Something that has always bothered me about conservative / trad wife content is that there are almost never older women speaking.
They talk often about returning to traditional gender roles, being like our grandmothers, but those grandmothers never make an appearance. If motherhood, religion, and being a wife is what will fulfill you and make you happy, why aren’t they trotting out women in their 50s, 60s, etc. to confirm this? When you tell women their focus should be entirely on the children and home, what do they suggest for women whose husbands leave them or abuse them? Do these women talk to their grandmothers?
Both my grandmothers were religious women who were virgins when they married. My maternal grandmother once told me about her wedding night, how her introduction to sex was when my grandfather raped her. Both of my grandmothers were “rewarded” with husbands that drank and beat them and their children.
My paternal grandmother chose to leave, and it shaped my father’s life; the poverty they endured because of the lack of job opportunities and taboo of being a single mother.
My maternal grandmother stayed, and my grandfather got sober when my mom was an adult. My grandfather, in appreciation of the many years his wife spent getting her head bashed in by him, immediately left my grandmother for someone he met in treatment.
I’ve honestly thought about going to one of these events and earnestly asking these questions because I want to see how they will answer.
So, women of reddit – did you have a grandmother who followed the path conservatives say women are destined for? How did that turn out for them?
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My mother started out following that path. She had a few years being a housewife, but she got bored sitting at home and went back to work when I got old enough to go to school. When my father died, she was well served by the fact that she had been working and could support herself. In spite of all that, she stayed conservative even though she benefited directly from being independent.
She’s passed away now, but basically she was totally misled by conservative media. Her opinions didn’t make logical sense. She was totally against the Equal Rights Amendment but also wouldn’t have thought she should have been paid less than a man just because of her gender. She believed it was right and proper for her to get divorced when she remarried and her husband didn’t treat her right.
My maternal grandmother is at husband number 4. This one at least doesn’t beat her, but she isn’t even allowed to call someone without being interrogated by him who it is and what they are talking about (of course during the call). She only sees my mother once a year because she isn’t allowed to get out on her own and has to wait for days he is out of the house and won’t notice.
Soooo… She wouldn’t be allowed at one of these events to speak, lol
Anyone conservative or traditional is usually the first person to try shut these women up.
Your grandmother’s experience was the same for one of mine (the other was ok) but being beaten, raped and spent her life cleaning and caring for an abusive man child.
People don’t want to acknowledge that this is the reality for a traditional relationship. Most men aren’t monsters, but a lot of them don’t mind the idea of being legally able to lash out even physically without consequences.
Whenever you hear about men and women pushing for a traditional relationship, you can hear the start of domestic abuse like always submit, never challenge, don’t speak to anyone he doesn’t give you permission for, this is all blatant tactics for isolating someone
I only know 1 conservative grandma. She currently has a shocked Pikachu face realizing the dumpster fire is headed straight for their business. She is truly clueless, married right out of high school, lived as a SAHM and now just her and hubby, in the middle of nowhere. She has never tried to educate herself, does not use the internet, etc.
There’s not as strong a connection between trad wives and right wing politics in my country, so I’m not focusing on the political element of your question. But there are plenty of older women who have l followed the trad wife path but just don’t talk about it. All the stuff I see about trad wives is younger social media influencers. That doesn’t mean they’re the only ones, it just indicates they’re the loud and visible ones.
That’s because its Fetish Content and not Actual People
My grandmother didn’t own a computer, her method was that she wrote a tiny paper booklet called the Proverbs woman. I still have a copy in my dresser. She handed them out all over.
My grandma and I talk a lot. She had a terrible marriage. My grandpa died in the early 2000s and she’s said consistently the best years of her life has been after he died.
She still had some ingrained, indoctrinated thoughts. When I tell her stories about my husband and I, she will ask things like, “well what did you make him for dinner?” And I’ll say “nothing, he’s a grown man and makes his own dinner”. She’s shocked. That wouldn’t have been an option for her. She isn’t shocked as in how dare you treat your husband that way, but more she’d be worried he’d beat me now because that would have been the reaction she’d get.
As she sees how my husband treats me she’ll make comments like “I shouldn’t have let your grandpa treat me like he did”. And I explain to her that she didn’t let anything happen, that he was a mean man who chose to do those things and with how the world was she didn’t have any options. I’d ask her what would have happened if she left with her 5 kids and no support in the 60s? Nothing good.
She tells me constantly that what I’m doing is way better than what she did/went through. That if she could do it all over again now she would do so many things differently.
My family was not conservative socially or politically, but my grandmother certainly would have been considered a tradwife on paper. She had 7 kids and was with her husband until he died. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was just the way women were.
I also imagine a lot of their grandmothers might be dead? Mine has been dead for about 10 years now and I’m 41. Also, the generation before the Baby Boomers is called the Silent Generation and they’re called that for a reason. They might not even know that their way of life was controversial. They might not realize they were abused. Their generation was very traditional and generally were in survival mode growing up during the Great Depression and WW2. Thinking about their personal autonomy and civil rights was not on most women’s minds. Second wave feminism didn’t kick off until the 60’s, so there was nothing propelling women to question their roles in society for anyone born in the first half of the 20th century.
I agree, if it’s possible, we should be speaking to our grandmothers about their experiences. But the venn diagram of tradwives and people who give a shit about women’s safety and autonomy is just two separate circles.
My grandparents have always voted Republican for some reason. They were working class folks who owned various small businesses at points and my grandpa worked multiple physical labor jobs too.
My grandpa passed away when I was a kid. According to my Dad, they’re dynamic when raising kids was traditional. My grandma took care of the kids and the house and finances. On weekdays my grandpa went to work, got home and relaxed. On weekends, he would cook, clean, do some projects, watch the kids, and my grandma was able to do what she wanted.
When trump first ran grandma didn’t like him but she thought she had no choice because she always votes Republican. She was very distressed over this and I thought I convinced her that just because he’s Republican doesn’t mean she had to vote for him.
Then her church convinced her that Trump is the person to vote for. She still doesn’t like him but is very religious so whatever her pastor says must be what Jesus wants. It makes me sick.
Women are invisible after 35, everyone knows that
/s
Grandmas don’t get to be on social media. Their husbands don’t let them. The only reason the young ones get to be on social media is because they get to be monetized propaganda. If you’re not good propaganda (young, pretty, and skinny, which is very difficult after a bonkjillion kids), you don’t get to be out there making conservatism look be by reminding you your wife will age.
There’s also the social factors of conservative men not putting their money where their mouth is and their marriages ending in divorce and marrying a younger woman, leading to them not being tradwives anymore, and that most older people aren’t great with technology generally. If they learned to use a camera and kept up with it as a hobby, they’re probably sticking to photography rather than picking up a whole new skill in videography.
A lot of these purveyors of trad lifestyle are the right age to have had a hippie for a grandma. That’s probably why you don’t see a lot of trad grannies.
These people’s grandmas are probably out protesting the Trump regime like I am.
IDK. My impression is that they defer opinions to husband or their church and don’t have an informed opinion of their own. And they prefer it that way.
Following a traditional path turned out just fine for my grandmother. She also accepts 0 bullshit and rules the house. My grandfather just basically does what she wants.
My mother was a housewife with six kids, my dad was a cheat and it turned into an extremely nasty divorce. He has since done the same to his second wife.
I think being a tradwife can work out great but it all depends on the man, and that is too big of a gamble to take.
You can usually find them featured on r/BoomersBeingFools .
As for my grandma’s, I’m not so sure how my paternal grandma voted. We never really talked about politics and she died right before the 2016 election.
My maternal grandma is extremely left-leaning. She’s my neighbor and landlord so we talk to each other every day, and the topic almost always go towards politics because republicans just piss us off so much.
My husband’s maternal grandmother was also pretty left-leaning… I think. I’ve only met her once when she was pretty far gone with Alzheimer’s, but she talked about how she was looking forward to voting for a woman in 2015, and my brother-in-law talked about how he prefers Bernie, and she was like “I like him, too.”
She introduced her husband as her brother to me and claimed that she remembers me even though it was the first time we met, but she seemed to have remembered how she leaned politically at least. She died in 2020. I wish I could’ve seen her at least one more time.
My paternal grandmother is an anti-vaxxer and I think she leans right. She talks like a libertarian and she lives in a deep red state surrounded by her conservative children, sooo… The last time I saw her (last year) she said that she wasn’t vaccinated against COVID, and then in the same sentence talked about how she almost died from COVID. But she still refused to get vaccinated.
She’s constantly in and out of the hospital and she might just learn the hard way soon. (I doubt that she voted though. She can barely walk. But if she could it probably would’ve been for Trump. Or RFK Jr.) Then again, I’m not entirely sure she’ll live long enough to see her medical rights taken away. When she does pass away I have a feeling that I’ll be more angry than upset.
My paternal grandmother died when my dad was 12, so she didn’t get a chance to leave, but my dad said his parents didn’t have an abusive relationships. My dad is a kind, caring, loving man and good to my mom.
My maternal grandmother had it different. My maternal grandfather, while he was kind to my mom, had his alcoholic brothers stop by their small farm to sober up, so my grandmother was always caring for them, plus raising 8 kids, or whoever else needed a place to crash.
He worked as a traveling painter, and ended up having a second family in California. I’m sure my grandmother was pissed about that. According to legend, she told the daughters he has with the other woman, never to call her house again. That’s so sad. What a fucked up situation.
That grandfather died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm in the late 60s. After his death, my grandmother had a bit of a renaissance. She would dress up, go dancing, she had a younger boyfriend who loved the menudo she would prepare in large batches every Sunday. It sounded like after years of caring for everyone else, she lived her best life in her elder years. Unfortunately, she developed Alzheimer’s, but died surrounded by her remaining children and nieces and nephews. I didn’t get to know her as she was in advanced stages of the disease by the time I came around.
She said a big F U to the trad-wife world once her husband was gone. Legend.
My partner’s grandma passed a few years ago (my partner isn’t, but his family is conservative) and her funeral was so sad – not because people were sad she passed – but because they literally had NOTHING to say about her. Not a thing. No hobbies, never learned to drive, no funny stories or memories (or if they had any it was like “remember when mom smacked you cause you snuck out?”). Just “she was a wife and a mother” and that’s it, because that’s what every person in her life reduced her to. And she probably thought of herself like that, too.
They trot out a woman in her 50’s, she has no ability to speak on it. She wasn’t born yet. Same with a woman in her 60’s.
Women in their 70’s were literal children just grazing double digits, so their opinion doesn’t much matter either. They’re not recalling what it was, they’re recalling what they thought it should be.
Women in their 80’s and 90’s all hated the way it was. They actually lived it as adults. They DON’T want to go back. They fought against the way it was so it would change.
My mother would be in her 70’s now. If you roll back the clock to the 50’s, she would have been anywhere from 1–10. She had 11 older sisters. One would have been between 6 and 16 during the 50’s, and wouldn’t have had much to say, most likely. Her other sisters would have been 15 (at the earliest point) to 38 (at the latest point).
Those women fought for abortion. They fought for birth control. They fought so women could have bank accounts and credit cards. They were all super Catholic and raised that way. They all believed in a woman’s right to live. My grandmother (their mother) died in the 70’s and she fought with them. They all marched in various marches as well.
My dad’s mother was the same age as my mother’s second oldest sister. She also marched for all of this stuff.
When I was in school (many, many moons ago), our school was located about two miles away from an abortion center. The ONLY reason I knew where it was located was because of the “protestors” who had nothing better to do Monday to Friday between 8 and 4 than stand outside with graphic signs and yell. There were only ever between 5 and 20 of them.
Every day, from 1st to 8th grade, we drove past them. Two people were always there: one man, about 60, and a woman that was about 80 at the time. He would occasionally be giving her water and stuff, so they were together at this… protest. He was always pacing and yelling, she was just sitting in her wheelchair, a sign propped against her, completely zoned out. The only women that I ever saw protesting were all elderly, in wheel chairs, barely awake or literal kids who should have been in school. They had no independent thought in what they were protesting. They were handed a sign, told to march in circles and yell a lot. No 5-8 year old has deep rooted beliefs about abortion.
My aunts and my grandmothers fought for women to be able to get real jobs. To get a decent education. For women to not be stuck at home popping out children, doing all of the mental and emotional labor of having huge families just for their husbands to come home and be upset about something absolutely stupid and lay them out.
My uncle’s all thought this was just a jolly works and everything was absolutely perfect. They didn’t have to do anything but ejaculate, go to work, go get drunk, come home, and be a piece of shit. Luckily, they generally weren’t like that, but the fact that’s all they had to do was fine by them.
Until my aunt shattered their delusions. Her first husband was insanely abusive. And an alcoholic. He beat the hell out of her all of the time, but she never complained or told anyone about it. She just took it. Because of him, and his version of loving his wife, she lost five pregnancies. They did have one child together.
One day, he was wailing on her, and the kid intervened to save her. Dear hubby beat the hell out of a four year old kid. He went and passed out, she cleaned the two of them up and packed and left.
Within forty minutes, there was a mob ready to lynch the bastard, but she said no. She wanted to divorce him. Her religion and the law basically said “he takes care of you when he’s not beating you, be happy with what you have.” She decided to go through it anyway.
She couldn’t get a place to live because she couldn’t get a bank account. She couldn’t get a car because she didn’t have credit history. She couldn’t get a job because she didn’t have a man to tattle to. She couldn’t get food because she didn’t have a job.
Her brothers each took over a part of it and co-signed for everything for her. She wasn’t allowed to exist without a man to run to and tattle to. By day, she worked her ass off to keep her bills in order. She couldn’t fall behind or it would affect her brothers who helped her. She worked two jobs to keep up. One of her brothers had to go with her in Fridays to pick up her paychecks — they wouldn’t even hand her the money that she earned with her own two hands. They would hand it over to any brother that walked in with her. They would hand it to a BIL they never met, but they wouldn’t hand it to her. Then, he has to go to the bank with her because she couldn’t deposit her paycheck in her account. She needed her co-signer there to cosign the check she just received for working and put it into an account with her name on it. What’s crazy is that when it was her husband’s account and his paycheck, she could do it without a babysitter. She was allowed to make the deposit. Once the check had her name on it, well, that was an entirely different can of worms.
She has to live like this for years.
The one thing she doesn’t want is for it to go back to the way it was.
The one “trad wife” twit in my family who has heard her story, and the stories of my aunts who didn’t have it as bad so chose not to go through divorce, truly believe that “it can’t happen now.”
YES IT CAN, that’s the point! Roll back the clock and that bastard CAN hit you and will. Too many people out here swinging already and it’s not ok. When it becomes ok because “marriage” you’re in for a sad and horrifying awakening.
Right wingers don’t amplify the voices of older women.
My grandmother (on father’s side)was largely one. Less religious (grandpa was a mason, she went to the order of the eastern star temple) but still there for everything else.it was pretty clear she hated him, but built her world around him.
When she got dementia in her 80s, she mentally was largely back in her younger years, she thought she drove all the time, she brought up stories of nearly being scammed by the corner store when paying. This from a woman who was not permitted to drive since the 50s, and hadn’t touched money since not long after. She was clearly independent and had spirit, which he’d ground out of her by the time I was born.
Meeting her is what turned my mom away from the stay at home dependent mother pipeline back in the day.
I did not. Both of my grandmas were married twice. Both had jobs. Neither had perfect second marriages but they were happy in them. My maternal grandma’s first husband was a violent thief. She left him. My paternal grandma’s first husband left her and her kids for another woman.
My grandmother was a quintessential 1950s republican housewife.
When she was in her late 80s, my grandfather passed.
A few years later and she now loves Bernie and AOC and is constantly sending me things about women’s and immigrant rights. I think part of it is a reflection of what had happened within the GOP and part was her actually starting to think for herself.
right wing grandmas embracing the tradwife thing is doing exactly that: shutting up
so… they’re doing the thing they support