The ‘Trad Wife’ Panic Is Running Into One Big Problem

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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If your only perspective on conservative women and family life comes from buzzy books such as the bestselling novel “Yesteryear,” which paints a portrait of traditional families as hypocritical and deeply dysfunctional, you’d think conservative women must be miserable in their marriages.

Your view would be further cemented if you read mainstream outlets such as the New Yorker (“The Trap of the Trad Wife”) or New York magazine (“The Young Women Leaving the New Right”). This perspective would only be confirmed if you read Helen Lewis’ new cover story in The Atlantic, “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet,” featuring Lewis’ notes from her conversations with a handful of (largely) right-wing male social media influencers. Some of the men came across as boorish and intellectually silly, from suggesting women should lose the right to vote to openly mocking them.

While annoying, none of this is particularly shocking. Each person Lewis interviewed could be fairly described as an influencer — the shock jocks of the internet age. In other words, these were not exactly shadowy power brokers about to repeal the 19th amendment whose views required “unearthing.” As far as we can tell, these men are literally talking all the time to just about anyone who will listen.

To be fair, we know some are listening. One of us authors (Brad), a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, has watched a growing share of his male Gen Z students take a sharp right turn on gender — and yes, some of them are following the kind of manosphere men that worry Lewis. Some tradwife influencers — Lauren Southern among them — have had terrible experiences with the most extreme, internet-driven versions of this lifestyle.

But the misogynists are in the minority on the Right. Nevertheless, Lewis’s message in The Atlantic was clear: These right-wing troglodytes are ascendant, men whining online about disenfranchising women belong to the same movement as those rolling back DEI overreach, and women everywhere should regard these men as a mortal threat.

But when you get offline, into the real world, and look at what we might call Normie Land, where men and women are choosing to live, work, and build actual families together, things usually look a lot better on the Right — and, actually, the Left too. For those of us who have worked our way through serious or minor differences, or found a way to live with them, things look much better than the online Gender War between the Right and Left would suggest.

We who live here are, apparently, the silent majority: neither convinced of one sex’s moral superiority or the other’s inherent inferiority, yet fully convinced that we are all, equally, lovely and annoying. Far from fearing, avoiding, or hating the opposite sex, we deliberately live with them: We are the Normie Marrieds, and we’re doing pretty well. Better than most, actually.

For example, last year, we at the Institute for Family Studies, in partnership with the Wheatley Institute, found that the happiest women in America are married mothers. All married women, with or without children, were more likely to report being “very happy” than their unmarried peers.

Other research has found an even stronger link between marriage and happiness for men: Husbands are almost twice as likely to say they are “very happy” with their lives as unmarried men. Married fathers seem to have an additional happiness advantage.

Institute for Family Studies

It gets even more shocking: Marital happiness is high across the ideological divide. New research from the Institute for Family Studies shows that among married American women, the happiest are those who identify either as clearly “conservative” or “liberal” — in other words, strong worldview convictions on both sides of the aisle are correlated to happier marriages. That means conservative couples — yes, those whom Helen Lewis might lump into the same category as her anti-woman influencers — are some of the happiest, just as liberal American couples are happy.

We hypothesize this finding suggests that marriages in which spouses have high, clear expectations of intention and involvement in family life from each other — often for feminist reasons on the Left and religious reasons on the Right — tend to build successful relationships.

It brings to mind an incisive bit of marriage counseling from the late evangelical pastor Tim Keller. He wrote, “If each spouse says to the other, ‘I will treat my selfishness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect for great things.” The advice carries: Humility is the antidote not just to marital strife, but the perfect opposite of the fear-based, blame-obsessed gender war that is being stirred up by actors on the Right and Left.

Despite the noise from women-phobic men on the Right, and the overwrought “investigations” of them on the Left, we American men and women who manage to build relationships — sometimes across real ideological and political differences — remain the happiest and healthiest. That’s why we ought to continue to encourage younger generations to get off their devices, drop extremist gender takes (“men are toxic,” “women should lose the vote”), mix and mingle with a wide range of peers, date people who don’t align with them 100% on every issue, and then find their way to the altar with someone who would be a good friend and a great spouse.

Real life isn’t the gender-based fear and hatred we often see manifested in the online Gender War; it’s the steady contentedness men and women find talking across the kitchen counter. This is the place where many Normies — yes, including happily married conservative women! — are making marriages and families. It’s cozy in here.

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Maria Baer is a contributing editor at the Institute for Family Studies. Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.