We can learn about ‘trad wives’ from Diane Keaton’s finest role

The “trad wife” trend online comprises a small but visible movement of women who advocate a “return to traditional gender norms” through domesticity and submission to their husbands. 

They tend to be conservative, and some regard them as anti-feminist — part of a movement called “lifestyle evangelism.” Trad wives are a counterpoint to the philosophy of Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” which urged women to overcome society’s expectations, take risks, and pursue their ambitions. 

Diane Keaton’s death is an occasion to reflect on these dueling ideologies. Keaton led an unconventional life — from her quirky personal fashion to her adoption of two children as a single mother after she was fifty. She also made a career of portraying women who were anything but “trad.”

Her arguably finest non-trad role was as Louise Bryant, an early 20th century journalist and radical in Warren Beatty’s movie “Reds.”  The film centers on Bryant’s epic entanglement with an American communist journalist John Reed, played by Beatty.  “Louise was never a communist,” an acquaintance of both later observed. “She only slept with a communist.”

In 1917, Bryant and Reed traveled to Russia to cover the Russian Revolution and produced vivid eyewitness books — hers, “Six Red Months in Russia,” and his, “Ten Days That Shook the World.” The latter is now widely regarded as a classic.

Bryant defied conventional expectations of women by insisting on creative and sexual autonomy in an era that offered women little of either. In “Reds,” Keaton brilliantly brought that defiance to big-screen life.

It’s tempting to label Bryant a “lean-in” heroine ahead of her time.  Yet both the lean-in and trad models offer lofty slogans but little understanding of human nature or how to live day-to-day while leaning in or behaving traditionally, especially for women with limited means.  How can a woman devote herself to “domesticity” if both she and her husband have to work full-time to support a family? Or how can she “submit” to her husband if he is abusive? How can a woman lean in to an exciting career when, as one put it, she was “terrified that my colleagues would judge me as not committed to my job if I tried to take more time to be with my baby.”

Bryant had her own struggles. After Reed’s death in Russia in 1920, she returned to journalism and then married the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family who later would serve as ambassador to Russia and France. They moved to Paris and had a daughter. Did she triumphantly lead a “trad” lifestyle — well, trad for an American living in Paris, anyway? She was, after all, an envy-of-us-all mother with a domestic life of governesses and devotion to her ambitious husband’s career.

Not quite. Although “Reds” did not tell this part of her story, she reportedly felt “useless” managing an upper class household. Her husband divorced her after he discovered her alleged lesbian affair. She lost custody of their child, became an alcoholic, and died in 1936 at age 51. By then, she and her book, her “lean in” achievement, were long forgotten, whereas Reed’s memory and his book endure to this day.

When it comes to assessing Louise Bryant’s life, or living one’s own, catchy slogans like “trad wife” and “lean in” aren’t much help, because life is never that simple.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”