Are Trad Wives Happier Than Working Women?

"The problem that has no name" has a name—negative prediction error.

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I sometimes watch reruns of I Love Lucy just to taste feminism's bittersweet irony. The show's star, Lucille Ball, was a shrewd businesswoman who co-founded Desilu Productions, the American film company that acquired RKO Studios.

But on TV, she playacts the simpleton in kitten heels, whose only worry is not burning the pot roast.

In one campy episode, appropriately titled "Job Switching," Lucy even becomes a cautionary tale for those rouge-wearing renegades who dare to enter the uncharted territory of (clutch your pearls)…a paying job.

The drama begins when Lucy and her sidekick, Ethel, agree to switch places for a week with their husbands, Ricky and Fred. At first, Ricky impresses Lucy with a gourmet spread for their first dinner. Unfortunately, that "gourmet spread" is really a creatively re-arranged platter from the local Italian joint. Hijinx follows when Ricky and Fred try to master their culinary skills. Of course, the boys can't hack the kitchen. Cue the bumbling domestic man trope.

Meanwhile, Lucy and Ethel, score paying jobs at a chocolate factory in the "dipping" department. Get it? Dippy blondes dipping chocolate. Subtle.

Unfortunately, Lucy and Ethel lack the mental dexterity to dip chocolates, so they get demoted and land in the candy-wrapping department. But candy wrapping fries their remaining brain cells, and the ladies turn an entire assembly line into a hilarious, sticky, polka-dotted chocolate mess.

Of course, the moral lesson is as soft-handed as a cartoon mallet to the head. The world is righted when everyone stays in their lane. Women are happier in the kitchen, and men are happier in the workforce.

Decades of feminism would disagree.

Before 1964, companies could legally deny a woman employment based on gender. As recently as the 1970s, newspapers separated the classified section into "jobs for women" and "jobs for men." Today, Gen Z women have closed the wage gap in several cities.

Before 1968, a landlord could deny a woman housing based on gender. Today, women own more property than men.

In 1960, men outnumbered women 1.6 to 1 in U.S. four-year colleges. Today, women outnumber men in four-year college programs 4 to 3.

Before 1974, a woman could be denied a credit card based on gender. Although women are still stereotyped as spendthrifts, men have 20% more personal loan debt than women.

These advances didn't come easy, but they did come at a cost — women are less happy today.

In 2009, researchers Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published their groundbreaking report in the American Economic Journal, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." They analyzed data from 35 years of the U.S. General Social Survey and found the proportion of women reporting high happiness levels decreased by 0.15 percentage points each year compared to men.

More revealingly, they found this decline in happiness occurred not only in the United States but also in Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain—all countries where women achieved greater equality.

Yet when Stevenson and Wolfers peeled back the demographics, they also found the decline in female happiness held for "both working and stay‐at‐home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution."

Researchers were perplexed. If feminism gave women more freedom, why were women unhappier than their unfree grandparents?

Is feminism to blame for declining female happiness?

Today, many Christian influencers offer a solution to women's growing dissatisfaction — a return to traditional gender roles, otherwise known as the "trad wife" movement.

If you have ever wanted to step inside a time machine and ride back to the 1950s, minus the fallout shelters, tuna casseroles, and bullet bras, the trad wife movement will seduce you. These traditional wives have formed social media enclaves where they swap homemade ketchup recipes and domestic hacks like a digital Tupperware party. In this nostalgia-fueled renaissance, the scent of freshly baked sourdough wafts through Instagram feeds, and women happily swan about in aprons and pearls while men bring home the bacon.

Why juggle a soul-crushing job and family responsibilities when you can channel your inner Donna Reed and let hubby wrestle with corporate America?

But let's not ignore the elephant in the room — or rather, the kitchen. Critics are quick to point out that this retro dreamscape glosses over the not-so-halycon bits of the 'good old days,' such as systemic gender inequality.

While trad wife influencers have presented an idyllic escape, other trad influencers, such as Lauren Southern, have recently confessed that their apron strings bound them to marriages they couldn't leave. Others have come forward with tales of domestic abuse.

It's all fun and games, with Marie Antoinette playing the country shepherdess until the sheep want to leave the farm.

Obviously, these social media darlings are not leading traditional lives but are merely monetizing their lifestyle choices. Last I checked, traditional women don't work. And despite the fairytale presented, making homemade strudels from scratch in full hair and makeup while a camera is rolling surely looks like work to me.

But what really makes feminists spit flames is when these women start claiming women were happier in the 1950s because they focused on family vs. their careers.

If you were to strap any trad wife influencer into a time machine and catapult her back to postwar America, she wouldn't last a week. Forget the inequality. I would like to see any trad wife function without her creature comforts.

Boredom today is intolerable. In one hilarious study, participants were placed in a room with nothing to do but shock themselves. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly with their thoughts.

Let's stop and think about that.

People would rather hurt themselves than endure the pain of boredom. And yet, how many 1950s women had to endure the monotonous, mind-numbing routines of domesticity?

“The problem that has no name”

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that fanned the flames of second-wave feminism. Her opening chapter described "the problem that has no name"—an eerie, unspoken malaise lurking in the lives of many 1950s American housewives.

Friedan described this unnamed female problem as a sense of emptiness, or something missing, despite having everything they were told would make them happy: a home, a husband, children, and a shiny kitchen brimming with the latest gadgets. Many 1950s women were trapped in a gilded cage, feeling unfulfilled and disconnected from their true selves.

In suburbia's perfectly manicured lawns and immaculate homes, these women found themselves questioning, "Is this all?" They had been sold a bill of goods that domesticity would bring ultimate joy, yet found that cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing left them yearning for something more — a purpose beyond the confines of their home. Society's expectations were clear: a woman's place was in the home, and any dissatisfaction was seen as a personal failing, not a systemic issue.

Friedan's articulation of this widespread yet unspoken discontent was groundbreaking. She unveiled the stifling reality behind the picture-perfect facade by challenging the notion that women's ambitions should be confined to the domestic sphere. The result was that women sought fulfillment beyond traditional roles and questioned the societal norms that kept them silent and subservient.

“The problem that has no name” has a name.

Today, many psychologists point to envy as the primary driver of unhappiness. Philosophers such as René Girard theorized that envy fuels mimetic desires—the tendency to model one's desires after others' desires.

For example, the 1950s housewife may have envied her next-door neighbor's seemingly happy life, but women today envy thousands of online neighbors' happy lives. When we are bombarded with an endless stream of people who have more, we expect more. In other words, comparison plants the seeds for much of our misery.

The mentality of 1950s women was that you get what you get and don't get upset. Today, that mentality is you get what you go after and only get upset if your peers get more.

Neuroscientists call the gap between what you expect and what you get a negative prediction error. Simply put, the brain is an endless prediction machine. Deep in our lizard brain, predicting what came next ensured our survival.

Unfortunately, negative prediction errors are also major drivers of unhappiness. For example, imagine you're eagerly awaiting a chocolate chip cookie, only to bite into a vegan oatmeal raisin cookie. That sinking feeling of letdown? That's a negative prediction error at work. Your brain anticipated a chocolatey reward, but reality underdelivered, triggering a wave of disappointment.

In other words, when reality consistently falls short of what we hope for, the brain's reward system sends out signals of dissatisfaction. Over time, these signals accumulate, creating a backdrop of chronic unhappiness and frustration.

For example, women expect equal pay, but the persistent motherhood penalty keeps working moms from reaching the same pay grade as working fathers.

Women expect bodily autonomy only to have their reproductive rights stripped away by draconian abortion laws.

Women even expect parity in the bedroom, and yet the stubborn orgasm gap persists, with men deriving more pleasure from sex.

But arguably, feminists' biggest complaint is — "the second shift." Many women work the same number of job hours as men but then perform a second shift of domestic labor. And while a 1950s man mopping the floor was as laughable as a man in a tutu and the punchline in many sitcoms, working wives today expect their husbands to share the burden. Unfortunately, when expectations are not met, wives grow resentful.

The divide is worsening. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently dropped its 2023 American Time Use Survey, shedding light on how much time American adults spend on work, household chores, and leisurely activities. While the hours spent on work responsibilities showed no significant gender difference, the disparity regarding household chores and leisure time was glaring.

On average, 86 percent of women reported spending time on household activities like chores, lawn care, cooking, or household management, compared to just 71 percent of men. The gap widened further with specific chores like cleaning and laundry: 48 percent of women tackled these tasks daily, while only 22 percent of men did the same.

Paradoxically, 1950s women did far more domestic labor. A 2020 Gallop Poll found women are doing less grocery shopping (down 14 percentage points), less laundry (down 12 points), less cooking (down 12 points), less dishwashing (down 11 points), and less overall cleaning (down nine points).

Unfortunately, women might be doing less domestic labor than their grandmothers but also have less time to do it. Today, women must bring home the bacon, fry it up, and get to Pilates to keep it off their thighs. Or at least, that is what the beauty influencers tell them.

It's no wonder that some working women envy the trad wife's bucolic existence, milking cows and churning butter in weathered overalls. It's not only unmet expectations that make women unhappy. It's also a societal expectation to do it all.

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When Carly Fiorina took the reins as CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, she heralded her appointment as the ultimate sign that gender discrimination was a thing of the past. "I hope that we are at a point where everyone has figured out that there is not a glass ceiling," she proclaimed confidently at a news conference.

Six years later, she was fired.

Fiorina blamed gender discrimination. The very barriers she once declared vanquished, she now pointed to as a key factor.

Simply put, 1950s women normalized the lack of basic human rights and adapted to their lot in life. If your expectations are low, you can't be disappointed. Or, as Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Unfortunately, women today have a lot to lose. We are reminded of what we can lose by the Carly Fiorina(s) of the world.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. To start, we can recognize when envy is driving our actions. (Hint: If you are on social media constantly, the envy monster has you in his grasp.) We can support and mentor young women so that they never normalize gender inequalities. Most importantly, we can stop seeing feminism as a zero-sum game in which the more one side gets, the more the other side loses.

Whether you consider yourself a trad wife or a working woman, we are in this mess together.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. “— Ernest Hemingway

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.