The New Yorker:

Alena Kate Pettitt helped lead an online movement promoting domesticity. Now she says, “It’s become its own monster.”

By Sophie Elmhirst

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.”

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