cottage core

I’m working on my tradwife merit badge this summer.

Tradwives are part of an internet subculture ostensibly about the aesthetics of well-run and beautifully appointed domestic life but that is actually doing some heavy lifting in reviving “traditional,” oppressive gender theory and far-right politics.

I am nobody’s wife, I don’t think I belong to any particular internet subculture, and refusing to submit to traditional gender roles is what has been getting me in trouble for decades, now. One angry man even wrote me a letter a decade or so ago - written on a typewriter and mailed to my home address - accusing me of “usurping mens’ authority.”

I’ve definitely earned THAT merit badge.

The tradwife badge attempt is a pretty sure and certain failure, and I will not be sad at all about it.

BUT. It turns out that when I have time, bandwidth and energy to do what I WANT to do and not just what I HAVE to do, I end up spending a lot of that time in domestic pursuits. To wit:

I have three gardens going this year, and one of them is filled almost entirely with FLOWERS. I went up to that garden plot the other day to clear out some wildflowers that were past their prime, but when I got there, a goldfinch was flitting around, feasting on the buffet of wildflower seeds that the blooms had dropped, and that seemed like the epitome of gardening success to me, so I just left it as it was.

I’ve been baking sourdough since the winter, and in addition to my weekly loaves I’m dabbling in discard cookies, crackers, and homemade pop-tarts. I’m not great at bread, yet, but I’ve kept my starter bubbling and fed a bunch of people, and that feels like a win.

I’ve spent a bunch of Saturday mornings in my kitchen, processing the produce from my gardens and the farmshare I get each week. Last Saturday, I told myself not to waste the beautiful summer day in the kitchen but just couldn’t help myself: I pickled the cucumbers I picked from my own vine, made my weekly bread dough, and improvised two kinds of garlic scape pesto.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Agnes showed up to dinner with a gorgeous serviceberry pie that she’d baked and confessed that she had actually FORAGED the berries from our neighborhood trees. She offered to take me foraging, so I we spent an afternoon picking berries off the trees by the city soccer fields and then I MADE HOMEMADE FORAGED SERVICEBERRY JAM, which should surely be enough to get me some kind of merit badge.

All the sourdough baking and kitchen wins gave me confidence to make homemade pizza with a friend who visited from out of town, topped with farmshare kale and NASTURTIUM blooms that I grew from seed.

Agnes, my foraging friend, calls all this “cottage-core,” which is probably way closer to what I’m doing than working my way toward any kind of tradwife badge. Cottage core doesn’t carry the icky, repressive gender expectations with it, and it might be the exact opposite of alt-right politics.

Call it what you want: it turns out, I just like growing, baking and making things. Especially when they are pretty.

When I lived and worked in contexts where women’s authority and power was seen as suspect, where women’s voices were ignored and undermined, where I was regularly dismissed as too weak and womanly to matter, it felt like a liability to be any more feminine than was necessary. I realize how gross that sounds; it felt that way, too. But it’s the same impulse that makes women in politics dress exclusively in power suits: if you replicate male versions of authority then maybe they won’t notice that you’re not really one of them.

I’m not in charge of anything or anybody other than myself, these days, which means I don’t have to perform any version of power other than the kind I already, inherently, own. I like reading and writing and thinking and arguing, and I like doing those things in public despite the centuries’ worth of cultural baggage that declares women cannot or should not do any of it. But I also like watering my tomatoes and kneading dough that rises in my great-grandmother’s pyrex bowl. I like spending a couple of hours in my kitchen and decorating pizzas with the edible flowers I grew from seed. I like figuring out flavors and making jam and feeding people.

I’m never going to be a tradwife influencer. But I will definitely show you these pictures and brag about all my feminine, domestic art successes.

Maybe I’ll get the Cottage Core badge, instead.