Tradwife

Based on Wikipedia: Tradwife

The Paradox of the Modern Traditional Wife

Here's a curious contradiction of our time: some of the most successful female entrepreneurs on the internet have built their brands by telling other women not to work.

They call themselves tradwives, a portmanteau combining "traditional" and "wife." They post videos of themselves in vintage dresses and aprons, baking sourdough from scratch, packing lunches for their husbands, and caring for their many children. Their aesthetic evokes the American suburbs of the 1950s, or sometimes a romanticized Victorian homestead. The videos rack up millions of views. The sponsorship deals roll in. And nobody seems to notice—or perhaps care—that these women advocating for financial dependence on husbands are, themselves, generating substantial independent income.

The Rise of an Internet Subculture

The tradwife phenomenon emerged as a distinct movement in the early 2020s, though the concept of a traditional wife has existed throughout human history. What changed was the platform. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube provided the perfect stage for these performances of domesticity.

The hashtag #tradwife became a magnet for content. Videos titled "a day in my life" showcased women cooking elaborate meals from scratch, folding laundry with military precision, and homeschooling children—all while looking impossibly put-together in clothing that would be wildly impractical for actual housework.

Alena Kate Pettitt, a British influencer considered one of the pioneers of the movement, rose to prominence after a 2020 BBC interview where she expressed her desire to serve her husband. She wrote two books on being a woman in the home rather than the workforce. But as she watched the aesthetic spread and mutate across social media, she offered a telling observation: the tradwife concept had "become its own monster."

What Exactly Does a Tradwife Believe?

At its core, the tradwife subculture advocates for traditional gender roles. Women should be mothers and homemakers. Men should be breadwinners and heads of household. The wife should defer to her husband in matters of family finances and major decisions, while focusing her energy on domestic management—cooking, cleaning, childcare, and creating a harmonious home environment.

The influences on this movement are surprisingly diverse. Some tradwives draw from 1950s American nostalgia. Others cite Christian religious values, particularly complementarianism—the theological belief that men and women have different but complementary roles in marriage and church. Still others come from a choice feminism perspective, arguing that true liberation means being free to choose homemaking without judgment. A smaller subset connects the lifestyle to neopaganism and back-to-nature movements.

One key appeal of the tradwife identity is the promise of reclaiming leisure time. In modern households where both partners work, women often face what sociologists call the "double burden"—they work a full day at their jobs and then come home to a second shift of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. The tradwife ideal suggests an escape from this exhausting duality: if you're not working outside the home, at least all your labor is concentrated in one domain.

The Aesthetic and Its Contradictions

The visual language of tradwife content tends to glamorize a very specific version of the past. The setting is typically a beautiful home decorated in trendy pastel colors. The tradwife herself wears a dress, an apron, and sometimes high heels—the kind of outfit that would have been reserved for special occasions even in the 1950s, not daily housework. Everything is clean, calm, and aesthetically pleasing.

This creates an immediate problem of authenticity.

The reality of staying home with children involves chaos, mess, repetitive tedium, and exhaustion. Anyone who has actually done this work knows that looking camera-ready while doing it is either impossible or requires its own significant labor. History professor Marissa C. Rhodes has pointed out that many tradwife influencers promote incorrect beliefs about how women actually lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—periods that were far grittier and more physically demanding than the pastel-hued videos suggest.

In February 2025, a controversy erupted in the tradwife community when an influencer known as "Patriarchy Hannah" was exposed for misleading her followers. She had presented herself as an ultraconservative married mother of fourteen. She was not. The incident highlighted a broader question that had been simmering beneath the surface: how much of what we see in tradwife content is performance?

The Business of Being Traditional

Consider Hannah Neeleman, who runs the popular Ballerina Farm brand and has been called the "Queen of the Tradwives." Her content shows her milking cows, making butter from scratch, and raising her eight children on a Utah farm. The aesthetic is gorgeous. The message is clear: reject the corporate grind, return to simpler times.

What the videos mention less prominently is that Neeleman is co-CEO of Ballerina Farm alongside her husband. The company sells products like sourdough starter and butter-making supplies. She's not just documenting her life; she's running a business. The same is true of Nara Smith, another prominent tradwife influencer, who is also a professional model.

Many tradwife influencers have monetized their lives through brand deals, merchandise sales, and affiliate marketing commissions. They earn real income. In some cases, substantial income. Yet their content promotes an ideology of women being financially dependent on their husbands.

This creates a strange dissonance. A woman in the 1950s—the era these influencers aesthetically invoke—could not get a credit card in her own name without her husband's permission. She had far fewer options if she needed to leave an unhappy or abusive marriage. The modern tradwife influencer has her own income streams, her own platform, her own brand equity. She is, functionally, a successful businesswoman. But her business is telling other women that successful businesswomen have it wrong.

The Girlboss and Her Shadow

To understand the tradwife phenomenon, it helps to understand what it emerged in reaction to.

In the late 2010s, particularly on platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, the "girlboss" became a cultural archetype. The term originally celebrated women in leadership and entrepreneurship—female founders, executives, and go-getters who were succeeding in traditionally male-dominated spaces. Lean in. Shatter glass ceilings. Have it all.

But the girlboss ideal attracted criticism over time. Critics argued it represented a specifically White feminism that focused on individual achievement without challenging underlying structures of inequality. What good was having more female CEOs if the companies they ran still exploited workers? The girlboss, in this view, was about acquiring personal wealth and status while leaving systemic problems untouched.

The tradwife emerged partly as a counterpoint. Where the girlboss was ambitious, the tradwife was content. Where the girlboss pursued wealth, the tradwife rejected materialism (or so she claimed). Where the girlboss was individualistic, the tradwife emphasized family, community, and stability.

In this framing, becoming a tradwife wasn't submission to patriarchy—it was rejection of capitalism's endless demands. Why run the corporate rat race when you could bake bread and raise children? Why climb a ladder when you could tend a garden?

The Demographics Surprise

You might assume tradwife content is exclusively the domain of white Christian conservatives. The data suggests otherwise.

A 2025 study that sampled sixty-one tradwife influencers on TikTok found that approximately half were white, while the other half were not. The movement has attracted women from diverse backgrounds and for diverse reasons.

Refinery29 reported on a growing number of Black women embracing traditional marriage arrangements. They often don't use the tradwife label, preferring terms like "submissive marriage" or "biblical marriage." Their reasoning is sometimes framed differently than their white counterparts: traditional marriage, they argue, offers liberation from being overworked and economically insecure in a world that is hostile to Black women's survival and existence.

This perspective has attracted its own critics, who argue it lacks awareness of how broader structural and social issues in American capitalism created those conditions of overwork and insecurity in the first place—conditions that a traditional marriage might cushion but cannot solve.

The Political Entanglements

Here is where the tradwife phenomenon gets thornier.

Researchers have linked the tradwife subculture to far-right movements, including the alt-right and its softer cousin, the alt-lite. This doesn't mean every woman who posts videos of herself making homemade pasta is a white supremacist. But the overlap is significant enough that researchers have noticed it.

Seyward Darby, in her 2020 book "Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism," interviewed women who identified as traditional. She found that some espoused tenets of the American far right: white supremacy, antisemitism, populism, and ultraconservatism. The tradwife aesthetic, with its emphasis on white suburban nostalgia and producing children within traditional family structures, resonates with certain white nationalist ideologies.

British journalist Hadley Freeman put it bluntly: the tradwife message that white women should submit to their husbands and focus on having as many white babies as possible is "especially popular among White supremacists."

But the picture is genuinely complicated.

A 2025 study found diverse ideological beliefs among TikTok tradwife influencers. The one consistent thread was anti-feminism—but that anti-feminism ranged from moderate conservatism to extreme positions. Historian Kristy Campion of Charles Sturt University has cautioned against "denouncing all tradwives as far-right extremists," noting that for many women, the lifestyle is a personal choice unconnected to any specific political ideology.

Alena Pettitt herself, the British tradwife pioneer, posted in 2020 that she was "dumbfounded" by media attempts to link tradwives to extremism, calling it a "smear campaign."

The Algorithm's Role

There's another layer to this story, and it involves the machinery of social media itself.

Research by Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors media misinformation, found something striking about tradwife content. The more tradwife videos a user watched, the more likely they were to be recommended conspiracy theory content. The algorithm, doing what algorithms do, was drawing connections between tradwife audiences and conspiracy theory audiences.

This doesn't mean tradwife influencers are promoting conspiracy theories. But it suggests that the platforms' recommendation systems have identified overlapping viewer interests. Someone who watches videos about traditional gender roles may also be receptive to videos questioning mainstream narratives about vaccines, elections, or other topics. The algorithm doesn't make moral judgments; it optimizes for engagement.

Many tradwife influencers don't discuss politics openly. Some explicitly say they avoid political content. But this apparent apoliticism may itself serve a political function. By presenting traditional gender roles as aspirational, aesthetic, and divorced from ideology, these influencers normalize ideas that are, in fact, deeply political. The message spreads without triggering the defenses that explicit political content might.

The Hidden Labor

Perhaps the deepest irony of the tradwife movement is what it obscures about domestic work itself.

Tradwife ideals advocate against wives and mothers working outside the home. But this framing treats housework and childcare as if they aren't real work. People who stay home rather than participate in the paid workforce make enormous contributions to society. They cook, clean, do laundry, provide childcare, maintain homes, and perform what sociologists call "emotion work"—the labor of managing family relationships and emotional wellbeing.

This is demanding work. It is often tedious and rarely glamorous. And it is almost never compensated.

The curated videos on social media rarely show this reality. They show the sourdough coming out of the oven golden and perfect, not the hours of mixing, kneading, shaping, and waiting. They show the clean house, not the endless cycle of cleaning that is immediately undone. They show happy children in matching outfits, not the negotiations, tantrums, and exhaustion that are part of every parent's daily experience.

Social media, by its nature, favors the highlight reel. But tradwife content takes this further by implying that the highlight reel is the full picture—that being a traditional homemaker is peaceful, beautiful, and fulfilling in a way that working outside the home could never be. For women who try to live up to this ideal and find it grueling, the dissonance can be painful.

The Wealth Question

There's one more uncomfortable truth buried in the tradwife aesthetic: it requires money.

The beautiful farmhouses, the designer kitchens, the organic ingredients, the matching children's clothing—these things cost money. Lots of it. The lifestyle being portrayed is often upper-middle-class at minimum. The tradwife ideal is frequently associated with a certain level of wealth, both historically and today.

For a family with one income to afford a nice house in a good school district with a well-equipped kitchen for all that from-scratch cooking, that one income needs to be substantial. This is not achievable for most American families. The tradwife lifestyle, as portrayed on social media, is a fantasy available primarily to the already privileged.

And yet the influencers promoting this lifestyle rarely discuss money. They don't mention the income from their content creation. They don't acknowledge that their situation is made possible by resources most families don't have. The message to viewers is: you could have this too, if only you made different choices. The reality is: you probably couldn't, regardless of your choices, because you don't have access to the same financial foundation.

Why It Resonates

Despite all these contradictions, the tradwife phenomenon clearly resonates with millions of people. Why?

Part of the answer is exhaustion. Modern life—and modern work especially—can be draining in ways that feel newly intense. The expectation of constant availability, the blurring of work and home life, the sense that you can never quite do enough—these pressures are real. The tradwife fantasy offers an escape. What if you could just opt out?

Part of the answer is aesthetics. The videos are genuinely beautiful. There's something soothing about watching someone make bread, fold laundry, arrange flowers. It's a form of aspirational content that feels more attainable than watching someone yacht around the Mediterranean, even if it isn't actually attainable at all.

Part of the answer may be a reaction against certain strains of feminism. Some women felt unseen by the fourth wave of feminism, which focused heavily on issues like sexual assault and workplace equality. If you weren't in the workforce, or didn't want to be, where did you fit? The tradwife movement offered an alternative identity—one that validated choices that mainstream feminism sometimes seemed to dismiss.

And part of the answer is simply that social media amplifies extremes. The tradwife who goes viral isn't the one living a quiet traditional life without comment. It's the one who makes the most shareable content—which means the most visually striking, the most provocative, the most ideologically charged. The algorithm rewards the outliers, and so the outliers shape our perception of what the movement is.

A Complicated Relationship with Feminism

The tradwife philosophy has an inherently fraught relationship with feminism. Some adherents frame it explicitly as anti-feminism—a return to "simpler" times before women's liberation complicated everything. Others invoke choice feminism, arguing that true freedom means being able to choose traditional roles without social sanction.

Critics from feminist perspectives argue that tradwives embody toxic femininity and internalized sexism. By advocating for women's subordination to men, the argument goes, they reinforce patriarchal structures that harm all women. The fact that some tradwives succeed financially through their content doesn't change this; if anything, it makes them more effective vectors for ideas that limit other women's horizons.

From a Black feminist perspective specifically, some scholars argue that the tradwife aesthetic inherently promotes alt-right and far-right ideals. The "traditional values" being celebrated are deeply connected to historical ideals of white domesticity and white supremacy—the suburban 1950s, after all, was an era of legally enforced racial segregation.

But these critiques don't fully account for the diversity within the movement, or for the women of color who have adopted tradwife-adjacent identities for their own reasons. Like many cultural phenomena, the tradwife movement contains multitudes—some of which contradict each other.

What Remains

Strip away the politics, the contradictions, and the performative elements, and something real remains at the core of the tradwife appeal.

There is dignity in domestic work. Raising children is important. Creating a home is meaningful. The labor that keeps households running deserves recognition and respect, whether or not it's compensated in dollars.

These truths got tangled up in a social media phenomenon that is often superficial, sometimes deceptive, and occasionally connected to genuinely harmful ideologies. The tradwife influencer who earns six figures while telling other women not to work is engaged in a contradiction. The algorithm that leads viewers from cooking videos to conspiracy theories is doing something worrying. The aesthetic that presents an upper-middle-class lifestyle as achievable through attitude alone is selling a fantasy.

But the woman who genuinely prefers to stay home with her children and finds meaning in that work—she's not a contradiction. She's just making a choice. The question is whether the tradwife phenomenon, as it exists online, actually serves her interests, or whether it exploits her values for clicks and commerce while promoting a political agenda she may not share.

Like so much of what happens on social media, the answer is probably: both, and it's complicated.