to change that.)
Indeed, Trad Wives are so happy with their traditional wife and at-home mom lives that they’re doing this work for free.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with:
being married
being married to a man
having more than two kids
being a stay-at-home mom
homeschooling
etc.
There are good ways and bad ways to do these things. The bad ways involve oppression of women and/or children. This oppression has historically happened so often, and still happens so often, that the impact of this tradition of American storytelling is that the storytelling becomes propaganda which works to pressure people to live out these stories and strengthen capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. (Which kind of makes a joke out of “American freedom.”)
Extreme income inequality—either where men make much more than women or where C-suite level executives hoard all the profit that should be redistributed to the workers who generated the profit—thrives off of free labour produced by mothers.
To understand how mother labour exploitation works, see:
We can’t have a liberated future together if we’re supporting divisive ideologies and systems like a capitalism that prevents a full-time worker from being able to rent a 1-bedroom apartment anywhere in the US while a CEO makes on average over 300x more.
Or a capitalism that sells products by preying upon our fear of appearing to be not-rich.
We especially can’t have a liberated future together if we have different class categories of motherhood.
It may seem like such a small and senseless thing to talk about but the way we use language quickly sweeps through a culture and creates an overall flavour or mindset. When everyone is using the word “elevated” like it’s not problematic, like it doesn’t mean “coming from a better-than place,” it naturalizes the very idea of class—the idea that some people are better than other people and therefore deserve more wealth, social support, and well-being.
The truth is that wealth, social support, and well-being is what creates greater capacities and better outcomes in people.
Changing our language can help remind us of this. If we’d feel uncomfortable literally saying, “it has a real rich-people look to it,” it’s worth giving that some thought.
If people are suffering somewhere, if people are competing somewhere, if inequality exists somewhere, it’s all tied to all of us somehow. The same ideologies that touch them are what touch us. What rains on them will eventually soak us, too. It’s all the same weather system.