The Tradwife Resurgence—Your Least Favorite Guy’s Favorite Trend for You
Graphic by Gabrielle Davis
Everything cycles: trends, styles, reproductive rights—and after the results of the 2024 election, so too do presidents. Amid the uncertainty of the last few months, a time marked by presidential campaigns with women’s reproductive rights at the forefront of debate, emerged a trend cycling all the way back to the 1950s: the tradwife. The trending term, with 300 million attached TikTok views, characterizes the traditional lifestyle of a woman who stays at home, makes meals from scratch, cares for her kids (typically many kids), all while cloaked in feminine silhouettes and tending to their husbands.
Many online women, like social media influencer and self-proclaimed tradwife Estee Williams, post content for aspiring housewives. Williams' content ranges from tips on dolling oneself up for the husband, arranging the household, and cooking, to helping young women find masculine and providing men to have and to hold. Other content creators like model and food vlogger Nara Smith, gain traction through tradwife discourse without explicitly identifying as tradwives themselves. Nara Smith gained TikTok fame through her make-it-from-scratch cooking videos, always prepared in fabulously impractical dresses with recipes typically requested by her time traveling Americana husband, Lucky Blue Smith—never caught without gelled back hair or a toothpick balanced between his teeth. In a particular TikTok, Nara Smith made homemade cough drops for her sick toddler, wearing a $3000 Rodarte silk dress adorned with two exaggerated black bows draping down each shoulder.
Nara Smith is not the only tradwife with a designer budget, with many homemaking influencers spending thousands a year on designer dresses. By curating their lifestyles as old money and desirable, these influencers garner significantly more views and followers.
The connection between tradwives and fashion stepped off the screen on the Fall 2024 runway, with Miu Miu showcasing shift dresses and pearls, and Marc Jacobs featuring bell shaped dresses with dramatized lashes. These collections reveal a greater cultural shift towards traditionalism beyond an internet cult following.
Tradwife values also made their television debut on Hulu’s new hit-reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The show features the friendships of eight content-creating Mormon wives, who despite being the main breadwinners of their families, take on submissive roles in their marriages with husband’s who threaten divorce for discretions as little as overdrinking and as damned as attending a Vegas strip show.
With our rights on the line, the tradwife phenomenon sparks fear in those who reject a regression to a time before women’s liberation, and outrages feminists who see tradwives as women relinquishing control to live vicariously through their husbands' dinner gabbing. While villainized by many feminists, tradwives are also seen as victims in the public eye like Hannah Neilman—Ballerina Farm on social media—who went viral after the controversial Times article “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).” Dreaming of becoming a ballerina while attending Juilliard, Hannah’s life trajectory changed after marrying airline billionaire David Neilman and raising his 8 kids in the mountains of Utah. Hannah’s sacrifices in her marriage upset many readers, and fans of her TikTok channel were particularly outraged by her birthday gift; expecting to receive a vacation to Greece, she unwrapped an egg apron instead, courtesy of David.
At first, I too saw these women as victimized and deluded, spreading harmful ideas to a generation of women already born with less reproductive rights than their mothers. However, I came to realize these women weren’t so different from any other stay at home mom with the exception of a few dramatics, and a romanticisation of cooking. In many cases working women and housewives are really just the same women in different stages of life. Afterall, when Sex and the City’s beloved Charlotte York quits her job as a Soho art dealer to become a full time park avenue princess and intended mother in her marriage, she invokes the women’s movement and her feminist right to any lifestyle, defiantly yelling “I CHOOSE MY CHOICE.” So, as Carrie Bradshaw might say, I couldn’t help but wonder if these tradwives were being unfairly criticized, or if something more sinister was at play?
In fact, most proclaimed tradwives align themselves with the women’s movement, as they choose to submit to their husbands under their own beliefs that a woman's place is in the home. On a tradwife instagram account, @TradWivesClub, a post shares the message, “Culture says that marriage is modern-day slavery, but I have never felt more free.” Estee Williams also claims there is no tradwife movement, just increased visibility of women already living that lifestyle.
Despite Williams’ claims, the visibility in question is selective, intentionally omitting aspects of a tradwife’s life that do not traditionally fall under a woman’s marriage role. Most women who produce tradwife content, or are associated with the trend, ironically live rather untraditional lives, with opportunities that would have been denied to housewives in the 1950s. Despite posting content from her kitchen, Nara Smith is a successful model, traversing from her home in Utah to London and New York for photoshoots, and collaborating with brands like Marc Jacobs and Charlotte Tilbury. The label of a tradwife not only misrepresents her experiences, but reduces her to a decorative role and undermines her accomplishments.
The reality is, TikTok and other platforms are not turning anyone into tradwives with research indicating just the opposite. 61% of Gen Z identifies as feminists while a growing number of youth are leaving churches due to unequal representations of women. But if women are breaking from tradition, then why the resurgence of tradwives, and who is consuming the content? The answer: conservative men.
A study conducted by Media Matters investigated recommended videos after a deep-dive into tradwife content, and “found, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm also served up ‘19 videos featuring extremist right-wing media figures,’ such as Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes.” Instead of encouraging young women to become tradwives, TikTok’s algorithm is teaching right-wing extremists to want traditional women in their marriages. So, it seems, trad-living just might be your least favorite guy's favorite trend for you.
With Trump officially reelected in office, truthful and holistic representations of women are more important now than ever. Tradwife content presents a small, glamorized outlook on housewife responsibilities, mischaracterizing the hard work and real experiences of stay-at-home mothers. However, as the trad-lifestyle trends among right-wing conservatives, its counterpart trends for the left, Brat Summer. As Charli XCX puts it, a brat is“that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it.” With four uncertain years ahead, it would be nice to drop out of school, cook for my loved ones, and play house. But in the spirit of Brat, I’ll just figure it out as I go along, and in the meantime, maybe watch a Nara Smith video.
