The messy politics of the Trad Wife Movement

You realize the “trad wives” are serious, right? Over the last several years, I’ve watched the term “trad wife” go from a useful term to describe a modern homemaker with traditional values, to a weaponized slur and crude caricature of the same.

I’m not up to date on the latest TikTok trends or Gen Z slang, but when the term “trad” first emerged on the internet in the 2010s, it meant someone who believed that marriage was between one man and one woman and that the traditional family model of a husband provider and a wife homemaker made sense.

That’s it.

A “trad wife” was a wife who embraced this traditional and time-honored model, and an online trad wife simply talked about why she did, usually accompanied by content sharing her life at home.

Trad wives come from the position of being stay-at-home wives and mothers in a culture where it has become denormalized.

They’re usually relatively normal women who, for whatever reason, feel strongly about defending traditional housewifery. And they have found that their message resonates with a lot of other women who feel the same way.

When you have grown up in a culture that expects women to “break glass ceilings,” to devote their lives to education and career, and to remain always in a posture of defensiveness against men, embracing traditional roles in the home is outstanding.

The world over the last 50 years has made being a housewife political, so trad wives have embraced their lifestyle as a political act — because it very much is.

Why is Trad Wife content so popular?

Trad wives grew in popularity online because hundreds of thousands of women feel represented by them.

As long as I’ve been writing about traditional womanhood, I’ve received some version of the same message: “Thank you for what you do. I thought I was the only one. It can be so isolating not being a feminist. You make me feel like it’s OK to want to be a wife and mother.”

When you see a woman who makes videos about how she prepares her food from scratch and doesn’t need a career to feel fulfilled, she’s most likely sharing something she’s learned to do that’s rewarding to her and telling you the truth about how she feels about her life.

When you see a woman who likes to dress like it’s the 1950s and questions the mandates of modern feminism, she’s likely sharing her authentic passion for vintage fashion and concerns about an ideology that’s been forced down the throats of modern women her whole life.

When you see these women amass tens of thousands of followers, likes, and comments, it’s likely because their message resonates with other women who think like them and that this is all authentic.

Do people perform for social media? Absolutely. Is every “trad wife” influencer an honest person with solid values? No, of course not. Are some of them total hypocrites who don’t practice what they preach behind closed doors? I imagine so, yes.

Yet the fact remains that the average “trad wife” is just a woman who looked at the cultural landscape and decided to embrace the traditional role of homemaker.

And the fact that this has turned into a slur against the very same women who use the term with pride just proves their point.

The average “trad wife” is just a woman who looked at the cultural landscape and decided to embrace the traditional role of homemaker. And the fact that this has turned into a slur against the very same women who use the term with pride just proves their point. Isa Ryan

The culture still largely regards the traditional roles of women in marriage as negative, degrading, and archaic, even many conservative women who find the term cringey and cite the appearance or online behavior of “trad wives” as evidence of this.

I am never one to shy away from critiquing people who align with me ideologically, but I will also never abandon the term “trad wife” or stop defending women who identify this way on the internet.

We are fighting to re-normalize traditional housewifery, or proverbially die trying. And we’re certainly being routinely attacked using our own terminology.

And this just proves the whole reason why “trad wife” became a thing in the first place.

Isa Ryan - via A Homemaker’s Manifesto

This article was originally published on my friend Isa Ryan’s Substack, and she has kindly given permission for me to share it here. I think the point that she is making cannot be overstated… Here are my thoughts:

Why women are choosing the Trad Wife Movement

Over the years of writing this blog and speaking to the media, I have personally shied away from connecting the Trad Wife movement with anything political - because I personally believe that women can be homemakers regardless of which side of the fence you sit, and they should be able to do that no matter who is currently in office, or according to whatever we happen to be virtue signalling at the current moment.

A woman’s right, choice, and desire, to not work outside the home is above politics - whether you vote right, left, or the various shades in between…

Yet, as I grow longer in the tooth, the scales have fallen from my eyes and Isa’s article here really hit home! This IS a political act - but it’s one that can be joined without political party alignment. You just actually need to care about women, and family.

Compare your life to our sisters in middle eastern, communist, and oppressed cultures. We have choices and personal agency that some women can only dream of, yet the infighting and misrepresentation we are witnessing in the west is proof that many are adopting the ideologies they originally sought to destroy. The slurs, and questioning of the integrity of women’s choices like ours, like mine and Isa’s, like all Trad Wives, proves this point fantastically!

I realise now, that while unintentional at the beginning, and now by proxy, we are holding a mirror up to the culture as it stands! We all need to believe that women can be free to define themselves, and live as they wish without criticism or judgement (oh the oxymoron of “feminism”).

I realise now, that while unintentional at the beginning, and now by proxy, we Trad Wives are holding a mirror up to the culture as it stands! Alena Kate Pettitt

If I had a penny for every time someone commented “real traditional housewives wouldn’t be on social media”, or have a blog, or have a creative outlet, or speak openly in public about the lifestyle they love… then I’d be a very rich woman and wouldn’t have to rely on my husband’s hard earned salary ;)

The irony of all this, is that those who criticise the Trad Wife movement and creators who exist in this space become the very thing they are seeking to liberate women from... Someone else speaking FOR them!

Indoctrination of the expectations on modern women is now so deeply ingrained, we’ve lost sight of true north. I thought the whole point of feminism was for women to have choices, and her choices celebrated, regardless of what they are.

There is nothing dangerous in making the choice we have! It won’t send you backwards, or cost you anything to be happy for us.

We Trad Wives simply do not align with the modern narrative for women. It just doesn’t appeal. Thanks for the option though! We just choose to opt out.

Most women in online, celebrity, cultural commentator, and mainstream media spaces do not speak for our lifestyle, and thus, we desired a community whereby we can commune, share, inspire, and uplift one another. We did just that.

That’s the grassroots of the entire “movement”. But somewhere along the line - in our innocent desire to simply co-exist, we were swallowed by the current culture, chewed up, and spat out by the ’progressives’ who claim we’re better off now. We’re not actually seeing that people!!!

If “Trad Wife” content offends you, that says more about you than it does anyone else. Be careful, your prejudice is showing.

If “Trad Wife” content offends you, that says more about you than it does anyone else. Be careful, your prejudice is showing!

We are simply women defending the legitimacy of our decision, just like countless women before us. Or maybe, just maybe, we simply like sharing what made us finally chill-out and relax into a life that feels right, rather than having to live by what we were told to want.

The idea of this whole movement is that opting into this lifestyle is intentional, valid, and meaningful, and others shouldn’t assume it’s outdated, subservient, or forced.

Isn’t it funny (and a little depressing) how ancient values actually need defining and explaining nowadays, let alone justifying!? The term “trad wife” is, a thoroughly modern label. We must ask ourselves why new labels need to exist in the first place… we’re practically dishing them out like candy in order to define new subcultures that require visibility and understanding. Why should we miss out?

The label of “Trad Wife” literally did not exist in our grandmothers’ vocabulary, nor was it necessary when the role of wife and homemaker was simply understood as a natural and honourable calling.

I agree with Isa wholeheartedly that the phrase itself has arisen largely as a response, and is a modern reclamation of women with likeminded values, because of modern western secular culture’s steady demotion and degradation of the housewife, particularly under the banner of “feminism”.

For much of history, a woman devoted to her home, her husband, and her children required no special title. She was simply a wife. A mother. A homemaker. Yet as these roles were increasingly reframed as limiting, regressive, or even oppressive, a curious thing has happened.

Women like us feel called to new language to explain - and defend - our choices.

Wives are now represented in the media and modern culture as anything but full time homemakers with a focus on their practical, emotional, and spiritual role within it - they’re simply women with a gold band on their finger!

“Trad wife” is therefore less a hark to the past, and more a reaction to the present. It signals a conscious turning toward what was once ordinary. It is not the creation of a new identity, but the rediscovery of an older one, but still needs to be set apart from the “new normal”.

It is an attempt to restore dignity to a role that modern feminism has worked so diligently to sideline.

This blog, and Isa’s, and the thousands of women you see online who identify as proud housewives and homemakers, are testament to the fact that we’re not happy to be erased from, or silenced within modern culture.

If you take away, belittle, and shame the hand that rocks the cradle and stirs the pot of family nourishment, what, darling reader, will remain? I pray we never find out.

With love, as always,