You could call my friends and me “tradwives.” I have three kids with one on the way, I quit my government job to stay home with them, and I like to make homemade meals. As a conservative woman, I’ve found myself surrounded by many women who fit the description of tradwives and who hold that culture in high esteem.
For the last couple of years, the tradwife lifestyle, which promotes traditional family values and homemaking with an emphasis on all things homemade, has dominated conservative circles. Homesteading is no longer a term only found in history books. Sourdough bread became synonymous with housewife prestige. Milkmaid dresses and the sundress aesthetic defined conservative fashion — they even spilled over into mainstream fashion — and the “trad catholic” movement almost promised to be the next great cultural reset.
But recently, feelings about the tradwife movement have changed. So much so that Evie, a conservative women’s magazine that has done a lot to promote the tradwife aesthetic, published a piece titled “‘Everything is Tradwife’ is the New ‘Everything is Racist.’” The provocatively titled article made the argument that “tradwife” has become an overused slur, often employed against women who embrace any inkling of traditional values.
Do you like wearing sundresses? Suddenly people who disagree with you politically can call you a “tradwife” as if it’s a universally understood assault on your moral character. Then there’s Anne Hathaway’s upcoming movie adaptation of the book “Yesteryear,” critiquing the tradwife movement on the big screen. The book and movie have rekindled the debate regarding the movement’s merits from mainstream critics and conservative influencers alike.
As Allie Beth Stuckey wrote for the Washington Post last month, “For years, I have been a critic of the tradwife trend, not because I dislike home schooling or sourdough, but because it conflates the traditional and the biblical. It encourages young women to think that cooking from scratch or wearing cottagecore garb is a necessary part of fulfilling God’s plan for their lives. There is nothing wrong with neutral linens or chicken coops, but neither is synonymous with being a good wife and mother.”
Even social media icons who popularized the tradwife lifestyle such as Nara Smith have made it clear they don’t consider themselves tradwives. Smith, who has previously distanced herself from the label, just joined the Call Her Daddy podcast to make her thoughts clear. She argued that “we put women in very narrow, very specific boxes in order to make sense of them,” suggesting that “tradwife” is one such example. For her, it is far too narrow a box for the digital empire Smith has built for herself (4 million followers on Instagram and 9 million followers on TikTok) and fails to account for all the creative business ventures that got her there and the way she and her husband split household tasks.
Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, has also stated that she “doesn’t necessarily identify” with the title even though she’s considered the movement’s poster child.
Why has the tradwife trend waned in popularity, even among conservatives? Is it because, for some Christians, it was a form of materialism in the guise of holiness? Was the tradwife lifestyle and accompanying “Little House on the Prairie” Instagram aesthetic, with its insistence on homegrown, homemade everything, simply too hard for women to stick to over time?
While all these factors are likely at play, its biggest flaw is that the tradwife movement entails an isolating lifestyle, especially at a time when loneliness and depression are plaguing Americans. Much of the trad wife movement is admirable when grounded in religious and philosophical convictions about the sanctity of family life, healthier living, connection to land, and rejection of overconsumption. But its cultural trajectory has waned because of its failure to promote the community-minded matrons that society so desperately needs right now.
It’s not that the tradwife movement is anti-community or un-neighborly on purpose. Rather, it makes community involvement difficult from a practical standpoint. It’s hard to get to know your neighbors if you don’t have any for miles because you homestead. It’s incredibly difficult to manage a hobby farm and homeschool children and mill your own flour while being an active volunteer in your community, let alone running a local business or even being the one to organize a volunteer program or community-focused organization.
Home gardening, hobby farming, and homeschooling in and of themselves can easily become full time jobs. Undertaking them all together, with the added emphasis of making everything from scratch, leaves women with little bandwidth for community involvement or sometimes even good neighborliness.
More importantly, I have personally seen the tradwife lifestyle make it hard for tradwives to connect with women in other walks of life, such as single or working moms who don’t have the time or resources to follow traditional homemaking practices. At the start of a Bible study last fall at my church, a woman introduced herself by saying she was a homemaker extraordinaire, and that if you’re into “home birth, homesteading, and all things home” she’d love to connect and be friends. I know she was searching for likeminded women to befriend and likely didn’t mean it to be purposefully exclusionary. But I remember thinking to myself, Well, since I’ve had a hospital birth and resort to Costco for easy dinners, are we not going to be friends? And if I felt excluded as someone who is a stay-at-home mom with a fairly traditional lifestyle, how would a single or working mom feel hearing this?
I find it hard to imagine that many die-hard tradwives would be able to connect with a single mom who, if she were to have an hour of much-coveted free time, would love for a friend to take her out to chat about the mysteries surrounding Taylor Swift’s wedding over a Starbucks frappé (the mold risk! the sugar!). Perhaps that’s a caricature of both the tradwife and the single mom, but it drives home the point that it is difficult to connect with women in different walks of life, particularly the more vulnerable women in society, if you have withdrawn from it in order to embrace the time-consuming demands of all things tradwife.
This is precisely why the trad movement has lost traction: While it rightfully beautified home life, it made such exclusive, archaic standards for homemaking that it unintentionally excluded community involvement at a time when Americans are in desperate need of neighborliness.
Instead of the tradwife movement, I’m rooting for the good neighbor movement. For the return of matrons who are community pillars and intimately involved with and invested in their communities, even if that means we have to loosen up some of our homemaking standards and that meals from scratch are a little more sparse at our dinner tables. There was a time when we all knew not only our neighbors, but also our local elected officials, grocers, and baristas and even the homeless. We used to praise women for involvement in civil society, whether that be occasional volunteering or actively leading local organizations that thread families together in community.
Now, we seem to have settled on two extremes: We’re either applauding corporate female leaders or we’re in the tradwife camp, and there’s little acknowledgement that prioritizing home was never meant to be divorced from community involvement and even leadership.
Remember in World War II when women banded together to support the war effort from home? We’re probably familiar with the fact that women were the ones who kept vital industrial jobs going and that WWII marked the entrance of women into the workforce. But even women who did not formally join the workforce also rallied the community around the war effort, creating sewing groups to mend uniforms, organizing Red Cross chapters, and ensuring that the war effort was not only supported from Washington, but from every strata of American life. If the need arose today, we would not be connected enough with our communities to accomplish anything similar.
There are women, like my former neighbor three doors down, who give me hope. She and her family of six recently moved, leaving a large hole in our community. She knew everyone in the neighborhood. She was the one who alerted me to the presence of local political women’s chapters for involvement. Her children were always bringing over gifts or treats for those going through a rough time in the neighborhood or for the births of new babies, and there were impromptu pizza block parties in their small front yard. Despite what her own families’ political views may have been, their farewell party was filled with individuals of all political persuasions.
She certainly did not make everything from scratch, but her door was always open (quite literally, likely because one of their children was outdoors and left it so). This is precisely what I’d like to see glorified more in conservative culture: less emphasis on a picturesque homestead or an Instagram-perfect, made-from-scratch meal and more emphasis on who’s invited to eat with you. A homemade pie is elite, but I’d rather someone show up at my door with boxed brownies than not at all, and I’d wager most of us in the lonely, digitally oppressive world of ours would agree.
The tradwife movement’s decline in popularity may bring some much-needed moderation to the conservative womansphere — and the freedom for women to do some of the things that women intuitively do best: nurture, grow, connect with others, and model community involvement for their children.
Milkmaid dresses haven’t gone away, but they’re no longer dominating fashion-forward conservative social media accounts. Instead, a Ralph Lauren-esque, Americana aesthetic has swept in strong this summer. Fashion reads American. I don’t think this is a coincidence; fashion always winks at deeper cultural trends, and ours is nodding toward a lost American identity and community. As the tradwife trends wanes, I hope we conservative women will loosen some of our homemaking preconceptions enough to get out and active in our community — to embody the proverbial Marys of the world rather than the Marthas, even if it means we forgo the sourdough-making.
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Rebekah Bills is a freelance writer and mother of three. She previously served as a civilian intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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