Lessons for Side-Hustle Tradwives
Grounded Homes and Happy Families
Tradwives come in several varieties. The “trad” refers to practicing traditional gender roles in marriage: the wife prioritizes the home, and the husband provides for the family and exercises ambition in the surrounding community. The “side-hustle” refers to a wife’s part-time work, either to earn extra money for the family, exercise other talents outside the home, get a better work-life balance for both husband and wife, or assist a husband’s ambitions. Increasing numbers of moms—especially college-educated women—have a side-hustle along with their primary roles as mothers.
Listening to side-hustle tradwives, as I did for my recent piece for the Institute for Family Studies, reveals more lessons about how side-hustle traditional families get it done. To paraphrase Steve Martin, first you become a wife, then you get a side-hustle! I will focus mostly on the side-hustle with some thoughts on becoming a wife.
Get Credentials
The most successful, enduring marriages in America are between college graduates, even though universities are citadels of feminist indoctrination. Under today’s conditions, higher education credentials help graduates get a foot in the door for a job, which is a potential future side-hustle. Employers still seem to think higher education credentials are important, so higher education has become like standing up at a football game: fans stand because the fans in front of them stand first.
Take a Transactional Attitude Toward Higher Ed
Many embrace higher education as a transformational experience where they will be shaped through diversity and new experiences. Hogwash. Attitudes toward higher education should be mostly transactional. The student pays a university for a degree and marketable skills. Providing a humane education that’s aimed at safeguarding Western civilization would be nice, but most do nothing of the kind. Female students especially look to higher education as transformational and seek high achievement so they can secure world-changing jobs like being a lawyer or a future leader. But, above all, parents must guard them from taking higher education so seriously. The Mrs. Degree, with additional credentialing for work, is all you want by graduation day.
Look for Remote, Project-Based Work
Whatever degree a woman chooses, project-based work is the way to go. Get in with a company to prove your competence and conscientiousness. After pregnancy, ask for remote work to complete projects for the company. In a world where conscientious employees are harder to find, companies will retain conscientious workers who work remotely. Execution of projects demands self-discipline, persistence, and a sense of duty. Husbands can help make that execution possible by taking the kids on Saturday mornings or at other times throughout the week.
Find the Right Boss
Nearly every side-hustle wife I interviewed told me, unbidden, how many male bosses feel good about helping a young family make it because they value family life themselves. Meanwhile, female bosses and full-time female workers resent young families. A side-hustle wife can have her cooing baby sitting on her lap during a Zoom call. A male boss or fellow employee will either ignore it or celebrate it, while females are more likely to complain about not being able to hear over the baby’s noise. In another example, a male boss allows side-hustle moms to forgo travel, while a female boss tells her to make arrangements for day care. Male bosses tend to admire wives and mothers and wax on about their children or steer easier work to mothers. They want to support and accommodate young families. (Perhaps studies that ask if employees prefer male to female bosses are too crude for not distinguishing on the basis of marriage.)
Though Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act makes treating men and women differently illegal, all the remote side-hustle wives I interviewed knew that their male bosses cut them deals to support remote work. They discriminated in favor of remote-working women and against in-person men.
Live by Extended Family
If employers could act on their own, many more would offer remote work for young mothers (divvying up jobs to several side-hustlers, perhaps) while making different demands of men. Differences in pay would follow, making for a different kind of family wage. Allowing businesses to support the family as they see fit would lead to a fuller flowering of social and economic support for family life, which is far more beneficial for the family than direct government subsidies. Few things compromise family life more than the compulsory feminism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Additionally, side-hustlers doing shift work, such as nurses and those who work regular hours, need regular help. My wife (who did some side-hustling in her day) has regularly watched three grandchildren from three of our adult children (all under 30). She is a great source of free babysitting, and she imparts some wisdom, too. The extended family, like male bosses, wants to see the family succeed and can be invited in, modestly, to help that success.
Be Selective
For remote work, wives should cultivate flexible skills like writing, media, or management. Then, it is possible to slide into several kinds of jobs depending on the circumstances and opportunities available. Copy editors, social media specialists, photographers, and film editors are in such high demand that side-hustles are common; the same goes for accounting work. Online tutoring is remote but on a schedule. In-person side-hustles (for example, nursing or tax accounting) often need specific certifications, but this can increase the demand for services.
Avoid Debt
A home is within reach if student loan debt is minimized or avoided altogether. Medical or law school means delaying life, either because the training is intense or because debt compromises future homeownership. Side-hustle families with more than $30,000 in student loan debt have a difficult time owning a home before the age of 30. This is why parents should help their college-bound kids by cutting them a good deal and negotiating a price for higher education. They should see it like purchasing a used car: negotiate from a position of strength with a transactional attitude. Students should decrease the number of years they are in college with concurrent credits. While some advanced degrees are worth it, being transactional is the key.
Find a Like-Minded Community of Women
Finding a woman who wants to marry young and start a family is not like finding a unicorn. Many talented, ambitious women already see that prioritizing family life fits nicely with part-time work. Even more women would like to be either trad tradwives or “Eras” wives. Regardless, many women are going to work, especially with the tendency of the college-educated to marry the college-educated. Side-hustle tradwives can square the circle a bit, not by having it all (as feminists promise) but by having a lot and less in different ways.
As a parent, I would prepare my daughter to be a wife, a mother, a citizen, and a worker. Perhaps she will not be all of these things, but they all fulfill important human longings—especially the first two roles.