Calling Home-Makers “Abhorrent” Isn’t Progressive
How Market Logic Hijacked Feminist Language
I’m Concerned About my Fellows on the Left
I have always been on the left – the true left – by which I mean mutual aid, material equity, skepticism of power, and respect for lived labor. (We’re not talking about merely being in the American Overton Window Left here.) Yet I’ve always been uncomfortable with much of the feminist content I’ve encountered. In particular, I’ve noticed a recurring habit of moralizing a person’s choice to pursue a career versus choosing to be a home-maker, as though one path is inherently enlightened and the other inherently suspect. This moralization doesn’t just distort individual choice – it quietly reshapes what kinds of lives are considered respectable, intelligent, or even morally permissible within left-leaning spaces.
Recently, I had been enjoying educational content from a YouTube creator whose work thoughtfully dismantles patriarchal assumptions baked into our culture. Over the course of several videos, I developed genuine respect for her perspective and analytical rigor. That is precisely why I was so taken aback by a video addressing “trad wives” – a term I was not previously familiar with. “Trad,” as it turns out, is shorthand for “traditional.”
The video opened by displaying a comment made on someone else’s so-called “trad wife content.” The comment read:
“You left your dreams, ambitions, and career for the sake of your husband’s dreams. The trad-wife life is abhorrent.”
This comment is not a fringe insult; it’s a crystallized expression of a worldview that equates human worth with career participation and treats domestic devotion as a kind of moral failure. After the comment appeared on the screen, I waited through the entire twenty-minute video for some kind of centrist explanation (by which I mean true centrist – where we use our intellect to analyze what truths may be found from any and all sides of an issue). Surely, I thought, this woman – whose work I had come to admire – would dig into the nuance here. But she didn’t.
As the video ended, the comment remained unexamined.
I’ll examine it a little here, because I feel it’s vital to ask what kind of feminism we are actually advancing when this premise goes unchallenged. The above comment isn’t merely insulting; it assumes a massive amount about anyone choosing to be a home-maker. The author doesn’t just assign the moral judgment of “abhorrent” – but also minimizes the value of devotion to one’s relationship, home, and family in the process. The comment author puts “a career” on a pedestal – as if humans are merely economic cogs who may not have dreams or ambitions outside the workplace.
Ultimately, I left a comment of my own, which read, in part: “I’ve loved almost everything about every episode I’ve watched. This one, however, gave me pause. I was genuinely frustrated that no follow-up was given to the comments shown at the beginning of the video. Those were not mild or neutral remarks; they were inflammatory. Displaying them and then declining to address them directly feels like an oversight, especially given the subject matter. When a topic carries moral weight, silence can read as tacit agreement.”
I’m very concerned that the narrative of the “abhorrent trad wife” is coming from a market-aligned, liberal feminism that quietly accepts capitalism as a given and then asks, “How can women succeed inside it?” Success, under that framework, is legible only if it looks like wages, careers, independence-through-income, and status recognized by institutions. What I am arguing for sits at the intersection of socialism’s critique of commodification and care-feminism’s insistence that relational labor is not peripheral to justice, but foundational to it.
Counter Evidence? Exhibit: My Mother
If the claim is that choosing domestic life is inherently diminishing, then my mother’s life stands as a direct counterexample. Thus, my counter-argument to the “abhorrent trad wife” is found in my upbringing – which sits uncomfortably outside many contemporary assumptions. I was raised by parents old enough to be my grandparents – landing my parents firmly in the boomer generation. My mother had me at forty-two; I am now thirty-seven. I admired my stay-at-home, home-maker mother deeply, and I still do.
My mother, in her younger years, had a certifiable genius-level intelligence quotient, and yet she loved being a stay-at-home mom. She occasionally worked on the side – becoming a tax consultant for H&R Block, doing accounting for a female friend who was a lawyer, and other similar work – but her primary devotion was to her home, her family, and her community. Before marrying my father, she had been abandoned by her first husband in her twenties and raised two boys as a single mother. She had done secretarial work, aided by her phenomenal touch-typing skills. (Skills she taught me at age eleven; I am touch-typing now at my desk as I write this).
My mother was far from lacking competence or self-sufficiency. She could change a tire as a teenager. Despite being born in 1947, she came from a family culture that combined traditional female roles with a profound respect for female intelligence.
My grandmother – old enough to easily be my great-grandmother or older – had a college degree. My mother earned a 4.0 in calculus and tutored other students in math.
Today, Mom is seventy-nine and still married to Dad, who is sixty-nine and retired. They play board games together. My mother acts as a social fulcrum in her neighborhood, serving her community in dozens of ways. She gives rides to people without cars. She teaches board games to elderly and younger folks alike. She assists a disabled friend in numerous ways, including matchmaking – connecting people who can help one another and even negotiating fair arrangements for shared services. She has assisted many people with their addiction problems, as well as money-management problems. She is a mutual-aid powerhouse. She hires local people who have trouble finding work to do odd jobs around the house. My parents are not wealthy; they are simply redistributing what they have within an economically oppressed neighborhood. If mutual aid, community resilience, and informal care networks are leftist virtues, then this is what they look like when practiced daily.
At no point – ever – did my mother lack an identity because she was a stay-at-home mom for my entire upbringing. On the contrary, every time she considered taking a job, she lamented all the ways it would pull her away from me, from Dad, from her sons (my half-brothers), from her community, and from her hobbies. She reads fiction novels. She watches science-fiction movies. She sews clothing, including elaborate Renaissance costumes.
Does this sound (or look) like the sort of person you imagine when a phrase like “trad wife” is thrown around? The “trad wife” label collapses complexity into caricature, and in doing so erases the very intelligence and self-direction it claims to defend.
The two years of my childhood that I was home-schooled were, without exaggeration, the best two years of my childhood. The education Mom gave me was far superior to anything I encountered in magnet schools, a Waldorf school, a religious school, or various public schools. She taught me phonetics, cursive writing, touch-typing, and how to navigate a computer – long before any of this was introduced in formal schooling. She taught me algebra in fourth grade – which is when it was taught when she was a child – while the public school system wanted to wait seven more years (i.e. high-school).
I am profoundly grateful to have had my intelligent, multi-faceted mother.
Was Mom “traditional?” Not in any shallow or caricatured sense. Mom built computers. She fixed plumbing. She redid the insulation in our house – and then installed drywall, plaster, and paint. She rewired electrical systems in our ancient home. Mom wields power-tools with skill and taught me to use a drill and a circular saw before I was ten. She did not confine herself to being “a proper woman” by any restrictive standard.
And yet, Mom did hold traditional values around roles. Her roles were home-maker, community networker, and parent. My father’s roles were income-earner and parent. Because Dad performed the vital task of earning money, Mom gave him choice cuts of meat from whatever animal she prepared for dinner. She deferred certain categories of decision-making to him. Meanwhile, he never interfered with how she arranged – or overhauled, remodeled, and reinvented – the kitchen. These values around who-made-which sort of decisions were passed on from their own parents.
We Need Home-Makers & Care-Takers
A society that cannot value care work without monetizing it will eventually find itself starved of care altogether. Beyond ideology, there is also a pragmatic reality: this world desperately needs more attentive, nurturing parents who actually talk to their children.
The most extraordinary gift of my childhood was having two educated adults who spoke to me at an adult level every single day. Can you imagine the intellectual acceleration this provided? I have since come to understand that this practice – being spoken to as a thinking person – is perhaps the greatest privilege I have ever received. And I received it, in large part, because my mother was a stay-at-home mom. My own intelligence, agency, and self-directed life isn’t an accident; it was the direct result of time, presence, and cognitive investment that was only possible because someone (Mom) was structurally allowed to prioritize care.
As you can imagine, the idea that all women want a career, and must have one in order to have character, intelligence, societal value, safety, or authenticity, sits very poorly with me.
My parents had roles. Just like roles at work. A role does not define the totality of a person. In fact, Mom already held three roles: mother, wife, and community-builder. Being a traditional wife does not automatically or inherently mean sitting at home shopping, fussing about cleanliness, giving oneself manicures, and reading magazines – at least one of which my mother never did at all.
Being a stay-at-home spouse – of any gender – should not be moralized. It is an important, functional role, and many people have filled it throughout history without being abused, neglected, or erased. If we use the worst experiences of house-spouses to condemn the entire role, then we should also ban cars – because cars are dangerous and people die in car accidents every day.
The American history of a female house-spouse is a tiny sliver of global history concerning domestic roles. It is not inherently pathological. It is deeply uncomfortable, as someone on the political left myself, to watch those “on my side” demonize something that was a healthy, stabilizing, and enriching force in my own life.
Abuse is the Problem; Roles Aren’t
Conflating abuse with the presence of roles is a profound analytical mistake – and one that ultimately leaves abuse harder to name, not easier.
I’m not blind to the reality that many women enter into marriages and are then saddled with the expectation that they should have no aspirations, hobbies, or interests beyond the walls of their home – but that’s abuse. I wouldn’t consider that the fault of marriage or domestic roles.
I’ve read A Thousand Splendid Suns where a woman in an arranged marriage is horrifically abused, and watched the series MAID, where a young woman suffers from domestic abuse and has difficulty escaping with her young daughter to look after. These kinds of reprehensible situations happen – with shocking regularity. But shifting this trend means creating avenues for people to escape abuse.
Preventing stories like these from continuing means shifting how we perceive marriage – and even the idea of “ownership.” We say that a rancher “owns” their cows – and this ownership should mean they are a steward and caretaker, not someone with get-out-of-jail-free card for abuse. Even if marriage still means ownership of women to some people, that still shouldn’t be an excuse for abuse. Ownership without accountability is domination; ownership with responsibility is stewardship – and confusing the two has left a long legacy of fallacious arguments.
Preventing someone from having an identity or life outside of submission is abuse. Full stop. It doesn’t matter what gender or role they are performing. If someone is prevented from their own pursuit of happiness, that is abuse.
Roles Need Not be Gender-Assigned
If the roles themselves were the problem, gender-flipping them would also be somehow bad, unworkable, or open the floodgates of abuse. But truly, the only abuse this seems to encourage is the constant shame that strangers heap on stay-at-home-anybodys of any gender.
I have lived on both sides. I have been the breadwinner for my own stay-at-home husband for six years of our now sixteen-year marriage. He is disabled, and caring for the home is what he can do well. He is excellent with furniture, creative arrangements, carpentry, computer work, and more. He is my emotional support in this world. He handles laundry, compost, cooking, and driving – because driving is a horrific chore I deeply dislike. He doesn’t drive because I’ve “been conditioned” to believe that women shouldn’t drive. Mom did almost all the driving growing up and still does more than half in Dad’s retirement. My husband drives for me because I hate driving; that’s partnership, not blind conformation to assigned roles.
My household is anything but traditional. And yet, I still believe that having household members whose primary responsibility is caring for the household is immensely beneficial to everyone living within it.
I was a happier child during the years when Mom wasn’t working – but instead available to pick me up from school, talk with me about our respective days, and slow-cook a nutritious meal for our little family. I have been a happier adult at times when at least one household member was able to caretake the home, making sure things are orderly, ergonomic, and pleasing to the best of their ability. My experience is that having someone perform this role makes for a happier home – and it need not come pre-packaged with patriarchal baggage, marriage, or notions of submission.
Choice is not liberated by symmetry; it’s liberated by alignment between capacity, desire, and circumstance.
I Abandoned My Dreams
Can we please stop tearing down the incredible people who devote themselves to their families, their children, and their communities? It belittles these individuals – who are sometimes quite heroic – to lump them all together as people who were just “programmed with patriarchy” or people who lead "abhorrent lives” that involve abandoning their dreams.
This is the part of the conversation that is often neglected: In truth, I abandoned my dreams. My greatest dream the first twenty years of my life was that I would be a home-making, stay-at-home mother like my mother was before me. I cherished this dream, and thought about it every day of my childhood, teens, and early adult life.
In my teens and early twenties I developed lesson-plans for home-schooling. My whole childhood I thought about what I wished to teach my daughters. Reading books like The Continuum Concept deepened my understanding of how child development actually works. To this day, at thirty-seven, I still enjoy content about child-rearing and human development.
I abandoned my deeper dreams for dedicating more of my life to work. This wasn’t a private failure of imagination or perseverance; it was a structural narrowing of what was economically plausible. I didn’t want to abandon my notions of motherhood and homeschooling – but the people at the economic top have made it much less affordable to even be a stay-at-home parent . . . Or even a parent at all.
As usual, the right-wing is shooting themselves in the foot because today’s young people can’t economically afford to maintain the old scripts. But those scripts weren’t a hundred-percent bad. If we remove the assumption of abuse from concepts of ownership, marriage, and roles, then performing roles is no longer abhorrent at all. It’s merely efficient.
Reimagining Feminism
Whatever your political leaning, and whatever your upbringing, I can confidently say this: care, devotion, and domestic labor are not the enemy.
A feminism that cannot distinguish between chosen roles and coerced submission has lost its analytical compass. A left that cannot recognize care work unless it is monetized, professionalized, or performed in opposition to family life has quietly absorbed the very economic logic it once set out to dismantle. When we reduce human worth to market participation, we do not liberate people – we simply conscript them into a different hierarchy.
It is very troubling that abuse persists within domestic arrangements Рand it must be identified and confronted Рbut it is perhaps just as troubling that we increasingly treat care itself as suspect. We have begun to speak as though love, presence, patience, and long-term investment in others are only virtuous if they can be itemized on a r̩sum̩. That is not progress. That is alienation wearing the costume of liberation.
The real danger is not roles. The real danger is silence in the face of coercion, shame masquerading as moral clarity, and a politics so afraid of past harms that it refuses to discern present realities. The real societal problem is turning a blind eye to abuse – and this happens in the workplace too, not just as home. Abuse also happens in households where both parties have careers. Stripping people of their agency, dignity, self-esteem and freedoms can happen everywhere – even to wealthy celebrities who are being puppeteered by family members and/or producers.
We must not turn our backs on the quiet, unglamorous labor that makes human life possible in the first place: caretaking our families and homes. If we cannot defend care without apology, if we cannot honor devotion without immediately scanning for pathology, then we have not escaped patriarchy – we have merely rebranded its contempt for softness in more progressive language.
The future I want to fight for is one where liberation is measured not by how fully we contort ourselves to fit the market, but by how freely we are allowed to shape our lives around care, meaning, and mutual responsibility. A future where feminism defends a woman’s right to pursue a career and her right to leave one; a man’s right to provide and his right to nurture; and anyone’s right to organize their life according to their capacities, values, and circumstances – without shame, coercion, or ideological suspicion.
In that future, care work is visible, honored, and structurally supported, whether it happens in homes, communities, or professions. Parenting, elder care, domestic labor, and emotional stewardship are understood not as personal indulgences or moral regressions, but as essential contributions to a functioning society. Liberation looks like having real choices – choices made possible by economic conditions that allow people to slow down, to tend to one another, and to opt out of arrangements that diminish them.
This is a feminism that is not bowing to capitalism, not embarrassed by dependency, and not hostile to devotion. A feminism that recognizes that dignity does not come from sameness, but from agency. Liberation and equity don’t stem from symmetry, but from alignment with reality. I dream of a feminism mature enough to say: abuse must be addressed everywhere it exists – and care must be protected, respected, and cultivated.
That is the future I want to fight for. One where freedom does not mean standing alone, but being supported well enough to choose how you belong.
