On Tradwives
When is a woman cooking just a woman cooking, and when is she holding society back?
There’s a scene in the 1966 movie Black Girl by Ousmane Sembène where the main character, Diouana, who’s been brought to France from Dakar, Senegal, by a white French family to be a nanny, is sweeping up in a polka-dot dress. She’s been wearing it the entire film thus far, along with kitten heels, and in the black-and-white scheme, it makes her stand out as a striking figure while every other character in Antibes looks quite dull and drab. Just the sight of her sweeping up while looking stunning enrages the madame of the house, who screeches at her to change into a something more suitable to the labor—a duller frock.
Immediately, I thought: Nara Smith. Smith is the German–South African model who went very viral in 2024 for making food from scratch while wearing beautiful clothing. One of the things people did not like about her was that she had the audacity to look stunning in her own kitchen, performing domesticity for millions. “Unrealistic!” “Unrelatable!” they cried. To be unrelatable—the highest online crime. They wanted to see her show some suffering, some fuck-ups and messes and tears. They might as well have been telling her to put on a house dress. They might as well have been telling her to know her place.
In an on-the-street video interview at the end of 2024, Smith told @mysteryfashionist that her biggest annoyance was people thinking she’s a tradwife when she’s “a working mom.” I’m often confused about the label, which is thrown around quite easily, especially when it comes to Smith. Her being biracial, as Bianca Betancourt wrote in a Harper’s Bazaar profile of the model-creator, “further complicates the ‘trad wife’ assignation; the ‘trad’ part also implies whiteness.”
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“My mom was a feminist, so she didn’t cook,” is something that people will say without question, and this can be difficult to untangle for the feminist who likes to cook or has to cook (because there’s no political posture that overrides the need to eat). It also makes for easy dismissal of the women who do cook. I would argue that knee-jerk responses to women cooking, the cultural obsession with actual and suspected tradwives, as well as the mainstream emergence of RFK Jr.–type conspiracy-minded wellness are all symptoms of very broken relationships to and understandings of food systems, the value of domestic labor, and health care in the United States. They’re not the root of the tree; they’re its fruit.
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