Where Feminists and Tradwives Can Agree

The devaluation of care work hurts us all

Image compiled by author in Canva.

There’s a lot of shit I could talk about the tradwife movement. As a progressive feminist who has long been the primary income earner in my home, it goes without saying that I feel distinctly uncomfortable seeing any woman ostensibly delight in submitting to her husband or calling for a return to strictly prescribed gender roles.

If you’ve been protecting your mental health by not getting caught up in the latest trending hashtags and have no idea what a “tradwife” is, I heartily commend you. Is the rock you’re hiding under comfortable, and is there any room for me?

“Tradwife,” as you may have surmised, is short for “traditional wife,” and the growing tradwife movement calls for a return to an era that sort of existed for some people for a little while about 70 years ago. But unlike 1950s homemakers, modern-day tradwife influencers meticulously document every aspect of their daily lives for all the world to see — except, you know, for all the flurries of scrubbing and arranging and haranguing and arguing that I can only imagine has to go on between their carefully staged videos.

If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of consuming content from tradwife influencers, I wouldn’t personally recommend it. First, it feels kind of icky. The icky factor, of course, isn’t confined to tradwives, but to all online influencers promoting impossible standards of beauty, perfection, and poise. Then there’s the danger of kind of enjoying tradwife content. I mean, it’s icky, but it’s also kind of entrancing to watch beautiful women in beautiful kitchens cooking beautiful food.

I hope I didn’t just lose all my feminist street cred.

To be honest, I haven’t really consumed all that much tradwife content because I’m not much of a content consumer — and, you know, I’m busy working and managing my own household. But the tidbits I’ve snatched here and there, including the rabbit hole I fell into while doing research for this article, have made me both grimace and want to keep watching.

It’s easy to decry tradwives as antifeminist and to bemoan all the ideas they promote that fly in the face of years and years of hard-fought feminist progress. But what’s actually…