As I approached the finale of the Tradwife Trilogy, I began to wonder if what I felt about tradwives could be defined as anger or pity. On one hand, I resented tradwives because of their renewed credence to the double standards our working mothers fought to unlearn — the ones that condemned them as “selfish” for bearing the same professional aspirations that characterized men as “providers.” But when I cracked open the pink veneer of the tradwife movement, only to discover the “Manosphere” lurking at its core, my perspective began to shift. I realized that tradwives weren’t the progenitors of this traditionalist, anti-feminist rhetoric. It was men — duh. Quickly, the anger I felt towards tradwives was displaced by pity. They weren’t the masterminds of the Manosphere’s women-hating, patriarchal agenda. They were the pawns.
Even after I brought the origins of the tradwife movement into focus, I still felt like I was missing something. Sure, I could understand what it meant to be a tradwife through the eyes of an influencer or even a fragile male traditionalist. But what about a woman in real life? I needed to assimilate myself to her psychology, to evolve my investigation of tradwives past the comments section of an Instagram post. And so, when I discovered a Facebook group with upwards of 3,000 members entitled “The Tradwife Life,” I resolved to answer one simple question: Why? Why are normal women sacrificing everything from their careers to their financial autonomy to become a tradwife? Why are normal women submitting to the same patriarchal forces that oppressed their female ancestors for more than 12,000 years? Why are normal women raising their daughters to acquiesce to male authority instead of commanding it?
To infiltrate this circle of traditional homemakers, I had to write answers to three questions for which I posed as one myself, employing the traditionalist verbiage I had studied on other platforms:
Q: What does being a Tradwife mean to you?
A: As someone aspiring to this lifestyle, being a tradwife means celebrating and returning to a time when society actually uplifted women who love homemaking.
Q: How do you incorporate traditional values in your daily life?
A: Despite only being in college, I try to incorporate traditional values into my life by cooking meals for my boyfriend and me as often as I can, maintaining a close relationship with God and minimizing my interactions with men, especially when my boyfriend isn’t present.
Q: Why are you interested in joining the Tradwife Life?
A: In being surrounded by so many career-obsessed peers, I’ve realized that I’m different. I feel a natural calling to a more traditional lifestyle, which is something I plan to practice after my boyfriend (soon-to-be fiancé I hope!) proposes to me after graduation.
If my use of these signifiers was a test to measure how well I could cosplay a traditionally-minded college student — despite having cooked nothing more than a hotdog in a pan for my boyfriend — I passed with flying colors. A week later, I was in.
I can remember the shock that overcame my body when I scrolled through the feed of the Tradwife Life for the first time and discovered that these women acted nothing like the legions of crazy Facebook moms, banded together by obsessions like breast milk, essential oils and silent letters, to name a few. Most of these women didn’t even act like typical traditionalists either. They didn’t hold space for the alt-right clickbait that tradwife influencers plastered across social media, the egos of toxic, red-blooded men coddled by the Tradwives Club, nor the cartoonish, feminine ideals forged by the Manosphere to dehumanize real, flesh-and-bone women. Instead, these women accomplished what I thought to be utterly impossible in the realm of traditionalism: They made tradwives look … normal.
These Facebook tradwives don’t coalesce around the ideals of traditionalism, but instead the symptoms of it — the anxiety, the guilt, the fear and the resentment that come from embracing a way of life designed to subordinate women. In a vast majority of posts, these women reckon with their fiscal unworthiness, their apprehension to ask their husbands for help, their unfulfilling housework and their indignation at caring for their partners like mothers instead of wives. The more I scrolled, the more I began to notice that each of these emotions arose from the same anxiety — the anxiety of being inferior to one’s partner.
Facebook tradwives have internalized this spousal inequality as inadequacy. Namely, the comparisons these women draw between the cost of feminine and masculine labor serves no other purpose but to invalidate their suffering. As one tradwife puts it, “I’m not allowed to be tired or sore because my day doesn’t compare to his.” Another tradwife writes about feeling immobilized by burnout, “dreading when my baby wakes up (and) not wanting more kids.” Even then, she still proceeds to deny her suffering on the basis that it must be unequal to her husband’s: “I want to ask my husband to take on more of the mental load, but I feel so selfish and weak-minded when he works 40-60 hours a week… and all I do is just babysit 2 kids.”
Despite studies equating motherhood to 2.5 full-time jobs, the value of domestic labor has been systematically diminished in the public consciousness by its lack of economic recognition. In an age of internalized capitalism, our determination of self-worth via economic productivity produces a false equivalence between the merit and price of labor. In consequence, forms of unpaid labor like homemaking are belittled, while high-earning, historically male professions propel men to positions of leadership in and out of the home.
The low self-esteem of Facebook tradwives elucidates how patriarchal oppression doesn’t discriminate between the traditionalists who embrace it and the feminists who defy it: Under the patriarchy, inferiority is an inescapable condition of the female psyche. Traditional women cope with this patriarchal oppression by framing their subordination as self-sacrifice. This includes the denial of basic, emotional communication between themselves and their husbands. By coding their expressions of disapproval, anger and resentment as “controlling” and “nagging,” tradwives have programmed themselves to silence any criticisms directed toward their husband at the risk of sounding like a bad wife. In response to her husband’s financially abusive behaviors, one tradwife grapples with the limits of this emotional self-denial: “Am I being too much? Asking too much? Do I just need to give up control and let him have it all? Or do I deserve to be asking the questions I am asking?”
The plight of these Facebook tradwives demonstrates how the imbalance of power in patriarchal households isn’t liberating, but instead the cause of anxiety, inferiority and guilt in women’s psyches. By giving these negative emotions a platform, these Facebook tradwives reject dominant representations of female traditionalism, which Betty Friedan calls “The Happy Housewife Heroine” in her seminal 1963 publication, “The Feminine Mystique.” Performances of this youthful domestic bliss proliferated in 1950s media, homogenizing the image of the female homemaker to resemble women like Alexia Delarosa, the TikTok tradwife who makes you wonder if a prolonged, forceful smile is the byproduct of a lobotomy or maybe just Lexapro. Facebook tradwives, by contrast, divorce the housewife from her everlasting smile, producing an image of the 21st-century homemaker who’s as exhausted and depressed as the rest of us.
When I began investigating the ways Facebook tradwives responded to the anxieties of spousal inequality, the comments from the aforementioned posts revealed that the subversion of traditionalist discourse in the Tradwife Life didn’t end at debunking the myth of the happy housewife. Instead, by defining the antidote to marital discord as equality between husband and wife, Facebook tradwives align their traditionalist discourse with the same feminist ideologies they claim to revile. In almost every comments section, Facebook tradwives implicate the husband in the origination of marital anxiety. “Your husband is an a*hole to put it nicely,” one woman writes, while others write: “Girl it’s not selfish to need help … you’re in a partnership. Your loads should be equal;” “Stop mothering him;” “You do too much. Less work, more self-care;” “He needs to chip in more;” “He should be wining and dining you;” “A wife is a partner NOT a maid;” “His pain does not negate (your) pain” and “Advocate for your needs. You are just as important in your marriage as your husband is.” By identifying the solution to marital conflict as behavioral changes made on the part of the husband, Facebook tradwives demonstrate an implicit awareness of the role that patriarchal oppression plays in fostering their suffering.
This indictment of patriarchal power represents a departure from the tradition of misdiagnosed female suffering. From 1940 to 1970, male doctors medicalized the unhappiness that women faced as homemakers as a mental disorder they dubbed the “housewife syndrome.” Yes, that’s right — these defunct male doctors gaslit their female patients so literally, they’d give the male manipulators of 2023 a run for their money. By misdiagnosing female suffering as the byproduct of mental afflictions like neurosis or hysteria, male doctors denied any culpability for the role that patriarchal oppression played in the disparagement of female self-worth. Twenty years later, the perception of female suffering only changed when second-wave feminists from the 1960s and ’70s redefined the origins of unhappiness among housewives not as a mental disorder but instead as a symptom of patriarchal oppression.
Concurrently, feminists articulated the solution to female subordination as the pursuit of an egalitarian marriage. A twentieth-century feminist by the name of Vera Brittain compiled a list of demands centered around this very idea: The “education of men,” she writes, is imperative “to a fuller recognition of their parental responsibilities,” for “mere(ly) handing over a weekly check does not adequately dispose of such responsibilities.”
One Facebook tradwife borrowed these feminist sentiments when articulating how indispensable equality is to a happy traditional marriage: “Being a tradwife … does not mean being a doormat. It does not mean you are to be screamed at, yelled at, demeaned, put down, overworked, overused, over-bred and unable to have options for your own life. I’ve seen too many posts where people accept whatever the penis holder dishes out. No. Just no. My grandmother told me ‘never be one man away from welfare,’ always have an option for you or be working on getting one.” Marriage, in other words, is a partnership of equals. Too often, tradwives lose sight of this fact because their anti-feminist rhetoric confuses “man-hating” women with those who hold men accountable for withholding the empathy, respect and compassion all human beings deserve.
If the watered-down feminism of Facebook tradwives taught me anything, it’s that the traditional marriages of the 21st century may not have been as traditional as I thought. Facebook tradwives all but confirmed this notion to me when I got to know who these women were before they identified as homemakers. Many of them wrote about how they were raised by matriarchs who not only worked full-time jobs but also “carried all the weight” around the house. Many of them were just as independent and professionally-minded as any young woman you’d encounter today. When describing themselves before marriage, one woman writes about how she “had huge plans which included a job with the government and an unconditional offer from a university to do my masters,” while others write about being “catapulted onto the management track,” “working 100hr weeks,” “making 180k” and “working for a global corporation.” If the past lives of these Facebook tradwives were characterized by independence and ambition, then what changed?
Often, a tradwife’s withdrawal from the workplace didn’t correspond to a choice made by herself but instead, a choice made that was made for her. At face value, pregnancy most commonly precipitated a woman’s transition to full-time homemaking. One tradwife writes about how after giving birth, “motherhood just took over because whilst the plan was always to do my masters, it just never really seemed important.” Other tradwives tell a similar story: “Before I had this baby I worked A LOT but since 39 weeks pregnant I have been at home,” one woman writes, while another said, “I stopped working when I got pregnant with my daughter and … realized the massive benefits of me being home. I don’t plan on going back to work ever.”
Apart from pregnancy, the pursuit of homemaking was a choice most often decided by husbands, especially those who failed to support their working wives. One woman writes about the time she picked up night shifts to subsidize her loss of income as a daytime homemaker, thereby forcing her husband to take on domestic responsibilities like bedtime routines, dinners and cleanups. Her husband’s negligence of such tasks “put a huge strain on our marriage” because she would then be “cleaning a disaster of a house either when I got off work at 11 p.m. or all the next day.” Despite her burnout, it was her husband who asked her to quit her job, “because he can’t manage our home and children the way I can.” I was disappointed but not surprised by the sheer number of Facebook tradwives who echoed this exact sentiment.
In another post, one tradwife writes about how she “decided to stop working on my own because my husband did nothing to help me when I worked. I asked for help for 4 years while I worked and he just didn’t.” As another woman puts it, “I feel very overwhelmed because I do everything a SAHM (stay-at-home mom) does plus a 40-hour job. I try to never complain (out loud) and I’m always very exhausted.” But above all, the most damning anecdote I read came from a woman who wrote about how her husband “called me up in the middle of the night when I was at work five years ago” to tell her that “he could not take care of the baby all night and work all day. I was pretty exhausted as well.” Here’s the kicker: After displacing all of his domestic duties onto his wife, “He moved up four times at his job.” Weaponized incompetence, in other words, has become a prerequisite of professional achievement among male breadwinners.
Together, these anecdotes amounted to one simple truth: Real women aren’t called to traditional gender roles — they’re driven to them. For as many advancements as women have made in the workplace over the last century, the infrastructure designed to sustain working professionals has remained unchanged. Today, in other words, we practice the same work policies, school schedules and social programs designed by and for a workforce dominated by male breadwinners. It should come as no surprise then that a vast majority of Facebook tradwives represent a class of working women who were failed by a society that purported to embrace gender equality while lacking the structures to support it.
When I began to see tradwives in this way — as mothers who were jettisoned from the workforce because of their unwillingness to participate in its toxic, “always-on” culture — it became more and more difficult to differentiate the plight of a tradwife from that of an ordinary mother. The largest statistically significant survey of mothers in the United States revealed that the challenges mothers are facing in 2023 are no different than the ones Facebook tradwives described in the Tradwife Life. With 49% of mothers relying on outside childcare, the cost of daycare has risen so exponentially in this economy that 52% of mothers have considered leaving the workforce. Each year, this lack of affordable parental support is driving more and more mothers out of the workforce: The amount of respondents who identified as stay-at-home mothers jumped from 15% in 2022 to 25% in 2023. Moreover, when it comes to the mental load of parenting, mothers are bearing a disproportionately higher percentage of domestic labor than their partners. In addition to the 58% of respondents who identified as the primary caretaker of the home, 62% of mothers also indicate that they allocate less than an hour to themselves each day. In consequence, a mental health crisis has emerged among 46% of mothers who have been driven to therapy in the last year.
Collectively, the findings of this survey paint a somber portrait of motherhood in 2023: Maybe women really can’t do it all. Mothers today are among the first generation of women who were raised by working parents. As children, they couldn’t call in sick without experiencing the shame their mothers felt when they asked their boss for the day off; they couldn’t wait for their mothers to pick them up from school without feeling forgotten past 5 p.m.; they couldn’t be disappointed when they couldn’t find their mother’s face in the crowd of parents watching their first-grade play. Mothers in 2023 possess a unique awareness of what it means to be a working mother as both a child and a parent who suffered its toll: Working mothers live in the liminal space between the private and public spheres of life where women are neither good enough mothers, nor good enough professionals.
When I awoke to this reality, I returned to the question that elicited this investigation in the first place: Why? As the feminism of Facebook tradwives revealed, no woman of the 21st century would voluntarily surrender herself to oppressive, patriarchal gender roles. Instead, such gender roles act as a last resort — the only way that burnt-out, working mothers could rediscover purpose in a world that robbed them of it. Sure, tradwives will probably explain homemaking to you as a calling from God. But deep down, they know the real reason behind their acquiescence to traditionalism: to conform to traditional gender roles is to protect themselves from the same patriarchal systems that failed them as working mothers — the ones that provided such little support to working parents that women must now to decide between being a good mother and being a successful wage-earner.
As I stood on the precipice of my concluding remarks of the Tradwife Trilogy, all I could think about was how I felt neither anger nor pity towards these women. I felt pain — a pain that’s become so universal, that young women on TikTok have begun to recognize it among inanimate objects, including a statue of a 13-year-old girl being groped by tourists, a Minnie Mouse pinata and the Rockefeller Christmas tree lying barren in a truck bed. In the comments of these videos, women responded to these objects with empathetic sentiments like, “She is so tired”; “Leave her alone”; “Hold her hand. Hug her. Sit with her and admire the sky”; “Hacked down, redecorated, admired and thrown away”; and “It feels like she just lays there like she knew this was her fate. Like it was her mother’s like it was her mother’s mother’s.” Together, these women are resonating with a pain that’s best characterized by the text overlaying each of these videos: “To be a woman is to perform.”
When I began to see performance as a fundamental condition of womanhood, I started to understand why tradwives traveled to such great extremes to idealize their life on the internet. The tradwife movement was built around performances of domestic bliss that have become necessary in a world where women must surrender themselves to the needs of others — and smile while doing it. The more we alienate tradwives from the struggles of modern women — despite being the product of it — the more we risk seeing them as enemies instead of the women we must fight for.
Daily Arts Writer Bela Kellogg can be reached at bkellogg@umich.edu.