If social media has taught us anything, it’s that old ideas can be made anew. Social conservatism is on the rise, and alongside it comes the promotion of the tradwife lifestyle, made in the image of 1950s homemaking and the male breadwinner model.
Dressing in floral, frilly dresses and red lipstick, tradwife influencers advocate for women’s return to the home, inclusive of traditional gender roles, a passion for cooking and baking and a willingness to submit to one’s husband. For young, unmarried women, this mandate of a return to so-called traditional values have even taken the form of the stay-at-home girlfriend who spends her days maintaining a beauty regimen and performing tasks aiding her boyfriend’s life.
The online emergence and popularity of these lifestyles have, in turn, received backlash. Much concern stems from a rightward shift that pushes women back into traditional gender roles. Another reason, though, is the typical devaluing of housework. For a woman to go into a nonprofessional line of work, for some, suggests a lack of ambition or modern belief. Pair this with the issue of invisible household labor done often by women, and it’s clear why tradwives are rarely taken seriously.
It is, of course, the right of women — and people generally — to opt into housework themselves. But in addition to being able to make that autonomous decision, tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends and all others carrying out domestic tasks deserve salaries that recognize their labor and provide them with independent support.
The formalized conception of waged domestic labor dates back to the 1970s, when the grassroots International Feminist Collective began organizing to demand wages and recognition for housework. Dubbed the International Wages for Housework Campaign, these feminists asserted that the government should be providing salaries to the people — mostly women — performing unpaid domestic labor. This stance affirms the idea that domestic labor, though often undervalued, is nevertheless labor. A devaluation of housework comes from a history that associates housekeeping with unskilled labor often performed by women and people of Color.
Today, the current developments to the idea of the right to care in Latin America strive to fully recognize the contributions of care-based work. While in part asserting the right to receive care, the right to care also maintains the importance of recognizing, supporting and funding care work. Achieving a more caring society does, in part, require norm shifts that expand the involvement of husbands, fathers and men more generally. Equally important, though, is the aspect of financing care so as to solidify the economic autonomy of caregivers.
In broadening this principle and imagining it in our current cultural context of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends, we can understand that care work might not just pertain to caring for people like children or seniors, but caring for a home too. Funding this care through a salary that allows the worker to sustain themselves is an extension of this idea of a right to care.
Paying full-time domestic laborers doesn’t have to take a single form, but the United States can begin compensating homemakers by adopting a system similar to Venezuela’s. For over a decade, Venezuela’s labor laws have included pensions for those keeping house full-time. A similar framework in the U.S. could guarantee minimum wage funded by taxation or even supplemented by the partner.
At present, with no guaranteed wages for housework, it’s up to individual partnerships to decide how to share finances or figure out an informal salary on their own. While this system allows partners to decide what works best for them, it also puts women and homemakers more broadly at risk of financial abuse.
The unfortunate reality is that when you’re dependent on your spouse’s income, they can cut access to not only their funds, but also the assets they paid for. That might mean no car, no place to live or no finances to fall back on. A wage is not only a means of making overlooked labor visible; it’s also a means for independence and survival for those who could very well need it someday.
The thing is, though, that tradwives — or tradwife influencers, at the very least — aren’t often in favor of receiving salaries of their own. They tend to put forward the idea of submitting to your husband, allowing him to make the bulk of the decisions for the family unit, inclusive of financials.
Still, it’s important to recognize that these influencers posing as tradwives or stay-at-home girlfriends we see online are, in fact, content creators. Through selling the image of a perfect lifestyle online, they earn salaries of their own, something an offline, traditional homemaker of today certainly wouldn’t have access to. Those who are carrying out domestic labor but not dressing in full glam to film their work for content deserve an income all the same.
It’s likely that most of us at the University of Michigan, as we work toward receiving our degrees and securing a career, are not planning for a life in homemaking. Nevertheless, it’s necessary that we advocate for the support and recognition of the work our peers might opt into. In doing so, we’ll also be moving toward a greater awareness of the unrecognized domestic labor across all partnerships, not just those with a single breadwinner.
This then leads, in turn, to broader discussions of more equitable distributions of labor within every household, as well as how other policies like universal basic income might begin to address labor in the home. But to eventually arrive there, we first need to address how to financially support the people who are providing that labor full-time. The idea of distributing wages for housework and the conception of the right to care ought to be the principles driving an acknowledgment of labor overlooked up to now.
Audra Woehle is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at awoehle@umich.edu. In her column “In Hindsight,” she writes about what our relationship to history says about us today.
