MATCHBOX

At the Presidential Inauguration, it was impossible to ignore the adoration with which Usha Vance stared at her husband while he was being sworn in as the Vice President. With her wide-eyed, unblinking gaze, and the beaming smile, she projected the image of a teenager who had not yet come to terms with the fact that the object of her veneration had chosen to bestow his attention on her. This was a carefully curated aesthetic, and her intention clearly was to make herself the object of countless “find yourself a woman who looks at you like Usha Vance looks at her husband” memes.

In reality, Usha Vance is anything but the vacuous Barbie doll that she projected herself as. The daughter of professionally qualified parents, she is a graduate of Yale Law School with a fairly impressive legal career. Her husband often refers to her as the more privileged, the more sophisticated and the more intelligent person in the relationship. In his memoir he describes how on more than one occasion he sought her guidance on how to behave in social settings that were awkward for him. Despite being his equal in every way, she chose to present herself as a docile and devoted wife and mother who couldn’t believe her good fortune!

If you really think about it, was there any reason for a woman to carry a three year old child in one hand while holding the family Bible in the other? When my child was three, I often made him oversee his younger brother while I was busy- even if the Vance child couldn’t have been left in charge of her older siblings, she could have been made to stand next to her mother and hold her hand. But that would not have made a dramatic picture would it? The adorable “baby” sucking her thumb, the pink dress, the devoted gaze- it was all created to fit into the “trad wife” aesthetic that is so popular in the United States, especially among the alt-right.

Who is a “trad wife”?
A “trad wife” is someone who consciously chooses to adhere to traditional gender roles where the man is the provider and the woman is the homemaker. This phenomenon is driven by social media influencers who typically adhere to a 1950s aesthetic of frilly aprons and tow-headed children, and who have their make-up and high heels firmly in place while they whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch because their husband asked for it. Without exception, “trad wives” also espouse the conservative Christian ideology and reserve special scorn for feminists, who, they claim, look down upon their “choice” to be “trad wives”.

If feminism is about women having the “choice” to be and do whatever they want, then, is being a “trad wife” incompatible with feminism? Doesn’t the “trad wife” have the right to choose to be one- isn’t being a “stay at home mom” is a perfectly legitimate choice? The incompatibility is because of a subtle difference between a “stay at home mom” and a “trad wife”. A “stay at home mom” believes in gender equity and chooses to prioritise childcare under certain circumstances. A “trad wife”, on the other hand, specifically views homemaking as her duty and chooses to submit to her husband’s authority. In effect, by making marriage the ultimate objective for a woman, by linking their self-worth to the cleanliness of their home and the quality of food they prepare and by telling them that “husbands must come first if you want a happy marriage”, trad wives are romanticising the ideology that the second wave of feminism fought against. Feminism is certainly about giving women the choice to bake banana bread if they want to, but the “trad wife” ideology implies that the self worth of a woman should be linked to the quality of banana bread that she bakes. Interestingly, trad wives are almost without exception white and married to white men who earn enough to support their decision.

By openly endorsing the traditional “Christian” values, “trad wives” willingly or unwillingly reinforce the alt-right philosophy which is based on denying women the fundamental right to make decisions that directly affect her. By choosing to present herself as the adoring wife and doting mother, Usha Vance (like many others) showed her allegiance to an ideology which will deny girls and women a future which she could aspire to, but chose to turn her back on.