Throughout history, women have been consigned to a marginalised, domestic role. We were expected to have children, look after said children, keep the house in order, never disobey our husbands, remain silent, remain beautiful and if we didn’t like it we didn’t have much of a choice. Now, women do have a choice in what we want to do with our lives. So my question is this: why are some women trying to turn back the clock, and why the hell are we aestheticising it? That, my friends, is the subject of our conversation today.
The tradwife movement rose to prominence around the same time we all got quarantined and downloaded tiktok, around the beginning of 2020, and has grown rather un-coincidentally under the re-election of Donald Trump. Above all, my central concern with the tradwife phenomenon is not the desire for some women to embrace traditional models of femininity and domesticity. What concerns me, is that some influencers explicitly advocate turning back the clock on women’s rights, and these messages can be wrapped in an appealing, romanticised aesthetic, tied up in a bow and fed through people’s algorithms so that they consume it without really questioning the ideology underneath. And that’s what makes it so sinister.
Now, I want to preface this by saying there is nothing wrong with choosing to be a housewife or a stay at home mum. The beauty of feminism is that it has given us choice. In most cultures, women are no longer forced into domesticity, we are given an education and entitled to the same career pathways as men. If a woman chooses to live a more traditional lifestyle centred around taking care of her family as opposed to pursuing a career, then that’s her choice, and she should’t be automatically labelled as ‘anti-feminist’ because of her role as a housewife.
In a paper on ‘Tiktok Tradwives’, Kate Scott and Lindsay Day suggest that the concept of Tradwives ‘has emerged as a controversial phenomenon that intertwines traditional gender roles with harmful racial and political ideologies, with concerns arising over their influence on young people’ [1]. They also argue that the women within this community make up the so called ‘womansphere’, a feminine response to the ‘manosphere’ with whom they aligned on the belief that ‘‘contemporary ‘woke’ politics oppress conservatives and threaten their idealized (white) gender-essentialist worldview; where women are submissive homemakers and men are strong breadwinners’’ [2].
And what Scott and Day are getting at here is one of the crucial issues with this emerging tradwife culture: if the manosphere wasn’t bad enough, now we have women advocating for their own rights and freedoms to be limited, which is what makes the movement so damaging to feminism. The great irony in all this, of course, is that if we really did revert to a traditional society in which women were made to submit to their husbands and consigned to the domestic sphere, they likely wouldn’t even have a platform to speak on.
One of the key issues with women promoting these kind of traditional values and glamourising submission to their husbands is the threat this kind of financial vulnerability can pose to women. Think about it, if a woman is a housewife, and has no source of income of her own, and is by all means financially tied to her husband, then what happens if something goes wrong? If he cheats on her, abuses her, or if they simply fall out of love, what is the women left with? She has no career, no money of her own, probably children she still needs to take care of, meanwhile he still has everything: the money, the house, the car, a job. And this is what causes a lot of women who are in this position to stay in abusive or unhappy relationships, because they’re trapped. That’s why this runs deeper than merely valuing traditional roles. If a woman is completely financially dependent on a man, she isn’t free. If a woman is taught that a man can provide everything for her, what happens if he leaves and takes everything from her? I’ve heard countless stories online of former tradwives having to completely rebuild their lives after their husband leaves, and it’s heartbreaking to see. That’s why I think it’s so important for women who do want this kind of lifestyle to maintain an element of their independence. Get an education, start a side hustle, have something for yourself to fall back on in case things go wrong. Because at the end of the day, the hand that feeds you can also be the one to starve you.
Undeniably, there will be men out there who love this kind of power, who love the idea of women being more traditional so they can take on an authoritative role in the relationship and let their wife do all the domestic chores. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting a more traditional relationship if that’s what both parties want, there is a fundamental problem with the expectation on women to naturally fall into this domestic role. Obviously, with so much of the tradwife belief system being rooted in religion, there are many men who believe a woman is intended to be his ‘helpmate’ (Genesis 2:18), whose main purpose in life is to help him on his ‘mission’, although I don’t know what kind of mission these men claim to be on. While there’s ongoing debate as to whether Christianity is innately misogynistic, there are Christian communities that interpret the Bible in this way, and genuinely believe that women are subordinate to men, which leads me to believe what I think we can all agree on: why the tradwife lifestyle would appeal to a certain category of men. But then why does it appeal to women? Some of these tradwife influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers so clearly there are people watching them, looking up to them, admiring their way of life. I guess a lot of that comes from the ability to romanticise almost anything these days; and with toxic work culture and the increasing desire for escapism, the idea of a peaceful, domestic life, to many, might sound rather appealing.
But again, curling your hair and putting on a perfectly polished outfit to make sourdough bread and post it online isn’t the problem. The problem is that we have women out there romanticising a lifestyle whose values diminish female freedoms. The problem is that we have women out there being vocal about the fact they would happily give up their right to vote, and encouraging other women to think the same way, we have women out there advocating for abortions to be banned, for a woman’s own bodily autonomy, to be removed, we have women out their suggesting that your husband should own your body, and some that go as far as to say consent doesn’t exist in marriage! The scary thing is, all of the things I have mentioned are rights that women have acquired in relatively recent years. We were given the right to vote in 1918 in the UK, abortion made legal in the UK in 1967, and premarital rape became illegal in the UK in 1991. That last one I find particularly alarming, as should all of you.
An interesting study by Sophia Sykes and Dr Veronica Hopner, conducted on 36 tradwife influencers, gives us a great idea of the spectrum on which these women lie. Throughout this article, I have argued that not every tradwife is necessarily pushing the same anti-feminist narrative. And I think that’s a really important distinction to make, so as to avoid villainising women for simply choosing a more traditional life. To make this distinction, Sykes and Hopner propose the idea of a ‘Tradwife Landscape’, suggesting that tradwife influencers can largely fall into three categories, ‘Conservative Right’, ‘Alt-Lie’, and ‘Alt-Right’, going from least to most extreme. Conservative Right tradwives, they observe, share the least harmful content, documenting their lives as stay at home mums and subtly promoting traditional gender roles. The Alt-Right, coming under their bracket of ‘Militia Tradwives’ advocate much more explicitly for white supremacy, anti-feminism and traditionalism. [3]
The study shows us that some tradwives make mostly harmless content centred around their lives as homemakers, while others actively reject feminism and encourage their followers to do the same, which is an extremely dangerous narrative to push, especially with the amount of impressionable young girls on social media these days. And I think that’s the crux of what I’m trying to get at: the tradwife movement isn’t just an aesthetic, it reflects a wider cultural push to repackage traditional gender roles as the ideal of modern womanhood. And for some of its most prominent voices, the ideal of domestic femininity is inseparable from religious conservatism and political opposition to changing gender roles.
So I encourage you all to really think about the ideology behind this kind of content. Social media influencers will only ever show you what they want you to see; it’s easy to romanticise things; it’s easy to mask political propaganda when it’s so heavily aestheticised - and I’ll leave you with that thought.
References
[1] Scott, K., & Day, L. (2026). ‘TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media.’ Gender and Education, 38(6), 716–733.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Sykes, S., & Hopner, V. (2023) ‘Tradwives: The Housewives Commodifying Right-Wing Ideology’