Make Him  A Sandwich (From Betty Crocker to Tik Tok Wifey)

Make Him A Sandwich (From Betty Crocker to Tik Tok Wifey) 

If you, like me, have the popular social media platform known as Tik Tok, you might have seen the new trend of “trad wife.” If you haven’t, a “trad wife” short for traditional wife is a woman who is “going back to her roots”, returning to the societal gender roles of housewife and bread winner within a marriage. These women usually have some relation to Christianity, though not always, and have a very serene, perfectionist social media image.  So what are they trying to emulate? 

Well, from what I have gathered in my extensive research (scrolling through the hashtag on Tik Tok for twenty minutes) they are trying to go back to the golden days. The Betty Crocker, cartoon propaganda, hoop skirt days of the 1950s. There are many obvious differences between these two era’s of women, but the one I’m going to be discussing is the recipes.  One of the main pulls of the online trad wife presence is cooking videos, with notable creators like Nara Smith, Ballerina Farm, and thehealthywife. Recipes and tips, tutorials and what-not-to-do’s backed by a soft voice saying something slightly judgemental about other people’s cooking. The items they make are often steeped in homesteading culture, another internet niche that has been accidentally intertwined with the trad wives, and focuses on the organic, all natural “from scratch” of it all. 

They are fighting against the processed foods of modern America, and this usually plays out as being more expensive, or at the very least more work for them. But for the women of the 1950’s, processed, canned and easy meals were often preferred, largely due to the fact that refrigerators were only owned by the wealthy and no one owned a freezer. So if you wanted to make a fresher meal, you’d have to go to the green grocer, the butcher, and the regular supermarket that day, and ensure you don’t mess up the recipe otherwise the food you use will spoil. That is why the most common recipes you see when searching for vintage recipes, have jello or mayo or some other food combination that we may deem disgusting. It was reliable, it was affordable, and it was less time consuming. The women of the 50’s got creative with the privileges they did have. The women of today seem to sneer at those privileges, viewing their from-scratch methods as a form of superior motherhood.