The prize of Alena Kate Pettitt’s childhood Barbie collection, the item that she still searches for fruitlessly on eBay, was a dining table. Press a button, and—magic!—a turkey dinner swung around from underneath and landed on top. It is a totemic image of homemaking: a hearty home-cooked meal, served by an immaculate, apron-wearing hostess—an actual doll. “It was the best thing ever,” Pettitt said, of Barbie’s turkey, over coffee in her home town of Cheltenham, England. “I wish I still had it.”
Pettitt, who is thirty-eight, is a self-proclaimed “trad wife,” one of the earliest and best known in a burgeoning movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media. Her fame was assured in 2020, when, on a BBC News video, she discussed her ambition to serve her husband, but her desire long predated that moment. After all, the contours of a traditional marriage, in which the man goes out to work while the woman stays home to cook, care, and clean, were shaped many decades ago. Pettitt, like a lot of the trad wives who fill various social-media platforms with photographs of outdoor clotheslines, has an intense nostalgia for the postwar period. “If you put me in a time machine back to the fifties, I’d have it made,” she told me. “Everyone wouldn’t be asking me when I’m going back to work.” Her point ran a little deeper: that era, she believed, was the last time the housewife was celebrated. She appeared in ads. Her domestic rituals inspired magazines. Whether she was happy was not for Pettitt to say, but “at least she was seen.”
For readers of Betty Friedan or viewers of “Mad Men,” the idea that the interior life of a mid-twentieth-century housewife could be anything but tormented is strange, but the trad wives want to reclaim the role and show it as a source of pride and happiness. Though many trad wives voice suspicions of contemporary feminism, there is no singular model. The current queen is Hannah Neeleman, a homesteading mother of eight, who milks cows, bakes, dances, and takes part in beauty pageants, to the delight and incomprehension of her followers. Some, like the American Estee Williams, a quasi-Marilyn Monroe with white-blond waves and a cinched waist, advocate marital subservience. Others, like the Australian Jasmine Dinis, sell Biblical womanhood affirmations. One, the Canadian Gwen Swinarton, has pivoted from making porn videos for OnlyFans and A.S.M.R. content for YouTube to the trad-wife space. (In a recent TikTok testimony, she credited the transition to God.) Then there are more openly political, like Abby Roth, who splices mothering tips with anti-abortion content.
Pettitt, the O.G., is a rare Brit and a purist. She never had commercial aspirations for her content. Instead, she is more the movement’s house intellectual: she wrote two books with no intention of making money, she told me, but to put something out in the world for girls like her. (The books, which her husband, Carl, helped her to self-publish, “certainly don’t pay the mortgage,” she said, but cover the odd grocery bill.) In the books, she set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood long before the new generation of trad wives began filming themselves saucily kneading sourdough. Pettitt has watched the rise of the younger trad wives with fascination, then alarm. “It’s become an aesthetic, and then it’s become politicized,” she said, of the movement in its new era. “And then it’s become its own monster.”
The first setting for Pettitt’s trad-wifery was, inevitably, her Barbie Dreamhouse. On a damp autumn day in Cheltenham, a town with a nineteenth-century tree-lined promenade once patrolled by parasol-wielding women wearing dresses and bonnets, Pettitt explained that her parents separated when she was four years old, and, through years of weekend excursions to toy shops with her father, she collected almost the entire Barbie ecosystem. (She had yet to see the movie, concerned that it was overly political and would make her think differently about one of her idols.)
In the Dreamhouse, Pettitt could enact her ideal home life. After her parents’ separation, Pettitt and her mother often spent their evenings at her grandparents’ house, in Feltham, on the outskirts of London. Her grandparents cooked and gardened, and the family gathered to eat at a round table pooled in warm light from a pendant lamp. Pettitt adored it. But once dinner was over Pettitt and her mother would return to their flat, where, in her memory, it was always cold and dark. No one had been there all day. Pettitt’s mother, Winnie Rushby, worked full time and would then have to start on the laundry, a vision of obligated stress. “I think that made her realize the path she wanted to go down,” Rushby told me. “She knew that to have to do both is really, really hard.” For Pettitt, the lesson was stark. “I’d see that and think, No, I want family,” she said. “I want to be in my home.”
In late-nineties suburbia, Pettitt struggled to find a model for this future life. The culture at the time was high on girl power, the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, and teen magazines offering advice on how to give the perfect blow job. Pettitt—an introverted “good girl”—felt adrift. “There wasn’t a shy, bookish Spice Girl,” she said. Then, when she was twelve, she suffered a double loss: her father moved abroad, and her mother threw out all her Barbies. Not long afterward, her mother found a new partner, and Rushby and Pettitt moved into his large country house, with his teen-age kids. Pettitt’s new stepsiblings liked to party. To fit in, she played along, feeling deeply insecure. After leaving school (she attended college but did not graduate), Pettitt did what she felt was expected of her in the early two-thousands and Carrie Bradshawed her way to the city, where she got a media job, drank heavily, and had casual sex.
In secret, Pettitt began researching the life she actually wanted. She ordered Debrett’s book for girls. Debrett’s—an eighteenth-century British publishing outfit specializing in society etiquette—was associated with the aristocracy and reflected a country both riven by and obsessed with its own class system. There was no family that Pettitt looked up to more than the Royal Family, which made Debrett’s the most reliable guide for her aspirations. But even Debrett’s seemed to be infected by the times: one of its tips for girls was how to behave in the aftermath of a one-night stand. “I was, like, What?” Pettitt said. “Surely this is what the Queen reads!”
Pettitt had something else in mind: a life she’d seen in TV shows like “Bewitched.” (“Yes, she was a witch,” Pettitt acknowledged, “but she was just in her home.”) Or on “The Darling Buds of May,” a British series that charted the sunlit, rural lives of the Larkin family. (“Who wouldn’t want to live on a Kentish farm in the nineteen-fifties?”) Her vision was fictional, built on the uncertain foundations of nostalgia. If this wholesome life did not or perhaps had never existed, she would simply have to forge it for herself.
To stay at home—that is, to not work—requires a certain privilege. After all, someone has to pay the bills. By her early twenties, Pettitt had left London, which she’d found lonely and miserable, to work in a marketing job in Cheltenham, which she’d also found lonely and miserable. Her then boyfriend, Carl (who declined to be interviewed), wrote her resignation letter for her.
Pettitt began sharing her experiences of being a stay-at-home girlfriend on a late-two-thousands blog called Mrs Stepford. “Nothing thought-provoking,” she recalled. “It was more, ‘I’ve figured out the nicest way to fold a towel.’ ” But she felt embarrassed not to be working. She was worried about being financially reliant on Carl, because, as she put it to me in an e-mail, “we are told NEVER to do that.” After a few months, she took another job and then became pregnant. She and Carl sat down and thrashed it out. “What do you want?” Carl asked. Pettitt said she wanted to stay at home with the baby. Carl said this was what he wanted, too. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, glad we finally communicated!’ ”