And then came the tradwives, whose content leans heavily into the old tropes. “Our world loves extremes,” says Neha Ruch, founder of Mother Untitled, a platform built to redefine stay-at-home motherhood and career pauses. “So there was the girlboss, now there’s the tradwife.”
Tradwives are not all mothers, and there’s a clear distinction between tradwives and stay-at-home moms. Yet our societal image of tradwives and stay-at-home moms is becoming muddled—and taking away any nuance we might have recently gained about the work that is done within a home to make a home or raise a family.
People who opt out of paid work do face a degree of financial vulnerability—that’s nothing new. But both tradwives and many detractors seem unconcerned with actually addressing that issue. Ironically, the same tradwife influencers who romanticize a traditional way of living and financial dependence on a male partner are leveraging modern-day technology to attain a level of financial freedom. Though there’s a real dearth of income transparency where influencing is concerned, we know content creation can be a highly lucrative gig. During an appearance on the Tamron Hall Show, influencer Alexia Delarosa (who identifies as a “homemaker” rather than a tradwife) admits she makes “enough [money] to pay all the bills” via her content.
Tradwives are, almost unilaterally, white and affluent, which reinforces the idea that homemakers and stay-at-home mothers have a level of socioeconomic privilege that doesn’t warrant systemic protection. (Thanks to the childcare crisis, low-income mothers often have had to leave the traditional workforce out of necessity.) “That is part of the story and always has been,” says Beatty, “that this kind of submissive white womanhood that ostensibly is protected by white manhood comes with a racial and a class privilege.”
The reality is there’s ever-increasing fluidity between the old dichotomy between boss babe and homemaker. And with their hustle (yes, both homemaking and content creation are work) and hidden (or not so hidden) economic agendas, influential tradwives occupy that in-between space too.
“Women, when they step into chapters of career breaks, are really nervous about parting with their professional identity,” says Ruch. “They worry they’re going to be deemed traditionalist or not feminist. We’re at this moment where we are reexamining, and we have to be clear about the new narrative—and any sort of old imagery, old dialogue, does threaten that progress.”