The pursuit of contentment

The second chapter on home-working practices – Chapter 4 – investigates how embodying trad femininity entails continuous work on the self. It highlights how trad women practices frame the tradlife as a palliative release from anxiety, stress, and a range of other psychological ills. Demonstrating how the emotional struggles they narrate often relate to socioeconomic hardship and other symptoms of widespread neoliberal precarity, it argues that the trad solution entails laying bare the cruel optimism of the neoliberal feminist good life and enjoining women to stop striving so hard and just be content in living the tradlife. As shown later in the chapter, however, being content requires continuous practices of self-optimization that dovetail with mainstream self-improvement culture. Forwarding the term self-redemption, the chapter demonstrates how trad women compound the flexible potential of femininity under neoliberalism via the affordances of social media in a manner that resonates with Christian themes. Finally, it details how trad women engage with a Christian notion of wifely submission that serves as an extension of the trad discourse of therapeutic pragmatism and the imperative to self-redeem.