Around 2018, a problematic movement started to become visible online. One that has, over the last few years – and especially during the pandemic – incorporated more and more conspiracy theories, transforming from a something notionally supportive of women in domesticity, to a movement shrouded in racism and hatred towards women who choose a different path. I’m talking, of course, about the TradWife movement.
#TradWives began on social media as a branding aesthetic, largely based on that of the 1950s in the US. Or, at least, a romanticised version of that period, because it conveniently overlooks that women’s power and autonomy had grown during World War II, before they were forcibly pushed back out of the workforce by returning soldiers and back into the home. The effect of this sudden loss of power would lead to the over-prescription of Valium and Librium to silence those women who did not want to accept their autonomy being taken away.
Gradually, this imitation of aesthetics turned into a movement that openly and proudly labelled itself anti-feminist and promoted a supposedly traditional division of gender roles as a way of offering self-fulfilment – again, conveniently overlooking that it is only thanks to feminism that women have the freedom to decide their roles at all.
The TradWife movement encourages women to turn away from these hard-fought freedoms, such as the right to work, the right to have an abortion, and in extreme cases even rejecting women’s right to vote. The movement instead aligns closely with a fundamentalist view of Christianity, teaching that a woman ought to obediently and completely follow her husband’s will.
The aim of the TradWife movement is to row back on the many gains of feminism and, in doing so, they are never afraid of being openly hypocritical. On the one hand, they believe that women are to be seen, not heard; on the other hand, they openly seek to recruit others into their ranks, through public speaking and social media, even as they decry feminists for daring to do the same.
TradWife influencers portray themselves as women who are merely trying to be those perfect, traditional wives from the “simpler times” of the 1950s in the US, yet at the same time they have built huge platforms – Lana Lokteff, a prominent TradWife voice online, had over 300,000 YouTube subscribers before her channel was banned in 2019. They make regular public statements, run brand-based businesses, and have even been part of pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing schemes that have found a willing market among Republican-minded American housewives.
By embodying these inherent contradictions – essentially, having their aesthetically pleasing homemade cake and eating it, too – TradWives continue the tradition of women’s roles within white supremacist movements.
#TradWives and white supremacy
It is not just the domestic aesthetic that #TradWives take from the 1950s – frequently, their white supremacist view of race is lifted directly from that past, too.
More specifically, when it comes to TradWives, views on race are discussed as part of the revival of the Great Replacement Theory, a notion first coined by French author Renaud Camus. According to this discredited idea, the white race is in mortal danger, with the threat coming at the hands of people of colour, who are deliberately brought into a country (in most versions of the theory, by a secret global cabal of Jews) in order to out-breed, and eventually replace, the ‘native’ white population. One of the defences against this imagined attack, according to the white supremacist, is for white people to do their duty by having as many offspring as possible to make the white race harder to replace. There are other proposed solutions, of course, along far less peaceful lines.
As well as being expected to be a baby-making machine to secure the future of the white race, TradWives are central to the Great Replacement rhetoric in that white women’s wombs must belong to the white male community, and therefore women must fear men of colour and immigrants, who might take this rightful property from white men.
Despite the visibility of TradWives, and their online appeal, there is as a result no active place for women in movements revolving around white supremacy. Take, for example, Elizabeth Tyler, who brought 85,000 members into the Ku Klux Klan. Her reward? Her male colleagues pushed her out of the KKK because they found her to be too active.
None of this is to denigrate or criticise women who choose to be housewives, but merely to highlight that #TradWives do not have the idyllic lifestyles their YouTube videos and TikTok montages would have you believe, and life for the TradWife is far from easy even within their own communities. They are criticised by men who share the same values with them, precisely because these men resent their public speaking and entrepreneurialism.
It oftentimes feels that, as a woman, no matter what you do, you cannot win. That should be incentive enough to work towards creating access to more opportunities and choices – be it becoming a homemaker, being childfree, or figuring out a balance of family life and career with one’s partner – rather than limiting women to play-acting a non-existent ideal.
References
- Bowman, E. (20 August 2017) The Women Behind The “Alt-Right.” NPR.
- Christou, M. (17 March 2020 #TradWives: sexism as gateway to white supremacy. openDemocracy.
- Cooksey, M. (29 July 2021) Why Are Gen Z Girls Attracted to the Tradwife Lifestyle? Political Research Associates.
- Dart, C. (12 June 2018) Crazy things we told housewives in the 1950s. CBC.
- Gawronski, R. M. (n.d.) White Women and White Supremacy: How and Why White Women Contribute to White Supremacy. The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College.
- Kelly, A. (2 June 2018) Opinion | The Housewives of White Supremacy. The New York Times.
- Love, N. G. (2020) Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, Patriarchy, and Right-Wing Populism. Frontiers in Sociology, 5.
- Prewitt, T. (28 April 2015) Take Some Pills for Your Hysteria, Lady: America’s Long History of Drugging Women Up.
- Proctor, D. (2023) The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized Domesticity. Persona Studies, 8(2), 7–26.
