The Disturbing and Hypocritical World of Tradwives

Tradwives. Who are they? Where did they come from? What do they want?

To answer these questions and more, we’re going to dive deep into the bowels of anti-feminist history. Starting with a woman named Phyllis Schlafly.

She was the absolute fucking worst.

Schlafly dedicated her entire life and career to thwarting the causes of feminism. She advocated for women to give up careers and their places in society in favor of staying home, having babies, and nurturing their husbands and homes. She successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment (which is still not ratified as the law of the land to this day), headed a grassroots movement to convince women that equal rights were not only unattainable but undesirable, stood firmly against gay rights, and loved the idea of a white supremacist theocracy even more than she loved the sound of her own goddamn voice. Schlafly was staunchly anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-divorce, and anti-fun in all its forms.

Fortunately, she died in 2016.

But the infuriating legacy of Schlafly lives on. For while she was yammering on about uppity women knowing their place, this anti-feminist Babadook was decidedly not in her supposed place.

(Actually, this is an insult to the Babadook, who The Kids™ tell me is a bisexual icon and therefore someone to be celebrated and not denigrated. My apologies, dear sweet Babadook. It won’t happen again.)

The traditional hypocrisy of anti-feminist activism

What does this history lesson have to do with tradwives? We’re getting there.

Despite her rhetoric, Schlafly wasn’t wearing pearls and heels while crafting her family a home-cooked meal every night. Nor was she singlehandedly doing all of the errands and chores for her husband and kids. She wasn’t a humble, unambitious housewife and stay-at-home mom—she was a highly educated activist even before she became a lawyer. A humble homemaker she certainly was not!

For of course Phyllis was a big ole hypocrite. It was hard not to be! Because (and I’m sure you’ve never heard this before) it’s really fucking hard to balance raising kids while simultaneously working a demanding career.

She gained fame and notoriety by telling us all to go back to the kitchen and get preggo… while she hired a household staff to look after her family. Schlafly told us girls to get back inside and give up any professional ambitions… while she embraced a high-powered, extremely public-facing career as an extreme anti-feminist mouthpiece. She traveled the country without her husband and kids, living—by her own definition—the lifestyle of a man. It was all very do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.

The policies she advocated for made it exponentially harder for other women to enter public life, choose if and when they had children, escape abusive marriages, and pursue educational opportunities. Phyllis walked so that we could run be trapped in financially dependent lives not of our choosing.

What’s the gendered version of a “race traitor”? Is it a “gender traitor”? “Betrayer of the Sisterhood”?

The point (and I definitely have one) is that the brazen hypocrisy and internalized misogyny of Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-feminist philosophy is alive and well today. For the tradwife movement is the same old turd-encrusted playbook by a different name.

Dafuq are tradwives?

Back to the present day. And god I wish I was making this shit up.

Here’s what the internet tells me tradwives are: A return to traditional family values and gender roles. They choose to stay home with their children while their husbands do the work of providing for them all financially. Meanwhile, tradwives make bread from scratch, sew their kids’ clothing, and earn bonus points by homeschooling and homesteading. And they do it all while looking conventionally attractive and feminine.

Jessica Grose for The New York Times writes,

“These conventionally pretty influencers depict themselves cooking elaborate meals, tending to their children and doing housework. Their posts sometimes come with florid captions about the joy and freedom that come from submitting to their husbands, because biblical submission doesn’t connote inferiority. They tend to dress either in 1950s cosplay or barefoot in gauzy, long dresses.”

Here’s what tradwives actually are: Social media influencers running one-woman gingham-clad empires of backwards-looking bullshit.

What’s wrong with that?

We’re pretty pro-choice here at Bitches Get Riches. We’re practically pro-choice absolutists! And some day our army will rise up against the Freeze Peach Absolutists and do battle for the title of Group Most Justified By the Constitution to Say “YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”

What this means is we tend not to support any movement that prescribes a One True Way for everyone, regardless of personal circumstances or preferences. (The only thing we’re evangelical about is dog ownership. And even then, we’ll be the first to admit that not everyone is worthy of belonging to a dog.)

When I saw my first couple videos of tradwives serenely mixing cake batter while their toddlers clung to their breezy floral skirts, I was unfazed. But then things got weirdly conservative, racist, and anti-feminist. Then it felt like the influencer was weaponizing her platform to pressure others to join her cult. My pro-choice spidey senses began to tingle.

For the influencer tradwives are not just celebrating their lifestyle… they’re selling it. They aren’t just extolling the virtues of tradwifedom… they are denigrating the alternatives. To hear them say it, tradwives are the best wives and everyone should get on board the tradwife train or suffer the consequences of a miserable, unfulfilled, meaningless existence.

Which is when I decided that tradwives are bad and must be stopped.

For make no mistake: There is absolutely nothing wrong with freely choosing a lifestyle for yourself, whether it be as a homesteading stay-at-home parent or a childfree girl boss or something in between. But the keywords there are “freely choosing” and “for yourself.”

The minute you start to pressure and influence others to join your lifestyle, you get a failing grade from our army of pro-choice absolutists.

Profiting off of the tradwife trend

I understand how richly ironic it is of me to say this on my monetized platform here in Internetland. But tradwives are making bank. Just like their spiritual godmother, Phyllis Schlafly, tradwives talk a big game about traditional gender roles and family values. Meanwhile, they are ab-so-lute-ly hustling for them dollars.

Money With Katie (a great blog you should follow) has an article titled “The Naked Financial Hypocrisy of Tradwife Influencers” in which she explains how fucking gross and cruel it is that these tradwives are peddling a lifestyle that they themselves do not actually embrace. They use all the usual online influencer tactics—affiliate links, brand sponsorships, exclusive products in an online shop—to profit off of their tradwifely message of staying home and letting your husband provide.

But you cannot work ten-hour days building a social media presence and wheeling and dealing affiliate marketing relationships while also claiming your husband is the provider and you, solely a homemaker. It’s giving Phyllis!

If you truly believe in traditional gender roles—your husband providing for you financially while you’re busy keeping a sourdough starter alive and homeschooling three kids… then why are you also selling us tradwife branded T-shirts and bespoke candles out of a warehouse in Utah?

MAKE 👏 IT 👏 MAKE 👏 SENSE 👏 👏 👏

The illusion of having it all

The influencers behind the tradwives must be exhausted. Speaking as someone who makes money on the internet, it’s a tough job. As Money With Katie explains, most of these tradwives have pages of affiliate links and products to peddle. Whether or not their husbands’ careers are bringing home the bacon, these tradwives are contributing a whole ass piglet.

Because of course they are! It’s not only hard to handle homemaking and childrearing all on one’s own… it’s harder than ever to pay the bills on one salary alone. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960 25% of households had two income earners, but that number had risen to 60% as of 2012.

I can’t help but think that these tradwife influencers, who peddle the idea of a single-income family while absolutely belonging to a dual-income family, are—what’s the word?—fucking lying. Their social media presences are just a way of encouraging women toward an unattainable goal and then punishing them for burning out before they get there.

Hey! Speaking of burnout: check out our Burnout Workshop. Very affordable, very mindful, very demure. I’m linking to our product and not the numerous shops of tradwives and tradwife “clubs” I perused in researching this article because, uhhhh… I don’t want to give them backlinks!

But what do the men think?

As if I wasn’t already side-eyeing tradwives, they have the full-throated support of a group whose full-throated support should give just about anyone hives: the men.

Not All Men™, of course, but you know the type. The Men’s Rights Activists, the incels, the bros who make reels about Alpha Shit.

These guys have greeted the tradwives with open arms and are loudly longing for more women to give up this silly feminism thing and embrace the lifestyle of tradwives. They don’t seem to realize that The Stepford Wives was a horror movie!

In fact, it can be argued (and Jessica Grose does in The New York Times) that all the tradwife influencers out there aren’t really making content for other women. They’re making it for men. Men who resent the equal rights gains of feminism and fantasize about marrying submissive bang-maids.

These dudes also happen to be in favor of things like legalized rape, compulsory pregnancy, an end to no-fault divorce, so again… maybe their endorsement should give us all pause.

The internalized misogyny of it all

Even beyond the hypocrisy of a bunch of online business owners selling aspirations of a lifestyle of homemaking… the lifestyle of tradwives is one giant step backward for womankind. They’re throwing a big glass of Chardonnay in the collective face of decades of feminist activism.

We’ve been through this. There’s a reason most women want the option of working outside the home! There’s a reason we want the option of whether to have babies… and when… and how many! Our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought like rabid wolverines so we could open bank accounts and credit cards and own property and the means of financially supporting ourselves independent of husbands and fathers!

To spell it out, that reason is domestic violence, coercion, and abuse.

Again: Ain’t nothing wrong with choosing to be a stay-at-home mom married to a working dad. There’s just something wrong with that being touted as the superior option with absolutely no access to legal and financial safety nets in case something goes wrong. Which, let’s be clear, is absolutely what tradwife influencers and their conservative, misogynist fans are advocating.

What tradwives owe to feminists

Despite what they’d prefer to think, tradwives owe feminism. Like, a lot.

Since 1960, the share of American adults who are in opposite-gender marriages has fallen according to the Pew Research Center. The current divorce rate is also higher than it was in the 1950s and ’60s, according to the CDC. And one of the top three reasons for divorce is domestic violence.

According to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers, the historical legalization of no-fault divorce is directly correlated “with a reduction in female suicides and a reduction in intimate partner violence.” Stevenson and Wolvers also connect the institution of no-fault divorce with a decrease in intimate partner violence among all genders and a 10% drop in women being murdered by their romantic partners.

These numbers didn’t change in a vacuum. They are the result of persistent efforts on the part of feminist activists, politicians, community organizers, and their allies. Our feminist foremothers gave us the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which gave women the right to hold credit cards and bank accounts in their own names, regardless of their marital status; the Federal Sexual Abuse Act of 1986, which criminalized rape between married spouses; and the various state laws that made no-fault divorce (meaning spouses seeking divorce don’t have to prove they have an acceptable reason for divorce) possible between 1969 and 2019.

Freedom means having options

All of this gave women the ability to choose their lifestyles. It made it possible for women to escape from abusive, controlling, dangerous, or even just dissatisfying lives. Today, if a woman wants to be financially dependent on her husband, she can be… but she doesn’t have to be. If a husband is abusive—emotionally, physically, or even financially—his wife can fucking leave him and start her life over.

She isn’t trapped by financial circumstances because she has the legal right to assets of her own: property, bank accounts, lines of credit, and legal representation.

Equal rights legislation and legal protections have even made it easier for women to forego marriage entirely. Whereas before these legal protections were enacted, lots of our predecessors got married not for love—but for survival.

Tradwives would have you believe that all this stuff ain’t necessary. That nothing ever goes wrong in the land of herb gardens and homeschooling. It’s fucking shortsighted. Centuries of history can back me up on this one. And the conservative types who fanboy over tradwives are absolutely in favor of legislating these protections out of existence.

As Dr. Kristy Campion writes for The Conversation:

“It’s ironic that women who choose to become far-right tradwives are romantically reimagining a time when women couldn’t choose their own conditions—while condemning the feminism that has allowed them to make those choices today.”

I get it, we’re tired

And like… I get it.

Another great piece on the trad wife movement is “Work Sucks, Put on an Apron” from The Financial Diet. Our homies at TFD basically lay out how it’s totally understandable to pack it all in and wish for someone to take care of you. In this way, the tradwife movement can be seen as a reaction to hustle culture and the girlbossification of women’s careers.

Because I don’t know about y’all, but I am exhausted. And I’m not even a WTTHIA (that’s Woman Trying To Have It All, for the uninitiated). I’m only trying to have, like, two-thirds of it all!

On the surface my life has some elements in common with tradwifedom. I have an enormous vegetable garden, I keep chickens and bees for eggs and honey, and I cook meals and build stuff around the house and yard. I’ve even been known to do my husband’s laundry from time to time. (I am, however, a noted childfree dog lady with two whole-ass careers.)

So I totally see the appeal in staying home from work and focusing on a simple life of childrearing, homemaking, and cucumber pickling. I get the relief of stepping away from a complex career or the stress of earning money. Give me a simple life that doesn’t strain my ladybrain!

Am I… sympathizing with the tradwives???

Between my career, my marriage, and all these chickens I’m trying to raise into strong, independent women… well, my back hurts and I’ve got dark circles under my eyes. It’s pretty tempting to just part my hair down the center, throw on a diaphanous floral dress, and start baking for my hardworking husband.

I must have a floppy sunhat and a basket for collecting tomatoes around here somewhere. I’m sure my husband will be fine paying all the bills on his salary alone! Especially when I start running all the errands, doing all the chores, cooking all the meals, and learning more bedroom tricks than the collected archives of Cosmopolitan magazine! Reducing our household income by half doesn’t sound so bad if it means I can get a little rest!

Giving up my career and income sounds like a big old chunk of pressure off my plate. Letting my husband just… take care of all that unpleasant money stuff sounds downright relaxing!

At first, anyway.

We can’t go back

The relaxing pleasure of tradwifery is an illusion. It’s a mirage in a desert of burnout and too much responsibility and have-it-all-itis. It’s a pleasant fantasy in a society that decidedly does not appreciate the labor and sacrifice of working mothers.

But that doesn’t mean we should go back to the Beforetimes: before women had the options to pursue educations and careers and a childfree life. We can’t fucking go back. My sisters, I implore you: do not allow us to go back.

Financial independence and reproductive rights are two ways we can protect ourselves from the violence of a society that would prefer to enforce a narrow definition of womanhood. Contorting to fit into that definition without prodding is no true protection from misogyny. Being “not like other girls” will not save you from dehumanization. Every pick-me girl in history has learned this sad fact eventually.

So let’s be honest. Tradwives are not truly SAHMs—they’re business owners selling a pretty lie. And while the personal choice to have children, raise them, and even stay home with them instead of holding down a career is totally valid… it’s important that it remain a personal choice, complete with escape hatches.

Phyllis Schlafly would have absolutely loved the tradwife movement. And anything that monster would’ve endorsed with two thumbs up is something all women should run from as fast as they can.

Thanks, y’all!

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