Why Tradwives? Why Now?
The Tradwife movement, in many ways, is a reaction to feminism’s dominant cultural script: The flourishing life comes from career, autonomy, and self-definition. Many women followed the feminist script faithfully and found themselves exhausted, lost, and lonely. The tradwife trend challenges the cultural narrative of feminism by returning to the mid-1900s image of the happy wife. Will sourdough bread and backyard gardens cause the collapse of feminism? No. The Tradwife movement, however, asks questions about sources of happiness and life balance, rather than domestic roles.
Studies and surveys show that interest in Tradwife activities has far more to do with having free time away from workplace pressures than it does with a shift in opinions about whether a woman should work outside the home. Tradwife content provides a picture of a happy life with more time to make beautiful things inside the home for those who can’t keep work from invading the home. Mothers (and fathers) cannot easily unplug from the office. Microsoft Teams pings your computer, emails swamp your inbox, and your co-worker texts to vent about how work eats into family dinner time. Technology may increase productivity, but it also asks for attention, even when you are off the clock. The work notifications exasperate when you just want to watch some social media reels and see what a better life would look like.
Stay-At-Home … Influencer
For years, advertisers have crafted images to provide a picture of the good life. The pictures change over the years, but the principle remains. What’s missing in your pursuit of the good life is the new car, the right vacation, the time-saving technology, but now with social media, algorithms lurk, not behind you but right in front of your face, in order to give you the picture of the good life that remedies your deepest aches.
Curating compelling pictures of the good life has become a profession in and of itself. The Tradwife movement exists in the digital economy more than the home economy. The aesthetic feels real, but the product is fabricated. These are typically influencers — modeling domesticity for an audience, not the family; homemaking to a camera, not a husband; baking bread to be seen, not tasted. It’s the attention economy in a lovely linen apron. Nostalgia isn’t a theology; it’s a feeling. And a feeling makes for a flawed foundation for the good life. However, the draw of Tradwife influencers reveals something about what people truly desire.
What The Trad Movement Misses
Both the feminist script and the tradwife aesthetic respond to the same genuine ache: the shifting realities of work, whether at home or in the marketplace, that make life feel meaningless. The real question underneath the trend isn’t should I stay home? It’s does my life mean something? That’s a theological question, more than a lifestyle question.
The images of a peaceful, flourishing home in a chaotic age create a deep longing in each one of us: the nostalgic visuals of a not-so-distant time that offers simplicity and hope. It’s the same desire that C. S. Lewis spoke of in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”:
“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
The things of the Tradwife movement are not bad. I love a great slice of sourdough bread, my wife and I would happily add a chicken coop to our property, and home-making is a noble calling. However, if we raise up good things to be the source of our hope and joy, we end up worshipping a new idol because previous ones failed us. Reality shatters our idols. It does not matter if our idols are notoriety or nostalgia, it does not matter if we long for balance at home or positive balance sheets at work, and it does not matter if our desires put a simple or abundant life as our hope. If we worship created things over God, we miss out on the only thing that will truly satisfy our desires for peace and joy.
By all means, bake delicious bread but make an extra loaf for the family at the church who has just gotten home from the hospital. Take care of your house well, but do it so you can invite people to true community. The Trad movement reveals wonderful desires but places the image above the one who created. When the next reel comes up that shows a young woman with the happiest of home life, she’s asking a real question. She deserves a real answer — one that doesn’t come from an algorithm or a nostalgia filter, but from the God who made her.
No comments have been added.