The Darling Academy/InstagramA British housewife gave up her job and set up an academy that teaches women good manners, etiquette, homemaking and how to ‘spoil their husbands like it’s 1959’.
Alena Kate Pettitt had worked in marketing, but decided to quit when she got married and welcomed her son into the world.
The mother settled down in the Cotswolds and is now a proud ‘#TradWife’; a ‘homemaker’ of her generation who is ‘happy to submit to, keep house, and spoil [her] husband’.
While women have battled issues of sexism and equality to be seen as more than mothers and wives, Pettitt told the BBC that’s exactly what she was born to be.
She explained:
The culture [in the 1990s] was anything but what I enjoyed and it definitely made me feel like an outsider.
It was all kind of, let’s fight the boys and go out and be independent and break glass ceilings. But I just felt like I was born to be a mother and a wife.
What I really related to were the old shows of the 1950s and 60s.
While working made her feel ‘unsatisfied’, Pettitt now enjoys making sure her husband comes home to a cooked meal made of food she’s purchased with a ‘monthly allowance’.
The mother discovered a number of other ‘traditional’ women who enjoyed living the same lifestyle as her and has since set up a website titled The Darling Academy, which encourages women to put their husbands first.
The academy also shares recipes and tips on etiquette, supporting a return to ‘traditional English manners, lifestyle and values’. Pettitt gives further advice in her two books, Ladies Like Us and English Etiquette.
While the ‘#TradWife’ trend seems like a huge step back for women, Pettitt has argued feminism is about choices.
She commented:
To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you’re not allowed to stay at home – to me is taking a choice away.
Pettitt certainly makes a valid point, and if she’s happy staying at home, cooking, cleaning and caring for her family then she has every right to do so. A more troublesome aspect of the lifestyle is the repeated references to ‘living like it’s 1959’, when staying at home was less of a choice for women and more of an expected trait.
The trend is certainly not for everyone, and the mother has had her fair share of backlash, but she believes shaming people for ‘traditional’ lifestyles is counter-intuitive because that in itself is ‘not progressive’.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.