If you’ve been online in the past few years, you may have been unlucky enough to see the new “tradwife” influencer trend. Unfortunately for me, I’m sickly fascinated with the phenomenon.
A tradwife is the shortened version of “traditional wife,” and by “traditional,” they mean an evangelical Christian delusion of what an American — very often a white American — wife is supposed to be. The tradwife is to take care of all matters of the home with a picture-perfect smile, a full face of makeup, and form-fitting clothes that claim to be the peak of demure modesty. She cooks, cleans and cares for her children and her husband — giving her life perfect fulfillment. I’d personally like proponents to find historical evidence of this traditional wife, but I think they’ll just point me toward the bible and the Hays-Code-adhering movies from back in the day.
Years ago, I ran into an organization called “Girl Defined” (its tagline is “biblical womanhood,” if that helps you understand the group quicker). I watched one of its videos inviting women to come join for a “women’s empowerment” conference. Two things especially struck me:
1. The extremely poor production quality of the video, and
2. The weird cloaking of misogynist principles as “feminism.”
I learned from the video that it’s more respectful to women to allow them to fulfill their true purpose, which is caring for a man. It was also actually women’s empowerment for a woman to not only have a lot of children but to also take care of them with no help at all. It is incredibly interesting to see how misogyny in and of itself is getting less popular, but that same misogyny repackaged as “empowerment” is still OK. Apparently, as long as you say “girl power!” enough people will get confused and won’t want to argue with you (looking at you, TERFs!).
Honestly, the video was incredibly sad. The speakers themselves were unmarried but spoke about their lives as if they were just waiting to marry. They would have one big event in their lives, and that would solve everything. Their mothers had told them how much they were going to enjoy being married, and they wouldn’t need or want to aspire to anything beyond that.
But, obviously, they did want more. Why else would they be filming this video and running this conference?
I find this confusion in a lot of tradwife content. The man is in charge of their lives and they are just there to support him, yet, conversely, they are running their own businesses. The business is where they just talk about supporting their man, but they are the center of it. Often, the more prominent tradwife influencers seem to make a lot more money than their husbands. It’s odd to see this desperation for independence snake its way out but then be smothered in Christian evangelical values.
There’s also this strange power play over other women. Tradwifes feel that because they dress modestly they aren’t like the women they think of as whores and sluts. Unlike the misguided working women, they understand their place — and they are purer for that. They care for their husband and children because, unlike other women, they actually love their families.
It’s very evident that when you have these Christian and misogynistic values that you force women to learn, they internalize them. However, the need and want to be a multifaceted human person never goes away, so women learn to weaponize these values against other women. They can stay inside this bizarre value system but still can exercise power. They can validate to themselves why they believe the things they do. There’s this internal belief that if they dress themselves up as what men want, they can be happy. And if they are ever not happy, it’s because they themselves aren’t good enough, and they need to pretend to be happy so they aren’t like those poor misguided women they are better than.
Unfortunately, we also need to talk about how men factor into all this tradwife content. There’s a great article by Salon on this (it also has a lot of examples of tradwife content if you are still confused). The quick version is that tradwife content is also for men to view. Many young men are being sent down these rabbit holes of influencers who are teaching them that they deserve a quiet, demure Christian wife to take care of them like their mother would, and that young women today would be fulfilling their duties except for the “woke” phenomenon. They see these influencer women and think women like this exist in the real world and that the tradwife influencers are the default version of women uncorrupted by dirty feminism. They can’t understand that what’s in front of the camera isn’t real.
And because people like me think this whole tradwife thing is ridiculous, any pushback is considered us oppressing women and Christian values.
Weirdly enough, this pull back to “domestic traditionalism” is also not new! Sure, it has the new aspects of being on social media now, and the tradwives have new unique aspects like loving bone broth, but people having a weird obsession with the perfect domestic life is nothing new.
Hell, “Don Quixote,” written in 1605, has a whole adventure making fun of rich people obsessed with the domestic simplicity of shepherds. There were entire art movements of rich people wanting to be painted as shepherds and peasants and romanticizing simple lives such as in pastoralist art. I honestly think this is a great comparison to what’s happening today — really rich folks playing pretend that they lead simplistic nature-driven lives while not actually doing that. If you notice in tradwife videos, they are almost always filmed in huge pristine white kitchens.
If we look a little closer in history, we will see that this call for “traditional families” is accompanied by fascism! Check out this propaganda art from Nazi Germany — looks familiar? The blonde family with the mother lovingly breastfeeding a baby while the children play in the dirt. To me, this just needs a TikTok caption of “the woke left hates us being happy” to fit right in with modern content.
The tradwife trend is nothing but a bunch of rich people playing posers again. But the consequences are still very real, both to young men and women. These ideas are being taught as natural truths instead of some weird Christian people roleplaying for clicks online.
So, in case it needs reiterating, no, women aren’t “natural caretakers,” they are people. No, men don’t need to be cared for by a wife, they can wash dishes on their own. No, there’s no perfect family structure that a god intended for us; there are only people doing what works for them.
As I think most things should be solved with humor and satire, here are my favorite pages online satirizing tradwife content. Wanderandthrive on Instagram, who posts extreme versions of tradwife aesthetic content, has a recent post that says “If you don’t spend your life in an endless, desperate, and ultimately futile endeavor to become a perfect version of yourself, your life will have been a waste.” And hannsaurr on Instagram posts cooking videos in which she collects fresh eggs from her dog and collects ingredients from random plants in her home while speaking in a soft, gentle whisper.
I love content like this. I hope it goes before the eyes of people who are being swayed by tradwife content — so they can see how truly silly it all actually is.
Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
ROWAN HAHN graduated from Texas State University with a B.S. in Mass Communications and Digital Media Innovations. In their free time, they like to go birding, read, ponder art, and find new places in town to get sweet treats.
5 Responses
A challenge for progressives is to find an acceptable third-person singular pronoun that does not specify sex or gender. ‘They…’ is not good enough.
In the good old days of monarchy the king would use the royal ‘we’ and say “We think such-and-such…” and the courtiers would naturally all think so too, so his majesty was to an extent justified in using the first -person plural. But it did not really make sense and it has rightly lapsed.
‘They’ does not make sense either. It is like a quantum particle. ‘They’ can refer to two imaginary people. These identify as male and female perhaps. When ‘they’, plural, are observed or declare out loud their sex- or gender- identity, they resolve into one, and the imaginary plural pronoun becomes a real singular pronoun. But the pronoun stays in the same plural form, wrongly.
When I was being taught French, the phrase ‘La plume de sa tante’ would crop up. How to translate it into English? ‘His’, ‘her’ or ‘their’. What if the niece/s and/or nephew/s disputed or shared ownership of the pen? A new 3rd pers. sing. pronoun is needed, easier said than done
I am sure most humen will agree.
I knew there would be a mistake. The pen belonged to the aunt.
That was the nuns job while I was growing up,” be a good woman and wear your peals and take care of your husband and children”! By all means DO NOT get a divorse! So what if he sleeps around and occasionally rapes or beats you! You must stay married and always give money to the church! ALWAYS! (Why don’t the preachers get a REAL job?)
“Check out this propaganda art from Nazi Germany — looks familiar? The blonde family with the mother lovingly breastfeeding a baby while the children play in the dirt” Lumping “blonde” in with “Nazi”, acceptable racism for the Left. As far as “trade marriage” goes, it’ll overtake the West not because of Christians but via the Muslims you allowed to mass-migrate to Europe.
Trad marriage, not “trade marriage”: spell correct.