Review: The Stepford Tradwife
On the tradwife renaissance, half a century of 'The Stepford Wives,' and the empty promise of J. Nicole Jones's 'The Witches of Bellinas.'
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Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives was right on time. First published in 1972, in the Gilded Age of second-wave feminism, the novel—part thriller, part satire—captured viscerally the stigma and shame attached to being a wife and mother who dares to desire an identity outside of being a Wife and Mother. In the five decades since, The Stepford Wives has been so culturally impactful that, aside from meriting two film adaptations, its title stands on its own as an idiom in the pop cultural lexicon.
The now-iconic novel follows Joanna Eberhart, a progressive young New Yorker who finds herself a pariah among the eerily perfect residents of her new neighborhood in Stepford, Connecticut. That is, until she uncovers the community’s dark secret: by some mysterious ritual, the once independent, accomplished women of Stepford have been forcibly and unknowingly transformed by their own husbands into docile, compliant housewives. With The Stepford Wives, Levin skewered male anxieties surrounding women’s liberation, creating a piece of biting cultural criticism that never sacrificed its breakneck pace to drive home its message.
Half a century later, The Stepford Wives has yet to reach irrelevance. Instead, in the last days of reproductive rights, as the age of #MeToo wanes and the era of the transvestigation, alpha male influencers, and, of course, the tradwife renaissance dawns, Joanna’s plight feels almost prophetic, and no less terrifying than it did the first time Roe v. Wade went before the Supreme Court.
Were he still alive, Levin might be exasperated to learn of the tradwife.1 In the 2020s, the phenomenon is something akin to Phyllis Schlafly with a TikTok account: it’s not enough for her to embrace her “traditional role” unless she is simultaneously recruiting other women to do the same. Fifty-two years after Levin’s satire posed one death for the feminist movement, the Stepford Wife has become a commodifiable persona for the digital age. Maybe, given Joanna’s fate, Levin would have expected it.
Aided in no small part by the rise of the influencer, the online tradwife is something more insidious even than Levin’s pseudo-robotic women. Her perfect adherence to pre-feminist gender roles isn’t just a performance for her husband, but for thousands—if not millions—of other women on any number of platforms watching along at home. In a cultural moment where conservative lawmakers attempt to restrict bodily autonomy seemingly at every turn, she presents a body preemptively aligned with their agenda, promising to do the dirty work of luring other women to fall in line.
The tradwife doesn’t struggle with child-rearing. In fact, she is frequently pregnant, so often that prompting acolytes to guess her next baby name becomes a regular mode of driving audience engagement. She may or may not be a proponent of modern medicine. She rarely discusses politics, but truthfully, she can't understand why feminists wanted us to work, when this life is so much easier. Her time spent outside the home or with anyone other than her husband and children—if this time exists at all—is seldom part of her public persona. She is, at least online, lovingly submissive to her (often nebulously wealthy) husband, though, to be clear, no one is forcing her to do this.
Her tradwifeism instead comes naturally, the result of embracing her inherent role as a woman, sometimes repackaged by more spiritually-oriented influencers as her “divine femininity.” She’s almost always white, but don’t think too hard about why. (Because if you did, then you’d have to reckon with that why, when the answer is all too often that her “traditional femininity” refers more specifically to an infantilized, delicate, white femininity, one reliant on white beauty standards and generational wealth, while the historical context behind her “traditional role” of laboring exclusively inside her own home is itself wrapped up in this whiteness. And by that point, you’d almost certainly have realized that it’s this very attachment to white femininity that in turn allows the more outspoken tradwife to position herself as a victim whose way of life is under perpetual threat from unnamed enemies. And if you’d gotten that far, you’d likely also have noted the tradwife’s regular coziness, inadvertent or purposeful, with white supremacy. So, for her purposes, it’s better not to think too hard about why.) To question any of her choices—if you choose to ignore feminist theory and centuries of Western patriarchy and take her at her word that they are, in fact, individual choices—is to join her many attackers in waging war on traditional family values. But don’t worry, she’s not listening.
Unlike the Stepford Wife of yore, the tradwife takes on many forms.2 While she sometimes packages herself in an expected 1950s housewife aesthetic, outspoken in her regressiveness, the tradwife can just as easily come to you as a homesteader embracing “farm life” somewhere in Utah, or—as in J. Nicole Jones’s debut novel The Witches of Bellinas, published by Catapult last month—as a faux-hippy multimillionaire embracing her inner goddess. Either way, her message is clear, even if her 100,000+ followers might deny it: hers is real womanhood. Motherhood (but only her version of it) is an act of sanctity, and she is the perfect saint.
In The Witches of Bellinas, the author’s fiction debut, Jones attempts to tackle the tradwife phenomenon with a premise similar to that of Levin’s original satire, albeit as a more straightforward drama. Witches follows Tansy, a moderately successful Manhattan writer, and her less ambitious (but aptly-named) husband, Guy. In a bid to save their brand new—but already rocky—marriage and finally become a mother, Tansy agrees to relocate to Bellinas, a planned community in California that, as one can imagine, is not what it seems. Like Joanna Eberhart 50 years before her, Tansy soon finds herself questioning the other women—and eventually the entire reality—of Bellinas, to horrific effect. Or perhaps the reality of her unfulfilling life has been the horror all along. It’s Levin’s hybrid of nightmare and social commentary, born again for the age of the tradwife. Or, at least, it could have been.
The Witches of Bellinas is an impressive pivot for Jones, whose memoir Low Country (Catapult, 2021) made waves for its rich storytelling and lyrical prose. Her transition to fiction, however, is less than seamless. The glossy, almost journalistic prose that gives her nonfiction writing its distinct voice is less successful when applied to Witches, where it leaves Tansy’s semi-epistolary first-person narration reading more like a collection of carefully edited personal essays than the innermost thoughts of a character slowly losing her grip. The result is prose that’s sometimes jarringly clinical, delivering a visceral, hyper-personal story with a confusing level of removal from its own intimacy.
Hiccups aside, however, the novel’s premise could be compelling enough on its own. Jones is interested in a more covert version of tradwifeism than the right-wing pundit influencers who’ve made themselves the face of the movement, instead focusing on a group of women who would likely call themselves anything but. Still, the idyllic Bellinas is a tradwife’s dream: a gaggle of impossibly beautiful, blonde, stay-at-home mothers rear beautiful, blonde children under the benevolent leadership of the beautiful, blonde Manny, the billionaire cousin of Tansy’s ostensibly less impressive husband. Bellinas is hyper-wealthy, hyper-exclusive, and even protected, quite mysteriously, from the effects of climate change, be it wildfires, floods, or even just unpleasant weather.
The town is also smothered by an air of past mystery, an oppressive fog of silence that makes the novel’s early chapters read something like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The suspicious recent death of two former residents looms over the otherwise perfect community, though no one will discuss it. The neighborhood’s many young children share curiously similar traits. One or several women may be practicing dark magic.
And, like Stepford, Connecticut before it, Bellinas’s idyllic existence relies on an insidious truth. In fact, it relies on almost the same insidious truth, painted with a shiny, pseudo-spiritual veneer for the modern era. The twist is not not effective.
The problem with The Witches of Bellinas isn’t that the modern-day Stepford Wife has been done before, though for what it’s worth, it has. The past three years alone have birthed a bountiful canon of books that attempt to reimagine Stepford-esque horrors in contemporary settings, to capture the psychological terror (and occasional literal body horror) of motherhood in a patriarchal world that simultaneously devalues the labor of motherhood and sanctifies The Mother. Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere (Celadon, 2022) gave us stay-at-home mothers whose labor is so taken for granted that they physically disappear. Ainsley Hogarth’s Motherthing (Vintage, 2022) depicted motherhood and the desire for it as processes so viscerally mind-bending that (spoiler) actual cannibalism seems rational in comparison. Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (Doubleday, 2021) offered up a wife and mother who, after giving up her dream job in pursuit of child-rearing, becomes so far removed from her individual identity that she begins to wonder if she has actually ceased to be a human altogether. At least, if the tradwife renaissance would exhaust him, Levin might be somewhat encouraged to know that in its midst, The Stepford Wives has borne bountiful children.
But where her contemporaries run with Levin’s seeds in any number of directions, Jones seems more interested in synthesizing and retooling existing stories about women who lose themselves in webs of power—marriages, motherhood, magic, cults—than creating a new one. The Witches of Bellinas is the idyllic cult setting of The Stepford Wives meets the madness-inducing isolation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with notes of the blonde-centric cult in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. It’s the feminist housewife’s doomed internal battle, loss of self, and desperate loneliness, as seen constructed so expertly by Yoder in Nightbitch. It’s at least one major plot point from Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. It’s the bumbling-to-the-point-of-nefarious husband from all of the above. (Naturally, the novel even pulls plenty of inspiration from its partial namesake, John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick). Ultimately, however, this perpetual homage to the mothers who came before comes at a cost: it leaves behind a novel that sometimes feels more invested in its cultural criticism than following through on its plot, and more interested in being timely than being original.
In fairness, no one could accuse The Witches of Bellinas of not being timely. The novel is ostensibly one about the tradwife’s simultaneous allure as an escape from reality and its reality as a backlash to the last century of advancements in women’s autonomy. And if The Witches of Bellinas shines in any area, it’s in Jones’s understanding of these themes through Tansy’s interactions with other women. The horror in Witches is insidious—often more akin to the mom-on-mom bullying of Big Little Lies than the outright gore of Nightbitch or Motherthing—and it’s played excellently through Tansy’s interactions with her so-called peers, the supermodels-turned-stay-at-home mothers who populate Bellinas.
To Jones’s credit, she’s perhaps more interested than anyone else in the literary fiction space to interrogate the factors that lead an otherwise autonomous woman to tradwifeism, and the intricately constructed world of Witches certainly serves her intellectual purpose. In Tansy, Jones has created a character who falls for every one of the tradwife’s myriad temptations and feels all the more authentic for doing so. The allure of the trad-life stems not just from Tansy’s desire to please an unsatisfied husband or leave behind the responsibilities of the real world, or even her overwhelming yearning for a child, but also from an earnest need to connect with the women of Bellinas, those seemingly aspirational figures, to let their unabashed femininity infect her, to feel like a real woman—whatever that means.
The women of Bellinas, in turn, are the most insidious of tradwives, those who style themselves as apolitical. Their “divine feminine energy” is separate from thousands of years of subjugation in the outside world, at least the way they see it. In another of the novel’s more interesting choices, Jones’s deepening intellectual investigation leads her to zoom in on the tradwife’s insistence that she is, ultimately, the master of her subjugated fate. Where Levin’s Stepford Wives were forced into submission without their knowledge, much less their consent, the climax of Witches reveals a different approach: through sheer belief, the women of Bellinas have become witches. Manny may believe himself the leader of the cult-like community, but it’s the women’s secretive magical practices—and their willingness to carry his countless offspring—that maintain Bellinas’s idyllic facade.
And with their apparent power, the witches become all the more insidious. Though we witness them experience repeated patriarchal violence even in the short few months over which the novel takes place, the witches insist their lifestyle is one big, divine act of empowerment. Their submission to Manny, they claim, is really a covert power negotiation with a megalomaniac male leader who is none the wiser to their secret upper hand. So despite Manny’s rampant sexual violence, despite his billions of dollars dedicated to implementing a more indestructible form of patriarchy, the witches are the true danger behind Bellinas; or at least, they believe themselves to be. The witches insist they are—if you choose to ignore feminist theory and centuries of Western patriarchy and take them at their word—the architects of their own subjugation, “In a way,” one such witch tells a hesitant Tansy, “we’re using them as men have used us for the whole of history.” No one is forcing them to do this.
It’s this performed apoliticism and so-called empowerment that makes the witches so ultimately successful; like any good tradwife, they are, above all else, influencers. Subjugated or not, they are perfect mothers, perfect wives, perfectly fertile, perfectly happy, and doing it all in Free People maxi dresses that help them connect to the goddess inside. By the time Witches takes its final turn, we’ve come to understand that Tansy could just as easily have been led to her fate by the idyllic, stealth wealth, stay-at-home motherhood of an influencer like Ballerina Farm as she was by actual magic. Tradwifeism, or else its pseudo-spiritual California billionaire equivalent, presents itself to Tansy so compellingly under the guise of reconnecting with her womanhood that she nearly forgets to mourn her lost autonomy.
But there are two great tragedies in The Witches of Bellinas, and Tansy’s descent is only the first. The second is what Jones fails to do with the world she’s created. However interesting and nuanced her line of cultural criticism surrounding the tradwife may be, it falls on the same sword as her all-too-journalistic prose: Jones’s nonfiction instincts kneecap her attempts at suspense.
The tradwife’s insidiousness may be at the heart of The Witches of Bellinas, but we’ve somehow embarked on this thematic investigation at what should be the novel’s climax. Even the critical moment when Jones’s protagonist enters a mad dash to escape her death—or to avoid becoming one of the witches, or some other, once intriguing fate—is hindered by the questions Witches’s sprawling plot leaves behind. By the time the novel reaches its inevitable conclusion, Jones has lost those readers interested in her novel’s once-compelling mystery, and, without ever truly breaking from the mold of The Stepford Wives or its many other children, has run out of points to make.
It’s hard to say whether The Stepford Wives was really a timeless novel, or if it simply has yet to stop feeling timely. In fairness, we have yet to enter a cultural moment not terrified of women’s autonomy. Perhaps the truth is a bit of both: Levin’s feminist criticism makes his novel striking in its aptness for the present moment, but it’s his unwavering commitment to his role as a storyteller—above that of a cultural critic—that makes his novel timeless. Indeed, for all its prescient observations, The Stepford Wives is careful never to let commentary come at the cost of its plot. Half a century later, the story might carry a sort of uncanny modernity, but it’s the novel’s whip-smart, perfectly constructed mystery that allows it to stand on its own. Meanwhile, for all its own timeliness, it’s in this central task—that of telling a story—where The Witches of Bellinas fails to measure up.
Instead, like the tradwife, The Witches of Bellinas offers up a false promise, posing itself as an arresting meditation on marriage and motherhood in post-Roe patriarchy without actually honoring its own potential as a compelling thriller—or telling a particularly original story—in the process. The novel is nothing if not in touch with the zeitgeist; it just falters when tasked with being something more.
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Collage by the author.
The tradwife: a phenomenon of contemporary right-wing propaganda in which women publicly disavow feminism in the name of embracing “traditional womanhood” (read: total and complete submission to men).
Discussing the phenomenon, Katherine Jezer-Morton of The Cut wrote, “What is irksome about Instagram tradlife isn’t the question of ‘How does she do it all?’ It’s that the visual appeal overrides whatever ideology lives in the background—and that’s the point.”