Influencers organizing around the hashtag #Tradwife have claimed the mantle of historical memory by tracing a line from Victorian wives and mothers to idealized 1950s housewives to themselves. They claim to be a new generation rediscovering womanly ideals despite the efforts of feminists to dupe women. They argue that women were once safe under patriarchal protection, able to revel in domesticity, and returning to that state would improve lives.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]One tradwife influencer, for example, has written that “women attending universities and having careers have made women much more unsafe than they were living under their fathers’ roof and then their husbands’” and argues that feminism “hoodwinked” women into believing they were oppressed.
Yet, the picture of the past that tradwife influencers paint is based on falsehoods. Their narratives emphasize archetypes imposed on 19th-century women by men rather than historical reality. Nowhere is that clearer than in the lives of the women of Lily Dale, N.Y. Lily Dale’s women used the Spiritualist town, founded in 1879, as a proving ground for their experiments with authority and activism. They were traditional wives and mothers but not the submissive, conservative figures romanticized by tradwives. Their stories demonstrate that the bucolic past nostalgically portrayed by tradwives was never the historical reality for women; women experienced real oppression and they sought self-actualization beyond prescribed gender roles out of pragmatic need not feminist indoctrination.
Though Tradwife influencers have romanticized an image of women devoted to the home, the reality is that throughout history, most women engaged in income-generating work — from managing estates to selling goods — out of economic necessity. Only a privileged minority of wealthy white women could afford to withdraw from the workforce starting in the late 18th century. Even then, however, contrary to the tradwife narrative, they did not live private lives of domestic bliss.
Instead, many dedicated themselves to religious innovation. Religions like Spiritualism sprang out of the Second Great Awakening which emphasized personal, emotional connections to spirituality that weren’t mediated by religious authorities, who were almost all men. Mediumship, the mechanism of spirit communication, happened inside of middle- and upper-class homes, a collision of the public and private spheres. Many women flocked to the religion after experiencing the loss of children and spouses in a time of high mortality rates due to modern medicine only being in its infancy. The religion’s teachings gave them an avenue of personal fulfillment, which they took up with gusto.
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Spiritualism’s most authoritative mediums, Maggie and Kate Fox, RS Lillie, Mary Theresa Longley, Leonora Piper, and Elizabeth Lowe Watson, were wives and mothers. Women mediums traveled around the country, often as breadwinners, performing for mixed audiences in massive auditoriums. Other women joined them to help build Spiritualist organizations, serving in positions of authority as trustees, board members, and officers. Rather than serve as helpmeets to men, their husbands often took a backseat.
For example, Jack Lillie, a musician, deferred to his ambitious wife, R. S., a gifted medium who traveled the American west lecturing about Spiritualist theology. In 1889, Lily Dale’s first historian, Josh Ramsdell labeled R. S. Lillie the “queen of the Spiritualistic speakers and teachers” who could hold “the interests of larger audiences than any women it has ever been our pleasure to hear.” Jack Lillie recognized his wife’s gifts and dedicated himself to her career.
This trend of male deference was reflected in the culture of Lily Dale, where it was often the wives, not the husbands, who wielded spiritual and community authority. The town was an intentional community or planned utopia incorporated by Spiritualists in Western New York in 1879. Lily Dale modeled itself after Methodist revival camps and dedicated itself to the faith and science of Spiritualism.
More than half of the community’s founding pioneers were women, most of whom were typical upper class, 19th-century wives and mothers. With them in charge, Lily Dale flourished into a resort town, a summer destination, a thriving year-round community of the faithful, and a hub on activist lecture circuits dedicated to suffrage, temperance, abolition, and socialism.
Rochester medium Elizabeth “Libbie” Lowe Watson epitomized the women of Lily Dale. She began her public career as a preacher and medium in her early teens. She married oil tycoon Jonathan Watson, also a Spiritualist, in 1861. In addition to raising nine children, Libbie continued her ministry. She also advised her husband’s business decisions through her mediumship. Libbie was one of the founding members of Lily Dale though she later diverted her energies to the West Coast and fighting for women’s suffrage. In a 1911 speech, she argued, “There was never laid a stone in the foundation of this republic but that woman had a part in it.”
Similarly, Marion Skidmore, perhaps the most important figure in Lily Dale history, was a cherished friend of suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw. She organized Lily Dale’s Political Equality Club in 1887. While her husband, Thomas, also held important positions on the Lily Dale board, he often traveled for his contracting business, leaving the lion’s share of this work to Marion. As a Trustee and Vice-President of the Lily Dale Assembly, Marion orchestrated the development of the community into a lakeside resort town and has been called the “mother of Cassadaga.” Her lasting legacy is the Marion Skidmore Library which is still in operation today, a testament to her administrative acumen.
While Skidmore did most of her work from the comfort of her Lily Dale home, she and the rest of Lily Dale’s women traveled unaccompanied, organizing and pursuing political connections. One day, while traveling by train, Skidmore met another wife and mother, Abby Louise Pettengil. The two struck up a friendship, bonding over their belief in Spiritualism. Pettengill’s curiosity was so piqued that she impulsively canceled her travel plans and went to Lily Dale instead. She joined as a trustee the next year, buying up surrounding acreage to enlarge the town and naming the old growth forest surrounding the town after her granddaughter Leolyn. Pettengill lived a large part of her life in Lily Dale, serving as President of the Lily Dale Assembly for many years.
The Pettengills, one of the founding families of Cleveland, were fabulously wealthy. This was typical among Lily Dale’s influential women. It was wealth that freed them from working for wages and whiteness that freed them from racial oppression.
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Yet, the affluent white women who spent their time at Lily Dale knew they were lucky to experience the progressive ideals of a Spiritualist community and the comfort of financial stability. They redirected the labor they did not expend at home toward activism that expanded options and legal protections for all women, which suggests that, however fulfilling was their Spiritualist work, their lived experiences as wives and mothers exposed societal problems that convinced them that change was necessary.
That meant advocating for temperance and women’s suffrage. For example, while women were initially excluded from the Temperance movement, they bore the brunt of their husbands’ alcoholism because they had no control over how men spent their wages, and no recourse for spousal abuse, rape, or neglect. That drove their activism, which transformed the movement.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women’s organization in the country, was founded seven miles from Lily Dale and shared membership and resources. By 1883, the WCTU took on the cause of suffrage as well, noting that outside of places like Lily Dale, men were unwilling to cede political authority to them unless they had the vote. Temperance activist Helen Stoddard said, “Of one thing we are positively certain, king alcohol will never vacate his throne in the politics of our nation until the home forces are brought into action.”
Despite their embrace of traditional lives as wives and mothers then, the women of Lily Dale lived very different existences than the image that tradwife influencers paint of 19th century life for women. They didn’t spend their time thanking their lucky stars that they need not leave the safety and sanctity of the home. Instead, while they had the resources to delight in domesticity, they worked and sought self-actualization beyond the home, separate from their husbands. They fought for suffrage, temperance, religious and philosophical innovation, and other reforms — in direct response to oppression that they had experienced and witnessed. In many cases, their husbands took a back seat.
The lived reality of the women of Lily Dale exposes the fallacies underlying the #tradwife phenomenon. Feminist activism wasn’t based on fooling women to give up something great. Instead, it arose as women noticed problems plaguing their lives and moved to address them.
Marissa C. Rhodes is assistant professor of history at Saint Leo University and a producer at Dig: A History Podcast. Her co-authored book Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale is published by Three Hills, imprint of Cornell University Press.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
