Eva Wiseman: What does it mean to be a wife today?

We are living through a golden age of wife content. Of trad wives, of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and of “wife guys”, men whose identities revolve around the precarious act of loving their wife (before, inevitably, his dickpics are discovered in the babysitter’s DMs). A Reddit thread for followers of Laura Doyle’s The Surrendered Wife and the “empowered wife” coaching programme (short version: wives, relinquish control) sees women in turmoil. One user, announcing with some majesty that she is leaving the community, encourages her fellow wives to combine Doyle’s lessons with “some more modern twists like [TikTok fueled dating trend] black cat theory or [“feminine energy” YouTuber] Margarita Nazarenko.” Wives are being pulled apart and put back together, in sometimes Picasso-like forms. To be a wife today is to be at the centre of a political argument. Or, more accurately, the slop bucket beneath the argument, where the scraps and peelings fall.

I write while browsing extracts from Sarah Vine’s anguished new memoir, How Not To Be A Political Wife, in which she details how politics broke her marriage. Her response to the Telegraph’s suggestion that she was directing the fate of the Tory party: “Seriously? A husband offering his wife advice is seen as kind and insightful, but me offering Michael [Gove] the benefit of my journalistic acumen and my wifely support was Lady Macbeth? Oh, would you ever all just fuck off?!” It’s an old sexist trope, she writes, to blame the wife. “It’s the one thing I actually have rather a bit of sympathy for Meghan Markle over: this idea that, somehow, it’s all her fault that Prince Harry turned out to be such a spoilt, vindictive little brat. Why, because he couldn’t manage that all by himself?” The wife is simultaneously pathetic and all-powerful.

It’s a contradiction we see daily with our trad-wife influencers, who perform fertility and homemaking and submission for millions of followers, many of whom read it as provocation, thus increasing clicks and shovelling cash and power back into the trad wife’s apron. Both trad wives’ content and the critical content they inspire in feminist commenters drives tensions, particularly between women who work and wives who stay at home, ignoring the facts that the content creation the online trad wives do is a legitimate business, and that, rather than being two distinct sets of women, these are people whose lives frequently overlap and merge, depending on age, responsibilities, economy and luck.

TV is entering its Maga era, reports Wired, listing the conservative turns Hollywood has taken, including investing in a revived, rustic spin on The Bachelor called Farmer Wants a Wife, in which the only thing female contestants have in common is a desire to get married and have kids. The second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has been a similar ratings hit: the reality show that focuses on a group of Utah women who document their lives online, a space they call MomTok. A twist came when one went live to tell viewers that she and other MomTok wives had been “soft swinging” (swinging, allegedly, without sex), a confession that upset their particular balance of devout Mormonism and hot-wife content, but deliciously. Again, a wife here must be two things at once. She’s both a committed wife and hot TikTok girlie, she’s a business bitch and the world’s best mum, she’s devoted to God and devoted to clicks, a pile of contradictions stacked precariously on top of each other in the shape of a woman.

Are the young women that follow such wife content showing signs of being influenced by it? Of chucking out ambitions of independence and instead retreating to Utah or a well-lit kitchen? Recent surveys reported that 53% of Gen Z women identify as feminists. And despite a renewed focus on wives in culture, last year the proportion of people in England and Wales who were married or in a civil partnership fell below 50% for the first time. So, probably not? Instead I think the appeal of tradwifery is in the way it shows, as if through a tear in time, a lobotomised place of extreme surrender.

A generation earlier, women fought successfully to be allowed to work, but the next round of that fight – for mothers to work, too – remains, if not quite unexamined then still, I’d argue, unwon. Of women in employment, 36% work part-time, compared with 14% of men, largely due to caregiving responsibilities at home. In this light, performative wifeliness looks like an escape hatch. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom told the magazine Mother Jones: “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies. When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men.” The cultural obsession with the trad wife and its satellite archetypes will remain, she believes, “so long as there’s a threat”. Tighten your wedding rings girls, we’re in for a ride.

Rubber souls Mild obsession here around finding the perfect jelly shoe in time for summer – inspired by sold-out viral flats of the ones that look like the creepy mesh that protects a mango. The Row’s are currently £1,500 on Vestiare. Helen (our mens’ fashion editor) bought some from Asos, but found them ‘too pretty’. You’re aiming instead for chewy and ugly. The ones to get are on Amazon, in red, for £29.99. Shoe of the summer! Quite vile!

Smart dumplings Visit Tatar Bunar, a chic new Ukrainian restaurant in Shoreditch, east London (a UK version of the founders’ original place in Odesa). It’s lined with voluptuous ceramics and elegant people. I ate piles of superb varenyky, or dumplings. They were plump and satisfying, stuffed with minced meat, cabbage or mushroom.

Play it again I am dying to see The Ballad of Wallis Island, a film in which an eccentric lottery winner (played by Tim Key) spends his newfound money on getting his favourite musicians (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) back together for a private show. I’ve loved everything both Key and Basden have done, from Key’s turn as Alan Partridge’s sidekick to his Late Night Poetry programme, and Basden’s brilliant Here We Go, so I look forward to laughing and weeping a bit and pulling myself together before laughing again.

Photograph: Getty Images