It is easy to think of the concept of a “housewife” as a thing of the past. This is not the case, but the vocabulary has evolved in favor of terms like stay-at-home mom, homemaker, and family manager. These put the focus on the children and the work that these women put into their households, as opposed to being someone’s wife. Online, a term that’s been popularized is tradwife. However, tradwife is not synonymous with stay-at-home mom.
The term itself is short for “traditional wife,” and the lifestyle that accompanies it draws from traditional gender roles within a marriage, with a woman who stays at home cooking and cleaning while her husband goes to work and financially provides for the family. In the past few years, tradwife content creators have reached massive popularity online. Women like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have gained millions of followers by showcasing their lives making meals from scratch, doing household tasks, and looking after their children. It is a peaceful, glamorized snapshot, with polished and soft-spoken content creators talking about domestic tasks. The bigger platform that this type of content has reached lately has led to debate over the ethics and negative impact that it may be projecting, especially onto younger girls.
It is crucial to remember that this type of online content is not an accurate insight into someone’s life or the tradwife lifestyle as a whole. This way of life requires the privilege of being able to have a single income household, and the videos pose potential dangers to young girls who view this glamorized content as aspirational. Nara Smith is actually an exception to the standard of this lifestyle, as typically a tradwife will not have a job outside of the home and Smith is a working model. One danger of the lifestyle is that as tradwives' primary occupation is homemaking it's difficult to earn money if, or once, their marriages end, due to lack of work experience. Former tradwives have spoken out about how they married young and became wholly financially dependent on their partners. This can be especially dangerous because being financially constrained may prevent one from leaving a bad or even abusive situation. A 2023 report by LendingTree found that 23 percent of polled Americans are staying in their relationships because they are financially dependent on their partner.
Berkeley High School junior Riley Pattison has noticed the potential negative impact of this trend. Pattison said, “When it becomes dangerous is when tradwives or their audience glorifies this lifestyle. I think I’ve seen many people say that they wish they could just ‘not work’ or have that lifestyle, but it’s really not that simple, it’s a lot of work to be a tradwife, and many times you can’t get out of that."
While this lifestyle is ultimately a choice and can be very fulfilling for the women who choose it, online videos should not be seen as an entirely accurate representation of this lifestyle. It’s especially important to consider that the tradwife lifestyle can be unattainable for people in less privileged situations and draws from a history of exclusivity.
“(A) big problem I have with this content is that it glorifies a time that has never existed, especially for lower-class women and women of color,” Chloe Caruth, a BHS senior and Film Food and Feminism Club leader, said, “I understand the appeal of this content for many people, especially now that we’re living in a time when two parents working full time is not enough to sustain a family. But for lower-class women and women of color, these traditional values and lifestyles that are being highlighted were never a possibility, because during the time period that influencers are looking back on so fondly these demographics of women have always had to work to support themselves and their families.”
Ultimately, the internet moves at a quick and ever changing pace and it will showcase and popularize things that need to be viewed with critical thinking. Content like this should not be demonized, but it also should not be consumed readily or viewed as the “right” way to live. There is so much pressure on women and young girls to behave in a certain way and it’s especially difficult to navigate life with online content pushing a lifestyle that is not very sustainable.
“The internet is a free space and people are allowed to post whatever they want. No one is truly able to control what becomes popular and starts trending,” Caruth said, “But I think that nuanced conversations and representation of tradwives in mainstream and traditional media is really important, especially for a generation of young girls that are growing up in a world with different messaging coming at them from all sides.”