When their child was a year old, they moved out to a suburb of Cheltenham, where they could afford more space and grow a garden, and Pettitt could make the Dreamhouse a reality: a round table, warm light, home-cooked food. But, like many new mothers, she felt isolated, still wrestling with the insecurity that had beset her since her teens. At a playgroup one day, a woman, who Pettitt said seemed to have light emanating from her body, approached her and asked her to tea. The woman invited her to join her church.
Eighteen months later, Pettitt was baptized in a modern Pentecostal outfit, where the services were relaxed and progressive, led by song. During the baptism prayers, she recalled, she felt her body fill with a honey-like substance packed with thousands of words. It was a sign: she had to write a book. She worked while her son was at preschool, the words pouring onto the page. In 2016, Pettitt published what turned out to be something between a guidebook to traditional womanhood and a memoir of self-transformation through faith. Pettitt called the book “Ladies Like Us.”
If the trad-wife community’s sacred text is the Bible, “Ladies Like Us” is surely high on the list of further reading. The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 31, sets out some fundamentals, including rising in the dark, fearing the Lord, having strong arms, and working with flax. This is the homesteading strand of trad-wifedom; “Ladies Like Us” is more concerned with ideals of femininity. In a chapter titled “Find a Mentor,” Pettitt lists her own: Jacqueline Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Jane Austen, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, and “my favourite of all, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.” Pettitt loved Catherine, now the Princess of Wales, for her style, the “conservative yet flattering knee length dresses,” and her ability to handle the pressure of her role as “a commoner done good.” She seemed to represent one of Pettitt’s messages—that anyone can become a lady, if they learn the right skills. “There is nothing wrong with the dream you had as a six-year-old,” she wrote, “wanting to be wooed, to wear girlish and feminine things, marry your true love, bake pies, raise babies and live happily ever after.”
A Christian publisher was keen to put out the book, but Pettitt decided that, with Carl’s help, she would do it herself. Branding was required. Pettitt, deploying her marketing nous, came up with the notion of the Darling Academy, a kind of online “finishing school” for traditional young women. She never offered classes, but she created a Web site, where she posted long, instructive articles: “How to be beautiful”; “Why nice girls will always finish first”; “Ladylike ways to deal with sneezes and sniffles.”
Pettitt’s next book, “English Etiquette,” followed in 2019. The idea was to rescue the idea of etiquette from the clutches of snobbery—to make it less about social climbing and more about kindness. The instructional tone continued: the book included advice on public conduct, entertaining, and modest clothing, and a list of the precise items required in a man’s wardrobe, including dress shirts and oxford shoes.
In a section on obeying the head of the household, Pettitt set out her position clearly. Marriage might be a partnership, but “there will always be one top dog,” and, in a traditional English family, that job is occupied by the father. The husband pays the bills and supports the family in “strength and defence,” making him the head of the household. The wife supports his decisions, assuming they are made fairly. When I asked her to expand the point, Pettitt used the analogy of a company: “It’s basically like trusting the Finance Manager to help run your business,” she told me, in an e-mail.
Her output, enhanced by a dogged Instagram effort, caught the attention of the press. In early 2020, a BBC film crew arrived at Pettitt’s house and showed her ironing Carl’s shirts on a floral-covered board, then standing in her kitchen, decorated with British-flag bunting, while explaining how the couple split the roles in their marriage. Multiple newspapers picked up the story, and a week later Pettitt appeared on “This Morning,” a popular U.K. breakfast show, where the female host, Holly Willoughby, looked aghast as Pettitt revealed that she would have to consult her husband before buying a sofa.
Pettitt didn’t use the term “trad wife,” but it didn’t take long for others to link her to what was, at this point, still a niche social-media meme. Her pronouncements, on marriage especially, provoked outrage among women, including newspaper columnists and viewers who waded online to air their responses. (It’s “like a frilly version of fascism,” one YouTube commenter said.) In the press, some made the link between the American trad wives and the alt-right or even white supremacists, who, Hadley Freeman wrote in the Guardian, “are extremely down with the message that white women should submit to their husband and focus on making as many white babies as possible.”
At the Darling Academy, Pettitt wrote of a growing “apron-clad army,” fighting back against the haters. “I am part of a community of women who are from a vast array of ethnicities, cultures, and faith beliefs—and we all have a good laugh at this nonsense,” she said. “It isn’t racist or overtly conservative to want to be a good housewife and mother, it’s just common sense!” To the press, in which she was now appearing on a regular basis, she issued a broadside: “So long as you, the mainstream media, continue to try and cancel traditionalism, and the at-home role of the wife and mother—you’ll see me in the opposite corner ready to fight for it.”
Declare war and you’ll soon discover enemies. Pettitt was met with dark looks in supermarkets. Messages on social media questioned her non-working credentials, given that she appeared to have written two books. Most of all, there was an outpouring of bewildered fury from women who believed her promotion of marital submission undid much of the feminist work that had been accomplished during the past half century. But, amid the trolls, Pettitt told me, she began to receive what she called “War and Peace” e-mails, epic in length, from women who felt seen: their secret domestic desires were finally voiced. Pettitt realized that she was no longer alone: other women felt as she did. She consulted her husband, who told her she had to carry on.
Like any leader, Pettitt now had a public image to maintain: a stream of podcasts and radio shows on which to appear; insatiable social-media platforms to fill with content. It was obvious what worked. When she wore jeans and a T-shirt on Instagram, the reaction was muted. When she appeared as “an idealistic, pretty, wrapped-up-in-a-bow housewife, the likes would go through the roof.” Pettitt would respond with flawless algorithmic logic and post another pretty picture. “And so it goes.”
Feed the algorithm or die. Any ambitious social-media user knows this (and if they don’t they can buy Jasmine Dinis’s guide, “The Road to 30K: A Stay-at-Home Mom’s Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Instagram,” for $14.99). Pettitt did her hair. She wore the dresses. Soon, she was living the merciless existence of a full-time influencer, without the income. Her family often found themselves unable to eat the homemade banana bread until she had captured it adequately for her feed.
Swept up in the quest for likes, Pettitt lost perspective, until e-mails of a different kind started to arrive in the wake of the early media interest. Women who were goths, gay, overweight, or disabled wrote to her saying that they also loved being homemakers but felt they didn’t fit the brand. Pettitt was mortified: “I was, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s not about what you look like. It’s about your life style and how you are happiest and how you serve your family.’ ”