Social media’s glamorous TradWife fad bemuses ‘real’ traditional American wives

She is a traditional wife, but she is not a #tradwife.

Clad in denim overalls and a sweatshirt, Amy Jay milks cows, churns butter and slaughters poultry for her family of five on their homestead in western North Carolina. Instagram photos and TikTok videos of coiffed, high-heeled #tradwives preparing meals for their husbands amuse and bemuse the Catholic wife and mother.

“Gals all glammed up in aprons, trying to look pretty, it’s just not real,” Mrs. Jay told The Washington Times.

Since kicking into high gear around 2020, the #tradwife trend on TikTok and Instagram has painted a polished, pleasing picture of domesticity for modern women. With their chic homes, stylish children, multicourse dinners on the table by 5 each night or quaint farms snuggled alongside the Utah mountains, #tradwives have created a standard for stay-at-home moms.

What turns a traditional wife into a #tradwife is up for debate, especially among religious women who have been doing it for decades.

Shuly Amsel, an Orthodox Jewish wife and mother who runs a wig business in the heart of Brooklyn, New York, rolls her eyes when she thinks about the perception of women in her neighborhood whom many might deem #tradwives. She said wondering whether you are a #tradwife is a sign you might not be traditional.

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“Look, some women are not particularly traditional wives, as you would call it, but they classify themselves as that. And then some, some women who think, no, no, I’m not a traditional wife at all. Well, they are,” Mrs. Amsel said, chuckling.

Social media influencers, such as Estee Williams, describe their roles as women who “submit to their husbands and serve them.” Other influencers seem to agree. Some #tradwives aren’t wives at all.

Many are stay-at-home girlfriends who clean their boyfriends’ apartments and perform skin care routines while their men are at work. The undercurrent is a clear designation of gender norms — an attempt to return to tradition.

Nara Smith, a 22-year-old South African-German model, has turned her Los Angeles home into a social media stage where she displays motherhood, modeling and homemaking. She has three little ones and a model husband named Lucky Blue Smith.

Mrs. Smith reached new heights of fame by captivating her audiences with dreamy recipe videos. With soft piano music in the background, she glides through her kitchen to whip up complex meals. Forget sliced celery and peanut butter. She is making cheese from scratch.

Her meticulous approach to living seems beautiful and archaic in an age when convenience reigns. Many women wonder in her comments section: How does she do it all?

Hilda Shepherd, a nondenominational Tennessee Christian with eight children and a farm, had no idea what #tradwives were when The Times asked her for an interview. She had to ask her Gen Z son, whom she homeschooled with his siblings, to look up the definition. She said she sees women struggling to keep up with social media trends all the time.

“Because of the internet, because of social media, so many people feel they must meet the standard of someone else. ‘If I don’t do it like so-and-so does it. Oh, my goodness, she sets such the bar so high, I can’t do that,’” Mrs. Shepherd said. “So then we have all these girls feeling like they can’t do anything right. They feel very low self-esteem.”

Mrs. Smith joined a chorus of other frustrated #tradwives when she told GQ she wasn’t trying to push an agenda.

“In no way am I saying this is normal or this is something people have to do in order to be a certain way,” Mrs. Smith told the men’s magazine. “Whether it’s a meal idea, or a home-cooked meal I’ve made my toddler, or my soothing voice, or whatever it is, I just put content out there to inspire people. Everyone can take whatever they want to from my content.”

Her TikTok account has 463.7 million likes and more than 9 million followers.

Mrs. Jay, in North Carolina, said she understands the appeal. “I’ve got to tell you, I milk a cow, and I really enjoy it. It’s relaxing. It’s fun. I make cheese out of that milk, and I make butter taste real good … and, and I just enjoy it, right? It brings me joy to do that.”

Perhaps fun is why #tradwife content is rising in popularity. Mrs. Smith’s account isn’t the only content attracting millions of followers. More followers means more potential for income for #tradwives as they monetize their videos and gain brand deals.

Though she is a homesteader and a homeschool mother — two descriptors widely praised on #tradwife social media — Mrs. Jay said she is not sure what tradition means in the online context.

“I worry that the co-opting of that word of ‘tradition,’ it makes people who feel excluded from all the baggage of tradwifery. I worry that it makes those people feel like the skills that fall under a traditional life are things that they can’t pursue or shouldn’t pursue because they don’t fit the criteria. And I think that’s hogwash,” she said.

Emma Waters, a senior research associate for the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family at The Heritage Foundation, said embracing traditional values doesn’t need to look like the perfect aesthetic many #tradwife influencers seem to propagate. In fact, she said, it can’t.

“The tradwife movement … is in large part just a reaction against the atomizing forces of modern life,” Ms. Waters said, and many women are simply rediscovering the joy of domestic productivity.

Mrs. Waters, who is writing a book about modern femininity, said the attempt is superficial but she is optimistic about the trend. “Those depictions are pointing to something that’s much truer and long-lasting,” she said.

Lauren Caggeso, a Catholic wife in Indiana, said the glossy version of traditional living misses the mark entirely. The focus shouldn’t be on aesthetics but on what works for your family, she said. Years ago, Mrs. Caggeso had what she described as the “social media ideal,” but she found that something was missing: community and faith.

Mrs. Caggeso and her husband left behind a 10-acre working hobby farm in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. They felt it was essential to move their five boys to a robust Catholic community, though they had to say goodbye to the animals and homegrown food. Her current home simply has a nice yard, she said.

“We gave up the physical food for the spiritual food,” Mrs. Caggeso said.

Her concept of a “stay-at-home” wife, too, isn’t quite what the Instagram accounts insist it is. Mrs. Caggeso is a director at Paper Pie, a book business with more than 1,000 employees. She also runs a publishing company called Glorious Heritage Books with her husband.

“We flipped it upside down about a decade ago where I worked and he didn’t, which is just a little different. It’s to show that it can be done many different ways, and it’s just about you both working mutually together,” she said.

Ivana Greco, a senior fellow at the independent think tank Capita, told The Times that almost all women engaged in productive activities at home before the Industrial Revolution. They made clothes, prepared food or ran small businesses while raising children.

Mrs. Greco, who writes about her research on her blog, “The Home Front,” sees the #tradwife trend as an attempt to return to that model. “In some ways, the tradwife movement is a throwback to that traditional division of labor: women staying home with young children but still finding ways to be productive.”

Mrs. Greco is a stay-at-home mother who homeschools her children while working as a freelance writer and policy analyst. She said the notion that traditional wives tend only to their homes is misguided.

“I homeschool my kids, but I also do policy work and freelance writing. In many ways, it’s very traditional to combine having your children at home with productive work,” she said as her children whooped in the background. “It’s not about being ‘just’ a homemaker; it’s about creating a balanced, meaningful home life.”

Mrs. Amsel, who lives in Brooklyn, said the key to traditional living is flexibility and adaptability, not rigid gender roles. This concept of balance is echoed in the Jewish tradition, where roles within the family have evolved.

She said historical circumstances, not mandates, shaped the roles of men and women in her community. Those roles pushed Jewish women out of the home. Her husband helped her start her wig business.

“After World War II, many Jewish men focused on studying in yeshivas to preserve ancient traditions, so the women went to work,” she said. Although that shift may have altered traditional gender roles in Europe, it was necessary for the survival of the Jewish faith.

“The feminine is very powerful,” said Mrs. Amsel, adding that Jewish spirituality emphasizes the balance between masculine and feminine energy. “In the Kabbalistic, esoteric hearts of Judaism, everyone has both masculine and feminine traits. The perfect human has both in balance.”

Mrs. Jay said that balance isn’t what many TikTok accounts promote. “The word ‘ought’ is the problem,” she said, acknowledging that several women she knows feel immense pressure to conform to the sleek, hyperfeminine ideals promoted on homemaker social media.

Mrs. Shepherd, in Tennessee, laughed when she found out what those ideals were. “[Bill] cleans the house all the time,” she said of her husband, a farmer and retired dentist. “He does all the shopping too. We speak different languages sometimes, but it’s just not that rigid.”

For Mrs. Shepherd, her 46-year marriage isn’t about apportioning tasks based on gender but about working together and adapting to life.

Early in their marriage, when asked to attend an event or take on a responsibility outside the home, Mrs. Shepherd would ask her husband for what appeared to be permission. She said she did this not as a form of submission but to avoid being taken away from things she wanted to do.

“I needed that protection,” she said. “Bill would ask me, ‘Do you want to do it?’ and if I didn’t, he’d say, ‘Well, tell them I said no.’ People just didn’t know the full story about that, but it never mattered to me.”

Dovie Eisner lives in a Brooklyn row house with his devout Orthodox Jewish mother, who tends to him and his brother as they cope with a muscular condition that requires round-the-clock care.

“[Traditionalism] isn’t a thing women really choose or oppose,” Mr. Eisner said while observing his mother, a stranger to social media. “It’s just sort of the goal in life. Like, who doesn’t want to have kids?”

Mrs. Amsel said many women in the Orthodox Jewish community share that mentality. “They don’t have Instagram. They don’t want to know about Instagram. They don’t care about Instagram. That’s not touching them on any level.”

Mr. Eisner said his mother, who cares for four other children, is simply trying to be a good Jewish woman. He said she chose that lifestyle with autonomy.

“She’s not a tradwife,” he told The Times. “She’s a human being.”