The former “tradwife,” who lived life before it became a development, says she “hears the unhappiness” in some of the most popular “tradwife” content and creators as they chase that “good” ideal fit.
“You can never achieve perfection in the life of a traditional wife,” says TikToker Enitza Templeton. “You just keep going deeper and deeper down rabbit holes. I really feel like it’s just to keep her busy and keep her wheels turning.”
“Tradwife” is a shortened form of “traditional wife,” and is a nickname given to women who are stay-at-home moms while their husbands provide the family income. They stay home to raise the kids, maintain the home, and do things like grow their own meals and make things from scratch as part of this lifestyle aesthetic.
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Templeton, a mother of four, has lived this life for a decade, so she definitely knows what she’s talking about, though she rejects the “tradwife” moniker for herself. She acknowledged it in a new brand People story that she recognizes a variety of her previous life in the most popular content created on the planet of this growing development, which deeply concerns her for the women in them.
On Wednesday morning, Templeton jumped into his Instagram Stories to marvel at how quickly his story has become famous and to express his appreciation for the platform it is giving him to speak about this development.
“I’m glad I can be an anti-voice for this tradwife shit, because it’s all fucking shit. Pure shit,” she declared in her impassioned video. “This sh– This sh– is not that fun because it doesn’t even look fun! And it’s not fun.”
In the article, Templeton talks about the gradual realization that the “traditional wife” existence she had been leading for a decade was not what she needed for herself, and indeed, not what she needed for her daughters.
“I remember watching TV and folding towels and thinking, ‘I want someone to help me get out of this. If I had the money, if I had the means, if I had a way, I wouldn’t be married. I hate it. I don’t want my daughters to be in a marriage like that,’” she recalled to the outlet.
“If I need my daughters to do something completely different, I’ll have to show them something completely different,” she realized. And it was from there that she began to change her life until she finally left her marriage.
Ahead of the curve, Templeton said she agreed to fall into these conventional stereotypes of husband and wife roles when she first got married in 2009. She even made the choice to move away from that before the new “tradwife” trend started to emerge on TikTok.
Watching these films of housewives preparing their meals from scratch and homeschooling their children to pursue some legendary ideal, Templeton claimed that the whole mystery is a “little carrot dangling” that if you are able to do these things, you can become “a good trophy wife.”
“It’s this silly, silly, silly goal that keeps changing,” she said. “You can never reach it because if you bake the bread, well, did you use fresh yeast? Oh. Well, did you mill the flour? Oh. Well, did you grow the wheat that you milled the flour from? They’ll keep pushing it back.”
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One example Templeton references in her story — and later in the Instagram Tales video — is the favorite couple behind Ballerinas’ farmand “tradwife” Hannah Neeleman, featured in a profile for The London Instances. She and her husband Daniel have 20 million followers across their platforms, with much of the content following Hannah’s day-to-day life with her seven children.
One story from the Neelemans particularly resonated with Templeton, and it’s the story of Hannah’s birthday gift from her husband. Hannah stated in her unboxing video that she was hoping for “tickets to Greece,” before revealing an apron with pockets for eggs.
While she felt happy about getting the gift in the video, trying it on for her husband, Templeton says she can see through the veneer and can “hear the unhappiness” in the girls’ voices. She also said it’s hard to watch for these reasons.
You’re not showing the full picture. There’s a variety of ugliness behind the scenes.
“If Ballerina Farms was my daughter, if I saw her hand over Juilliard to live on the farm, I would probably cry a little bit every day knowing that’s what she did,” Templeton said.
“It’s terribly unfortunate,” Templeton advised Folks about these “tradwives”’ efforts to paint this good life. “It’s also a little hypocritical. I know how it is. You’re not showing the full picture. There’s a variety of ugliness behind the scenes.”
At the same time, she admitted that she probably would have made “tradwife” content again in 2009 if social media had been bigger. “Once I started realizing, ‘Oh, I can go on social media and pretend my life is beautiful,’ I started,” she said, explaining her own initial foray into social media by showcasing desserts she baked.
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She also detailed the struggles, which she believes she shared with Hannah from Ballerina Farms, of keeping up with the prospect of continuing to have children, children that “professional wives” are primarily responsible for raising and caring for.
Templeton’s story included a child with Down syndrome, a series of open-heart surgeries and a miscarriage, but none of that diminished her anticipation of getting pregnant, having more children and taking on all that responsibility.
Furthermore, Templeton states that in each of her stories, epidurals were only provided by their midwives when their husbands were out of the room. In any other case, they were expected to undergo a natural birth as part of their conventional position.
“If you’re giving yourself to that particular person, you don’t get anything back,” Templeton said of tradwife husbands. “They just keep taking.”
Now, Templeton hopes to make use of his social media presence and Motherhood on the rise podcast as a “lifeline” for other girls who feel trapped in the “tradwife” lifestyle to know that there is a way out.
“I wasn’t raised to think that women had the right to think and the right to ask questions. I assumed that if a woman didn’t have a child, she would be depressed for life,” she said. “I didn’t realize that there were women who were just happy to just live and be themselves.”
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