Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the explicit goals of Project 2025, J.D. Vance, and Christian Nationalism in general — will make trad wife life just, well, life. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens incrementally, as choices are very slowly taken from you, or made more attractive. To get to what lures women into this life, and just how difficult it is to escape, I wanted to talk to someone who gets it in a way that those lurking in the Instagram comments simply cannot. So today we’re talking with Tia Levings, who left her trad wife life and, through a bunch of therapy and processing and support, figured out how she wanted to tell her story.
Content Warning: In our conversation, we talk explicitly about emotional and physical abuse and coercion. If you’re not in a place where you want to listen to that discussion, I’d suggest skipping this episode.
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Show Notes:
Tia Leving’s book, A Well-Trained Wife, is an absolute must-read. As Melody put it: I’m not even a memoir person and I devoured it. You can find it here.
You can find more about Tia, her work, and how to book her for interviews here.
Tia’s Fundie Baby Voice TikTok (I also recommend exploring the rest of Tia’s Toks)
@tialevingswriterSo often viewers will catch my slip back into using what’s being called “fundie baby voice.” While sometimes it’s intentional, because I’m demonstrating how I was taught, a lot of times it’s not. It’s my trauma resurfacing. Because the vocal suppression to force women to sound like earnest, seductive children is an abuse in evangelical fundamentalism. Women are taught to hide their emotional range and our voices are denied. Men are taught women who sound like little girls are seggually attractive. Recovery and retaining has taken years. So it’s frustrating when I unintentionally slip. It usually points to activated trauma, which definitely feel now as the life I worked so hard to escape is now leading in our mainstream. I hoped our government was safe, that educated, intelligent, constitutionally guided logic would prevail. But the fundamentalists have had their eye on dominion for a long time, and although they’re complementarian, with an authoritarian umbrella of so-called protection, there’s a host of women using their groomed baby voices against other women. Enter Katie Britt. Amy Coney Barrett. Kelly Johnson. And more evangelical women of the nationalist sects. To get more on what it’s really like to live in Christian fundamentalism grab my free FUNDIE CHEATSHEET, link in bio @tialevingswriter Preorder A WELL-TRAINED WIFE anywhere books are sold. #fundiebabyvoice #katiebritt #voicetraining #keepsweet #childlike #exevangelical #exmo #exmormon #fundies #shinyhappypeople #religioustrauma #primaryvoice #bookofmormonmusical #michelleduggar #duggars #gaslighting #manipulation #persuasion #tradwives
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserTia is also in the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, about the Duggars, Bill Gothard, and the Institute for Basic Life Principles. Here’s the trailer:
I didn’t talk about this in the episode, but I highly recommend Seyward Darby on the place of trad wives in the white supremacist vision of the future
My piece on Trad Wife Life as self-annihilation and some reflections on the recent Ballerina Farms discourse, which ramped up after we recorded this episode
We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:
Why is Paul Mescal so hot
Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)
Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house
For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE
Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)
The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)
Contemporary ideas of self-care
Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market
Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment
You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here
A Former Trad Wife on What It Actually Takes To Leave