Further, there are tons of reasons any parent might opt to stay home that don’t require buying into tradwife values: Work isn’t always satisfying or well-paid, some people want to spend the majority of their time with their kids and child care is so expensive that it can push a lower-earning parent out of the labor market, to name a few. And as an avowed lover of #cleantok, I have no problem with content about household tasks — but that’s separate from what the tradwives are often cynically pushing. When people criticize the way tradwives troll, they’re very likely to respond that their detractors simply don’t value the hard work of raising children and running a household — when many of their critics value that work tremendously, and do it themselves.
That said, I’m not particularly concerned that young women watching TikTok are going to be so influenced by this content that they’ll start fleeing the secular world en masse to submit to their husbands, live on a farm and bake aesthetically pleasing pies. That’s because young women are increasingly rejecting this specific kind of domestic arrangement.
According to a November 2023 survey from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, 61 percent of Gen Z women consider themselves feminists, the highest percentage of any generation. And as the Survey Center’s Daniel A. Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond explained in April, “Young women are leaving church in unprecedented numbers,” partly because they “are more concerned about the unequal treatment of women in American society and are more suspicious of institutions that uphold traditional social arrangements.” Women are outpacing men in terms of college graduation rates, and prime-age women’s labor force participation is even greater than it was prepandemic.
Still, some tradwife creators appear to be popular if you look at their follower counts, and they certainly generate a lot of chatter. But I often think: Who is this content really for? Sure, some portion of their followers are probably like-minded women, but a new study from Media Matters made me wonder if the tradwife’s main audience is actually right-leaning men:
Media Matters coded and analyzed 327 recommended videos after exclusively interacting with tradwife content and documented what happened. We found TikTok’s recommendation algorithm rapidly populated our F.Y.P. [For You page] with conspiracy theory content and fearmongering, which made up nearly one-third of all videos served to the F.Y.P.
After interacting with tradwives, the study found, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm also served up “19 videos featuring extremist right-wing media figures,” such as Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes.
(A related idea, put forth by the journalist and internet commentator Max Read in a story by my friend Kathryn Jezer-Morton in The Cut, is that tradwife content is actually for men with something of a Donna Reed fetish: “Maybe it’s a different version of the e-girl phenomenon or the OnlyFans phenomenon. To the extent that I would worry about anything in the future, instead of creating a mass of tradwife women, it feels a lot like you’ll get one or two very famous ones, and a mass of simping male followers.”)