What's the 'Tradwife' Movement and Why Is the Left Determined to Kill It?
Who could have predicted that the new and not-so-roaring ’20s would evoke a deep and powerful longing for the old days? Well, anyone who has noticed the state of our hollowed-out civilization and its rotting culture might have had an inkling.
At the same time, who could have predicted that the screeching woke left would respond to this healthy nostalgia by launching a fresh assault on everything traditional? Again, anyone who understands the intellectual and spiritual rot at the heart of modern leftism might have expected as much.
In the last few years, something called the “tradwife” movement has taken hold among young women, especially in the U.S. and U.K.
The website “TradWife TradLife” defines a tradwife — short for “traditional wife” — as “a woman who chooses to prioritize her role as a homemaker and caregiver within a marriage or partnership” and who “often embraces traditional values, such as domesticity, modesty, and a commitment to family life.”
The Two Elements of the Tradwife Movement
To understand how this has emerged as a recognizable movement, we must understand its two basic elements, one practical and the other what we might call spiritual.
First, as a practical matter, the tradwife movement amounts to a social media phenomenon. That tells us that tech-savvy young women, either millennials (born 1981-96) or Gen Z (born 1997 or later), have driven the movement.
These young women have used social media to showcase their traditional lifestyles. And they have attracted considerable notice.
According to a March 2023 Fox News story, one content specialist reported “more than 152,000 mentions of the term ‘tradwife’ on social media” in the previous year. In January 2023, the New York Post noted that the “TikTok hashtag #TradWife [had] garnered 110.6 million views.”
Some tradwife influencers have amassed impressive followings.
For instance, Estee Williams has attracted 144,000 followers on TikTok. Williams, a young homemaker from Richmond, Virginia, makes videos documenting her transformation from college student to housewife.
“Honestly, I love this lifestyle. And I feel like I always wanted it,” she told Fox last year.
@esteecwilliams Being a traditional wife is my greatest blessing 💕 #NextLevelDish #fyp #viral #tradwife #traditionalwife #traditionalgenderroles #housewife #homemaker #wiveswhostayhome #megawife #makewivesgreatagain #obediantwife #femininenotfeminist #traditional #sandwhichmaker #traditionalmarriage #housewivesofamerica ♬ Viva La Vida – Coldplay
In the U.K., British housewife Alena Kate Pettit started a tradwife blog called “The Darling Academy.”
“It’s almost harnessing the best of what made Britain great during a time where you could leave your front door open,” she said, according to the Daily Mail.
Tradwives’ formidable online presence, therefore, constitutes the movement’s practical element. Of course, readers probably already have an instinctive understanding of its second and more spiritual element.
In short, the tradwife movement represents a yearning for something beautiful and meaningful.
With this in mind, tradwives reject the ugliest tenets of modern feminism. While they do not seek to narrow women’s choices regarding marriage and work, they have rebelled against a dogmatic feminist ideology that venerates the pursuit of a career at the expense of family.
In a story published this month on the libertarian website run by Mises Institute founder and chairman Lew Rockwell, author L. Reichard White shared an anecdote about a “successful women’s rights attorney” whom he called Myra and described as “unhappy and seriously depressed.”
“Feminism told me I could only be happy if I had a career. I now realize that was a lie, a big lie. My inner voice is telling me I should have gotten married and been a homemaker raising children,” Myra said, according to White.
“My clock has been ticking for years and I’ve been ignoring it in favor of the feminist ideal. I’m afraid it’s too late for me now. All I can see ahead is a lonely old woman.”
Dixie Andelin Forsyth, daughter of 1960s-era traditionalism advocate Helen Andelin, had a shorter and simpler message.
“We say to feminists: Thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way,” Forsyth told Stylist.
Estee Williams cited the ultimate source of spiritual authority.
“The Bible speaks of wives submitting and serving their husbands and being their husband’s helping mate,” the Virginia tradwife said, according to the Post. “The Bible talks specifically about gender roles, and I completely support traditional gender roles.”
Why the Left Wants to Kill the Tradwife Movement
In light of these women’s quest for something beautiful and meaningful, who on earth could possibly object? And why?
Well, it should come as no surprise that woke leftists have targeted the traditional movement.
As for why, the answer is simple: They are captured by ideology. As hardened nihilists, they abhor existence itself and thus recoil from all beauty and meaning.
A sampling of establishment media commentaries on the tradwife movement should suffice to illustrate.
This month, for instance, Forbes published an astonishing piece full of red herrings and outright lies about the movement.
“Historically, rigid gender roles confined both men and women to predetermined roles within the family and society. Women were predominantly assigned domestic and child-rearing responsibilities, while men were expected to be the primary breadwinners and providers,” Forbes reported.
Thus, biological realities and the demands of hardscrabble existence had nothing to do with historical gender roles. Apparently, someone simply “assigned” those roles at random and could have assigned different ones if they chose.
Meanwhile, historically rooted pressures toward “gender conformity” could prevent people today from becoming “their authentic selves,” according to Forbes.
That modern self-obsession is precisely the sort of claptrap against which tradwives rebel.
Finally, Forbes accused the tradwife movement of “occasionally aligning with overtly white supremacist content or hashtags — signaling allegiance to hate groups.”
In other words, traditional values and gender roles mean — you guessed it — white supremacy.
Alas, when it came to perpetuating this “white supremacist” lie, Forbes had plenty of company.
Journalist Annie Kelly, for instance, described tradwives as promoting “an idealized and implicitly coded white past,” according to CNN.
In an unhinged 2021 analysis, Political Research Associates — a “social justice” organization — slandered “far-right” young women who “fantasize explicitly about the mythical post-war Americana of the mid-20th century, which they envision as full of Aryan nuclear families and blonde, Tupperware-touting women who are submissive to their husbands.”
Worst of all, perhaps, Vice derisively described tradwives as “part of the broader shift harkening back to an earlier time.”
How do we know that comment was meant to be derisive? Well, consider the example Vice provided and the link it thereby attempted to make.
“The trad movement writ large includes those wishing for a return to more old-fashioned architecture,” the outlet reported.
That architectural nostalgia evidently gripped one social media user who shared a picture of the Neuschwanstein castle in Germany and asked, “Why did human beings stop building things like this?”
The problem, according to Vice, is that Neuschwanstein is “most famous for being where the Nazis stored their looted artworks, and which Hitler held in such admiration that he painted the building.”
In other words, appreciating old architecture really means loving Nazis.
“The dog whistle comment isn’t all that subtle — and shows how the trad movement has been co-opted by those with more nefarious aims,” Vice warned.
In short, anything that once crossed paths with something sinister carries an automatic taint. That is how modern leftist ideologues destroy the past.
Conclusion
In the 1991 book “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” author Jung Chang described her experiences as a teenage schoolgirl during communist tyrant Mao Zedong’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
One day, Chang recalled, Mao decided that front lawns constituted a counterrevolutionary ornament of the bourgeoisie — the middle class.
Thus, without delay, Chang and her classmates marched outside and began pulling grass out of the ground.
Totalitarian regimes work that way. They program millions of people to blindly follow one man or one party’s lead.
But they also insist on total revolution. Everything old must perish. The beautiful must be called ugly, and vice versa.
That is the real dynamic at work in the woke left’s war on tradwives.
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