The tradwife trend, emphasizing traditional gender roles, is making waves online

Social media trends come and go, but few have had the consistently polarizing holding power of the tradwife.

The term, which has garnered significant social media traction in recent months, is shorthand for "traditional wife" and most broadly refers to a woman who practices conventional gender roles within a relationship. On TikTok and Instagram, however, the trend has manifested through popular content creators who've gained large followings by showing off their lives as homemakers, from their elaborate homemade meals to their 1950s-inspired wardrobes.

In July 2024, Hannah Neeleman, known to her over 9 million Instagram followers as @ballerinafarm, was featured by U.K.'s The Sunday Times, giving the outlet an in-depth glimpse of her day-to-day existence as a mother of eight on the family’s Utah farm. The piece garnered the attention of both fans and critics of the often controversial tradwife lifestyle, particularly with Neeleman saying she doesn’t associate herself with the term — despite the internet deciding she’s one of the biggest tradwife influencers.

“We are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman,” the content creator said of her dynamic with her husband, Daniel. “We have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before. So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,” she added, “I don’t know if I identify with that.”

While the term has been around since at least 2018, it continues to change, polarize viewers, stir controversy, raise questions and sometimes serve as comfort content for those who really, genuinely, just want to know how to make something from scratch.

Here’s everything to know about the tradwife lifestyle, its massive social media presence and the root controversy surrounding the term.

What is a tradwife?

Despite the term being generally understood as a woman who advocates for conventional gender norms in a relationship, there isn't a single concrete definition. At its core, the most fundamental aspects of a tradwife are domesticity and upholding the traditional roles of homemaker (for women) and breadwinner (for men).

However, the lens with which one defines “traditional” gender roles also differs in this context, with some analysts pointing towards the trend explicitly exercising mid-20th century, Mad Men-esque norms, and others noting influencers like Neeleman performing more 19th century homestead wife vibes.

Regardless of what time period the content is “supposed” to mimic, the essence is generally unmistakable from one tradwife to another. Researcher Mariel Cooksey defined “tradwifery” in 2021 as “a movement that’s part aesthetic and part ideology, encouraging women to embrace supposedly feminine characteristics like chastity and submissiveness, and trade feminist empowerment for a patriarchal vision of gender norms,” per the Political Research Associates, a social justice and research strategy firm.

One of the movement's biggest participants, Estee Williams, who boasts over 300,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram, defined the term in 2022 as a “woman who prefers to take a traditional or ultra-traditional role in marriage, including beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home.”

The origins of the term are unclear, but it can be traced back to an anti-feminist Reddit page called the Red Pill Women, which was set up in 2013, per The Guardian. The online community is loosely a female version of the male-dominated highly misogynist Reddit forum, Red Pill.

The tradwife trend eventually extended beyond Reddit, and particularly exploded in popularity on TikTok, where creators like Williams document their daily lives as homemakers.

Why is it all over social media?

The hashtag “tradwife” on TikTok yields nearly 30,000 videos. At a glance, the cumulation of the hashtag sometimes looks uniformly curated, a mass collaboration by thousands of users: lots of floral, bows on dresses or in hair, almost always at a kitchen counter or a stovetop, often holding a vacuum cleaner.

While some creators, like Williams, explicitly claim the term tradwife as part of their identity and content, others do not, leaving viewers unsure of how much is a reflection of their real-life values and how much is a show for kicks.

Nara Smith, perhaps the biggest non-tradwife-tradwife has catapulted to TikTok fame with her "made it from scratch" videos, taking viewers along as she whips up anything from homemade bagels to bubble gum. Like Neeleman, Smith also married young and has been pregnant for much of her social media rise, welcoming baby no. 3 at the age of 22 in April 2024.

While many viewers label Smith as a tradwife influencer, the model has never claimed the label. Regardless, her extremely laborious homemade meals keep audiences watching — a recent video where she documented making Coca-Cola from scratch has more than 32 million views and counting.

Why is the term controversial?

Tradwife in the mainstream gained traction in 2020, with one of the early creators of the movement, Alena Kate Pettitt, being featured by BBC wherein she speaks of her decision to commit to being a traditional housewife and serve her husband.

The BBC video, released in January of that year, pre-dated what in two-months time would manifest into a lot of idling at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown. While many individuals became more family-focused and present as a result of the pandemic, some experts say that others took it to an extreme.

“The dark side of the pandemic was this ‘banana-bread-tradwife’ recycling of old ideas,” Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, told CNBC in April 2024. She also added that the decision to be a tradwife is a “huge economic risk” for women.

Other critics have called out the problematic nature of romanticizing a time when women became housewives because they didn't have the option to work outside the home. Many also bring forth the concern that those showcasing their tradwife lifestyle may be undermining the progress women have made towards individual rights, back peddling towards gender inequality.

In her explanation video on tradwives in 2022, Williams said that it’s “not a movement” and “nobody is pushing it.” She emphasized that it is an individual belief that she and her contemporaries hold that their “purpose is to be homemakers.”

“It doesn’t mean we are trying to take away what women fought for,” she added.

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