Tradwife

A tradwife (a neologism for traditional wife or traditional housewife) is a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles and marriages. Some may choose to take a homemaking role within their marriage, and others leave their careers to focus on meeting their family's needs in the home.

According to Google Trends, online searches of the term tradwife began to rise in popularity around mid-2018 and reached high levels during the early 2020s, before dropping again. The traditional housewife aesthetic has since spread throughout the Internet in part through social media featuring women extolling the virtues of behaving as the ideal woman.

Tradwife aesthetic

A Frigidaire refrigerator advertisement from The Ladies' Home Journal represents the lifestyle idealized by many tradwives

The tradwife subculture is based on advocating for traditional values, and, in particular, a 'traditional' view of wives as mothers and homemakers.

Tradwives are diverse demographically, and may have a variety of cultural inspirations. Influences on trend range from 1950s-era American culture, Christian religious values, conservative politics, choice feminism, and neopaganism.

The aesthetic tends to be soft, gauzy, or otherwise feminine.

One key aspect of appearing to be a tradwife is reclaiming – or at least appearing to reclaim – some leisure time, as women, and especially mothers, who earn an income often have a double burden.

Consumer choices

The tradwife aesthetic tends to glamorize a retro aesthetic from white suburbia in the 1950s. She may wear a dress, an apron, and high heels. Her house may be decorated in trendy pastel colors. The tradwife aesthetic has a significant influence on home decorating.

Others may prefer a back to nature appearance.

Practices

See also: Traditionalist Catholicism

Key to the tradwife identity is being a stay-at-home wife or a stay-at-home mother and the various activities involved in managing the household such as cooking, cleaning, managing laundry, and tending to vegetables. Additionally, special attention is paid to the importance of raising children.

A report in America magazine, a Catholic publication, has also reported that some Catholic tradwives have adopted the practice of wearing veils at mass, a practice embraced by some Catholic women as a means of reverence and empowerment.

One suggested reason for the criticism of tradwives is that they are reviled for appearing to truly live out an idealized home life in practice, when most social media users only achieve the superficial appearance, e.g., through a decision to wear a retro dress or to buy a trendy kitchen item.

Finances

Some women who identify as tradwives prefer a division of labor wherein their husband manages family finances more broadly while they focus on managing food and household consumables. A high-profile example of this is Canadian Cynthia Loewen, a former Miss Earth Canada, who abandoned plans to pursue a medical degree in order to be a full-time housewife. She stated that she finds fulfillment from the arrangement of her husband as the breadwinner and her in charge of the home, and that she is "more happy as a result".

However, many of the tradwife internet celebrities earn an income outside the home, in addition to running their influencer businesses on social media. For example, Hannah Neeleman runs food-related businesses with her husband, and Nara Smith is a professional model.

Demographics

Racial balance

Commentators have noted that "there is more class than racial diversity in tradwifery, though the content is not as white as one might assume".

Among men seeking traditional wives, East Asian and Southeast Asian women are considered the ideal. There is a shared cultural notion among White American men that Asian women make better wives, because they are perceived as being more feminine, submissive, and exotic-looking.

While most tradwives are white, a growing number of Black women are embracing the concept of traditional marriage, not explicitly using the tradwife neologism, but instead framing their identity within a "submissive" or "Biblical" marriage. These Black women claim that "traditional marriage is the key to liberation from being overworked, economic insecurity, and the stress of trying to survive in a world hostile to our survival and existence". This perspective has been criticized as lacking awareness of broader structural and social issues in American-style capitalism.

Political orientation

Critics often stipulate that tradwives embody what has been described as "toxic femininity", or internalized sexism. Critics claim this is a tactic used by male alt-right adherents to recruit more women to far-right causes.

Despite the link to extreme right-wing ideologies, not all tradwives endorse extreme ideas and ideology is not an integral part of the subculture. Prominent British tradwife influencer Alena Pettitt posted on social media in 2020 that she was "dumbfounded" by the media's "smear campaign" against tradwives, arguing they were all being unfairly linked to extremism.

Charles Sturt University academic Kristy Campion, who studies extremism, has researched tradwives and says that people should avoid "denouncing all tradwives as far-right extremists, holding them accountable for views they may not hold and demonising what is, for many women, an extremely personal choice".

Seyward Darby discussed the tradwife aesthetic in her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism, and shared interviews with women who call themselves traditional. She found that some women in the movement espoused tenets of the American political far right, including white supremacy, antisemitism, populism, and other ultraconservative beliefs. Other researchers have identified a wide range of political views among tradwives which, while primarily conservative, range from the moderate to the extreme.

Relationship with feminism

The tradwife culture has a complicated relationship with feminism, being at times criticized or supported by feminists.

While some who follow the tradwife aesthetic suggest that it is a rejection of feminism in favor of a return to simpler times and family systems, journalist Wendy Squires supports women's right to be a tradwife and describes the ability to choose as a feminist success. She rebuked critics saying:

"The last thing we need as women is for some of us to feel superior and judgmental of others. Putting women down is the patriarchy's job, not feminism's."

On the other hand, tradwives are underpinned by shared right-wing belief systems to varying degrees. For many, this entails a rejection of mainstream feminist histories and theories. Anti-feminist tradwives view the first, second, and third waves of feminism as oppressive, and as a rejection of traditional femininity, womanhood, and motherhood. The fourth wave of feminism, which highlights empowerment, internet advocacy, and movements such as the metoo movement, is perceived by many far-right-leaning tradwives as a man-hating ideology. Terms such as "toxic femininity" have been reclaimed as an antifeminist statement, on the premise that feminism promotes a culture of hating men.

Some Christian conservative women and tradwives oppose forms of feminism that they believe contradict the Bible, which states that "the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God".

Social media

The tradwife movement is a social media-based subculture. Multiple platforms, notably TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, are used to commodify and spread the conservative ideologies underpinning the movement. Platforms such as Reddit and 4chan are also used to promote embracing traditionally biological relationships, namely between a man and a woman. Influencer marketing strategies, the showcasing of private lives, and contemporary social media use promote the commercialisation of traditional heteronormativity and gendered relationships.

According to algorithmic research conducted by Media Matters, the tradwife audience is likely also viewing conspiracy theory videos, as recommendations for conspiracy videos increase concordant with tradwife viewership.

The rising success of contemporary tradwives is driven by clever and active use of social media and persistent positioning as online influencers. Videos such as 'a day in my life' showcasing activities such as cooking from scratch, cleaning, caring for children, packing the lunches of their working husbands advocate for gender roles wherein the man holds social and political power, and women for the most part are confined to the home as a wife and mother.

Tradwives are leading large-scale platforms encouraging traditional forms of dating, wherein the man pays and is the dominant group in culture and society.

See also

• Be fruitful and multiply
• Complementarianism
• Cottagecore
• Culture of Domesticity
• Natalism
• Neopatriarchy
• Separate spheres
• Wojak

Further reading

• Sitler-Elbel, Frankie (Spring 2021). From Swiffers to Swastikas: How the #tradwife movement of conventional gender roles became synonymous with white supremacy (Report).
• Proctor, Devin (February 3, 2023). "The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized Domesticity". Persona Studies. 8 (2): 7–26. doi:10.21153/psj2022vol8no2art1645.
• Sykes, Sophia Marie (2023). 'More than a housewife' : tradwives : the influencers of right-wing extremism : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand (Thesis). hdl:10179/18281.
• Sykes, Sophia; Hopner, Veronica (April 18, 2024). "Tradwives: Right-Wing Social Media Influencers". Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 53 (4): 453–487. doi:10.1177/08912416241246273.
• Mattheis, Ashley A. (2021). "#TradCulture: Reproducing whiteness and neo-fascism through gendered discourse online". Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness. pp. 91–101. doi:10.4324/9780429355769-7. ISBN 978-0-429-35576-9.
• Tebaldi, Catherine (May 15, 2023). "Tradwives and truth warriors: Gender and nationalism in US white nationalist women's blogs". Gender and Language. 17 (1): 14–38. doi:10.1558/genl.18551.
• Alexander, Ruby (2023). BirthStrikers and Traditional Housewives: Reproductive Power as Resistance in an Era of Crisis? (Thesis). hdl:2123/32353.
• Valderrama Rotella, Marta (2023). Gender and political identities in social media. An analysis of the discourse strategies used by the #Tradwives movement on Instagram (Thesis).

External links

• Media related to Tradwife at Wikimedia Commons