In a TikTok video with more than 1.6 million views, tradwife influencer Estee Williams explains what the buzzy term means. “We believe our place…our purpose is to be homemakers,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that we are trying to take away what women fought for.”
TikTok content
But then Williams calls upon a popular bit of tradwife rhetoric that upholds the exact framework women fought to dismantle. “Tradwives also believe that they should submit to their husbands and serve their husbands and family,” she says.
Williams is not the only woman to embrace the tradwife aesthetic with its patriarchal undertones and flowing dresses. Tradwives—at least in their TikTokified image—bake homemade bread with perfect manicures and keep spotless homes. It takes a lot of work to run a household in this way, but tradwives suggest that their lives are characterized by feminine leisure and dependence on their husbands. If it sounds performative, it’s because…well, it is.
Tradwives also proudly declare themselves anti-feminist. In one TikTok clip—which appears on a now private account but has been commented upon by multiple other creators—an apron-clad TikToker tells viewers “don’t tell the feminists but I would rather stay home and cook and clean.”
TikTok content
To some, this type of message seems purely retrograde. “The language that they’re using about submission to their husbands reminded me a lot of the legal frameworks that I studied in the late 18th century, which has serious implications,” says Jacqueline Beatty, PhD, a historian of early-American women and gender. She goes on to list what happened to women after marriage two centuries ago: “[They would] give up or lose their independent legal identity. They didn’t really have the power to earn money on their own, and anything that they did manage to earn would become their husband’s.” In short, they had extremely limited economic and legal power. “The most troubling component is women not just accepting this but advertising it as a viable or preferable way of life,” adds Beatty.
But to me the issue with tradwife culture isn’t that these women have chosen to opt out of the traditional workforce or that they find personal fulfillment in the domestic sphere. It’s not even that they are promoting a highly unrealistic (and highly curated) vision of domestic life that is economically and otherwise unavailable to many of us. The choice to focus on home and family is, at least as I see it, a valid one. The real issue is that the tradwife ideal is becoming conflated with stay-at-home motherhood, undoing some of the more nuanced, hard-earned understanding of domestic labor that has recently emerged.
I made the choice to stay home in 2018, leaving a career as an editor that had taken me six years and a master’s degree to build. It was the era of girlboss culture, when both professional acquaintances and friends of mine regularly talked about how they could never sit at home, as they put it, with kids all day, how they couldn’t conceive of any serious professional leaving a title and a salary on the table. That prospect felt, in their words, so 1950s.
When they learned I was leaving my job to be home with my children, they looked at me as though I had regressed—not just in my own worth but back to another time entirely. At my ob-gyn’s practice, a physician asked me when I’d return to work after maternity leave. I told her I planned to stay home with my twins. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I guess you can’t assume, even in 2018.” It was implied, I felt, that I was indulging in sentimentality for simpler times. As a woman of color and child of immigrants—someone who understands the implications of what that uniquely American glorification of the 1950s entails—this felt like a threat to both my professional and personal identity.
And then, during the pandemic, I watched as those perceptions shifted. We realized the true, essential value of unpaid labor. We started to confront the logistical minefield of American motherhood. We began collectively, loudly questioning why the school day and workday don’t line up, why childcare is so prohibitively expensive, why flexibility isn’t more commonly offered, why the motherhood penalty exists and persists, why paid leave is unavailable to many moms, and so much more. Instead of just telling American women they could do anything, we began asking why we’ve demanded that they do everything. The pandemic teed up a rebrand for the very idea of stay-at-home motherhood, an ideological push forward that would reevaluate labor in the home and expand our understanding of the issues mothers—both in and out of the workforce—face.
“The US is the only advanced economy that has had declining female labor-force participation in the last 20 years,” says Kate Bahn, PhD, chief economist and SVP of research at Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “The lack of a sufficient system of support for caregiving pushes women out of the labor market.”
And then came the tradwives, whose content leans heavily into the old tropes. “Our world loves extremes,” says Neha Ruch, founder of Mother Untitled, a platform built to redefine stay-at-home motherhood and career pauses. “So there was the girlboss, now there’s the tradwife.”
Tradwives are not all mothers, and there’s a clear distinction between tradwives and stay-at-home moms. Yet our societal image of tradwives and stay-at-home moms is becoming muddled—and taking away any nuance we might have recently gained about the work that is done within a home to make a home or raise a family.
People who opt out of paid work do face a degree of financial vulnerability—that’s nothing new. But both tradwives and many detractors seem unconcerned with actually addressing that issue. Ironically, the same tradwife influencers who romanticize a traditional way of living and financial dependence on a male partner are leveraging modern-day technology to attain a level of financial freedom. Though there’s a real dearth of income transparency where influencing is concerned, we know content creation can be a highly lucrative gig. During an appearance on the Tamron Hall Show, influencer Alexia Delarosa (who identifies as a “homemaker” rather than a tradwife) admits she makes “enough [money] to pay all the bills” via her content.
Tradwives are, almost unilaterally, white and affluent, which reinforces the idea that homemakers and stay-at-home mothers have a level of socioeconomic privilege that doesn’t warrant systemic protection. (Thanks to the childcare crisis, low-income mothers often have had to leave the traditional workforce out of necessity.) “That is part of the story and always has been,” says Beatty, “that this kind of submissive white womanhood that ostensibly is protected by white manhood comes with a racial and a class privilege.”
The reality is there’s ever-increasing fluidity between the old dichotomy between boss babe and homemaker. And with their hustle (yes, both homemaking and content creation are work) and hidden (or not so hidden) economic agendas, influential tradwives occupy that in-between space too.
“Women, when they step into chapters of career breaks, are really nervous about parting with their professional identity,” says Ruch. “They worry they’re going to be deemed traditionalist or not feminist. We’re at this moment where we are reexamining, and we have to be clear about the new narrative—and any sort of old imagery, old dialogue, does threaten that progress.”