The Rise of the ‘Tradwives’: Patriarchal Propaganda or New-Age Feminism?
By Molly Arabella Kirk | May 2024
A certain kind of young, submissive, soft-spoken housewife has recently blown up across social media, showcasing a luxurious and dreamy lifestyle of feminine leisure. Baking homemade sourdough from scratch, frolicking barefoot through luscious meadows, pouring raw milk into glass jugs, and homeschooling their many children. Enter the “tradwives”.
No one can argue there isn’t a seductive ease and synthetic nostalgia depicted in the lifestyle of a self-proclaimed “tradwife”. Beyond the filters, though, you may be able to see a rather fetishized depiction of domestic bliss carefully staged and set in gleaming sunlit kitchens. Here lie iron-cast gender roles and clear patriarchal, hetero-normative messaging: “a woman’s place is to get married to a man, stay at home, cook and clean”, casting our minds back to the 1950s. The 1950s minus the mental health epidemic faced by women, lobotomies, segregation, racism, inherent misogyny, and gender discrimination.
The “tradwife” movement, a self-explanatory portmanteau of “traditional” and “wife”, has been gaining traction over the last few years across social media platforms – especially TikTok and Instagram. According to Alena Kate Pettitt, a 38-year-old self-proclaimed “tradwife”, author of English Etiquette and Ladies Like Us, and founder of The Darling Academy website, ‘A traditional woman’s place is not under a man’s feet, but under his wing, by his side.’ 1 Similar self-proclaimed tradwives such as Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm) and Estee Williams (@esteecwilliams) typically speak in soothing, soft tones of serving their husbands and bearing lots of adorable children. Truthfully, many women would genuinely enjoy a day on the farm, taking hours to cook a hearty meal for their family on an AGA cooking range. It sounds luxurious and simple all at once, but one can’t help but wonder: is something sinister lurking beyond the façade of cottagecore simplicity? Just how simple is the lifestyle they’re campaigning, and is the performative nature doing a disservice to how laborious and vital farm work can be? @ballerinafarm, for instance, a part of the JetBlue family by marriage– her husband has a net worth of ~$450M. Is there anything that contradicts the ethos of a sustainable, green, simple, “local” life than a commercial airline? The AGA cooking range regularly featured in her videos is priced at ~$10-12K. Indicators of class and privilege have evolved into something more palatable and seemingly accessible. But they remain indicators of class and privilege just as much as a luxury car or vacation.
According to Sophie Elmhirst in The New Yorker, the tradwife movement appears ‘to be turning into something between a money-making exercise and an amped-up, kink version of cottagecore with political and religious overtones.’ 2 However, tradwives such as Estee Williams argue that there is no movement or menacing agenda behind the trend, that it is simply just women sharing an alternative lifestyle they chose willingly. They further argue that there is nothing more feminist than that.
Despite these careful assertions, a chilling example of how harmful the tradwife rhetoric can really be is the content creator ‘Wife with a Purpose’, who started the “white baby challenge”, encouraging Aryan men and women to procreate to combat the allegedly falling Caucasian birthrates. 2 Pettitt also provides some further insight into the alarming tradwife ideologies, claiming that a good tradwife ‘rejects distasteful elements of feminism’, including the allegedly absurd notion that “The Future is Female.” 1 Gwen The Milkmaid, once a popular Onlyfans creator, adds on TikTok that ‘feminism is not freedom’ and ‘is it just me, or are most women today completely blind […]? Protect femininity the way God created it to be […] This message is for all the young girls out there. Our culture is lying to you. Promiscuity, porn, premarital sex, abortions… None of these things will bring you true happiness.’ This is indicative of the fact that tradwives are not just showcasing their glamourous lifestyle online but also pushing expectations and a harmful, restrictive rhetoric of “womanhood” on their impressionable young viewers.
What these self-proclaimed pristine paragons fail to acknowledge from their pedestals is that they are turning their backs on a society daring to encourage an inclusive era of women empowerment. It also discounts the mostly linear progression of moving away from domestic restrictions to political and professional freedom that generations of women have fought for. Therein lies the greatest irony of conflating hyper-femininity with feminism: it is the very unaesthetic, unseemly feminist movement they seem to be rejecting that offered them the choice to be a “tradwife” in the first place.
Furthermore, many of these influencers are paid to post about their glamourous tradwife lives online. Without the sheen of beauty and the freedom of class and privilege, domestic duty is simply not that sexy. As Hadley Freeman in The Guardian summarizes ‘as much as the tradwives think they are being renegaded rebels by not working, their rebellion is based on their husbands earning enough to support a whole household. Whoa there, little rebels!’ 3
Ultimately, the beauty of the twenty-first century is that every woman has a choice, be it to join the workforce and become a corporate baddie or a satisfied stay-at-home wife. Likewise, preferring homesteading and cooking from scratch doesn’t make you conservative. In a world where women can work but often must do all the housework on top of that, experiencing burnout and giving up on professional life to focus on the family makes practical sense. As Monica Hesse summarises in The Washington Post: ‘Yes, we are allowed to have successful careers. But nobody had decreased the amount of laundry or errands that still needed to be run.’ 4 There is also nothing wrong with sharing that lifestyle with others so long as you make it apparent that this is your choice and not an expectation. It’s when you’re profiting from content that is both inaccessible and a mark of true privilege that it becomes a problem for younger, impressionable audiences.
The tradwife movement, whilst not an inherent threat to feminism at the present (being itself a niche sub-culture), has the potential to be damaging, as it continuously exposes young viewers to rigid gender norms and outdated, LGBTQ+ exclusive, heteronormative ideals. To allow influencers to encourage young girls to become a new generation of twenty-something housewives with no career prospects or protection from unexpected adversity is a collective failure by society.
In accordance with the very foundations of feminism, they should be allowed to choose their path and be equipped with the full weight/burden of that choice, not brainwashed into homesteading by well-placed subliminal TikTok messaging and religious, anti-feminist, Instagrammable propaganda.
Cosplaying a Don’t Worry Darling-esque simulation does not entail the harsh realities of living in the 1950s. The rose-tinted nostalgia of the 50s and romanticizing a past of allegedly “simpler times” is not the solution to modern-day problems and the dissatisfaction that women now often face. At a time when it is becoming almost impossible to achieve any level of financial security and where women are increasingly objectified and sexualized by society at large, seeking refuge in a fantasy is a natural solution. But that is all it is, in the end: a fantasy.
The Stepford Wives – published in the 70s by Ira Levin, is a satirical horror novel that does a great job of explaining what can be so terrifying about a society that has completely submitted to such harmful ideologies.
Running a home can be thankless and exhausting, especially when you have no other options or no one to support you. There is nothing simple or stable about domestic violence or financial abuse – very real problems that women face every day. Likewise, wearing a longer skirt and wedding ring does not act as a deterrent to sexually aggressive men and to imply otherwise is incredibly harmful. As Harmeet Kaur states in CNN: ‘All they need to do is to read Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ to see that their yearning for a simpler life is misplaced.’ 5
To summarize, as stated by Monica Ainley: ‘If my daughter one day expresses an interest in the tradwife life, I will steer her in a different direction.’ 6
References
1https://www.thedarlingacademy.com/articles/what-is-a-trad-wife/
2https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-trad-wife
5https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/27/us/tradwife-1950s-nostalgia-tiktok-cec/index.html
6https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/trad-wife-trend
Further inspiring sources
https://www.thecut.com/2023/09/tradwife-content-influencers-conservative-ideology.html
https://www.instagram.com/infinitescrollpodcast/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html
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