When BBC Stories aired in January 2020 the short documentary “‘Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959’: Why I became a TradWife” reactions were passionate. On the one hand, those who focused on the home-cooked meals observed a confident and well-organized woman in a serene, pastoral household who simply chose to devote herself to family life. On the other side were those who recognized this phenomenon in the larger ideological context of white nationalism and the Radical Right.

Alene Kate Pettitt—the British TradWife featured in the documentary who runs The Darling Academy, an online resource for women who aspire to be traditional housewives (#TradWife, #Tradlife)—expressed her utter, seemingly genuine shock when being told that TradWives may have something to do with white supremacy. What are the main threads of these debates? And what connections exist between domestic choices and white supremacist ideologies?

Women’s choice

Pettitt’s media blitz on the documentary and several morning shows came with a tired mantra: “It’s my choice!”—a factual statement that stands in for the ideological baggage it tries to camouflage. But whereas she kept recycling the feminist valorization of “choice” she rejected feminism as a movement that caused the over-sexualization of women and inflicted upon them an impossible myth: the idea that it is feasible to combine family, career, kids and the ability to make the perfect pot pie.

Many of the commentaries written about her fell in the trap of discussing Tradwives as an anti-feminist or possibly an ultra-feminist phenomenon as Pettitt herself does not shy away from providing her own definition of feminism: “My view on feminism is that it’s about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you’re not allowed to stay at home–to me is taking a choice away.”

Choice is of course a major legacy of the second feminist wave which focused on validating women’s autonomy in opting for roles against normative, patriarchal expectations. But even back in the 1960s it was obvious that choice was a divisive concept when questions of pornography and sex work forced many women to reconcile with the idea that people do not always make the choices you expect them to make.