In the past year or so, there’s been a growing trend of a certain kind of woman spreading across social media. You can see her clearly – she is everywhere on your social feeds.
She is conventionally attractive, skinny and white. She has long hair, delicate feminine features, barely-there make up. She’s often dressed in white, or pink. She is doll-like in her mannerisms.
She produces TikToks and Instagram reels glorifying “traditional” (that is, patriarchal) norms of being: she openly submits to her husband and proudly takes care of the home. She loves doing housework and baking bread. She loves sharing cooking tips because she’s very good at cooking and food preparation – she spends all day in the kitchen and in the garden, where she grows her own tomatoes. She raises chickens – she’s a salt-of-the-earth kind of woman. She is committed to a pastoral way of life, making everything from scratch because this gives her a sense of power and control.
Her white babies run around at her feet in their denim overalls, their blonde hair glittering in the sun. Her husband is tall, white, surfer-bro-like. In her world, rugged = wholesome, and wholesome = good. Her image is a moral stance. And it goes without saying, she is categorically against feminism.
She is the Tradwife (Traditional Wife) — an online female persona that’s been resurrected by influencers of late. These women produce aesthetically pleasing content that glamourise domesticity. Hello 1950s! But 1950s without the ugliness of reality (ie. rape within marriage was still perfectly fine back then).
Being conventionally beautiful gives her the avenue to promote these lifestyles. She has basically co-opted Instagram’s biggest currency (hot privilege) and ran with it.
Adhering to strict gender roles gives her a lot of pleasure. She likes to don out marriage advice, like “don’t go to the gym without your husband” and “be submissive and let your husband lead the family.”
As one journalist called it, it’s a “Little House On The Prairie fantasy” — one where “super gender-essentialist performance” is capitalised. These women are not fools. They monetise their posts, accepting sponsorships and using their platforms to sell homemade goods. They espouse the idea that the husband is the bread-winner (capitalist labour) while the wife is the bread-maker (unpaid labour), but hide the fact that they participate in the capitalist market with their content-making.
The Tradwives trend is not entirely new. In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen wrote about female celebrities who were “embracing the ‘new domesticity’, defined by consumption, maternity and a sort of twenty-first-century gentility.” In her book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Petersen identified these women as Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, among others.
The latest Tradwives trend is similar to cottagecore, a popular aesthetic and design style in the second decade of the 2000s which embraced a rural ideal of the old English vintage lifestyle. (It’s still around — in 2023, several celebrities were still dishing out its vibe).
Like cottagecore, Tradwife is firmly tied to far-right ideologies. It neglects the violent history of settler colonialism and prefers to focus on a “dreamy form of escapism” where women are rewarded for physical beauty and compliancy to a patriarchal set of hierarchies.
Popular Tradwives include 26-year old American Estee Williams, Canadian YouTuber Gwen Swinarton, Australian influencer Jasmine Dinis and Abigail Roth.
Many of these women started off as influencers or models, posting Instagram-perfect posts of themselves several years ago before jumping on the Tradwives trend. In the case of Abigail Roth, the anti-abortion conservative commentator is actually the sister of Ben Shapiro, the radically far-right shock-jock who recently featured in a rap song to extoll his anti-woke politics.
Estee Williams, one of the most popular tradwives of late, speaks regularly to the media about her lifestyle choices. Last year, she told Piers Morgan that she puts her family before herself.
“You see self-love promoted everywhere – women are leaving marriage far more easily than men and are doing it because they think there is something better out there for them,” she said. “Marriage is a bond and it’s a sacred bond – you have to protect that at all costs, and I think part of that is putting your partner’s needs before your own every single day.”
Williams’ videos include “Tips to attract masculine provider men”, “How I make homemaking fun”, “What we Practice in our marriage” and “Dress up for your husband”.
Is this all harmless fun? Or dangerous anti-feminist rhetoric that can be used to advance a sinister political agenda?
As some experts have already pointed out, tradwives often use the language of men’s rights activists, promoting harmful patriarchal conditions placed on the different genders.
Dr Julia Ebner, an Oxford University researcher and author specialising in radicalisation and extremism believes that tradwives want to “return to traditional power roles and exaggerated notions of masculinity and femininity”.
Dr Ebner’s 2020 study of tradwives found that up to 30,000 women in the U.K describe themselves as Tradwives, who openly make misogynist statements, such as “women’s highest value to men is her sexual value, and she’s most valuable when she’s in her sexually pristine state.”
According to Dr Ebner, tradwives are part of a much larger misogynist online community that all share a hostility towards feminism, liberalism and contemporary gender roles. What could be the appeal?
“Confusion about changing notions of masculinity and femininity has pushed men and women into fundamental identity crises,” Dr Ebner suggests. “…the idea of going back to old-fashioned gender roles can be appealing to men as well as to women. Was it all easier back then? With well-defined roles and behaviours on both sides?”
Far right social media influencers believe so. They are selling the idea that concrete gender roles is the way to go. Never mind that many of them are fuelled by alt-right, Christian fundamentalist and white nationalist ideologies. If it looks pretty, we want it.
Should we be worried? Does it pose a threat to feminism, especially at a time when abortion and reproductive rights are being stripped back across the world?
Salon journalist Amanda Marcotte believes the “toxic fantasy” of the tradwife “…preys upon men, especially young men, by selling them a silly fantasy as reality.”
“[tradwife content] helps sell the central, lucrative fantasy to credulous audiences: That female submission is a woman’s natural desire, one that’s being stolen from them by sinister feminist forces,” she wrote. “[It] definitely appeals to men who are eager to hear a woman ramble on about how feminism is bad.”
Psychologist Mark Travers also thinks its dangerous, quoting “extensive psychological research” which revealed that “the surge in tradwife content and adherence poses significant threats to feminism and gender equality, given its concerning roots in the alt-right.”
“The problematic nature of the tradwife identity extends beyond gender roles, occasionally aligning with overtly white supremacist content or hashtags—signalling allegiance to hate groups,” Travers explained in Forbes.
According to academics Kristy Campion and Kiriloi M. Ingram, Australia’s far-right tradwives population are active across X and Tik Tok, Instagram and YouTube. But is it something we should be worried about?
One columnist from The Cut believes the the tradwife content is simply “highly staged.”
“It’s a complete fiction… without any of the violent and kind of disturbing parts of that narrative [of pretending that it was the 1950s] and making, you know, like, a contemporary fiction out of it,” Kathryn Jezer-Morton said.