On Tradwives and the Rise of Conservatism in Western Pop Culture
Janelle Ackom, Staff Writer
A 1950s housewife offering her breadwinner husband a spoonful of food to taste-test. Photo source: CNN
WHEN VIDEOS of young, married, white women in retro outfits touting the notion that a woman’s place is at home and other right-wing views trickled onto my Instagram, I was mystified. I couldn’t believe that their imitation of prejudiced 1950s values and structures, disdain for vaccines, pasteurized milk, and feminism, and their use of Biblical scripture to justify it all, was completely unironic. As a Christian, I often get faith-related content on my feed; but, suddenly, these videos of ultra-conservative, anti-feminist, Christian nationalist wives were replacing them, their doctrine alien to me.
The formula? Aesthetic frames depicting a picture-perfect life of daily, intricate meals laboriously hand-prepared by the woman (decked in a long, flowing dress) using wholesome ingredients in vast kitchens situated in immaculate homes. Children often appeared beaming as they frolicked outdoors.
On the surface, the videos can feel like utopias: amazingly scenic with an apparent atmosphere of peace. However, the infused right-wing rhetoric reminds us that this lifestyle isn’t one simply of choice, but of a sense of obligation fuelled by gendered, racial, quasi-religious, and socioeconomic lines.
I would discover that this phenomenon I was witnessing was the tradwife. A portmanteau for “traditional housewife,” it denotes a married female influencer who forgoes (conventional) gainful employment for full-time domestic labour, raising children, and letting her husband make the important familial decisions and money.
A tradwife is not simply a stay-at-home wife, but one who, as Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse states, “romanticizes it in a retro, nostalgic way where [they’re] looking back not only to the way things worked in the ‘50s, but the values that families had in the ‘50s.” As one of the original tradwife influencers, Alena Kate Pettitt, put it, the tradwife submits to and spoils her husband “like it’s 1959.” This position is defended by the argument that women are not inferior to men, but simply were created for a different role: a viewpoint rooted in complementarianism, a school of thought within Western Christianity.
Complementarianism’s rise in online Christian spaces partially explains the tradwife’s trend—and they both directly reflect a general rise in Western conservatism. The burning question is, “Why?” What’s spurring this boom in conservatism not long after the girlboss movement of the 2010s?
The answer is found in the current political landscape of the West.
By the time Covid-19 struck, women were struggling against an “always-on” work culture, flatlining wages, and a worsening caregiving crisis. In a work culture where women are expected to outperform their male colleagues for lower wages, returning to a past where men were breadwinners and women were homemakers can appear like a sweet respite.
Catherine Rottenberg, associate professor at the University of Nottingham examining neoliberal feminism, explains that especially in America, where there is no universal healthcare, a gender wage gap, and unreliable access to decent childcare, tradwivery can provide a temporary solution to these larger issues—a solution with an ideological cover.
Estee Williams indeed chose her lifestyle after burnout. She took on a challenging course load in university while working, which was all too much. She realized that she didn’t want to experience the stress her mother did as a single, working parent. She says, too: “I didn’t want to see myself struggle in school and… in work. I wanted to figure out what my purpose was. When I became a strong spiritual woman, I figured out myself.”
Part of tradwife ideology is refusing to recognize the crises of childcare and overwork as structural problems in favour of simply blaming feminism. Tradwives’ anti-feminist stance isn’t surprising; however, Rottenberg sees the tradwife response as reflecting a specific failing in Western liberal feminism.
She writes that liberal feminism pushed for middle-class women to join the workforce as part of an emancipatory agenda. Yet, if the workplace is toxic and makes us sick, then entering the workplace hardly feels emancipatory.
Tradwives exemplify an anti-modernity sentiment that has been brewing in Internet culture and beyond for years.
Youth today are up against a slower economy, causing them to view the past with rose-tinted (and fictitious) glasses. Economic crises are proven to shift political beliefs and preferences to the right, which tends to fixate on and romanticize the past. We’re currently seeing this effect.
Since the end of the Cold War, liberalism has dominated political ideology in the West. However, global crises exposed major flaws in neoliberal economic policies, causing increasing wealth disparity and declining trust in traditional institutions. In response, conservative movements have gained traction, touting nationalism, economic protectionism, and cultural preservation.
Several global crises have severely affected the economy, the most established being the Covid-19 pandemic. Its aftermath caused supply-demand issues, resulting in inflated goods and services. Inflation exacerbates flatlining wages, which then reduces purchasing power.
It was during 2020 that tradwives started becoming popular. During the quarantine, millions around the globe turned to domestic pastimes to cure boredom, such as baking bread and growing food. This pushed the tradwife lifestyle to many’s algorithms, which—paired with its polarizing nature—cemented the content as more than a fleeting trend.
However, we cannot talk about the rise of conservatism and the tradwife without addressing “backlash politics”: a retrograde political reaction aiming to revert to a prior social condition. This prior condition can be one that is mostly an imagined or white-washed nostalgia. Since backlash politics revere a past condition, they consider the status quo as fundamentally and crucially deficient.
Annie Kelly, a journalist and researcher of anti-feminist and far-right digital cultures, depicts tradwives and far-right movements as a Venn diagram. While some tradwives (including POC), simply hold conservative beliefs on gender roles in relationships, some on the alt-right use tradwife aesthetics to recruit white women to their movement.
Such tradwife accounts use rhetoric that indexes white nationalist ideas like “replacement theory.” One tradwife influencer who goes by “Wife With A Purpose” online was scrutinized in 2017 for issuing a “white baby challenge,” where she pushed her followers to have as many white babies as her.
On another topic, Rottenberg writes that in a time when normative gender roles and dominant notions of sexuality have been challenged and in flux, while work life feels grueling, the defining of rigid gender roles and clutching of “traditional” values might seem like a refuge for some.
This echoes the historian Kathleen Belew: “At bottom, trad-wife culture has implicitly or explicitly in it a distrust of the modern social order.”
The irony with tradwives is that in their “rejection” of the modern social order, they become entangled in and profit from it. Tradwives claim not to work, yet they film, edit, and upkeep a social media presence, some for their monetized accounts. They “reject” feminism but reap its benefits: their movement relies on entrepreneurial women who utilize social media, courses, advice books, and products to market being a tradwife as a desirable identity, as Rottenberg states in a CNN-addressed email. Tradwives don’t reject neoliberal capitalism, but embrace it.
Furthermore, the tradwife lifestyle is a pursuit of the privileged. Take Hannah Neeleman, a popular tradwife and octomom who operates under “Ballerina Farm” online, sharing content from her Utah ranch. Although her life seems simple and “no-frills,” Neeleman’s father-in-law founded several airlines, making him and his son millionaires.
For ordinary people, in a time when inflation, housing prices, and a high cost of living are creating immense financial strain, the tradwife movement glosses over the risk of a family being financially dependent on one person.
As relationship expert Nicole Moore told Parents, none of the trending tradwife videos admit that being a “happy” tradwife depends largely on the household’s wealth and your husband’s quality of character. For every seemingly wealthy tradwife on social media who appears to glide effortlessly through her tasks, there are countless others who struggle financially, feel utterly overwhelmed by it all, or are dealing with subpar husbands and don’t have the means to leave them.
I’ve personally seen how controlling and financially abusive men can be with their wives when they’re the sole breadwinner and expect her one-sided submission. Although different lifestyles work for different people, there is a danger in how the tradwife movement incorporates ideology that romanticizes, imitates, and seeks to propagate an era’s values that only serve the white man and subjugates all else. Additionally, the immense risk that tradwives tightrope over due to their dynamic with their husband is one which no one thinks will happen to them but is universally true: the hand that feeds you can also starve you.
