Shucking Oysters: Stepford Wives
By Alex Allen
It’s official, “tradwife” has been added to the Cambridge Dictionary. Tradwife, slang for “traditional wife,” is a married mother with so-called traditional values, as in staying at home, cooking, cleaning, and posting on social media. It’s about domesticity and upholding the traditional roles of homemaker (for women) and breadwinner (for men).
The term first began trending online during the pandemic. Today, it’s changed from a mere phenomenon to becoming an everyday reality – especially in the Republic of the United States. On TikTok and Instagram, many female influencers have gained huge followings by showing off their lives as homemakers, from their elaborate homemade meals to their 1950s-inspired wardrobes. They present “housewifery” as the ultimate in wellness, an “escape from the soulless grind of the workplace.”
Nara Smith, perhaps the biggest “non-tradwife-tradwife” influencer has catapulted to TikTok fame (over 4 million followers) with her “made it from scratch” videos, taking converts along as she whips up everything from homemade bagels to pickled onions. Married young, Smith with the proverbial bee-stung lips, has been pregnant for much of her social media rise. She and her husband Lucky Blue, have three children, Rumble Honey, Slim Easy and Whimsy Lou, with the fourth to arrive in late 2025 – called let me guess, Squishy Bettee?
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, worship correspondent for Christianity Today and author of her forthcoming book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Failed a Generation of Evangelicals, said, “There is a sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel thinking in here. ‘If you live this lifestyle, if you do this thing that God is calling you to [do] as a woman, he will provide. And not only will he provide, he will provide beautifully. He will provide a beautiful family, a beautiful home, beautiful surroundings, a beautiful body.’”
Another social media influencer, 19-year-old Savanna Stone, again with bee-stung lips, is embracing her life as a stay-at-home wife, drawing in millions of views across Instagram and TikTok. “Have you tried putting on a sundress and cooking his favorite meal? Have you tried actually listening when he speaks? Have you tried being happy and joyful when he comes home instead of nagging him? Have you tried keeping the house clean so that it’s a sanctuary for him to come home to and not more chaos?”
“Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity,” Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark told thousands at a conservative women’s conference in June. For three days, prominent conservative women indoctrinated the crowd of white females in their teens and 20s with: Trade feminism for femininity, ditch your career aspirations, and focus on finding your husband and become a stay-at-home mom!
Despite the presence of a few high-vile women in Trump’s administration, the right is increasingly trying to drive women out of public life. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which leaders of his Christian denomination said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America,” to telling Esquire magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”), Trump’s views of women are patently clear.
JD Vance, his cherubic sidekick, has similarly pushed the tradwife doctrine: “I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.” The word “single” is the key; he’s not talking about economic advancement in the middle class. It’s about dad going to work and mom staying home to cook, clean, and attend to the kids. Fun fact: Vance’s wife, Usha, has a law degree from Yale Law School, a master’s from Cambridge University, was a Supreme Court Clerk and worked at a law firm that described itself as “radically progressive.” All before she became Vance’s arm candy and full-time wife and mother.
As Thom Hartmann wrote, when Republicans say that your grandmother stayed with your grandfather and should be your role model, they fail to point out that women three generations ago really had few choices unless they were independently wealthy.
In twenty states, Republicans have succeeded in removing one of the most important decisions: abortion of an accidental or unwanted pregnancy. Now they’re going after birth control and pushing back hard against equal-pay-for-equal-work, again arguing that women shouldn’t be on the job in the first place.
And the Trumpeteers are also working hard on ending no-fault divorce. As JD Vance said, women should stay home and serve their husbands even when those men are physically or emotionally abusive, ignoring the blatant fact that those states that enacted no-fault divorce laws saw an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides, a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.
In February, three political scientists published an essay in the New York Times with the title “Republican Men and Women are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave.” The essay drew on research conducted last November which found that almost 50% of Republican male respondents thought “women should return to their traditional gender roles in society.” Similarly, the percentage of Republican women who thought “women should return to their traditional gender roles” was around 23% in 2022 but increased to 37% in 2024.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being a wife and mother. Further, there is nothing wrong with a woman who chooses to stay home to care for her family, rather than pursue a career or work outside of the home. The bottom line is that tradwifery should be an option for women, not the only option.
Hartmann notes, “It’s one thing to argue that American society is and should be accepting of a wide variety of lifestyles for men and women, from academia to a working life to being a tradwife; it’s another thing altogether to reorganize society so one of those lifestyles is imposed on people by the force of law.”
And that’s exactly what the current US administration is trying to do. Think Stepford Wives; the women, avid activists with successful careers, who had lives outside of being a wife are turned into lifeless, docile robots reducing their only purpose in life to serve their husbands and God.
With the ever-increasing influx of influencers, tradwives offers the perfect platform that merges money with right-wing ideology. And the perfect spin-off: The Unreal Housewives.
