Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner · 20 Feb 2020 · 309pp · 79,414 words
painful to watch in real time how Kim skilfully takes all her fears and insecurities, inserts them into the Red Pill formula and gets a Trad Wife out of it. I am not in the most mentally stable state myself. Having just come out of a painful break-up, I begin to
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on a lie. The lie that you can have everything, self-fulfillment and a happy family life. It just doesn’t work that way,’ one Trad Wife tells me. Blame it on the hook-up culture, as Brittany Pettibone would say, the product of modernity, social progress, feminism. Millennials are increasingly fed
Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online
by Fortesa Latifi · 7 Apr 2026 · 240pp · 89,773 words
be a ballet studio was later turned into the kids’ schoolroom). Not only is Hannah the ultimate Mormon mom influencer, but she’s also the Trad Wife to End All Trad Wives. (Her next closest rival, Nara Smith, who famously makes her kids snacks like graham crackers from scratch, is tight-lipped
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about her religious leanings but was married in a Mormon temple.) Let’s back up for a second and define trad wife, which refers to a “traditional wife” or a woman who practices conventional gender roles in her relationship and basically does everything that we expect the
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, one in which gender norms are reinforced as a husband goes out and works and a woman stays home. Part of the controversy of the trad wife movement lies in the lack of choice and agency: Did women who were “trad wives” in the past really choose that? Or was it the
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’s this very precarious, scary moment we’re in. And so I’m not surprised people are trying to reconstruct the past.” The idea that trad wife content is surging because of economic and political precarity makes sense to me. The present is so scary—why not return to an idealized past
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white woman makes 83 cents and a Black woman makes 69 cents to every $1 a white man makes. I understand the appeal of the trad wife role. It seems like a relief to decide you’re done fighting in this society, where the wage gap persists, reproductive rights are vanishing faster
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step back from the crushing pressures of at least one of those struggles, I don’t know that I can blame anyone for taking it. Trad wife content promises an alternative: a soft life in which your only worries are taking care of your sweet babies, baking loaves of bread and cooking
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off. You can rest, Mama. You can make the home your domain. And you can make it beautiful—heavenly, even. I understood the draw of trad wife content more before I became a mother myself. I would scroll through TikTok and Instagram and spot these beautiful women with their perfect balayage hair
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least, it’s a way of being an ambitious, capable, striving woman while still centering what people most expect you to be—a mom. The trad wife performs an imitation of the past because the present is so uncertain. She drapes herself in prairie dresses and flowing aprons, smiles into the camera
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of the ‘Trad Wives’ (and Her Eight Children,” The Times, July 29, 2024, https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/my-day-with-the-trad-wife-queen-and-what-i-really-thought-of-her-qmbmmhkp8. “Tradwives leveraged maternal”: Sophia Sykes and Veronica Hopner, “Tradwives: Right-Wing Social Media Influencers,” Journal of
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
the opposite sex, in practice it often had the reverse effect. Increasingly isolated from career-oriented women, many gravitated toward the idealized fantasy of the “trad wife”: “women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media.” Trad wives ranged from Orthodox Jewish
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cooking videos with soothing voice-overs. One widely parodied clip showed the couple making their own toothpaste from scratch. To professor Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, the trad-wife movement was less a serious political position than an aestheticized form of magical thinking and prosperity gospel: “If you live this lifestyle, if you do
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. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “halo-shaped wearables”: Haskins, “Fashy Posturing and Rich-Kid Juvenilia?” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the “trad wife”: Sophie Elmhirst, “The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife,” New Yorker, March 29, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rise-and-fall-of-the
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-trad-wife. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “live this lifestyle”: Carter Sherman, “Sundresses and Rugged Self-Sufficiency: ‘Tradwives’ Tout a Conservative American Past…That Didn’t