The resurgence of ‘traditional wives’ such as Nara Smith (@/naraazizasmith) and Hannah Neeleman (@/ballerinafarm) are bringing the vintage, conservative lifestyle back into the spotlight through TikTok. Trad wife content often involves women doing domestic tasks and attending to her family, donned in vintage fashion and most importantly, at home. But is this aesthetic truly as harmless as they present?
Peacefully baking and quietly cleaning, free from the shackles of a 9 to 5, blithe and liberated: the tradwives of TikTok seem happy enough. With soft voices and gentle hands, the tradwives depict the character of a ‘perfect’ woman, caring wholly for her husband and children. She herself gets the luxury of staying home all day, financially stable and protected. Filming for social media becomes a fun hobby on the side. What’s not to love?
But when you start to look deeper, it can be seen as a machine of conservative propaganda.
Previously described by former trad wife and author, Tia Levings, as ‘lifestyle evangelism’, creating and posting tradwife content is critiqued for glorifying patriarchal gender roles. Encouraging people to blindly believe that there are no risks or difficulties involved in the life that they are promoting, creates a sense that it is how spectators should be living.
Levings states that “The promise is that, by abandoning career and money, young women can find true success and fulfillment by submitting to a patriarchal ideal that gives all the power to men. This, they posit, is how it should be”
In addition, Levings makes a point to stress that essentially all trad wives are promoting the same ideology: “Men have a place in leadership. Women are meant to serve. The world is a mess but we can clean it up by going back to old values and norms.”
Critics of trad wives also argue that they fail to acknowledge or even consider the immense privilege that is required just to live their lifestyle. In the US alone, where many of these creators are based, Magnifymoney says that more than 50% of all households with two residents rely heavily on being dual income and that number is rising. Living financially dependent on her husband is not even a fathomable prospect for much of the population of working women.
Promoting this lifestyle as an easy and ideal way for a woman to live, could be putting countless women in a position of shame towards their own lives, despite the fact that they aren’t in any financial position to change it.
For young, impressionable women who may be seeing trad wife content promoted to them through social media, the idealised simplicity of trad wifery can seem far more appealing than the monotony of a grueling office job. Young women are being told that unless their life is one of domestication, dependance and deference, it is not satisfactory. They grow into the perfect prey for patriarchy.
From speaking to my peers alone, several of the young women that I know have agreed that they have felt envious of the lifestyle promoted by trad wives, one peer even stating that “It just seems easy. I know it’s bad that I would want to rely on a man, but it isnt even about that, its the simplicity. I guess reliance on a man is just the part you have to accept.”
Critics accuse trad wives of creating content initially with the reliance on men seperate to what is being sold as attractive about the lifestyle so that as young women consume more of this content, they are desensitised and eventually accepting of mens’ leadership- ultimately leading to them championing it as they become increasingly invested in trad wife content. Trad wives are creating a mechanism for producing women who idolise patriarchal, anti-feminist values and see dissatisfaction in anything besides submission to men.
They do this by presenting this lifestyle as attractive and, most importantly, fail proof, which isn’t always the case.
Former trad wife, Enitza Templeton, is garnering support online for sharing her story of her time as a trad wife and bringing awareness to the dangers of falling for the devised aesthetic.
“One of the biggest things I’d love to stress to these young girls being attracted to the trad wife life though these aesthetic social media posts, is exactly that- it is simply an aesthetic” Templeton argues: “They are ruthless businesswomen profiting off of your views and engagement.”
Templeton also stressed the difficulty of keeping up with all that the lifestyle asks of you, exposing what many of the tradwives on TikTok like to keep behind closed doors.
“There are no days off. None.” This part of the trad wives lives where the camera is off and the work is really put in, is one that many viewers may completely fail to consider when looking at the way of life through rose tinted glasses.
Templeton also referred to the “traditional men, [who] are disguising their need for power and control as love and protection. […] Any man that loves you wants to see you flourish as a human, not as a servant.”
Many of these issues can be attributed to the different messages that are put out to young girls and boys according to Templeton- “We would never tell our little boys that they don’t need to think of a career path for life. They can simply find a friend to live with and do all the domestic tasks for and then the friend will support them. […] We should not be telling our young girls this narrative so that this Trad Wife content doesn’t even appeal to them.”
Templeton concludes that “the Trad Wife aesthetic seen on social media should be viewed as entertainment and almost ‘acting’, because no one shows what goes on behind the camera”, and ultimately, this is what most critics of Trad Wife content on social media point out as the main issue- the lack of transparency regarding how dangerous and exhausting the lifestyle can be.
It seems to be commonly promoted societally to not blindly regard what you see on social media as the full truth. So why, when what we are seeing has underlying patriarchal values of women submitting to and being compliant for men, are young women not being openly encouraged to be skeptical?
