“The traditional wife movement is a global initiative led by women advocating for a return to conventional gender roles by embracing submission to their husbands and promoting domesticity,” says Cécile Simmons, an Institute for Strategic Dialogue researcher, speaking to Euronews Culture. This movement began around the year 2018 on social media, gaining popularity on Reddit, particularly within an anti-feminist thread called ‘Red Pill’. Then, trad wives started to appear on other mainstream social media like Instagram.
The trad wife phenomenon started in the United States and spread across the Atlantic and quickly gained momentum in the United Kingdom. It currently has a more solid following in the Anglo-Saxon world than in mainland Europe. Tradwife influencers glorify and romanticize the period before and after World War II, when most women were homemakers. Some tradwives also resist the feminist movement, promoting a belief that men should exclusively have the workforce and women focus on domesticity. Advocating for “submissiveness” to their spouses, trad wives have raised concerns, with Simmons noting, the peril lies in the potential normalization of abusive relationships.
Enitza Templeton of Littleton, Colorado, draws on a first-hand experience in cautions against the tradwife lifestyle. For ten years, Templeton got up at 4 a.m. to bake bread and take care of her family, only to have the reality of her life “miserable” and “unfulfilling.” She referenced the burden of her daily chores, filled with the intention of distracting her from her lack of control. Templeton, herself divorced, speaks out for women who might be stuck in the same situation. “Social media can make everything look really pretty, because it’s a 30-second clip, but 30 seconds out of 10 years really omits a lot of the ugliness in those relationships,” she said.
The tradwife arrangement tends to have the husband having total control over finances. Experts such as Suzanne Degges-White, a licensed therapist and chair of Northern Illinois University’s department of counseling and higher education, caution that this can develop into an extreme power imbalance, resulting in financial and emotional abuse. It can give the partner who is working an awful lot of power. It should be a shared partnership, Degges-White said.
Dr. Kelly Campbell, the interim vice provost and co-chief diversity officer at California State University San Bernardino, stressed the of having a diversified identity. You don’t want your entire identity to be wrapped up in anything. You want a diversified identity, she stated. It’s good to have a loving relationship that you derive so much satisfaction from, but you can’t lose your own identity through that relationship.
Campbell also emphasized the importance of keeping close ties with friends and relatives as a support group in the event that a marriage doesn’t work out. Although some tradwife influencers have spoken negatively about needing a plan B, it is important to at least know how to monetize personal income in the event that things become an unexpected turn of events, according to Templeton.
