If you had asked me a week ago if I knew what a trad wife was, I would have stared at you with a dumbfounded look on my face. I had never heard that term before. Honestly? I still wish I didn’t know. I would love to travel back in time to about seven days ago when my ignorance of what a trad wife is was strong. Sometimes, ignorance truly is bliss. But, alas, I now know what a trad wife is. I can thank TikTok for that. Someone mentioned this trad wife movement on another social media app, and in an effort to cure my ignorance, and at the risk of screwing up my algorithm, I took to TikTok to teach me about this odd phenomenon of trad wife-ism.

It’s Women’s History Month — what honest progress can we say we’ve made in the lives of American women, especially American mothers? To answer this question, we must be honest about the direct correlation between white supremacy and womanhood and motherhood in the United States.

Our society’s desperation to keep whiteness and white people in power has not come without a grave cost to everyone who inhabits this society. That means you. And that means me. It is because of white supremacy that we have built a society that refuses more help to its citizens than any other developed nation in this world. It is because of white supremacy that we have withheld the human rights to safety, security, education, health care, public resources, child care, and more. It is white supremacy that wrote the very American narrative that even your most basic human rights must be deserved and earned.

Each of these characteristics can be traced back to the foundations and development of white supremacy to the society and culture we live in today. These traits have emerged from the development of white supremacy. They are the result of it.

It is not a coincidence that we are a society of humans walking around in a worthiness-chasing daze. Our society has destroyed our self-worth, convinced us that it’s our fault we don’t feel worthy, and has brainwashed us into normalizing toxic traits and behaviors in order to “earn that worthiness.”