Natalie explores the rise of the “trad wife”—a woman who embraces traditional gender roles and 1950s-style domesticity—with Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse. From curated homemaking to cultural nostalgia, we unpack what this retro revival says about gender, identity, and the digital age. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Read Vanessa’s book, Blurred Lines: Sex, Power and Consent on Campus, and check out Natalie on Instagram at @natrobe To connect with Infamous's creative team, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, everyone. Vanessa Grigoriadis here, and thank you so much for coming back to listen to Infamous. Over the last couple of weeks, we told you a story about a wife on the main line, and she was living in a very traditional marriage. She was a traditional wife. Now, would you actually call her a trad wife? The way we understand trad wives today is like blonde.
She's got those latiste lashes, beloved of baking. That is not necessarily Cammie, but her story did put us in a mood to think about trad wives and that whole phenomenon. If you're on social media, you know that trad wives have basically eaten the internet for the past year or two. So Natalie is going to talk to an expert to unpack what that's all about.
So if you've been listening to our series, From Cond to Cupid, you've been hearing a lot about one woman, Cami Verney, and the fantasy home life she was creating. Cami wasn't an influencer, but in putting together this story, we couldn't help but think about how Cami's presentation of domestic bliss mirrors something we've been seeing a lot of online. The Trad Wife.
This trad wife, I guess it's a Gen Z thing. A self-proclaimed traditional wife.
I recommend getting ready, doing some makeup, putting on a cute outfit before you see your husband.
But what exactly is the trad wife? And where did it come from? To answer those questions, I'm talking to Monica Hesse, a columnist for The Washington Post who's written extensively about gender and trad wives. So today we are talking about trad wives. What is a trad wife?
Oh man, so you're starting with a question that seems like it should be so easy to answer and is so complex and is going to really depend on who you're talking to. So I'll give you how I think about it, which I think is a pretty typical way. So a trad wife is somebody who embraces the lifestyle of being a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home partner, but not just...
the duties of that, the kind of patriarchal history of that. So I know a lot of women who are stay-at-home moms who consider themselves modern or feminist, or they're just doing it because this is what works well for their family. Maybe they'll go back to work, maybe they won't. But trad wives in general are embracing the idea that Being the caretaker of the home is really the woman's destiny.
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