graphic by roxanne cubero
On the first Monday of my graduate program’s spring break, I settled down at a table at a coffee shop with an iced matcha and went to slip on my headphones when a conversation happening between the two teenagers next to me caught my attention. “God, I can’t wait to be a trophy wife,” one of them said as they studied what looked to be some kind of coursework. The other girl laughed and nodded. “Oh my God, I know. It’ll be so much easier than this.”
It’s a sentiment I’ve also shared with friends over the years, even going as far as joking that my future kids will be able to brag about their mom’s degrees. That being said, I don’t think anyone ever expected these silly ideas about domestic freedom to become a social media phenomenon.
With Oreos made from scratch, children with names like Beowulf and McKinsleigh, and, more often than not, a set of political values straight from the 1950s, “trad” wives have taken over TikTok For You Pages everywhere. This phenomenon of young women ditching the grind and girl-boss culture of the 2010s in favor of “traditional” American family values is not necessarily new. Disillusioned by capitalism and a world that just doesn’t take them into consideration, women have been idealizing a life where all they have to worry about is being a stay-at-home girlfriend (#SAHG) or getting their adorable, blonde-haired, blue-eyed 2.5 kids to and from school. From the outside, this is appealing, and, for a lot of women, it can be empowering. Being a spouse and stay-at-home parent is no easy feat, and I commend everyone who can do it happily. However, I don’t think this wave of trad wives invading our consciousness cares very much about female empowerment or celebration of choice.
With states like Alabama recently ruling that frozen embryos are children and nationwide access to abortion services gradually becoming harder and harder to obtain, it’s not surprising that many of these influencers have anti-feminist thoughts and opinions. These trad wives often promote submitting to one’s husband completely and blindly, raising boys and girls in traditional (and harmful) gender roles with a strange favoritism toward sons (Freud, eat your heart out) and an emphasis on purity and modesty culture, and creating a distrusting and harmful environment around food in their homes.
One trad wife, Ayla Stewart (Wife With A Purpose), even shares religious-based, conservative parenting tips and white genocide conspiracy theories with her hundreds of thousands of followers. It’s backward, anti-feminist and jarring. And yet, we can’t stop looking at them. Trad wife It Girl Nara Smith has 4.1 million followers on TikTok and regularly surpasses millions of views on her daily TikToks documenting her life as a young Mormon mother of two. The tag #SAHG has over 31 million views on TikTok. The YouTube channel Girl Defined has over 150,000 subscribers. Every day, young women and girls are interacting with this seemingly harmless trend, commenting on their jealousy or requesting tips for how to achieve that lifestyle.
The trad wife phenomenon seems to be in direct opposition to the wave of educated, agnostic, sexually liberated, left-leaning young feminine people who have occupied spaces online to talk about everything from disability reform to pronouns to sex work. Why be a loud feminist, fighting day in and day out against a system that will never serve you when you can just submit to a man’s will and never have to worry about anything ever again? Right?
While it’s mostly women discussing the joys of being a trad wife, it’s not hard to realize the values they stand on are the values of conservative, often card-carrying members of the Manosphere. The Manosphere, as Laura Bates defines it in her book, Men Who Hate Women, is “a community devoted to the violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes.” We recognize members of the Manosphere by their “red pill/blue pill” ideology, bigoted jokes and memes, Reddit and 4Chan threads, and the IRL violence they wage against minorities.
Despite these generalizing statements, it is not a homogenous group and makes up hordes of men, including many elected officials, educators and parents. A widespread idea in the Manosphere? That women should submit to their husbands, bear children, and never question the status quo in order for them to be completely financially and emotionally dependent on their husbands. There’s even videos online talking about how trad wives have only continued to gain traction since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, with influencers such as the homesteading mother of 8 @ballerinafarm gaining 5 million followers after the reversal of Roe. There is a connection between incel culture and trad wives, and it’s terrifying.
Incel meme on trad wives vs. liberal women
It’s also a reimagining of the Angel in the House/The Fallen Woman dichotomy of the Victorian era. The trad wife is the perfect, chaste, kind, holy mother (but never the perfect Holy Mother) who allows her husband to make decisions without her consent or input, while the single, childless, sexually liberated woman is the Fallen Woman. Often in the viral wedding vows these women post for millions of people to see, they cite God as giving them the strength to remain pure and “blessed” enough to receive a husband such as the average man in front of her.
The blessing of companionship and children relates directly to Genesis and the first-ever Fallen Woman, Eve. In Genesis 2-3, Eve is created only to be an attribute to Adam, bestowing upon her the title of wife and mother the second she is alive (Genesis 2:20-25). When Eve eats the apple, it isn’t the serpent Adam blames — it’s her.
When a woman doesn’t adhere to the Judeo-Christian heteropatriarchal standards we have constructed for centuries, we blame her. It is never a failing of men — and especially not God. Eve, and all women, are damned to go through the pain of childbirth and for their husbands to “rule over” them. Khaled Hosseini might’ve described it best: “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.” Talk about never getting to beat the system.
This also feels like a good time to bring up the fact that trad wifery is specifically a white feminist phenomenon. There were hundreds of white trad wife influencers already posting content on platforms like TikTok long before Nara Smith was, and nobody said anything. I don’t think it’s fair to pile onto Nara Smith for buying into the trad wife phenomenon when we’ve blissfully let white women get away with, and even applaud them for, the same thing for years.
In addition, Black women and women of color have a history of working or being forced to work for white homemakers, and they get paid less, making it less likely that Black women are able to stay home with their children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on average, Black women were paid 64% of what white men were paid in 2021. Not only that, but pregnancy and motherhood are exceptionally dangerous for women of color as opposed to white women; many white trad wives have upwards of five children. Black women in America are 243% more likely than white women to die from pregnancy and childbirth-related issues. For many of these women, becoming a mother can be a scary and life-threatening process, and not necessarily a life they would force onto others. However, white trad wives have absolutely no problems pushing us to go back to a 1950s frame of mind when things were “easier.” Let’s ask women of color if they think going back to the 1950s would make things easier for them.
When these trad wives do follow the lifestyle set up for them and have children, they often become the newest moneymakers for their channels as they reveal the wonders of being a mother raising her children in a traditional, God-honoring way. This is dangerous for a number of reasons. First, there are no laws regulating or protecting the children of influencer parents. Dr. Francis Rees from Essex Law School conducted a risk assessment of childhood influencers and found that children under the age of 13 working in the influencer industry are being exposed to as many as 32 types of harm, including lower school attendance, lack of employment benefits and increased exposure to identity fraud or invasions of privacy. Second, it exposes children to preventable trauma, as an anonymous child influencer recently disclosed to Cosmopolitan Magazine. Third, these influencers will only continue to push their children and families to the brink for the sake of a monetization payout. Take Ruby Franke, for example: A Mormon parenting influencer famous on YouTube for the strict parenting of her six children, she was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated child abuse.
I don’t think women who record themselves performing domestic labor are abusing their children or necessarily engaging with the trad wife trend. For a lot of women, it can be seen as a genuine way to showcase motherhood and the domestic work involved that so often goes unnoticed or uncounted. In her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez writes, “There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work. Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours.” I think it’s completely reasonable for stay-at-home moms to try to find a way to get paid for this labor by sharing it on social media. Or, if not to get paid, then to at least have a recording of just how much domestic labor they are performing to dispel the myth that stay-at-home mothers don’t do anything except raise children (which is an endeavor in and of itself).
The danger of this trend emerges more distinctly when these women discuss submitting to their husbands or doing these things because it is central to their husband’s happiness — but maybe not their own — their parenting choices, and their political views. One particularly heartbreaking TikTok I saw was a trad wife talking about how she’s raising her daughter to believe that — and this is a direct quote from her own video — “being a homemaker is the No. 1 career she should strive for and that serving her husband and bearing children will be her greatest joy.” Her daughter, clad in a blue and white flannel dress in front of a Kitchen-Aid mixer, can’t be older than 5.
These parenting choices are directly aligned with conservative political views that women are only born to serve the men in their lives and bear the next generation, often a vision of the American family that conservative lawmakers have wet dreams about. That’s why abortion access is getting more and more regulated. That’s why they suddenly care about what’s being taught in schools and are cutting DEI and antiracist programs. That’s why trad wives have suddenly blown up. They don’t care about protecting children. They care about controlling minority populations and keeping white men at the top of the food chain.
I think the reason the trad wife trend freaks me out so much is because of how close it is to far-right ideology and much more sinister and dangerous things, and yet it’s being lauded as this counter-cultural phenomenon. It’s perfectly fine to want and choose to be a stay-at-home mom and wife because feminism and the work of feminists have allowed you to be able to make that choice. It’s okay to be disillusioned by capitalism and not necessarily want to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It’s okay to desire for someone to take care of you. It is not okay to advocate for dangerous ideologies in which the only thing women can do is fail or obey.
Under oppressive heteropatriarchal structures, we can’t afford to go back to a “simpler” time of shell-shocked, emotionally absent, violent fathers, sedated and abused mothers, and children who grew up to raise their own children without a healthy blueprint. It’s not safe, healthy or feasible for anyone. Instead of falling back on harmful views and the mirage of a safety net built by the even more illusionary American dream, we should be reevaluating our relationships with capitalism, grind culture (and, arguably, hookup culture) and the current state of affairs to understand how the fuck things have gotten so bad that a lobotomized version of motherhood has become the most appealing option for the next generation of young girls.