A Former Trad Wife on What It Actually Takes To Leave

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the explicit goals of Project 2025, J.D. Vance, and Christian Nationalism in general — will make trad wife life just, well, life. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens incrementally, as choices are very slowly taken from you, or made more attractive. To get to what lures women into this life, and just how difficult it is to escape, I wanted to talk to someone who gets it in a way that those lurking in the Instagram comments simply cannot. So today we’re talking with Tia Levings, who left her trad wife life and, through a bunch of therapy and processing and support, figured out how she wanted to tell her story.

Content Warning: In our conversation, we talk explicitly about emotional and physical abuse and coercion. If you’re not in a place where you want to listen to that discussion, I’d suggest skipping this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, just a quick heads up that this episode contains some heavy subjects, including discussions of domestic violence, child abuse, and religious trauma.
0:10.0	Listener discretion is advised.
0:13.0	So one of the things I say a lot is that fundamentalism is attractive during times of chaos.
0:20.0	And it's a lovely aesthetic. So the fundamentalism
0:24.0	that we encounter on Instagram today through the tradwife movement isn't really that different than
0:28.7	what we called ourselves 20 years ago. The traditional wives, you know, like we saw on the Duggers.
0:34.4	Like the aesthetic back then is more of a back to the-the-land prairie, 20 kids in long dresses.
0:40.2	Today, the aesthetic looks like homesteading.
0:42.2	If we had had Instagram back then, it would look identical.
0:46.8	And Trad is short for traditional.
0:48.4	So, I mean, the same thing.
0:50.2	But it's an answer to the chaos.
0:51.8	And so after 9-11, especially when the world felt very chaotic and scary, my trajectory
0:57.5	of the past 30 to 40 years matches what happened in the wider evangelical movement, which
1:02.8	was mainstream Christianity, becoming more political and nationalist and fundamentalist over that
1:09.2	span of time.
1:10.2	So they lead with beautiful ideals and a pretty
1:13.2	aesthetic that feels comforting. It seems soothing. It seems like simpler times. And they promise a
1:19.6	better life if you follow their formula. So that's very tempting.
1:27.4	This is the Culture Study podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
1:31.6	And I'm Tia Levings, author of a well-trained wife, and I educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism.
1:37.8	So I'm so excited for this episode today.
	...

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