tradwife
noun
| TRAD-wyfe
A dutiful housewife active on social media
What does tradwife mean?
A tradwife is a married woman who embraces traditional gender roles and values; the word is particularly used for a young woman who chooses to be a homemaker and shares her lifestyle online. It is closely associated with a 2020s social media trend widely viewed as ultraconversative.
Examples of tradwife
Today I: went to a Bible study, homeschooled, made bread, harvested things from the garden, did laundry, made soup, saved tomato seeds for next year’s garden, and painted a silly little picture of a barn. I feel like a tradwife caricature…
—@nienna121, X (formerly Twitter), 17 Oct. 2024
lena Kate Pettitt is a self-proclaimed “trad wife,” one of the earliest and best known in a burgeoning movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media.
—The popularity of the tradwife aesthetic has prompted debate over whether influencers are glamorizing a return to fundamentalist values, such as women retreating from the workplace to care for their husband and children.
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Where does tradwife come from?
Tradwife combines trad, shortened from traditional, and wife. What the term invokes by traditional is complex, but it generally characterizes a wife who—much like the stereotypical image of a 1950s housewife or, less commonly, 19th-century homesteader—devotes herself to taking care of the home, cooking, raising children, and dutifully serving her working husband (and looking beautiful while doing all of it). One defining aspect of the term and trend is that the woman chooses the lifestyle for herself. This is seen as a rejection of, broadly speaking, modern womanhood, in order to return to a romanticized domesticity and femininity of the past.
How the word has spread is also complex. While its exact origins are unknown, tradwife emerged online in the 2010s. It went viral in the early 2020s as the result of social media influencers, who have called themselves (or been called) tradwives. They posted massively popular—and controversial—content capturing their activities, especially videos in their kitchens where they are attractively made up in aprons and old-fashioned dresses, narrating how they are happily embodying the tradwife life for their husband and household. This marks another defining aspect of the term and trend: it is a social media phenomenon, in which some women have non-traditional livelihoods as successful influencers. The popularity of this content has sparked wide-ranging discussion on feminism, contemporary work and life, economic privilege, race, religion, and politics (particularly in the context of concerns about the trend’s perceived or actual connections to far-right communities online).
How is tradwife used?
The plural form of tradwife is tradwives. Tradwife is frequently attributive, used not only in reference to a person but to describe activities and beliefs that are associated (“tradwife values”). The state or practice of being a tradwife is sometimes referred to as tradlife; a more humorous, often disparaging term for this is tradwifery.
Just as the meaning and spread of tradwife are complex, so is the use of the term. While some women use the word to describe themselves, some of the most prominent influencers associated with it do not necessarily identify with the term. In this way, tradwife is now frequently used as a shorthand for a conservative woman or lifestyle. More broadly, it is sometimes used both earnestly and ironically used to refer to activities in any way stereotypically associated with women’s historical domestic roles, such as making a meal for a boyfriend or husband, regardless of her situation.
Some characteristic tradwife activities (such as home baking) and fashions (such as modest, flowery dresses) are similar to another popular Internet aesthetic trend called cottagecore, which embraces aspects of traditional pastoral lives but without insisting on conservative gender and social roles. Certain dress styles, such as milkmaid or shirtwaist dresses, are commonly described as tradwife.
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