“The trad wives of Gen Z should talk to the trad wives of Gen Boomer about what happens when you hit 40.”

This bit of social commentary on X from substacker Rachel Bitecofer has gone viral this week, sparking debate over the merits of being a “trad wife.” Urban Dictionary defines this bit of internet slang as, “Short for ‘traditional wife.’ Used in alt-right circles to refer to women that embody traditionally feminine and wifely qualities (submissiveness, chastity, willingness to do household chores, etc).”

While this definition is obviously pejorative, it does express the crux of the trend, which exemplifies a willingness to be seen in traditional roles with overtly feminine aesthetics, and to foster an online perception of women as primarily the keepers and stewardesses of the home front.

Bitecofer’s point, on the other hand, is that the fleeting trend of “tradness” will butt against real world trials and an inevitable divorce or abandonment soon enough, causing financial destitution for the woman who relied on her husband for decades.

This was a weird foreboding, I thought, because traditional wives and mothers in my life seem happy and content. According to this post, I should brace myself for their or their husband’s coming breakdown.

But if trad wife haters get one thing right, it is that many of the most internet-famous “influencers” in the “trad wife” sphere simply aren’t built for it. And by that, I don’t mean that there is some magic gene that makes one prone to wifely submission and sourdough baking, which they do not have, but that they are in it for the wrong reasons and thus are bound to burn out. Internet trends are a pendulum swing, and as soon as narrow attention spans tire of long dresses and cottage gardens, trauma dumping about patriarchal husbands will become the latest fashion.

So what of normal mothers and wives? Will every mother of more than the socially acceptable number of children become a girlboss and send them to daycare? Will every masculine husband and feminine wife hire divorce attorneys? Obviously – and thankfully – not.

The social media trend toward homemaking, marriage, and motherhood is a net positive in the sense that any cultural zeitgeist toward something good, even if fleeting and opportunistic, is better than a cultural zeitgeist toward something bad. The internet trend may indeed die out, but the actual people living it out, independent of trends, will last far longer.

“Tradwives often adopt these manosphere truisms as self-evident, rebranding and promoting them under the guise of idyllic, complementary gender roles, particularly through more feminine-coded platforms like Instagram,” Helen Roy writes at her Substack. “Alarmingly, this ideology is seeping into real life, as many well-intentioned, scrupulous men and women, who instinctively reject mainstream leftism, now accept its stark opposition without question.”

While it’s likely true at any point that some couples adopt Andrew Tate-style woman hatred as a cope against cultural feminism, I largely disagree with Roy’s point here. Women are sick of living their lives, and particularly being told to live their lives, in the same way as men.

The “grind” of a 9-to-5 is wholly unsuited to a woman’s nature. While necessity may often dictate such a life, motherhood and homemaking are, undoubtedly, far happier pursuits. The aesthetics of such a life, Roy does say, are not all bad, but I would go farther than that and say they are outright good.

In a world where a woman’s dream life is encouraged to include pantsuits and big cities, aesthetic countersignaling is exactly what traditionalists need to win. The left didn’t raise a whole generation on pop feminism by advertising missed periods and wrecked hormones from long-term usage of the pill or lonely apartments inhabited by women who have squandered their childbearing years. They focused on the aesthetics of flashy careers – high heels and skyscrapers and sassy girl bosses one-upping their male coworkers in the boardroom. The aesthetics actually do matter (and ours are very strong) but they can’t be the substance of our argument against cultural feminism and all that it has wrought.

The issue only arises when the cultural pushback stops there. When mothers begin barking at their children and chastising their husbands so they can have a quiet moment to set up a tripod and film a video showcasing the importance of homemaking, then one could safely say that we have truly, as the kids say, “lost the plot.” The Instagram trends must be treated as an aesthetic in service of a traditional lifestyle, not a traditional lifestyle in service of an aesthetic.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: AI