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The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife

Alena Kate Pettitt helped lead an online movement promoting domesticity. Now she says, “It’s become its own monster.”

In early 2020, a BBC film crew arrived at Pettitt’s house and showed her ironing Carl’s shirts on a floral-covered board, then standing in her kitchen, decorated with British-flag bunting, while explaining how the couple split the roles in their marriage. “It isn’t racist or overtly conservative to want to be a good housewife and mother, it’s just common sense!” To the press, in which she was now appearing on a regular basis, she issued a broadside: “So long as you, the mainstream media, continue to try and cancel traditionalism, and the at-home role of the wife and mother—you’ll see me in the opposite corner ready to fight for it.” Young women continued to follow their deftly curated social-media fantasy, lured, perhaps, by the hustle of the anti-hustle, the opt-out from job dissatisfaction and economic insecurity, or tempted by the promise of a single, coherent identity gathered around a distant, simpler time.

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