vivdunstan

Given the surge in popularity of "tradwife" influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It's a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren't fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it's possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn't have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the "trad life," you'll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It's an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants -- and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother's career as an influencer.

Because that's the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you're old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn't really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women's work. Even if a saint's day or other religious festival meant the men weren't going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it's a special day.

But what do I mean when I say "home production"? It's a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it's inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn't, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they'll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you're to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that's still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody's doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they're so labor-intensive that it's vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how "home production" turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home -- but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who's doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don't have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn't entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of "simple living" out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it's true they weren't entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of "his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!" We don't actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality -- you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all -- then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn't necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire "trad" movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it's worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot -- and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/06/12/new-worlds-home-production/)