TradWives and the Apocalypse

I’m not sure when I first heard the term “TradWife.” It seems to have seeped into vernacular gradually in that when the think pieces started coming out, I already cultivated a sense of what the TradWife trend was. For those not as steeped in social media think pieces, the trend is a TikTok-ified, Hashtagged take on “traditional wife” that is cultivated through a cottage core aesthetic (and sometimes “50s cosplay” as some describe it) rooted in evangelical Christian ideals of “biblical femininity.” In short, it was an online movement of sorts with intentions to make “traditional” Christian family life–breadwinning husband, submissive homemaking mother, lots and lots of kids–appealing to a broader audience.

Until recently, though, I had only skimmed some articles here and there and hadn’t thought too much about the trend. Then the topic came up in my writer’s group last week and I subsequently went down a deep dive, specifically starting with the recent Sounds Like a Cult podcast episode on “The Cult of Tradwives.” At first, I was pulled in because it related to a book I had just read, Jessica Calarco’s Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net (which came out last week!) on her research that showed the toll on society and women’s wellbeing when women, mothers in particular, are tasked with filling all the gaps left by our country’s lack of social safety net. The idea of the TradWife phenomena struck me as an extreme version of the “supermom myth” perpetuated by our society that Calaraco references. She uses “supermom” not in the context of the cultural and unrealistic pressures on moms in America, rather, a myth that “paints a portrait of children in constant danger and of mothers as the only ones with the power to rescue them from harm.” This myth is ripe for Chrisitian evangelicals to paint a picture of godliness in taking care of the home and the children. 

But how does this relate to this project? Well, it was an apocalypse of sorts that seemed to bring this trend into the mainstream.

In Sounds Like a Cult, host Amanda Montell, talked about when she first went down her own rabbit hole of homesteading-type content during the pandemic. “It felt like, okay, the apocalypse is here, here's a way to like return to a pre-slash-post-apocalyptic style of living,” she says. Originally, there wasn’t much overt religiosity to the content she was consuming as many of these people seemed a bit more progressive on the surface (“surface” being the operable word here). And to those left-leaning folks, that can suck a person in. This is where I could relate. When I started my Instagram account for Cramming for the Apocalypse, I began following female homesteader-types in addition to female preppers (which I went into a bit in one of my first posts). While the female preppers kind of scared me with their guns and doomer rhetoric, there was a softness to the homesteaders. They were living off the land, cultivating skills and teaching their kids about nature, and they were creating a life that could possibly go on in an apocalyptic situation. They lured me in with that sweet, sweet farm life.

But then, the further I got into the content, I realized the insidiousness of it. It started with one homesteader lady’s post about the evils of processed food. It read as something kinda sorta fact-based, but like many conspiracy theories came without any kind of notable source. I could not help myself but weigh in in the comments calling bullshit that respectfully pointed out the classism and inaccuracy of her statements. The responses to my comments were from both sides. There were a number of folks who responded in agreement with my comment who were probably like me, drawn into the bucolic farm life cottage core of it all but then smacked in the face with an ideology that was the exact opposite of mine. And, of course, there were comments in line with the supermom myth claiming they grew up poor and people’s inability to grow their own damn food was out of their own laziness. And with that dissonant experience, I decided to move away from that general content and while I do sometimes get some homesteaders in my feed, it leans more heavily on basic gardening tips and one Instagram reel of a liberal wondering where all the truly progressive homesteaders are. But while I looked the other way, this seemed to have turned into a full blown trend.

This social media content trend is indicative of the much larger, more troubling aspect of this whole homesteading/TradWife trend both with the general move towards bringing young people into misogynistic, patriarchal ideologies as well as being a gateway to alt-right thinking. Kathleen Belew calls it the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline” in The Atlantic. Essentially it’s a case for the “crunchy” trends of organic and unprocessed foods, natural products, and questioning vaccines that often seem linked to lefty, hippie folks are actually much more closely tied with right-wing ideologies.

“These bits of crunchiness included organic farming, a macrobiotic diet, neo-paganism, anti-fluoridation, and traditional midwifery,” writes Belew of the white-power movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that intentionally created this alluring propaganda. “All of these are often thought of as leftist or ‘hippie’ issues, but they appeared regularly in the robust outpouring of women’s publications in the white-power movement.”

It actually reminded me of something a college professor had noted in a course I took on “The Rhetoric of Social Protest”: the farther you get to one extreme of a political ideology, it tends to loop back on itself to the other side. “This is the whole circle, right?” said Ann Helen Peterson–who wrote a couple of great stories on the #TradWife trend (here and here)–in Sounds Like a Cult. “It's like the people who were like, ‘I would've voted for Bernie, but Bernie didn't get elected so I voted for Trump.’ There are a lot of people that I have met who were like that…it's where the circle goes complete, right? And how anti-vaxxers also meet. It's the far right and the far left.” 

Today with the TradWife trend, you have this curated alluring social media content that brings these ideals into a modern avenue that draws people in. And the more you’re in it, the more the ideas become normalized in your mind. Peterson gets to the heart of why this is troubling on a broader level even though the trend is exactly that, a trend, where these TradWives exist in small numbers that seem large thanks to the internet. But it’s still a problem. “There [is] a manifestation of an ideology that I think is pernicious,” she says. “Like it's kind of like, ‘oh there aren't that many white supremacists.’ But also there are ways in which that gets watered down and manifests in systemic racism and policy and all that sort of thing, right? And so I think that I'm not concerned about TradWife accounts. I'm concerned [about] anti-abortion and reproductive rights…they all are part of the same piece.”

It also begs the question about who this TradWife content is for. Certainly there are a lot of women who are there for the aesthetic and dreaminess of the idea of baking one’s own bread every day. Many are also critical thinking enough to separate the aesthetic from the ideological. Jessica Grose wrote about this in her New York Times Opinion column a few weeks ago linking it to NFL kicker Harrison Butker’s commencement address to Benedictine College. The response from women–including the nuns of Benedictine College–was generally one of outrage. And given that 61% of Gen Z women consider themselves feminist–a larger share than any other generation of women–it makes you wonder if that really is who the Tradwife audience is. Grose proposes, rather, that the audience is the men in the world who want submissive wives. She notes a study conducted by Media Matters on the topic:

“Media Matters coded and analyzed 327 recommended videos after exclusively interacting with tradwife content and documented what happened. We found TikTok’s recommendation algorithm rapidly populated our FYP [For Your Page] with conspiracy theory content and fearmongering, which made up nearly one-third of all videos served to the FYP.”

Grose continues on to share stories from women who were daughters of increasingly radical religious fathers who isolated their families from the world. “If there’s anyone to worry about watching and absorbing tradwife content to the letter, I suspect that it’s these men,” writes Grose. “There are too many stories about fathers and husbands who abuse the power they have over their families and too many stories about the wives and children who flee their coercive control.” 

And while Grose’s examples are more extreme, there does seem to be an increasing trend towards misogynistic ideologies seeping into younger people’s minds, particularly men. Jessica Calarco points out in her book that of the 70% of millennials that have heard of the misogynist influencer (and alleged rapist and sex trafficker), Andrew Tate, 50% of those people like his views. And these are the ones seeing the TradWife content.

So what that all comes back to for me is just reminding ourselves to have a general awareness about romanticizing a certain way of being. While it seems that TradWifery is meant to attract a certain sect of people, it’s subtly entering our minds. It’s a reminder that romanticizing any way of being has its downsides. 

I think of this as I wonder about what the future could hold on a changing planet. I worry about the doom and gloom, of course, but I also fantasize about a more utopian future. But can utopia really exist without having the complexity of what seems to be that very human pull towards power, control, and hierarchy? I don’t have any answers, of course. But I do have a heightened sense of awareness about this romanticization of a good future. And I’ll tell you this, that future in my mind is not anywhere near the life of a TradWife.