A woman speaks to camera about how to serve your husband. She says, ‘submission has become a dirty word’. She details her journey from ‘hardcore feminist’ to proponent of traditional femininity – softness, bread, being a helpmeet. The woman talking is my sister; I have watched this video maybe ten times. My sister is one of the growing number of women who identify as tradwives – a movement so big that recently the Cambridge Dictionary announced ‘tradwife’ as one of their new words of the year. At the time of writing there are 62.1 million posts on TikTok alone tagged with ‘tradwife’. One feels the way that this seeps into culture: a friend, looking in the shop windows on Oxford Street said: ‘Why does every single shop want me to dress like I’m in Little House On The Prairie?’

On Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, tradwives film themselves making jam, guiding chickens around gardens in which sleepy flowers nod their heads or speaking passionately about anti-feminism, Great Replacement Theory and how to bake cookies. As is typical with far-right movements on the internet, their politics are not unified. One thing that does unite them, though, is right there in the name. Tradwives espouse a return to ‘traditional’ gender roles of breadwinner and breadmaker, roles that they champion as natural and timeless.

Judging from the vibe of tradwives, they seem to be lifting their vision of womanhood from the 1950s or from an indeterminate pre-industrial past when people grew their own food, washed everything by hand and wrote letters by candlelight. Radically different historical moments blend into each other in many tradwife aesthetics – a polka-dot dress and a red lip while you strain homemade wine. Tradwives are mired in mixed visual metaphors, a symptom of the shallowness of their position.

When tradwives use the word traditional, what they mean is that this arrangement, a mother in the home, a father making money outside of it, is how the world has always worked. Why? Because of woman’s natural propensity for submissiveness and man’s natural desire to strive. There is, of course, one big problem with this idea, which is that it is an ahistorical fantasy. Gender and its performance have changed over time: the height of masculinity was, at one point in the 1700s, wearing a powdered curled wig and very tight knee-high socks. Tradwives speak about femininity as if it has a stable, immutable meaning and this is perhaps one of the reasons why they can’t figure out what moment they want to return to: specificity comes with baggage.

The 1950s, often held up as a halcyon period for the family, was an experiment in family arrangement that lasted for less than a decade, was only practised by a very specific group of (white, middle class) people, and was seen as bizarre even in its own time; commentary abounded on the plummeting age of brides and the decline in young women pursuing higher education. As Stephanie Coontz notes, one in three marriages that started in the 1950s ended in divorce. Even if you accept the 1950s as the zenith of the nuclear family, the economic context was wildly different from our own. It was an age of government subsidy, expansion of welfare, a housing market in which veterans could, under certain schemes, put a deposit of one American dollar down for a house, and immense wage growth coupled with tighter corporation regulation. Even under these conditions, which propelled the picket fence family to new cultural heights, only 60 per cent of working age women were housewives.

Most women, for most of the time, worked outside of the home, in jobs as varied as their male counterparts, as Silvia Federici notes in her iconic work Caliban and the Witch. The girlies in Mesopotamia were brewing so much beer. Take me back! There are other historical moments that stand out in the tradwife imagination: the Victorian era with her famous ‘angel in the house’, the pioneers (a weakness of this one is that they that didn’t really have houses or jobs in the way that we conceive of them now, which should sound an alarm bell in our head that maybe it isn’t about jobs or houses but about race), or, for some of the neopatriarchs, that glorious moment in Roman civilisation when women couldn’t go outside without the consent of their male partner.

There is a different kind of tradition shadowing this imagined one. In moments of economic and political strife, anxieties about capital have been displaced onto women’s bodies, neutralising the possibility that a new social order could be imagined or sustained. Here, we acknowledge briefly a foundational stone of capitalist patriarchy, the relocation of reproductive labour into the domestic, private sphere, where it is not only hidden but also devalued. In order to get away with not paying women for it, we have to convince them that it is their destiny, nothing more than an expression of their nature. These boundaries need to be policed, or, as Angela Saini puts in Patriarchs, you do not need laws to enforce natural behaviour. A simple example: if women long in their souls to be mothers, why would we need, as some figures on the far right suggest, to introduce capital punishment for abortion? Patriarchy tends to use both the carrot and the stick and deny the existence of either.

If gender roles are not so traditional after all, but are rigidly enforced as a response to shifting socioeconomic sands, we have to ask – why are we here? And, if we deny the possibility that these young women are hyper-feminine sleeper agents, programmed by their nature to be very into jam, why then are they signing up for their own subjugation? These appeals towards a soft life, a life that is less complicated, work because they reflect a real problem that these gender roles purport to solve: it is very hard, in this economic moment, to have a career and raise a family. It is hard, actually, to do just one of those things. When we are looking around for something to blame for this, is it a coincidence that we blame equality itself, when we have spent the last thirty years telling women that they can have it all, but it will make them miserable?

Backlash to ‘mainstream’ feminism was so pronounced already by the 1980s that Susan Faludi wrote her seminal book Backlash in 1991. In it, she describes a ‘whittling down process, much of it amounting to outright propaganda that has served to stir women’s private anxieties and break their political wills’. We have had over thirty years of popular discourse that has declared women free and miserable, and suggested a causality between the two that denies a continued lack of equality. Even me, a young woman who came of age in the world of Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls, who lived through the heady days of Topshop printing the word ‘feminist’ on boots made in sweat shops, felt the cultural power of a discourse that suspected that ‘having it all’ made you sad and shrill. This idea that women had achieved equality (and that it did not, largely, feel good), set the stage for the emergence of a new wave of feminism, one that abandoned the goals of systemic change and turned its attention inwards.

Think of Sheryl Sandberg’s call to ‘internalise the revolution’. Even if we accept that we are not going to have an economic revolution (which, for the record, is not something I think that we have to accept: as Ursula K Le Guin said, capitalism feels inevitable but so did the divine right of kings), we can still see on the horizon the shimmering shapes of government-subsidised daycare, flexible working hours, enforced paternity leave, hovering there like an oasis in the desert. I think it is disappointing, to say the least, to have had a wave of feminism so profoundly unequipped to tackle the problems of the prevailing social order, to say nothing of the ways in which this kind of hyper-individualised choice feminism denies intersectionality: it is no wonder that tradwives align themselves with white supremacy so readily.

Reducing feminism to nothing more than personal choices is how we end up in a situation where people respond to tradwifery by saying, as Stacey Dooley does, ‘it’s about choice, they’re grown women’. There is plenty of writing about tradwifery that adopts this pose; in one piece, the author dresses like a tradwife for a week and declares ‘my experiment became a reminder that we get to play around with what makes us feel our best’. A politics based entirely on personal choice, coupled with an abandoning of the goal of systemic change in the public sphere, can’t be addressed by championing the power of personal choice. This hyperfocus on the individual lands us in the position where young women can conceive of no politic outside of themselves, where, as Catherine Rottenburg writes, ‘revolution, in other words, is transformed from mass mobilisation into an interiorised and individual activity’. As Faludi warns, misogynistic backlash ‘is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges inside a woman’s mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash too, on herself’. Can you imagine an arena in which this plays out more keenly than the tradwife, filming herself alone in her home?

This brings me to the key failure of logic in the symbolic figure of the tradwife: the camera. The camera is central to tradwifery. Lois Shearing notes that ‘content creation is skilled, time-consuming work – the type tradwives claim to eschew’. They have ad affiliations, their channels are monetised, they sell candles and write books and design calendars. Like all influencers, they are selling you a vision of the good life that is an unattainable fiction because it rests on suspended disbelief that erases the constructed nature of the scenes they broadcast. Tradwives emerge from the legacy of the girlboss choice feminist – building an online business where they sell you the tools to dismantle your freedoms and the apron to wear once you’ve done it. In this way, tradwifery is perfect for our current historical moment – you are never off the clock but labour is magicked away, somewhere out of shot. Oh, this small business? I just threw this on.

I think it is important to take tradwives seriously as propagandists and to take seriously the conditions from which they have emerged. There is no doubt that tradwives are part of the harmful machinery of the alt-right that calls for violence upon people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, women. But as others have noted, while tradwives are capable of perpetrating harm – indeed, it is central to their project – harm is being enacted upon them, too. Which I guess is just a way of saying that tradwives make me really sad. One of the rules for marital success of Estee Williams, a tradwife with 200,000 followers on TikTok alone, is not discussing your conflicts with anyone, to ‘keep your marriage safe from outside interference’. When I was reading about the history of these moments of misogynistic backlash, of increased control over women, I was struck by how actively friendship and community were discouraged, a necessary precursor for convincing women they are happiest in the home.

This is a hallmark of abuse – isolation, alienation from your friends, your family. This is to say nothing of the sexual dynamics proposed by the tradwife ideology, in which it is unfeminine to deny your husband access to your body. These women are stuck in a constant cycle of self-monitoring – make sure you are smiling enough, make sure when you ask him a question you are using a gentle enough tone in order to not make him angry – something Rottenberg warns us is a byproduct of this intense individualism. It is not just that these women are no longer critical of the patriarchal social structures that continue to oppress them, it is also that they are not allowed to be critical of the individual men in their lives who uphold them.

When I think about tradwives, I think a lot about visible and invisible labour. There is something in our digital moment where one wonders if the people creating the beautiful illusions start to believe them too, or if it is a Dorian Gray situation, where the ugly face of reality is hidden in the attic of their consciousness. This is not just specific to tradwives – I think it must be psychologically pretty intense to be Kylie Jenner, a brand built on beauty, maintained rigorously by a team of surgeons. There is the invisible reproductive labour that we have already discussed, the squirreling away of women into the home, the classic social media suspension of disbelief that rests on pretending the camera isn’t there, the way this is compounded by the fact that tradwives aren’t supposed to be working. But there is another kind of invisible labour going on here too, one that is at the core of the dizzying mental gymnastics of patriarchy: the performance of a traditional femininity is a constant labour that props up hegemonic masculinity. The work of maintaining masculinity is women’s work.

Tradwife content bombards you with advice on how to make your husband feel masculine: ask for his advice, give him praise (but not too much that he feels patronised), don’t have male friends, don’t contradict him. The husbands – always out of shot and literally invisible – rely on these women to shoulder not only the reproductive burden, but also the burden of constructing their selfhoods for them. How can you feel strong without a woman miming submission? How can you feel powerful without a woman who cannot leave you – no money of her own, no friends, nowhere to go? These men are like vampires – if they looked in a mirror there would be nothing but air. It must be exhausting to live this way, to have your behaviour picked over for any deviance from the ideal woman – a woman who does not exist and cannot be replicated. It is not good enough to look at these women, who are both causing and receiving harm, and applaud them for making a choice that leads to their own destruction, particularly when their entire business model is based on encouraging other women to do the same – the world’s oldest and saddest multi-level marketing scheme.

It is easy to be dismissive of tradwives – it is easy to be dismissive of women. We can mark them as lost causes, just more bodies piled up on the slag heap of patriarchy. Personally, this is not something that I can do, while collectively we would be fools to ignore them. Just because the past they invoke is mythic does not mean that it isn’t dangerous. When we look for a pressure valve in times of socioeconomic discord, we turn to tried and tested methods; as in Federici’s conception of women’s bodies as shared resources under capitalism, women too become the commons of political anxiety – a site on which to fly-tip your rhetorical trash. Tradwives are symptomatic of a grim slide towards the right, but they are also catalytic, encouraging young women to take off their shoes and sink, bare-footed, into a soft, simple, suffocating life.

*Katie Buckley’s first novel, Hero, was published in January 2025. *