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I didn’t expect to read an article about the “trad family movement” and find myself nodding along. Yet this is exactly what happened when I read J Oliver Conroy’s portrait of families across the US who have embraced what they call the “trad” life, which involves homeschooling, growing
your own food, strict religious observance and rigid gender roles.

As I read, I realised how familiar many of the underlying concerns of “trad families” sounded: frustration with the impossible balance of work and care, unease about fractured communities and anxiety about safety in a world that feels unstable. That anxiety is about more than personal security: it extends to fragile supply chains, industrial systems and the food we eat.

Yet these issues are not the ones we usually hear about when we talk about tradwives. The stereotypical tradwife is either depicted as a wealthy white woman in 1950s cosplay – retro styling, aprons and feather dusters – or as the “cottagecore” influencer – barefoot and pregnant in a floral dress by
the duck pond.

Interest in “tradwives” – just one subsection of a wider constellation of trends from homesteading to slow living – gained traction during the COVID pandemic and has only grown since. The Cambridge Dictionary even added the word last month.

Intrigued by my response to Conroy’s piece, I spoke to two researchers. One, Rebecca Stotzer, has analysed how self-identified tradwives explain the appeal of
the life they lead. The other, Siobhain Lash, has looked at how seemingly benign aesthetics like cottagecore can be co-opted into far-right narratives. Together, their work helps illuminate not just why women turn toward the tradlife, but what risks emerge if we dismiss it.

Here’s the Evidence

Why do women become tradwives? That’s the question Rebecca Stotzer and her colleague Ashley Nelson set out to answer in a recent study.

They analysed the TikTok content of 60 women who described themselves as tradwives. While journalists and scholars often default to the 1950s caricature, Stotzer told me that “very few of these women actually presented that way, and most were in fact lower income or middle-class women
looking for ways to make sense of social and gender relations.”  The majority were in their twenties or thirties, many were married with children, and nearly half identified as women of colour. Most were Christian and had tiny audiences – dozens or hundreds of followers – which suggests they were “everyday” tradwives rather than the high-profile influencers who usually dominate media coverage.

So what motivated them? Stotzer and Nelson found three themes that kept resurfacing: religious or ideological conviction (the latter often framed as a belief in traditional gender roles); practicality, such as childcare costs or husbands who worked away; and safety concerns in an era of school shootings and public spaces they saw as hostile.

Across these differences, common frustrations stood out. As Stotzer put it to me: “Many of the different routes that women took toward a tradwife life were grounded in the observation that the demands placed on modern women are unrealistic and unsustainable.” 

For many that meant pressure to be both full-time carers and full-time workers – and to excel at both. For others it was the sense of modern life leaving no space for meaning or connection – with God, with the natural world, with family or community.

“Just as some women choose not to partner and/or have children and focus on workforce participation because of the ongoing difficulties of being a workforce-engaged partner and
mother, these women are making a choice on the other side, to forego workforce participation in favour of domestic labor,” Stotzer told me. “A large driver toward tradwife identification for these women was to finally be able to focus on one aspect of their lives and do it well.”

Girlboss v tradwife

Underlying this was a broader critique: many combined feminism and capitalism into a single culprit, a system that forced women into waged labour without consideration of what they saw as their roles as primary carers. (Of course, more than a century of feminist theory and activism have critiqued the subjugation of women under capitalism and emphasised that
the devaluation of care work compared to paid work outside the home has trapped heterosexual women in an impossible economic situation).

“Feminism is ruining women’s happiness,” one said. “We think we can work 40+ hours a week, raise kids, keep a beautiful home, AND have time for our husbands. We can’t. We shouldn’t.” Another declared: “Submitting to one husband is better than submitting to ten bosses.”

In the words of one TikToker: “It was easier to adapt to tradlife than to change my husband or patriarchy overall.”

Although Stotzer’s work centres on the US, the dynamics she describes are not confined there. Google Trends data shows searches for “tradwife” rising across Europe, North America and beyond over the past five years – with Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands topping the list. The same mix of disillusionment with modern life, safety concerns, and yearning for simplicity is resonating around the West.

And no wonder. In a world of economic shocks, political polarisation and environmental crisis, the appeal of slow living, safety, security and community makes sense, and is
only going to grow. What that looks like depends on many things – upbringing, beliefs, education, geography. A devout Christian in rural America and a sceptical journalist in an urban flat may imagine it differently, but the underlying yearnings are strikingly similar.

But of course, tradlife isn’t always just baking bread and retreating from modern life. Alongside homemaking and safety talk, as we know, such communities often have harsher currents: vociferous anti-feminism, anti-trans sentiment, and isolation. One “trad family” profiled in The Guardian posted memes calling for the repeal of women’s suffrage; others shared violent far-right references.

Polarisation pipeline

This is why I wanted to speak to another expert – Siobhain Lash, author of a recent paper on what she calls “eco-paramilitarism”. Lash studies how seemingly benign aesthetics like tradwife and cottagecore content can be co-opted towards violent ends. Bread-baking and homesteading – that is, growing enough food to be self-sufficient – may look wholesome, but algorithms often nudge viewers toward extremist material.

“If you engage in that content, there’s a higher probability that the algorithm will start to share more right-leaning content,” she told me. “It’s really subtle, and it’s meant to be subtle. It’s not ‘here’s our racist rhetoric, come join us.’ It’s more like, don’t you want this low-key life where you can provide for yourself, live off the grid, not do what the government is telling you to do?”

That message, Lash notes, is palatable to many. And it can be dangerous: “Then you see people like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, who weaponize that desire for connection to nature or culture, and when it isn’t achievable, blame vulnerable groups – LGBTQIA people, women, racial and ethnic
minorities.”

“The far right are doing a far better job than anyone else of co-opting legitimate concerns.”

In the US especially, climate and social crises are often framed through a military lens – from climate breakdown as a “security threat” to police and private groups adopting war-like tactics. Lash warns that this mindset trickles down to civilians too. Most tradwives are not headed for extremism – as Stotzer found, many are simply seeking safety by shrinking their worlds – but without a coherent, hopeful alternative, that instinct for retreat can be co-opted into narratives of exclusion rather than ones of connection and community.

Better answers

For Stotzer, the lesson is to take women’s choices seriously while also tackling the systemic conditions that make those choices feel inevitable.

“These women are clearly articulating a similar problem that women on other sides of the political spectrum have also articulated – that the way home life and work life are currently configured in many modern economies is unsustainable for women,” she told me.

But while opting out of the labour market may make sense for individuals, it doesn’t apply pressure for systemic change. That, she argues, requires both policy and cultural shifts: paid parental
leave for both parents, re-valuing domestic labour alongside paid work, and teaching boys and girls alike how to care for homes and families.

Meanwhile Lash points out that there are lessons to be learned from communities who already know how to survive exclusion and crisis: Indigenous traditions, Black communities, and Latin American models of mutual aid and collective action.

Both experts point to the same conclusion: tradwives’ concerns can’t just be written off. Better to meet the underlying needs – for safety, practicality, belief, and belonging – in inclusive, sustainable ways. Because as polarisation deepens and economic and environmental shocks ramp up, the appeal of simplified answers will only grow. And that is exactly the terrain on which
algorithms and far-right influencers thrive.

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. ➕ A huge study of millions of French school children finds boys pull ahead in maths within just four months of starting
   school – showing the gender gap is driven by stereotypes, anxiety and teaching practices.
2. 🍎 AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health needs compared with men’s, a new study has found, deepening fears that AI is already entrenching gender bias.
3. 🤰 An Australian study found that severe pregnancy nausea, which affects 1 in 100 women, drove more than half to consider termination and most to consider forgoing future pregnancies, underscoring the urgent need for better care.

Join our subscriber-only event

To learn more about the surprising world of tradwives, we invite you to join our upcoming webinar, where Megan Clement, editor-in-chief of The Evidence, will be talking to Rebecca Stotzer. During this online event, you will have the opportunity to ask your own questions about what leads people to embrace the trad life.

Please register to participate.

8 a.m. in London | 9 a.m. in Paris | 5 p.m. in Sydney

* The event is reserved for subscribers of The Evidence. If you are not yet a subscriber, we will
automatically register you.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a Gloria Media newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it.

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