THE MOTHER!
Pop music and Trad Wives. Conservatisms sneaky grip on the media we consume.
Written By Niamh Devlin
‘Oh, she’s so mother!’, a phrase often uttered about iconic pop women like Robyn or Charli XCX, and with the topic of motherhood and fertility being an ever-increasing topic in pop music, it opens a whole different conversation.
When artists, like the afore mentioned icons, who have built their public personalities on choosing your own path, and most importantly embracing the fun of nightlife and parties, suddenly include the topic of motherhood in their music, it can be a stark contrast. Like when Charli verbalised the mental turmoil of wanting a baby but not knowing whether motherhood is right for her on her most recent record. The question is, is this sudden obsession with fertility a natural collective anxiety all women face or is it something more sinister, an unintentional campaign for the patriarchy?
This shift doesn’t exist in its own vacuum, there has been a huge spike across both the social media and political landscapes on the topic, idealising motherhood as not only a cultural solution to our society’s moral deterioration, but it’s also being framed as something women can do to gain personal fulfilment. That the only way to be genuinely happy as a woman is to be a mother. While women who choose to hold off on motherhood are often demonised and depicted as selfish.
With the surge in social media content over the last few years displaying Trad Wife values, where a family makes content showing their home dynamic that involves a domesticised women whose only desire it seems is to properly love, care for and labour over her children and husband.
This lifestyle is being sold as an opt out of the expectations placed on a working mother, rather than submission to her male counterpart, described to escape the burnout working a 9-5 to then come home to clock in for child labour can leave a woman in. This is a sneaky yet sophisticated rebrand of conservative values, dressing it up as a holistic wellness lifestyle, either completely ignores the patriarchal structures this lifestyle places on the woman, or suggests that the only way to beat these structures are to retreat into one of its oldest forms, in the home. It is masterful the way this content has sold the loss of the woman’s autonomy as the ultimate luxury gift she could give herself.
And scarily, this cultural shift isn’t just being filmed for our feeds, its bleeding it’s way into every form of media we consume. You can see it in the hyper pop girlies most recent releases, with Charli XCX’s ‘I think about it all the time’ on her highly regarded Brat album showing real raw vulnerability voicing that she might want a child but also, maybe motherhood just might not be right for her, and why she feels both of those feelings. While on the surface the sourdough bread and slow living life Tik Tok trad wife and a synth-soaked pop song may seem like opposites, but they are in fact two sides of the same coin. Both are bred from a world where the state can restrict a woman’s autonomy on her own reproductive health, this vitriol filters down, into not only our algorithms but our art too. This mental tussle Charli is singing about is shaped by the same patriarchal expectations that the Trad Wife markets on, that a woman’s only purpose is her fertility and her ability to contribute a child to society, one that will continue to uphold these structures.
A lot of this cultural fixation with fertility and motherhood is pressed on by the manufactured idea that their time is running out. The conversation of the biological clock makes it feel like the choice to be a mother is an ever-narrowing window and that delaying the prospect will only lead to risk and failure in the ability to carry a child. However, despite this, more women than ever before are choosing to put having a child on the back burner until their thirties, with the 2024 US census reporting that 63% of women remained childless by 30. This is a huge increase compared to the 50% in the previous decade, and a clear indication that more women are choosing not to bear children and focus on other areas of life first.
While pop music voices the anxiety of the biological clock, and the Trad Wife phenomenon offers us an ‘escape’ into outdated structures, both are in response to a world where men in government keep tightening their greasy grips on reproductive healthcare and rights, yet statistics show women aren’t flinching in their strides toward freedom they are asserting their autonomy simply by not to conforming to the pressures. Proving the most powerful thing a woman has is her choice.