Why Did The Tradwife Bubble Collapse So Fast?
Tijana Moraca | Shutterstock I think it’s fairly safe to say that the tradwife trend is dying out, and good riddance! For those not in the know, the #tradwife hashtag was a specific lifestyle marketed by Evangelical (and often white nationalist) influencers to impressionable young women.
The basic gist of it is a plea for women to ignore their educations, get married young, have kids young, rely on a man who may or may not be there in 10 years, and to become domestic goddesses. For some of us, that sounds like a nightmare. For others, myself included, there’s a lot of allure in being a housewife.
Tradwife influencers are a known part of a psyop to try to encourage younger people to join far-right political movements as well as conservative religious movements. And the people who run these psyops have a lot of money, including the Mormon church.
Why did the tradwife bubble collapse so fast?
Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
For years, women were urged to drop careers in favor of serving a spouse
And you know what? Those influencers and movements had a way of making it sound like the best thing ever. As a person who dreams of being a housewife and an in-home business owner, I absolutely get it. They made it sound so good. It didn’t start with “get back in the kitchen,” but started with other, sugary, saccharine sayings, such as:
- “Why are you so obsessed with a career? Your job won’t love you the way your husband will.” As a recent divorcee, I can attest to this. My husband never paid me to serve him.
- “Aren’t you tired of having to get a job? Don’t you hate having a manager scream at you? A man could fix that. He could do that for you while you tend to the home.” Gen Z women were transfixed by this, and I honestly can’t blame them. The modern workforce is brutal, unstable, and often cruel for cruelty’s sake. Tradwifing was seen as a golden bridge to a stable, happily ever after.
- “You know, 50 years ago, you wouldn’t have to worry about this…” Yes, 50 years ago, women were struggling to get into the workforce and couldn’t own a credit card without their husbands’ help. They weren’t worrying about it because they were chattel.
- “Man, don’t you just want to have a simple life with kids?” Yes, this is a thing that they say as a way of luring things in.
- “That can’t be healthy, all those premade microwave meals. Don’t you wish you had time at home?” Another common hook.
These kinds of statements all tend to sound so caring, so concerned. Yet, at the root of the movement was misogyny. It was about getting women to vote against their own rights. It was about making women dependent on men, reducing their own opportunities, and putting all their eggs into one basket.
Right now, nearly half of Gen Z women are aiming for a tradwife life. However, I have reason to believe the tide is quietly beginning to turn. Here are my thoughts.
The illusion of the tradwife had to crack eventually
SHVETS production / Pexels
What we are seeing in Gen Z and Gen Alpha are generations raised on the Internet, only realizing that all that glitters isn’t gold. The far right (and Christofascist movement, particularly) was working on recruiting women. Women were fleeing churches left and right after countless stories came out about how churches abuse women.
Social media, for a long while, was not kind to anything right-wing. It was basically social suicide to be too conservative, so churches started to create their own media empires. They started to recruit and astroturf movements of conservative rhetoric centers. And, like wise marketers, they gendered it.
These groups have money. And they decided to pay off influencers to drum up support for their endeavors: the subjugation of America, through angry men and helpless women.
1. The Manosphere: For men, they created Red Pill content and manosphere content that laid the blame on feminism for all of men’s issues. Russia had its own hand to play with it, too. They knew that misogyny tends to destabilize countries, as do large quantities of single men. So they pushed the rhetoric. Self-improvement? Not a man’s job. It should have been women telling men to do things. Or women were outperforming men, and that’s because the system is kinder. Empathy for women? Nah, forget that. Men need all the love, and women are the caretakers, not men.
2. Tradwives For Women: Unsurprisingly, women started to get disgusted by the way that men talked about women online. This, plus the #MeToo movement, drove feminism into overdrive and was also a major reason why the #4B movement started.
So, conservatives had to do something. If conservatism became known as a giant sausage party, men would want nothing to do with it. This is where the Tradwife idea came into play.
The term “tradwife” is not the same as a stay-at-home wife. It’s a term that takes things a step further by encouraging women to look down at women who choose to remain childfree, who want to get a job, or even who aren’t the right brand of “organic, crunchy” for their liking.
Many tradwife accounts go even further, shaming and humiliating women as a way to get them to feel like it’s their fault if they are not in a perfect relationship. They’re the type of woman to say that a girl “chose wrong,” all while using opaque makeup to cover the bruises on their own faces.
They dolled up subservience and the removal of life choices as a source of freedom, bliss, and happiness. In reality, it’s putting your entire fate in the hands of a man who could drop you at a moment’s notice. Still, it’s hard to ignore the allure of tradwife life or the call of the manosphere, especially if you are a young person who feels lost in the craziness of reality.
Yes, the tradwife movement was destined to fail
Monika Grabkowska / Unsplash+
Due to the nature of how this article is set up, I’m going to gender this too. Both the tradwife and Red Pill movements were destined to fail long-term.
1. The Red Pill: The Red Pill is toxic and does not get you girls. Study after study shows that the Red Pill and manosphere worlds tend to be horrible for men’s mental health. They also contribute to male loneliness because they basically encourage men to be horrible to women.
There are a lot of reasons why civil rights, particularly when it came to gender rights, became so popular in the 1960s. Living in a patriarchal society is absolutely brutal for men, too. Men suffer when women don’t have rights.
For example:
- The pressure to be a patriarch and alpha male cripples men’s emotional health. There’s that whole “don’t show emotions” if you’re a man thing. There’s also the way that all male friendships get a little cutthroat over women because women become a commodity to fight over.
- Being the sole breadwinner is a great way to get resentful of your wife and also face massive economic anxiety every day. I’ve seen men have mental breakdowns over it. I've even had breakdowns over it, and it contributed to a lot of my resentment in my last marriage.
- Men in patriarchal societies have a much harder time finding partners. The stakes get higher for women, so no, women won’t “give him a chance” unless he has a lot to offer.
A lot of men are starting to realize they’ve been sold a lie by the manosphere, but not all of them have realized it. Women, on the other hand…
2. The Tradwife Movement: The Tradwife Movement was destined to fail because it’s basically getting women to sell off their rights. Having the choice to be a housewife is great. Being forced into it and told that you’re not meant for the working world because you’re not built for it is not so great.
Men flee in an instant. No one goes into marriage ready to divorce, but half of all marriages break up. Plenty of others go on in quiet misery. There is a known tradwife-to-homelessness funnel, and former trads like Lauren Southern are now talking about it openly.
Of course, there are also several other glaring issues with the tradwife movement. Most noticeably, it’s because we live in a two-income world and they’re all basically pushing women to ignore that. Moreover, the influencers peddling all this are getting paid to do so, so not practicing what they preach.
But why is tradwife content dying right now?
In recent months, I noticed a lot of interesting changes in the talk about tradwifing. A lot of tradwife influencers have been outed as people who didn’t believe what they say online. Many openly admitted that they disavow the trad life. So, what’s going on?
Here’s the thing: the timing of tradwife content’s decline is very telling. Had things continued the way that all the right-wing thinktanks would have hoped, we would have seen this trend become totally mainstreamed, majority-approved, and likely been the status quo for decades.
However, there were several major problems with this movement:
- It was astroturfed. The people involved did not actually believe what they preached most of the time. It showed. Besides, it’s hard to ignore how many people were just doing it to get money. (Yeah, real trad right there.) When the money started to dry up, people stopped touting it.
- The system hurts the women who are meant to practice it, and a lot of them don’t hide it well. There have been several tradwife influencers who I genuinely am concerned about in terms of their safety and happiness; even the interview with that lady from Ballerina Farm went viral because of the creepy, controlling vibes of her husband.
- Women who got burned by the tradwife, Christian fundamental, and conservative worlds are going to speak up. Perhaps the most notable one was Lauren Southern, who admitted to being abused by her husband. Mrs. Midwest, a well-known white nationalist tradwife influencer, eventually admitted that women need a lot more support as moms. That was a far cry from her hard trad days. As more and more women turn into cautionary tales, tradwife stops looking like the grand life.
- Many of the men who helped push this movement are getting locked up at amazingly fast rates for explicit crimes. Or, they’re getting stuck with Epstein-like charges. The Duggar family guys are a good example.
Simply put, the illusion is bursting. In other situations, this would be a slow trickle that would have eventually turned into a groundswell.
However, Trump has made things get real
When Roe fell, women got the message. Trump and the GOP killed Roe v. Wade and started pushing through laws that criminalize women's health at a shocking rate. Ever since Roe fell, I noticed a deep, quiet panic in a lot of women, conservative ones, especially.
Women started to realize that there was, in fact, a War on Women. They started to realize that they were losing and that the men who were waging it hate women with a passion. We’re prey. And the predators have gavels, legislation, crosses, and power in hand.
That’s a big deal. It’s easy to just politely go along with the program or even say heinous stuff to make a buck. It’s not so easy to do so when you realize you’re quite literally cutting off options for your future, should anything go south.
That’s the big deal here. The GOP and right-wing think tanks overplayed their hand. And now, they’re losing. The tide is turning, and the wool is being lifted off their eyes, despite the millions or even billions they poured into trying to get women to fall for the trap.
Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
