The original tradwives
It’s May! We did it! Spring is here! The flowers are blooming! What did you get your mother for Mother’s Day? Has she read Yesteryear yet? If you’re unfamiliar, Caro Claire Burke’s satirical debut novel is about Natalie, a tradwife influencer who is pulled back in time to 1855, when she is forced to live the actual pioneer life she cosplays online. Would your mother like that?
Personally, I have a hard time with characters like Natalie, and according to the New York Times, “Yesteryear doesn’t revel in her downfall or dunk on tradwives at large,” so I’m probably not going to read it. I’m honestly kind of surprised more people don’t “dunk on” tradwives.
While it may seem like a new phenomenon, the tradwife trend originated a little more than a century ago. It started with an organization back in the 1920s. It had chapters across the country and membership around half a million. Members were progressive, driven to improve society. They fought for education—especially for women. They believed in non-violence, working for social change through grassroots efforts like campaigning for local candidates and the occasional small-business boycott. They donated food to schoolchildren and families in need. They helped their local communities organize every kind of event you can imagine, from weddings to funerals to carnivals. And they did this under the fabricated guise of a “traditional” Southern Protestant housewife.
This organization was the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). This was not an auxiliary of the KKK. It was an entirely separate organization that wanted all the nice progressive things, but, you know, just for whites. And although they are largely forgotten, their massive impact on American culture can still be felt in everything from our current public policy to our tradwife influencers.
After the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, there was quite a bit of pushback. I mean, really, “women” didn’t get the right to vote. Black women in the South were still living under Jim Crow laws that greatly restricted or forbid the Black vote in general. And the only reason the 19th Amendment passed at all was because white supremacists wanted as many white votes as possible. And if you really think about it, are you telling me that women—who are the majority of the population—got the right to vote over a century ago and don’t even have the right to their own bodies now? How are you going to be the literal majority in a democracy and function as a marginalized group? Obviously, there was a different identity at play in this “women’s” right.
Anyway, this new right made a lot of men mad, but the male leadership of the KKK embraced it. I know it’s hard to imagine now, when neither party seems to want anything good for anyone, but back then both parties wanted good things for Americans. They just wanted only certain people to count as “Americans.” The KKK figured more white votes meant they were more likely to have a say in that choice.
By 1925, the KKK boasted 150,141 members in our little state of Maine. That’s more than one in five of us at the time, so it makes sense that Maine also had two WKKK chapters: one in Augusta and another in Bath, though their activity was not restricted to those towns. They recruited across the state. But the thing about an organization based in exclusion is that it can only, eventually collapse.
In the spring of 1924 the WKKK was sued by Mrs. Jean McNair of Portland for $13. This was the combined cost of initiation fee and dues to the WKKK, of which she was briefly a member. McNair was white and hateful and met almost every WKKK criterion. Her husband was even in the KKK but McNair had been kicked out of or “banished” by the WKKK because she was born in Scotland. Like their male counterpart, the WKKK restricted membership to those born in the United States. McNair, having never hidden her country of birth, which was also obvious from her accent, wanted her money back.
The lawsuit filled the pages of Maine papers for months, and it divided the KKK. Some members thought being white and hateful was enough. Others really needed their nationalism. Plus the KKK’s business model was a pyramid scheme and being exposed.
Eventually, McNair won her lawsuit. Maine KKK leadership was ousted, but by then the inner schism had become so great that neither the WKKK nor the KKK could recover. Membership in the organizations dwindled, hoods and robes got buried in the backs of closets and eventually a whole lot of people began to take notice of this “new” tradwife trend.
Anyway, what did you get your mother for Mother’s Day?
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
