In a cottage somewhere in the woods right now, there is a woman making homemade sourdough bread in a long dress and apron, talking about the simplicity of domestic life to her phone camera to post on TikTok. Tradwives or “traditional wives” have been an online community since the mid-2010s. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic and change it caused, the term exploded online in hashtags and videos in 2020. The rise of domestic aesthetics and tradwife influencers on social media feeds calls into question modern ideas surrounding feminism and what it means to be empowered as a woman. There are some who deem this trend as empowering, in that women have the choice to adopt this perceivedly more simple lifestyle. The tradwife movement promotes a regressive vision of gender roles rooted in patriarchy, but dismissing the women who participate in it ignores the reality that patriarchal values shape the beliefs and actions of everyone.
The tradwife ideal that is promoted by most influencers in the sphere is an idealized construct of the American housewife with historical roots in post-World War II America. During the war, women entered the workforce en masse to fill in the gaps left by men fighting in the war. Once those men came back from war, however, many women were pushed out of the workforce and back to the homestead as men reassumed the jobs they left behind. This gave way to the construction of the idealized housewife in media and advertising in the 1950s. Housewives became the perfect target for companies looking to sell their recent surplus of goods.
In the “Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan describes how corporations in the 1950s were actively and purposefully feeding women the ideology of the feminine mystique to keep them buying products. This “feminine mystique” refers to the vibe of perfection that was actively being marketed to women at the time. Corporations marketed domestic perfection to increase consumer spending, adding another layer of patriarchal interests in the construction of the housewife persona. Feminist thinkers of the mid-20th century began challenging the idea that domestic life alone could provide fulfillment for women, with many arguing that the idealized housewife role limited women’s intellectual and economic potential.
In “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir argued that patriarchal societies often confine women to immanence, the repetitive cycle of maintaining life through tasks such as cleaning, cooking and childcare. These activities are necessary but rarely allow individuals to pursue transcendence, which refers to creating, achieving and shaping the world through meaningful projects. Domestic labor often functions like a “hamster wheel” of work, where tasks must constantly be repeated but don’t often produce lasting change, go without recognition and aren’t personally meaningful. As Abraham Maslow states in the Feminine Mystique, “capacities are needs and they clamor to be used.” The role of the traditional housewife is an imagined ideal constructed through media, advertising and patriarchal ideals.
The current tradwife movement romanticizes these historical ideals of a stay-at-home wife and mother, promoting traditional gender roles on social media. A study was conducted in 2025 by Rebecca L. Stotzer and Ashley Nelson, analyzing 61 creators using the “#tradwife” on TikTok after 2020. The study revealed that these creators are a diverse group in terms of race, religion and background, but many share similar beliefs about gender roles and feminism. Their shared ideology stems from gender essentialism, the idea that the man’s role is to provide while women’s role is to nurture. Many of these creators blame feminism for pushing women into the workforce, claiming impossible expectations were put on women in this shift. There’s a pervasive rejection of “girl boss” culture and hustle culture that defines modern work. Instead, creators promote homesteading, cottagecore and slow living in their content. The study also notes that a smaller subset of tradwives express more extreme views, including hostility toward feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and gender diversity. These views sometimes overlap with far-right or extremist rhetoric, though the authors emphasize that not all tradwives hold such beliefs. The tradwives found on social media repackage traditional gender roles in a palatable modern form.
While the tradwife movement enforces patriarchal gender roles, those who consider themselves tradwives should not be viewed as solely responsible for sustaining patriarchal systems. Patriarchy functions as a social structure that shapes the expectations, values, and aspirations of everyone raised within it. Women themselves can internalize patriarchal beliefs because those beliefs are embedded in the culture surrounding us. Many tradwife influencers frame their lifestyle as a response to the pressures placed on modern women who are expected to succeed professionally, maintain households, and raise children simultaneously.
In rejecting the “girl boss” model of empowerment, they are responding to very real frustrations with modern work culture and the unsustainable expectations placed on women in society today. However, the solution offered by the tradwife movement does not dismantle these pressures so much as redirect them into pre-existing hierarchies of gender roles, presenting domestic life as women’s natural or superior place.
The danger of the movement lies not in individual women choosing to stay home or prioritize domestic life, but in the broader cultural message that this arrangement is the ideal form of womanhood.
When traditional roles are framed as natural rather than socially and economically constructed, they reinforce the same patriarchal logic that earlier feminist movements sought to challenge and change.
The resurgence of the tradwife aesthetic on social media ultimately reveals how persistent patriarchal ideas remain within modern culture. The appeal of tradwife content reflects widespread dissatisfaction with modern work culture and the competing expectations placed on women, but it also demonstrates how easily outdated gender hierarchies can be repackaged into appealing modern aesthetics. Criticizing the ideology behind the movement is necessary, but condemning the women who participate in it misses the bigger point. Patriarchy is not maintained by a single group of people but by the cultural systems that shape how everyone understands gender, work and fulfillment. The popularity of tradwife influencers says less about the personal failings of the women who embrace the lifestyle and more about the enduring power of the ideals that continue to define womanhood in the public imagination.
