Meghan Markle has bottled it. Or more precisely, she has been making jam. Branded jars of her strawberry preserves, adorned with one of those frilly caps you see at village fete produce stalls, were distributed this week to assorted celebrity friends to post on social media (though possibly not for actually eating, given the restrictions of a Hollywood diet). This housewifely offering marks the debut of American Riviera Orchard, which sounds like one of Jamie Oliver’s children but is in fact the name of the Duchess of Sussex’s new commercial venture, under which she plans to flog everything from tableware to yoga kit to her reinvented self.
In a retro, sepia-tinted launch video, the woman we once hoped would put a rocket up the royal family is seen blissfully stirring a saucepan and arranging flowers. It’s only three years since she wrote an open letter to US congressional leaders lobbying for paid family leave for working parents, sparking wild speculation about a run for political office, but suddenly that feels like a very long time ago. For now at least, it’s goodbye to the much-mocked empowering feminist podcasts and hello to the safety of her Californian kitchen. Meghan is, it seems, entering her tradwife era.
If you’re a woman of a certain age, and given to scrolling exhaustedly through Instagram or TikTok after a long day, you’ll almost certainly recognise the genre. Think apron-wearing American homesteaders, posting wholesome reels of themselves canning peaches and feeding chickens; or wives posting syrupy tributes to the husbands rising at 5am for work so they can stay home with their babies and/or sourdough starters. And if you also happen to be an exhausted working mother of small children, so deep in the trenches you can barely summon the energy to microwave a ready meal, there may well be times when you’re secretly tempted. Not so much by the reality of actually giving up work as by the fantasy; the dream of a life that seems mainly to involve drifting serenely around your immaculate house, pausing occasionally to stir a bubbling pot of something delicious, rather than simultaneously juggling aggressive out-of-hours emails and a small person demanding you wipe their bottom.
It’s not the jam itself that appeals but the luxury of having time to make jam if you wanted, and to waft about feeling warmly maternal instead of constantly frazzled and guilty, and as if you’re failing on all fronts. That and the idea of not having to work all hours to earn the money to pay the nursery that enables you to work all hours for a boss who still ultimately hasn’t forgiven you for getting pregnant.
Like most fantasies, its downsides are so screamingly obvious as to barely need spelling out – did feminism teach us nothing about depending on a man financially? – but nonetheless, it returns to taunt each new generation of knackered mothers, inviting us if not to live a lifestyle that for most people is simply unaffordable, then at least to buy into the trappings.
Once upon a time, that meant floral Cath Kidston ironing-board covers and Nigella Lawson’s baking book How To Be a Domestic Goddess, whose cupcake recipes were (as Lawson herself has always stressed) designed chiefly for playing house after a long week in the office. But lately, the romanticisation of housework has taken a more political turn. Some of the more militantly bible-reading tradwife influencers have a distinctively white supremacist air, with their huge broods of children and the darkly apocalyptic hints they keep dropping about why exactly they are stockpiling quite so much canned fruit. Meanwhile, Britain’s NatCons fret about the falling birthrate and argue that instead of subsidising childcare, governments should pay mothers to look after their own children – even as the soaring cost of that childcare threatens to do the reactionaries’ job by pricing some women out of work altogether.
Of course, that isn’t remotely the world Meghan is asking women to buy into. All she wants is for you to watch the cookery and lifestyle show she’s about to present on Netflix, and ideally keep her in the lifestyle to which she’s become accustomed by splurging on a few branded napkins. Beyond that, presumably she hopes all the people who have been accusing her ever since she married Prince Harry of being supposedly too pushy, too political, or too angry, will like her better repackaged as an unthreatening housewife; that this softening of her edges will finesse the Sussex brand into something that can be seriously monetised.
Rather like Michelle Obama deciding to quit her high-powered job and style herself “mom-in-chief” once her husband became president, something about Meghan’s domesticated rebrand smacks of defeat. But as with Obama, who faced a similarly vicious backlash for being a modern black woman in a position of power and who ultimately used that bland cover to get a great deal done, it’s hard to blame the duchess for strategically retreating under fire. All too often, a woman’s withdrawal to the domestic sphere is a sign that the public one has been made intolerable for her, a story that’s anything but sweet. So it’s all the more intriguing that those twee promotional jams arrived in a basket filled with lemons, whose sour sharpness is traditionally used to offset all that cloying sugar. In life as in cookery, for the duchess it will be key to get that balance right.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
