If you spend time scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram, you are likely familiar with tradwife influencers. Women wearing floral aprons in pastel kitchens, talking about making food from scratch while five kids run around behind her. A carefully curated vision of domestic femininity that recalls the 1950’s housewife ideal. Recently, there has been a rise in this kind of content and a spike in popularity. Influencers like Hannah Neeleman, Nara Smith and others have taken the internet by storm, making the traditional wife’s lifestyle look peaceful and effortless. However, the image these women present online is not an accurate reflection of the “traditional” lifestyle.
The experience of a 1950’s housewife is not at all like what these influencers portray. While the #tradwife movement idealizes the homemaker role, the reality for many women in that era was one of isolation, limited opportunity and constrained ambition. The tradwife movement amplifies the aesthetic for visual appeal and is promoting the traditional wife role to the young women watching. Showing an idealized version of the traditional wife to young women is dangerous and leads them into a trap of financial dependance.
The internets glorification of domestic submission overlooks the risk of financial dependence, which historically left women to be completely reliant on their husbands. Although some trad wife influencers frame this dependence as a feminine virtue, it erases the history of women who fought to escape that role. Until the 1970’s, many women in the U.S. were legally barred from opening credit cards or bank accounts without their husband’s permission. It took generations of women marching the streets and demanding equality so their daughters could have choices. Watching women in my generation romanticize giving that choice away feels like historical amnesia.
The irony of many of these tradwife influencers is that they have jobs. Most of them are full time content creators who earn commission from their videos of baking bread. These social media personalities are also extremely wealthy. Hannah Neeleman’s husband is the son of a former CEO and Nara Smith is a model who earns money from her social media. The tradwife movement is selling a fantasy lifestyle that is not achievable for most women. The movement has mastered turning conservative ideology into content and commerce, using the freedoms that feminists fought for to promote anti-feminist narratives. Not only does this movement lure young women into financial dependance, but it also sugar coats what you give away for that lifestyle. You give up a career, an income, and often a sense of purpose.
Women should be free to become stay at home wives and mothers if they so choose, but it should be a choice, not an expectation. The trad wife online aesthetic does not portray the reality of that life and is in turn a dangerous influence on the young women watching. The online aesthetic flattens feminist history and overshadows how hard women fought for a chance to join the workforce. When these influencers suggest that leaving behind domestic responsibility is making modern women unhappy, not only are they wrong, but they ignore the countless women before us who dreamed of independence. History will never know how many brilliant minds were lost to kitchens and parlors, and we cannot allow the soft glow of the internet to make us forget that.