Who would have thought that a generation of young women, who have (perhaps unwittingly) reaped all the benefits of feminism, would rebel by choosing to be tradwives?
A tradwife is a young married woman who posts videos on social media depicting a highly curated, romanticised domestic life of cleaning, cooking and submitting to her husband. Short for “traditional wife”, the term first appeared on 4chan in 2013 when an anonymous user posted on /pol/, the Politically Incorrect discussion board: “You’ll find anything if you pay enough. She’ll pretend to be a tradwife for as long as it takes to get a visa/green card/whatever so you can expect at least a few years of ‘traditional marriage.’”
In recent years, the term has become a byword for predominantly white, wealthy, politically conservative Christian women who refuse to work and often promulgate racist and anti-feminist beliefs.
The tradwife idolises the 1950s housewife, even taking on her fashion tastes: in videos they appear with coiffed hair and an Alice band, wearing frilly frocks with a cinched waist and just enough plunging neckline, and speak in a whispery ASMR voice to give feminine and sexy vibes. Even though many tradwives are filming themselves from suburban houses in Toronto or Cheltenham, they often present “cottagecore”, an aesthetic inspired by an idealised notion of rural life—think homemade cookies, wildflowers and children catching butterflies.
God is never far from this bucolic ideal, as demonstrated by Gwen Swinarton, who found God and moved from soft porn on OnlyFans to tradwifing on Instagram. “Gwen the Milk Maid”, as she is known, is now making a small fortune selling bone broth powder, hair curlers, grassfed collagen, air purifiers, water filters and aprons for $150. Tradwife hashtags are often posted alongside biblicalwife hashtags, with captions akin to “Honouring God and my husband with my femininity”. You could almost hear the rejoicing when Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, recently tweeted a video of his Christian pastor advocating for women not to be allowed to vote.
The growing appeal of the tradwife life among gen Z and millennials is a reaction against what these generations call “bossbabes” or “girlbosses”, career women like their mothers. As TikToker @ivyoutwest put it: “We are a little bit boss-babed out.” Her videos have attracted 3.8m likes. Brushing her hair and putting on her make-up in front of a mirror, she described the tradwife: “It is literally the oldest lifestyle in the book. Before this they were just called stay-at-home mums and before that they were just called women. But now our society has gone so far in the feminist direction that anyone who wants to live a little bit old school and a little bit like how women used to live is cringe right like an extremist.”
