Linn Therese wants to become a stay-at-home housewife

The short version

• Linn Therese Solheim (32) wants to be a stay-at-home housewife when she has children herself. Solheim believes that it contributes positively to society to focus on the family and the children’s upbringing.
• The “Tradwives” movement is criticized as anti-feminist, but also as a symptom of reverse equality and the mother’s responsibility in the home.
• Trend researcher Gunn-Helen Øye believes that the housewife movement shows a desire for a flexible family life and a slower pace.

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32-year-old Linn Therese Solheim from Sogndal has a partner, but has postponed having children of her own. Among other things, because she wants to stay at home when the time comes.

She is not alone.

On social media, women all over the world front homemade food, lower priority career, more time for the children, walks in the woods and fields and time to feel and take care of themselves.

The movement is called Tradwife A movement on social media where women promote traditional housewife roles. and is referred to as anti-feminist in a comment in the Washington Post, but also as a symptom of skewed equality between men and women in working life.

Jump off the hamster wheel

Solheim believes that Norway’s forgotten workplace is the work done at home for the family.

– I don’t want to stay at home to lie on the sofa. What is done in a home is a job, and a great value to society, even if it does not contribute directly in the form of kroner and øre. Over time, society will see positive effects from this, she believes.

Being able to jump off the hamster wheel, to calm down at home, Solheim believes is the key to a good life for parents and children.

– The children are our future and the kind of upbringing they get will affect society later. The food they eat, and attachment to parents. Many people feel forced to give their children ultra-processed food because they don’t have time to cook nutritious food from scratch, she claims.

Her experience is that very few people who work full-time have the capacity to focus equally on work and home.

– By being a stay-at-home mom, you have both time and energy to take good care of your home and family, says Solheim.

– Being a stay-at-home mom means giving your children an optimal upbringing

– What about gender equality?

– It is completely impossible for there to be full equality. Men and women are not the same. We should rather become more concerned with equality, and make more arrangements for each gender, believes Solheim.

She clarifies:

– I am not against women working, and I do not believe that leave should be reserved for mothers. It must be up to each individual family. Many will probably choose for the mother to stay at home for the entire leave for obvious biological reasons.

She believes many people experience a stigma associated with downgrading their career in order to be at home with their children.

– Being a stay-at-home mom means giving your children an optimal upbringing, and I would like it to be seen as having a real value and recognized to a greater extent in today’s society.

– Most people will not manage on one income in 2024, is it therefore only the privileged who can jump off the hamster wheel?

– It is of course far from everyone who has the opportunity to do this, especially not now with increased prices and interest rate hikes. Personally, I save as much of my salary as possible every month, so I can have my future child at home longer than the leave lasts.

Solheim is aware that her views do not resonate equally well with everyone.

For some it suits working full time and for the children to thrive in nursery school, and if it’s the best for the family then that’s great, she explains.

– At the same time, I hope that all of us who feel the opposite will be heard. And that the policy changes. Just look at the high sick leave rate, the turnover in many professions and the fact that fewer children are being born.

– By staying at home, women lose pension points, which leads to an economic imbalance. How do you see it?

– That is true, but my impression is that people are much more concerned with how they will feel as pensioners than life here and now. I am aware that I may be on minimum pension, but for me it is worth it. Personally, I think it is more important to be there for the children when they are children.

Solheim does not believe that we should return to the decades that belonged to housewives “prime time” and idyllize it.

– But we have gone from one extreme to the other, and perhaps we can find a middle ground.

– Before, what was done at home was recognized and seen as a job. Now we have replaced the housewife and everything she did with time constraints, ready meals and less time with the children.

Trends

The hashtag tradwife has over 100,000 posts on Instagram and Tik Tok.

The biggest profiles promoting the lifestyle are the Americans Hannah Neeleman aka Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith. They have respectively 16 and 9 million followers on the two social platforms combined.

– What is expected of a modern woman today is to work as if you do not have children, and raise the children as if you do not work, says the American author Teal Swan.

During a video on Tik Tok called “The problem with the modern mother”, Swan speaks out about what she sees as one of the biggest women’s problems in modern times.

– I know that I have to be careful about saying the opposite of what everyone wants to hear – that you can achieve both, you can achieve everything. But that is not true, she continues.

Swan is also seen as a spiritual influencer with controversial statements. On Instagram she has 1.3 million followers, and on Tik Tok there are over 880,000 who follow her.

Trend researcher: – Roots in something deeper

Trend researcher and social anthropologist Gunn-Helen Øye believes that the housewife movement that is currently trending is further proof that people want to live flexible family lives.

– Before, this was something that was reserved for privileged women on the western edge with rich men. It probably still is to some extent, but it is also an interesting shift. It seems that this is rooted in something deeper and different now, says Øye.

She points to the rush and pressure many women experience after having children.

It is about rushing back to work, to training and continuing life as if nothing had happened.

– Due to several years of forced slow living then hybrid solutions have appeared which make it to a greater extent possible to live a quieter life, and make arrangements for yourself and your family.

– People almost feel a loss of life by being in the hamster wheel. Having said that, not everyone has the opportunity to work reduced hours or stay at home full-time, adds Øye.