Was My Mother Was a 1950s Tradwife?

My mother was a tradwife, a bona fide 1950s tradwife. That’s what she wanted. That’s what she got.

She cooked, she cleaned, she gave birth to three children. She breastfed them and washed their diapers. Later she played games with them and took them to the library every other week.  She planted a rock garden, canned peaches, put up strawberry jam, and ironed the bedsheets. Dinner was ready when her husband came home from the office and, thanks to her daily late afternoon soak in the tub, so was she.

They Met When She Was Sixteen

My parents met when she was sixteen and he twenty-one. Years later, in her 90s, my Aunt Grace could still recall the moment. It was at a summer resort on Lake Michigan in 1933, at a square dance.

My mothers’ grandparents owned the resort, and her grandfather called the dances, accompanied by a fiddler and piano player. The men who came to those barn dances liked to stomp their feet when they danced, which caused the sawdust to bounce up from the floor.

Resorters showed up for the dances. So did the local farm folks. One summer night, my Aunt Grace and her brother Dave drove over from Scottville, a nearby farm town.

Once inside the pavilion, my father spotted my mother across the room, sitting at the edge of the dance floor.

“Your dad saw her sitting there,” my Aunt Grace told me. “A pretty little gal. Just sitting there.”

Thus began a lengthy, on-again-off-again courtship. When at last my mother announced to the women in her family — mother, sister, aunt — that she intended to marry this man, they told her she was making a mistake. A big one.

“He’ll dominate you,” they said.

Dave Falconer, they had concluded, was the kind of guy who runs things. “And he’ll run you, Tinka. He’ll dominate you. Watch out.”

But my mother had made up her mind. “That’s exactly what I want,” she told them. “I want a man who will dominate me.”

My Mother Was a 1950s Tradwife

Decades later, in the 1950s, when I was a teenager and my mother was thoroughly married to my father and ensconced in what today could be described as the cozy life of a suburban tradwife, my mother explained to me what was on her mind when she decided to marry my father.

Over the years, my best girlhood conversations with my mother tended to happen over an ironing board or at the kitchen sink. Maybe this one happened at the kitchen sink, the two of us finishing up the dinner dishes.

Kitchens with dishwashers were still a thing of the future. Our hands were dry and red from the  Michigan winter air, the hot dishwater and the detergent powder we used. The last dish put away, my mother reached for the Jergens and tapped a dollop onto her palm.

As usual, my mother now had more Jergens than she needed. She took my hands between hers and rubbed the extra lotion from her hands onto mine.

Divorce, Disruption, Abandonment

Our conversation turned to love and marriage. My mother had opinions on the subject — opinions born of the disruption and abandonment she’d felt growing up with divorced parents. Too, my mother came from a long line of divorced women. Her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother — all had been divorced.

“There were too many divorces in my family,” she said, her voice emphatic, angry even. “I was going to get married and stay married.”

The generations of divorce would end with her.

“I told your dad he’d better know what he was getting into. When I got married, it would be for life.”

And that’s how things worked out. You could say my parents’ marriage lasted 53 years, ending with my father’s death when he was 78. Or you could say that my mother was married for life, and the union didn’t end for another 19 years, on the day she died.

A Tradwife’s Fantasy

It looks good on paper, from a distance of years, my mother’s marriage. She led the life of a classic ’50s housewife, a tradwife’s dream.

Make that a tradwife’s fantasy.

Yes, my mother had the husband, the children and the pleasures of creating house and home. And, yes, there were many parts of her life that I, as a teenager, wanted for myself — a steady husband, a houseful of children, family dinners at a dining room table set with the lace tablecloth, oatmeal cookies in the cookie tin, friends coming and going.

But there was a dark side to her marriage.

Today, tradwifers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have side gigs as social media influencers, which they use to pitch the lifestyle of the devoted homemaker and wife to their TikTok and Instagram followers — who often number in the millions.

Millions of followers means that tradwifers like Smith and Neeleman are raking in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars each year by monetizing their social media accounts.

Some influencers go so far as to sell stuff online — their own branded products. You can buy 24 grams of Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm Farmer Protein for $69.99. Plus shipping.

My mother had no such side gig, no independent source of income. She was totally dependent on my father for her support.

No Community Property Laws

And in those days in Michigan — it had no community property laws — if she were to divorce, she would have no claim on the money her husband earned as a corporate executive during their years together. She could get alimony payments, but only if a court so directed.

Many years later, after my father died, my mother talked about the dark side of her traditional life. At times, she said, she was so angry with my father she was ready to get in the car and drive away.

“But where would I go? To my mother’s? To my sister’s?” Neither of those women  had the wherewithal — or the desire — to take my mother in for more than a night or two.

One lived in an apartment in Chicago with her third husband. The other — divorced and remarried — had six children of her own and was busy running the family resort, which she had inherited.

Life as a 1950s Tradwife

My mother had no marketable skills. She had finished high school, but not college. She had worked briefly as a secretary as a young woman, but hated the work and wasn’t particularly good at it.

My mother was stuck.

She was a tradwife.

In the long run, my parent’s marriage proved a good and lasting one. My mother had chosen well. Her traditional marriage — creating a home and deferring to her husband — had suited her.

She knew how to make that life work, and she took pains to show me how it was done. Over the dinner dishes, over the ironing board, she offered insider tips on how to tend the male ego:

“Your dad sings off key in church, but I don’t tell him. That would hurt his pride.”

“When you dance, let the boy take the lead. Dance on your toes. Be light as a feather, so you can follow his lead.” (Actually, this is great advice, which I hold dear. Dancing with a partner — especially when it’s your job to sense and follow the lead — is an art.)

And finally, a piece of advice I was never able to take:  “You’re smart, Barbie. But don’t let the boys know it. Keep it to yourself.”

Postscript: I Found a Love Note

Hours after I thought I’d finished writing this piece, I came across a scrap of paper among my mother’s things. The scrap was so old and fragile it had torn down the middle, along a fold made decades ago. On the scrap of paper were four lines written first in my mother’s handwriting, then my father’s. It was a love poem, a poem too dear and private to share here.

That scrap of paper reminded me that I had left out the most important, most central, fact of my parents’ marriage: My mother loved my father. And my father loved her — probably from the moment he spotted her across that dance floor.