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Idolizing the “Tradwife” Is Tricky Business [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-05-07
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
Internet trends rarely endure, but one has stuck around long enough that I’ve decided to finally write about it: the mystic tradwife, a.k.a. “traditional housewife.” She’s beautiful and long-haired and most often white, adorned in flowy natural fabrics or pleated dresses that scream the 1950s. She’s a mother, a wife, a Michelin rated chef without the official certification – she is a man’s version of the perfect woman. And she’s the internet’s version, too.
There are countless tradwives on Instagram and TikTok who’ve garnered millions of fans, hundreds of millions of views. They usually live in a quaint cottage or barn out in the country with their 10 children and husband and sourdough starter. Their lives are bucolic onscreen, idealizing homemaking and family traditions while performing nonstop for a camera. It’s exhausting to watch yet I never want the content to end.
Much of what they preach fits squarely within the pronatalist policies defining the current Republican party. In late April, a New York Times report showed President Donald Trump is considering different incentives for Americans to get married and have babies, ranging from honoring women with six or more children with a “National Medal of Motherhood” to paying parents a $5,000 reward for each baby they birth.
The cash incentive is a worse version of the already-existing child tax credit, which provides money every year to parents within certain income brackets for each child they have. Democrats and some Republicans are advocating to increase the credit and expand its eligibility criteria before the current legislation expires at the end of 2025, but so far the White House has not voiced support of the bill, even though it arguably falls under a pronatalist framework.
Instead, the administration seems most interested in proliferating traditional family ideals as epitomized by tradwife culture, where people can be categorized neatly into the husband, wife, and child(ren) roles. At a March for Life rally in Washington D.C. earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance said that declining U.S. birth rates are because a culture of “radical individualism” has taken root, “one where the responsibilities and joys of family life [are] seen as obstacles to overcome, not as personal fulfillment or personal blessing.”
He goes on to say he wants “more babies in the United States of America… and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”
Being pro-family is a good thing, considering the future of humanity depends on reproduction – in whatever shape that might take. And I agree that American individualism has gone too far, but Vance’s solution – more babies now! – is impossible without the policies that his administration seems intent on dismantling.
They’ve already taken a hatchet to Head Start, the free childcare program for low-income families that predominantly serves rural communities. They’re doing the same to the Department of Education, arguing that getting rid of federal oversight will enable states and families to have more say in their children’s education.
With each new executive order or agency layoff, I can’t help but imagine a Jenga tower, that game made of wooden blocks where each player has to remove one without knocking the whole tower over. There are no winners in Jenga, just the biggest loser who pulls the final block before it all comes crashing down.
Right now, the Trump administration is playing Jenga, pulling block after block until all that’s left is a wobbly tower built on the whims of a few powerful individuals who think the nation should look a certain way. But the nation they’re imagining – the one we’re all fed through tradwife content – can’t exist without the building blocks they’re throwing away. I worry that soon none of us will be left standing, not even the tradwives.
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