“I’m teaching my daughter that it’s perfectly acceptable to depend on a man,” the video begins, as a tan, slender woman twirls a gingham-clad girl dangerously close to a whirring KitchenAid. “That being a home maker [sic] is the number 1 career she should strive for.” My breath catches, not because I’m moved by her message, but because every time she spins, it looks as though her waist-length hair is going to be sucked into the rapidly rotating spindles of the stand mixer.
As a (female) personal finance writer who thinks constantly about women’s financial rights and plights, this material is like watching an open bag of flour topple to the ground in slow motion. Please be satire, I silently plead as I scroll through her feed. “Submission simply means to trust,” the text-on-screen declares in another video over footage of her dreamily stirring something on the stove. Sigh. Not satire. In this worldview, a woman exists to serve; to be seen and not heard (demonstrated literally by the way the creators often rely on text-on-screen to communicate).
This distinct brand of domestic servitude fetish content comes from what’s known as a “tradwife”—or traditional wife—influencer. The Kitchenaid video, which has 109,000 “likes,” is overrun with comments from horrified onlookers, but many of her other videos are met with glowing praise from men championing this “return to the natural order” and women begging for outfit details.
In the last few weeks, the tradwife trend began entering more frequent mainstream thinkpieces, like this one from Time and this one from CNN. And for years now, the tradwife movement has presented something of a familiar philosophical boobytrap for feminists. Tradwife defenders in the commentariat tout that their movement is “about choice,” ignoring that the limits of this worldview are well-documented (namely, that it sidesteps a commitment to true progress in favor of claiming that any choice is, by definition, a liberating one).
Upon just slightly closer inspection, you’ll find there’s much more to this mirror world of traditional bliss and knee-length linen dresses than meets the untrained eye. There are different strains of the virus: Many are biblically driven (“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord”), and others employ “anti-hustle culture” rhetoric to legitimize the desire not to work outside the home. This is what all variants have in common, though: The videos themselves may be hashtagged #tradwife, but the “link in profile” betrays a different story. These women aren’t actually financially submissive at all. In fact, many of them are making bank.
This runs in direct opposition to one of the hallmarks of the tradwife ethos: a glamorized financial subordination to a male partner. “Dependence” and “submission” receive a cutesy, feminine rebrand, as if there were something demure about not having your own checking account. The husbands are frequently referenced but rarely shown; a sort of paternal Wizard of Oz-like character who must be consulted for any and all decisions, consequential or not. (“I don’t leave home alone after dark,” says self-described tradwife Estee Williams in one of her videos, “I always ask my husband before I leave home…I’m safest at home and with my husband. This is all about safety,” she reassures, ignoring the fact that most women need to leave their house to make money).
In another video, she clearly outlines the tradwife’s financial philosophy: “The money he makes is OUR money,” the text on screen begins innocuously, before driving straight off a cliff, “but as the head of the house HE gets the final say on the big purchases and investments. Let him lead…this will benefit you I promise 😉.” Not the wink, Estee! Have you seen what the boys are investing in these days?
It would be easy to see some of the tamer videos outside of their broader context—those that bemoan the way we don’t support moms (agreed!) without overtly referencing submission and dependence (yikes!)—and assume they’re merely celebrating the domestic work that’s so criminally undervalued.
In fact, for a while, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the trend enraged me so much. I believe domestic work is work, don’t I? I believe stay-at-home parents deserve financial and legal protections. Their labor has long been denied its due importance, something I mostly chalk up to a general devaluing of women’s time; if unpaid domestic labor were quantified with a monetary value, it’s estimated it would constitute between 10% and 39% of GDP.
It was only recently that I recognized the blatant hypocrisy hiding in plain sight: I tapped the profile link of a popular Aussie tradwife and was met with a barrage of links urging me to transact: an Amazon storefront, affiliate codes, a mailing list…even an e-book. I tapped through her website and discovered MLM-coded language: “Are you a stay-at-home mom looking to grow your Instagram and earn extra income while juggling the joys and challenges of motherhood?” Oh, no. The “anti-hustle” lifestyle is, in fact, a thinly veiled mega-hustle—one much more convoluted than the Tupperware parties that came before it.
I perused her site. Oh, look, I thought, a lead magnet! (In digital content marketing, a “lead magnet” is a free downloadable item you give away in exchange for an email address.) Hers just so happened to be iPhone backgrounds featuring affirmations like, “With humility, I embrace my role, upholding traditions as the keeper of our cherished home.” What struck me about her website was how familiar it felt: This was pretty transparently a content creator’s monetized hub, no different from the courses, e-books, and affiliate codes distributed by the boss-babe influencers the tradwives claim to disavow. Oh my gosh, I whispered to no one, She’s girlbossing all over us! The call is coming from inside the housewife!
I have to hand it to them: what a diabolical brand strategy! Build a career teaching other women how not to have a career. Make money assuring women that their husbands should be the sole breadwinner. (If you think most reasonable adults who’ve spent at least 12 minutes in the real world wouldn’t fall for these bizarre enjoinders, consider that a full 25% of TikTok’s 1.7 billion users are under the age of 20, and the majority are women.)
Of course, using the freedoms that feminism has afforded you to protest feminism is not new. Anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly famously spearheaded a movement that historians say single-handedly derailed the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, traveling the US on book tours that directed other women to stay home.
But perhaps the funniest (derogatory) silk ribbon running through the tresses of the tradwife ethos is the perplexing claim that it’s somehow anti-hustle; anti-capitalist. Amazon storefronts and discount codes aside, the very existence of the “1950s ideal housewife” they so emulate was invented in Cold War America as part of a larger, consumerism-driven marketing machine intended to strengthen capitalism against the perceived threat of Communism. Then again, a selective memory is a prerequisite of romanticizing this time period: Women wouldn’t have unobstructed access to their own bank accounts for 20 more years; Black Americans were still legally second-class citizens.
The ideal housewife’s role was seen as Chief Consumption Officer of the home, and it was an indefinite unpaid internship. In this way, the tradwife doesn’t reject capitalism—it embodies it. How else would you classify performing labor that enriches someone else who controls how and when you get access to the resources you created? Sounds a hell of a lot like a job to me (albeit one that requires sleeping with your boss).
Still, I keep returning to the little girl in the KitchenAid video: Is a child whose mother teaches her it’s aspirational to be financially dependent on a man even capable of choosing that path for herself as an adult?
Maybe my cynicism is statistically driven. Women are three times as likely as their male partners to end up in poverty after a divorce (tradwives like Estee have a simple solution for this pesky issue: “Just marry the right man!,” ignoring the truth that any man who’s chomping at the bit to financially control you is, by definition, not the right one). One in six women have experienced financial abuse. One in three admitted remaining in a relationship because they were financially unable to leave.
If you’re taking your cues from the fleet of fringe tradwife influencers, you might hear something about how this is just part of “your role.” But that’s easy for them to say—if things don’t work out, they’ll have the cushion of affiliate income and a personal brand to soften their fall.
