The Tradwife Trend: The Far-Right Standard for the Ideal Woman
Women's rights are under assault for a reason
It turns out that wedding planning is a pretty complicated affair.
I’ve had a crash course in the spectacle recently; I’ve been making phone calls and drawing up lists of guests, fielding a thousand questions and researching countless businesses and catering options.
I never imagined there would be so much paperwork involved — and we haven’t even hit the legal side of marriage licenses yet!
I’ve got the wedding venue sorted, thank goodness. Now it’s the reception venue, and making a thousand decisions about a thousand tiny details.
How big will it be? Food? Dress code? Music? Photography?
The cake?!
I don’t know about you guys, but the cake is serious business for us—we’re splurging on that thing. My partner was adamant that our wedding is the perfect excuse to have the best cake of our lives.
Planning your wedding is complex, but it’s only part of what goes into making a marriage work in the long run. You and your partner need to be on the same page on so many different levels.
There are any number of things that can break a relationship over time. Failures of communication, differences in life goals and expectations, incompatibility in the bedroom, or even one person wanting kids when the other does not.
In our case, how we load the dishwasher was a make-or-break issue. I’m pleased to report that we’ve found a happy medium.
Before you go to tie the knot, all of these things need to be ironed out. Unless you’re into the tradwife lifestyle. In which case, who cares what both people want?
Only the husband’s opinion matters.
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I’m generally a big proponent of live and let live.
The way someone else wants to live her life has no bearing on mine; if it works for her and the people around her aren’t getting hurt, then I have nothing to say about it.
So when it comes to the tradwife movement, I try not to judge too harshly. It’s not the way I would choose to live, but every person has different dreams and aspirations.
I’m a classical feminist. As long as the consenting adult couple has entered into their relationship—whatever it looks like—by choice and in full knowledge of what it’s going to be like, more power to them.
Having equality and the freedom to choose how to live is the whole point. The more options the better.
For me, the problem comes when a woman is either forced into becoming somebody’s tradwife by religion or circumstance or when she uses her lifestyle to pressure, judge, and slander others who don’t live the way she does.
When choice is removed from the equation, I get tetchy. Having gone through an abusive relationship, I know all too well how easily a power imbalance can tear you apart.
For those who don’t know, a tradwife is a woman who lives her life by the old ‘traditional gender roles’. You know—a stay-at-home mom who obeys and serves her husband, typically religious and often married young.
Love and partnership is not usually the goal; it’s to marry quickly and dedicate the rest of your life to your husband. Your own desires and wishes for your life must align with him, or you must give them up.
The lifestyle is glorified by social media posts, glamorizing making food from scratch, keeping a garden, making your own clothing, and generally doing everything by hand. Bonus points if you pop out an alarming number of kids along the way.
All while praising God in his infinite grace, of course.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this on its own. Like I said, it’s not for me, but if they’re able to support that lifestyle in a healthy way and everybody in the family is happy and cared for, that’s awesome!
The defining characteristic that makes a tradwife distinct from your average stay-at-home homesteading mother, though, is her motivation.
It isn’t about choice for them. It’s about fighting back against the concept of feminism.
The majority of tradwife content you find online is just ultra-conservative propaganda in a pretty dress.
It is a lifestyle that promotes heteronormative conservative values. The woman is at home in the kitchen, and the man is the power and authority at the head of the family. It’s an extremely popular ideal on the authoritarian far-right, especially among Christian white nationalists.
How do I know it’s propaganda? The giveaway is the production value.
Think about it—have you ever seen a low-budget tradwife video? Have you ever seen cheap lighting, bad mic quality or bad rendering?
That’s not the norm.
The norm is nice lighting, super clear audio, and well-edited video content that takes hours to put together and fully render. Somebody devoted days of their time to making that, and they probably used expensive equipment and software to do it.
On top of all that, the woman in the video is always well put together, with flawless makeup and hair and a perfectly arranged home. Who does household chores in a pretty sundress, lipstick and heels?
That kind of video content is not something you just throw together, that’s a full-time job. It’s staged to present a fantasy for the audience.
Nobody is doing that for fun in between chasing around children, keeping the house spotless and making bread and cheese by hand every day. Being a stay-at-home wife and mother eats up your time like candy.
Anyone selling you ‘the simple traditional wife’ deal with content like that is selling you a castle in Florida. I promise you that off-camera, she is not practicing what she preaches.
She’s an influencer, and she’s selling you an ideology.
That may not sound like such a bad thing; what’s wrong with working from home and making content that resonates with people? It’s basically what people like me do for work, and it’d be hypocritical of me to judge it, right?
The problem is that tradwife content glamorizes something that carries significant potential for hardships and does nothing whatsoever to prepare people for them.
Living the ‘traditional’ lifestyle is no cakewalk. It carries a lot of risks that these influencers are not sharing with their audience.
Remember when I said that these relationships can cause a power imbalance? It is all too easy for women in the tradwife lifestyle to wind up trapped in a horrible situation that they may struggle to escape.
It creates a culture in which misogyny is embraced and encouraged, and it removes the autonomy of the woman in favour of granting full power to the man she marries.
The consequences can be severe, and they can wind up permanently crippling women’s lives.
Tradwives romanticize the ideal of being subservient to your husband.
He is the breadwinner, and you are the homemaker. You clean, you cook, you raise the children. You don’t work outside the home, and you live off of an allowance granted by your husband at his discretion.
You depend on your husband for everything you need, including the ingredients you cook with and the roof over your head.
Do you see the problem yet?
Let me ask you this—if you find out after getting married that your husband is abusive, or he’s a cheater…what are your options? How do you leave him when you have no resources?
Where will you go? Where will you live? How can you take your kids and find accommodations for you if you have no job, and no money of your own?
Financial abuse is one of the most common ways for an abuser to maintain control over their victim.
Another common method of control is to leverage religion to force compliance. For so many women who get pushed into the tradwife lifestyle, fundamentalist Christian beliefs are a huge driver.
Many girls from conservative Christian households are taught that their duty is to remain by their husband’s side, no matter how he treats them.
These women are to turn the other cheek, even to abuse, and divorce is not acceptable.
It’s up to God to judge him, not her. She’ll be rewarded for her faith and fidelity, even if it means suffering during her lifetime. That is her place.
Many of those girls grow up believing that ‘worldly’ women are sinful, and that to seek her independence with an education or career would make her a bad person.
The problem compounds because fundamentalists across many doctrines take a dim view of dating. They believe that courtship should be short, chaperoned, and chaste.
Ideally, they want the kids to marry off young and for them to figure out who they are together. Independence is not considered a virtue for young women, and the notion that women are complete people in and of ourselves isn’t preached.
The notion that she might not be interested in being a wife and mother—or indeed, might be gay, or bi, or transgender or a-spec—doesn’t enter the equation. The idea that she might want an education and a career is off the table.
Young women in fundamentalist Christian families grow up being taught that their purpose is to follow the man their father gives them to.
She doesn’t live for herself, she lives for her husband and for God.
Young couples are given no time to work out all of those compatibility issues before they say, ‘I do’. They’re legally and spiritually tied together for life, long before they find out what kind of person their new spouses are behind closed doors.
And if you have children, you’re even more stuck. To be a single mother is heavily stigmatized in most churches, and it’s considered scandalous for children to grow up in broken homes.
It’s easy to imagine how somebody might feel like they have no way out once the ring is on their finger.
In a perfectly healthy marriage, there’s nothing wrong with living in traditional gender roles.
One breadwinner and one homemaker can work fine, so long as you can afford it and your relationship is built on trust, partnership and communication. If you choose to go that route, you can make it work!
But the reality is that these ‘trad’ relationships are not always built like that.
I’d go so far as to say that the vast majority aren’t.
And even if your relationship is happy and healthy, even if you’re content as a wife and mother and your husband is perfect, there are still dangers. Divorce might not be on the horizon, but death, disease and disability certainly are.
Nobody likes to think about the potential of losing the person they love, but it’s a real threat that can happen without warning. If the burden of providing for the household is carried by one person, and that person is suddenly unable to bear the weight, what then?
In our capitalist society, you need to make money to keep your family fed and sheltered.
The picture-perfect ladies in cottage-core aprons that you see in TikTok videos do not present an objective view of real life and all of its myriad possibilities and trials.
They’re holding up a fantasy; an air-brushed glimpse into a curated gallery.
It’s what they want you to see, only the positives and none of the drawbacks. A homesteader’s dream, but without the need to clean up manure and get your heels dirty.
It’s a very tantalizing image, presenting the idea of simplicity and getting back to the way things used to be. But we can’t afford to ignore the very real harms that this trend is perpetuating.
We can’t ignore the loss of freedom that it demands of its adherents. We can’t ignore the misogyny that it advocates. We can’t ignore the potential for abusive dynamics and ruined lives.
We need to take this kind of content with a serious grain of salt.
Solidarity wins.
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“We can’t ignore the loss of freedom that it demands of its adherents. We can’t ignore the misogyny that it advocates. We can’t ignore the potential for abusive dynamics and ruined lives.”
I couldn’t agree more, having married very young into that environment where my church made it clear that leaving a cheating, emotionally abusive husband wasn’t an option. I never had peace, saw myself as never enough and constantly sought perfection. It was misery.
I pity most of these women, no matter how they may appear in their videos. (Most people only saw the “perfection” side of me.)And it greatly concerns me that they’re influencing young women who really don’t understand what they’re getting into…it’s basically a cult environment masquerading as a marriage. When you add children, it gets much more challenging to keep up the perfection and they’re being brought up to think little of women and highly of men.
It took me 20 years to get the courage to walk away. I lost many “friends” and my church, which was most of my daily life other than home and children. But I started a healthier, happier life and have never regretted it. I feel certain I saved my son from becoming like his father.
Thanks for writing this article. I don’t often share about my past, but maybe some young women will read your article and rethink that lifestyle. Maybe my comment can be a warning.