Tradwife Content Is Taking Over Social Media... Again

[00:00:00]So, traditional gender roles are making a comeback, but this time they're being pushed by teenagers on Tik Tok who are romanticizing a submissive and financially dependent lifestyle that generations of women before them fought to dismantle. I'm 19 years old, married, no degree, no 9 to5, and I'm exactly where I want to be. People on this app act like this is the worst thing in the world. Stay at home mom. My husband's at work providing for our family. I have some sourdough fermenting on the bench, a baby, an apron, a cute dress. Our generation is infantilizing adults. I am 19 years old. I got married a week after I turned 18, and I had my baby on my 19th birthday. Have more babies than you can afford.

[00:00:44]In the past few years, Treadwife content has been slowly creeping back into the mainstream. that now these videos are going more and more viral and they're attracting millions of viewers who relate to the promise of soft slow living in a world that feels increasingly exhausting and uncertain.

[00:00:59]But underneath all of that sourdough bread and linen dresses and soft-spoken voices, there are dangerous ideologies being promoted from religious conservatism and the manosphere to movements trying to roll back fundamental women's rights. So where the [ __ ] did this all come from?

[00:01:21]Hi everybody. Welcome or welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Lola and I make videos breaking down the systems and patterns that shape our everyday lives. So, if you like this style of content and you want to see more, make sure to subscribe below and hit the bell button to be notified every time I post. I just came back last week from quite a long hiatus, but I will be posting weekly, so be sure to stay tuned. But with that, let's get back into the video. Because like clockwork, anti-women and misogynistic content is on the rise once again. An article from 2025 states, "When people think about online misogyny, they probably envision forums and video game chat rooms filled with young men using lewd language. But arguably the most popular anti-feminist content today is produced by women, trades. TRDwives are women who promote traditional gender roles. from marrying and having children really young to foregoing their education and careers to be stay-at-home mothers. They do all the cooking, cleaning, and caring for the home. And they're often financially dependent on or completely submissive to their husbands. And yes, this is an extremely heteronormative trend. But as the article continues, wife culture is not just aiming to restore traditional gender roles. It is also an important force in formulating a new model of womanhood, one that incorporates strong religious identity, a specific feminine aesthetic, and far-right ideas. And since more and more videos of these have been going viral, there has been a lot of discourse online about triedwives. Is the trend empowering or just anti-feminist? And isn't it just a personal choice that these people should be allowed to make? Well, today we're going to break it all down. We're going to look into the rise of tradife content in the last few years, just how traditional these tradives actually are, and who is benefiting from the reinforcement of these structures that are systematically disadvantaging women.

[00:03:06]Let's get into it. [music] So, to start off, why are so many people drawn to this wife lifestyle? Well, in the modern world, we're constantly facing economic insecurity, a cost of living crisis, constant burnout from the hustle culture. And through all of this instability, many people have a desire for simplicity, stability, and a clear purpose in life. The Guardian writes, "American women are grappling with a backlash against abortion rights, their economic mobility, and feminism itself.

[00:03:38]They're also dealing with the failure of US social programs to keep up with the rising cost of living or to provide meaningful support for working moms.

[00:03:47]Wouldn't it be nice if you could choose to live on one income? Wouldn't it be nice if you could choose to stay home and raise children rather than be forced into it because child care is so damn expensive? And so with this backdrop of instability, tradives present the exact idealistic escapist fantasy that many people are looking for. They spend their days looking after their home in a designer dress, cooking healthy food from scratch, and spend endless amounts of time with their kids. They introduce us to their slower, simpler, more intentional life, all wrapped up in a soft, beautiful aesthetic fit for social media. An article in the conversation writes, "This type of soft living content is inviting and relaxing. loose wavy hair, fresh homemade cooking, and a farmhouse aesthetic bring to mind Little House on the Prairie and help viewers forget the crises of the world outside.

[00:04:38]So for many, watching and engaging with this sort of content is a response to the real social and economic pressures that they're facing. Yet under the veneer of this idyllic cottagecore lifestyle, there are much more insidious ideologies hidden. These include submission and obedience to your husband and serving his every whim. the promotion of natural gender roles like being soft-spoken, agreeable, and nurturing. Giving up your bodily autonomy. Anti-feminist beliefs like the repealing of reproductive rights, removing a woman's right to vote or to work. Conservative Christianity through modesty, chastity, and submission, and this overarching idea of a gender hierarchy with men as leaders and decision makers and breadwinners of the house, while women are the followers and the subordinates. When interviewed about her content, Estee Williams, a prolific TRD wife influencer, said trwives also believed that they should submit to their husbands and serve their husbands and family. Williams was quick to defend her position against potential critics, noting that she did not believe women were inferior to men, but that they had an equally important but different role.

[00:05:41]The journalist who interviewed her later wrote that trades who claim that women are naturally suited for submission to male authority and thus deserving protection from men are implicitly condoning women's secondass citizenship.

[00:05:53]So with all this being said, if this lifestyle is being sold to us as a return to traditional values, how traditional is it really?

[00:06:03][music] So, as we discussed in the intro, trout wife content presents itself as a return to simpler, more traditional ways of life. But the version of tradition presented on social media is far removed from the historical reality. Jacqueline Betty wrote a wonderful article for Time magazine. In it, she discusses that 18th and early 19th century American women's submission was not merely suggested in prescriptive literature. It also had the force of law. Married women lived under the legal doctrine of coveture in which their individual legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands.

[00:06:41]In reality, coveture erased wives' independent legal identities under the guise of protection and care from their husbands. This legal framework dictated that a married woman owned no property in her own name. Any wages she earned belonged to her husband. Wives had no clearly defined parental rights and their bodies were not their own. Marital rape, for example, was not considered a crime in the 18th century. In certain circumstances, domestic abuse was condoned as a corrective measure to the submissive wife, and 18th and 19th century women did not possess rights as a full citizen in the United States. So, let's just go over that a second. The historical realities of this traditional life that modern-day tradives reference include no independent legal identity, no property ownership, no credit cards, no divorce, even in the case of rape or domestic violence, limited access to education, no employment, no voting, and complete economic dependence. So to the question of how traditional are modern-day wives online, almost all the ones we see on Tik Tok are benefiting from the influencer economy. They're financially independent through brand deals and sponsorships, merchandise, affiliate links, and even ad revenue. In fact, their online persona is their product. A GNET article from 2023 states, "Typically leading communities of between 20,000 and 200,000 followers, Triwife sites were not only significant in size, but probably highly lucrative.

[00:08:04]These women demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of influencer culture and a sophisticated understanding of what sort of content performs and generates the greatest reach on each platform. And as a USA Today reinforced, the blatant hypocrisy of advocates of the so-called tradife reveals that many women, whether they admit it or not, do feel called to work, to build a business, to advocate for a cause, or otherwise do something that they feel makes a positive contribution to the world in addition to being a wife or a mother. It really is possible for women to have both meaningful careers and family lives. And all of this is such a clear example of choice feminism. Even though tradwives today are choosing a life of domesticity, submission, and dependence, there's a key word in that sentence, choosing. So these creators are making the choice to be trades while still retaining the rights that were won through feminism, remaining financially independent from their spouses, and exercising the legal, political, and economic freedoms unavailable to women in the past. So modern tradwives aren't actually living traditional lives at all. They're living modern lives built on rights won by feminism while advocating a return to a version of history that they themselves don't actually live in. The modern tradife is only possible because of modern feminism. Let's take the delightful Erica Kirk as an example. Have more babies than you can afford.

[00:09:31]>> This isn't the first time she's said anything like this. She routinely tells women that they should get married and have children young, prioritizing family over their careers and education. Yet she herself holds multiple degrees, only got married in her 30s, and now at 37 serves as the chairwoman and CEO of Turning Point USA while being the mother of two young children. So it is just blatant hypocrisy. And one of the most dangerous parts about this push towards the traditional lifestyle is that Triwives' glorification of these views obscures the reality of the consequences of women's submission and subordination to men, whether it is a choice or not.

[00:10:08]Because the lived reality beyond this flashy social media version of the tradife lifestyle is that most women in these situations do not have financial independence and thus have no savings, no assets, no retirement fund, and no safety net if anything goes wrong. And with all the manosphere and extremist right content online concurrently encouraging men to find someone younger, hotter, and more submissive, having no backup plans and no support systems is really dangerous for women. Not only that, not only that, but these women are often left trying to support a crazy amount of kids while having no college education, no work experience, and no job prospects to support themselves or their families. So sure, if something goes wrong for one of these triedwife influencers, they can often leave because they have businesses, audiences, and independent income. But for ordinary women, they often can't. If they're being abused, raped, mistreated, or isolated from family and friends, they often don't have a way out.

[00:11:14]So, let's take it a bit further. What's behind this wife trend? turning its cogs and pushing these extreme conservatist and misogynistic ideas into the mainstream. You want to say it with me?

[00:11:25]The patriarchy. The answer is always the patriarchy. The rise of tradife content is not happening by chance. It exists because of the broader patriarchal system that has shaped gender roles for centuries. We're currently facing huge societal issues like the cost of living crisis, constant economic insecurity, and a widespread loneliness epidemic.

[00:11:46]And all of these problems have arisen as a result of the system that we live within. But rather than asking why these problems exist, women are instead being encouraged to adapt to them by returning to restrictive gender roles. And through this suggestion, the patriarchy is essentially presenting itself as a solution to systematic problems that the patriarchy helped to create. So yes, it's essentially a band-aid solution over deeper structural problems, which then again reinforces existing gender hierarchies instead of actually trying to dismantle them. Now, there are several specific mechanisms at play here under the surface of this tradife trend that are all helping to sustain our existing patriarchal system. And the first one is bio essentialism, which is when biological explanations are used to justify existing gender roles. Bio essentialists often claim that women are naturally nurturing, men are naturalb born leaders, and that women are naturally submissive. However, in an interview about her book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, Angela Sini argues that we know the psychological sex differences are small or non-existent. So, it really makes little difference what the structures of our brain do or don't. As a journalist, what I find really fascinating is the dogged way in which some scientists scour the brain for difference. As though they might find an answer to gender inequality in the hippocampus or the prefrontal lobe, other explanations get pushed aside by this biological essentialism. So what we can instead see is that gender roles are socially constructed being developed through socialization rather than biological differences. So through your family's beliefs, the schools you went to, the religions you grew up in, the media you were exposed to as a child, the conversation writes, "Trad wives frame a highly specific form of femininity, domestic, heterosexual, submissive, and often implicitly white, as natural, desirable, and morally superior. By presenting it as natural rather than socially constructed and affirmed by social institutions, tradives obscure the structural foundations of traditional femininity and help make existing inequalities seem inevitable, even healthy. The other main mechanism I want to focus on is religious beliefs and ideology. Many of the religious values that we see treadwives use to justify their way of life are simply reinforcing the existing patriarchal systems we live in. things such as submission, family hierarchy, purity culture and modesty, and of course our god-given gender roles. And in the words of the sisters at girl defined, womanhood is not a man-made idea constructed from ancient traditions and cultural trends. It's a god-esigned reality that he established from the beginning of time. And as the article continues, for many influencers, religious piety is a crucial component of their views on gender, particularly their belief that a wife's fundamental role is to let God and her husband lead the way. But with all this being said, it's not as if Pridewife creators don't have any idea that these are the ideas below the surface that they're reinforcing. Because the idilic aesthetic videos that they post are often just the first step they take in a broader process of radicalization.

[00:14:48]TDWife content typically begins with relatable lifestyle videos about baking, motherhood, homemaking, and slow living.

[00:14:55]They begin to build trust with their audiences by presenting themselves as ordinary women documenting their everyday lives. Yet, once that trust has been established, increasingly ideological beliefs begin to appear alongside their lifestyle content.

[00:15:08]Suddenly, they're sneaking anti-feminist, anti-immigration, and anti-abortion rhetoric into their videos, and before long, they're just straight up reciting far-right political points. The conversation says, "They take you into their homes, show you their children, and talk to you about their everyday lives, yet slipped into videos of wives baking sourdough bread, or comments about our migration problem.

[00:15:29]Once your interest is peaked, you're directed to less regulated platforms that traffic in more overt hate." The GNET article additionally states that TRDwife followers were offered in-group association and parasocial relationships with the intention of strengthening right-wing community membership and legitimizing extreme religious, political, and ideological positions. As platform regulation decreases, the opportunity for radicalization increases. And the thing is, this progression is really similar to other radicalization pipelines that we see online, particularly within the manosphere, where viewers are initially drawn in through relatively uncontroversial content before gradually being exposed to increasingly extremist ideas. Above all, this rise in tdwife content lately is a clear example of how this patriarchal system has survived for centuries. And it's because it's not exclusively upheld by men. Women can be both victims of patriarchal systems, but also participants in reproducing its systemic abuse. It doesn't mean they're purposely being malicious or trying to oppress other women. In fact, many have themselves been socialized into believing these gender roles and natural, moral, and desirable. But just because we can understand where these beliefs come from, it does not absolve creators of responsibility for the harmful ideologies that they continue to promote.

[00:16:54]So with so many deeper systems at play, what can we actually do about it? Well, that's exactly the thing. If tradife content is a symptom of deeper structural problems, then those problems require deeper structural solutions. So no, the answer isn't asking women to adapt to patriarchal systems and just put up with it. It's to work to change the system itself. And this is to me where radical feminism comes in. It's a concept that emerged in the late 1960s and it approaches patriarchy as a structural system rather than simply a collection of individual choices and attitudes. And it asks not how women can survive in existing structures, but how those overall structures can be dismantled altogether. And that's the thing. For us to live in a world where women aren't constantly in fear of our rights being repealed, where we're not constantly succumbing to the latest patriarchal trend, it requires transforming the institutions, cultures, and power structures that continue to reproduce this inequality. It requires challenging patriarchal gender roles, rejecting the idea that men and women have different fixed biologically determined social roles. It requires challenging biological essentialism, rejecting the belief that domesticity, submission, or caregiving are all somehow innately female characteristics.

[00:18:12]And it requires us to recognize that gender roles are socially constructed rather than just natural. But we also need to address the structural conditions that make TD wife content appealing in the first place. And yes, I'm talking about the cost of living crisis and economic insecurity, housing affordability, and healthy work life balances. If people are turning to TRWife content because they're exhausted, isolated, or financially overwhelmed, those underlying conditions deserve political and social solutions rather than romanticized returns to traditional gender roles. And this means actually supporting women through affordable child care, equal pay, paid parental leave, accessible health care, protection from domestic violence. And this means ensuring that women have genuine choices rather than choices that are constrained by financial dependence.

[00:19:02]And lastly, we need to counter online radicalization. It's so important to recognize how these ideological pipelines operate, to improve our own media literacy skills, to learn how to identify this sort of subtle propaganda, to challenge misinformation, to challenge misogyny, and most of all, to encourage critical thinking about the content that we're consuming online.

[00:19:28][music] To wrap up, an article in Miss Magazine wrote, "The Proud Wife Life, one where she doesn't have to work and where she opted into this, can be seen as a form of empowerment and liberation. And that's deeply dangerous. Her popularity to me signals a dangerous cultural shift, one towards general acceptance of a world where women's rights, the rights of queer people, and people in non-traditional family arrangements are increasingly curtailed and eliminated.

[00:19:57]tradife content didn't start rising again because all of us women suddenly decided, "Oh, I really want to be a housewife again. It appeared because the trend offers this very comfortable aesthetic looking answer to very real fears." And it's incredibly persuasive.

[00:20:14]But those answers come at a cost. They present a very romanticized version of history. They reinforce unbelievably restrictive gender roles. They normalize these patriarchal ideas. and they create pathways into broader conservative and far-right ideologies. But just because the problems that tradives are identifying are often real. Modern work is exhausting, child care is expensive, and many people do feel isolated every day, it doesn't mean that the solutions they're trying to sell us are the right ones. Instead of asking women to carry even more unpaid labor or telling them that they can only find fulfillment in submitting to a man and particularly instead of returning to the systems that have historically denied women autonomy, we should instead be asking why society keeps maintaining these conditions in the first place. Because if we're serious about giving women a genuine choice, then that choice can't be between exploitation in the workplace and exploitation at home. It has to be a world where everyone has the security, support, and freedom to build the life that they want to live. But that is all from me today. So, thank you very much for watching until this point. If you like the video, be sure to give it a like and comment below and subscribe and click the bell to be notified every time I post. But with that, enjoy your weekend and I will see you next week.

[00:21:30]Bye.

[00:21:34][music] >> [music]