Are Tradwives Luring Women To The Right?

On Oct. 30, days before the 2024 presidential election, Hannah Belle Freas (@springhillhomestead) posted a well-lit photo of small children making cookies in a cozy, cottage-core kitchen overlooking open, green fields. “I want to live quietly and be content going against the current,” Freas wrote in the caption. “This world is changing quickly and I don’t care to keep up, other than to educate myself and confidently say ‘no.’ I don’t want to conform. Here’s how I choose to live. By the Word. It’s okay to work hard to create a life that’s different than what they want you to live.”

As is the case with many “apolitical” women online, Freas is adept at presenting a statement as though it can exist independently of modern context, but it’s not a stretch to read Freas’ “no” as a “no” to progressivism, a “no” to balancing a career with the “second shift” of domestic work — and, by association, perhaps a “no” to the ideals espoused by Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.

While the majority of Gen Z women voted for Harris and embrace progressive politics overall, early polling numbers show that 40% of women aged 18 to 29 voted for Trump, compared to 33% in 2020. In a presidential race dominated by concerns over women’s increasingly threatened rights, this uptick in young women’s support of an administration that will likely do everything it can to further restrict abortion access was puzzling. But if you knew where to look, you could have seen it coming.

After decades of feminists advocating for women’s right to choose (in the context of abortion, but also more broadly, in life and career decisions), many young women are devoting themselves to family and domesticity and embracing traditional gender roles in lieu of the possibilities offered to them by girlboss feminism — sidestepping the systemic challenges of working motherhood.

These women — almost exclusively white— call themselves many things. Warrior mamas. Wild and free. Homesteaders. Christians. Mormons. And many progressives, who have spent the last few years ogling the perfectly golden sourdough loaves and seemingly blissful dissociations from an increasingly chaotic world, call them tradwives. I reached out to all the women cited in this piece, but none of them responded to my interview requests.

“Young women find themselves in the same job market offering low-paid, exploitative jobs for dwindling prospects,”Annie Kelly, who researches antifeminism, conspiracy theories, and the far right, tells me via email. “They are often subject to the same forces of loneliness and alienation that come alongside not having much money or free time, and living in a world where more and more of our daily social interactions take place online.” Kelly notes that while much has been said about the “lost boys” of Gen Z and their support of Trump, young women can also be convinced they’re seeing “their rightful future stolen from them by the progressive hegemonic order.”

Jess Rauchberg, Ph.D, assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, says that Gen Z has “very different ideas about work, family values, and their safety and security.” In comparison to millennials, who grew up in the shadow of the 2008 recession and often prioritize devotion to career as the only way to escape student debt and attain security, Rauchberg posits that Gen Z women are looking at that burnt-out generation and seeking another way to live. When tradwives step into this ideological vacuum and present a soft-lit image of mid-century harmony, it’s a very easy fantasy for young people to swallow — despite the fact that, whether you’re trad or not, the labor of mothering is hard, constant, and demanding; the labor of domesticity is ongoing, messy, and rarely aesthetically pleasing.

There are variations on the tradwife theme, which also — implicitly or explicitly — disavow feminism. There’s the stay-at-home girlfriend, who, by placing her financial well-being entirely in a man’s hand, is able to retreat from the hustle and devote her energy to ensuring her body and domestic space remain beautiful and pristine. There’s the trad cath (as in “Catholic”), who adopts an opulent aesthetic of lace, veils, and incense smoke, alongside a “radical” rejection of progressive ideals in favor of marriage and children. And there’s #softgirl culture, which celebrates calming, candlelit Pilates sessions, a strict devotion to self-care and -betterment, and usually requires someone else able to pay for one’s life of leisure. The prototypical “soft girl” can be found on the digital pages of Evie magazine, a MAGA gal’s version of Cosmo backed by right-wing libertarian Peter Thiel.

Gen Z is also on the whole more likely to be more gender fluid, more open to alternative lifestyles, and more queer than previous generations, so to live a life in service to a heteronormative nuclear family can be understood as an active countercultural choice — made in defiance of the mysterious, powerful “they” our cookie-baking mom, Hannah Belle Freas, refers to when she says “create a life that’s different than what they want you to live.”

Gen Z came of age in a time in which politics became memefied along with everything else, Mariel Cooksey, executive director of the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies, writes in an email. The alt-right has effectively shifted the Overton window on what’s appropriate to voice in public discourse and what isn’t. The result, Cooksey says, “is a generation of kids who grew up online who see even the most egregious political opinions as jokes.” Bernadine (@bernadinebluntly on IG), for example, memeifies the incel motto “your body, my choice,” overlaying the text “my body, his choice 💍😘” onto a photo of her and her husband kissing. The shock of the original comment is defanged by ironic humor, which functions as a flippant “f*ck you” to pearl-clutching feminists.

Not unlike Senator J.D. Vance, many of these influencers disseminate the pronatalist worldview that motherhood is a woman’s noble destiny, and that much of millennial women’s current life dissatisfactions can be chalked up to the fact that they weren’t encouraged to pursue their maternal destinies with enough commitment and joy.

Contemporary life is full of doubt, compromise, and, often, the choice between lesser evils, but in the trad universe, the rules are soothingly black and white. Women are women and men are men, and by playing into their gendered strengths, nirvana can be easily and joyfully achieved. Trad ideology isn’t worried about having it all or balancing child care with career because trad ideology promises that everyone who follows the rules will win at the game of life. When presented with the choice of devoting oneself entirely to career at the expense of family, or working and parenting in a society that makes it difficult to manage both, some young women see becoming a stay-at-home mom as the easier, better option.

Consider young trad influencers like Aria Lewis (@mrsarialewis), who takes the time to deliberately explain why she chose a trad life and what she’d do if, for example, the bottom fell out of her utopia. If her husband died, for example, she would move in with family, lean on them for support with child care, and look to her church to help with meals and financial assistance if needed. She’d employ her marketable skills (which she has worked hard to hone) and find a job within her community. Lewis doesn’t lack the desire or skill set to succeed in the marketplace. What she is doing is providing a clearer blueprint for living than, for example, many Democratic party leaders, who seem wary to embrace a more full-throated version of progressivism, complete with child care subsidies, comprehensive maternal health care, and federal paid family leave.

Many assumed that protecting abortion access would keep women voting Democrat, but apparently, it’s not as salient an issue as some thought. For example, Bailey (@bmcpher), a TikToker who describes herself as a “Jesus lover. Homemaker. Certified yapper” in her bio, explained in a Nov. 2 post that she was voting for Trump to protect her daughter’s rights: for free speech, national security, financial stability, the right to homeschool, and gun ownership, for medical autonomy in the vein of RFK Jr., and religious freedom. Bailey argues that her daughter’s right to make choices (about her body and otherwise) is about so much more than “the want to end the lives of babies in the womb.”

For me, the questions that follow tumble forth in rapid succession: What if someday you want to make a different choice? What if someday your life depends on making a different choice? Would you, only then, be convinced to vote differently? I think of Audre Lorde’s famous words: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” A choice is not a true choice if there is only one way to choose or if it serves only one type of person.

Lewis tells women it’s OK if their “big dream” isn’t a “huge salary, a Porsche, or fame … it can be this simple life.” And she’s right. And if a woman’s dream isn’t bound up in home-cooked meals, maternal love, and livestock care, that’s OK too. The problem is that a vote for Trump and Vance wasn’t necessarily a vote to preserve that choice — and it may have been a vote to foreclose it.