I’ve heard the version where marriage was invented by women (including the especially stupid version where it was invented by feminists during the 1920s) in order to trap men into slavery, and for some reason my mind immediately leapt to that. But that’s a manospherian thing, not a tradcon thing.
Anyway. There is a certain sort of person where the ideal life is to never really think for themselves, never really make any but the most trivial decisions, and already have the outline of their life spelled out for them. A glamorized version of the tradwife lifestyle is very appealing to women who happen to be that sort of person. I’m not going to knock that as a personal ideal, but the reality is that they are almost certainly not going to be the next Nara Smith; unless your husband is as rich and genuinely kind as hers, life is going to be some degree of ugly, harsh, and forcing you to make difficult decisions, and you won’t know how bad it will be until you’re already married. (I’m aware that The Transformed Wife is Lori Alexander and not Nara Smith, I just chose her as a better example.)
Note, however, that I said as a personal ideal. There are two levels where this kind of thing fail; first, people who idealize it equate it with “freedom”. What they don’t seem to understand is that the freedom is not in the lifestyle itself, but the ability to choose it; some people would experience even the glamorized version of this as a nightmare, and it’s the forcing of unwilling people into this which is slavery. Because as hard as it might be for some of them to understand, everyone’s different, and not thinking or making decisions is hell for some people. And others may not have personalities suited for housework and childcare. The other is that there are a lot of tradcons currently pushing the glamorized version of this as an “alternative” to a “feminist lifestyle” in hopes of attracting young women, when they’re really just comparing the best-case version of the former to the worst-case version of the latter, both of which are unrealistic, which is a form of lying.
And most of them know they’re lying. They just think it’s for the greater good.
