Your Handy Guide To Becoming A Tradwife

If you’ve got a lot of time for regressive lifestyle fads then you may have come across Tradwives — the dutiful housewife trend gaining pickup among Gen Z.

But because Tradwives are kind of romanticising a path that almost every generation of women before us were forced to follow, they are getting some pushback. And frankly, we just think that’s sad.

I mean, what kind of world is it where women can’t make the choice to stay home and cosplay as Marilyn Monroe, for some reason? We’ve had enough, which is why we’ve compiled this blow-by-blow starter guide to becoming a 2020s Tradwife. You’re welcome.

1. Lament The Rise Of Feminism While Also Saying Feminist Things  

A great start to becoming a Tradwife is to talk vaguely about how feminism has corrupted women by making us stray from our worldly fate as housewives, before going on to say something feminist. Mariel Cooksey notes that many aspiring Tradwives are into egalitarian relationship dynamics, worrying about the oversexualisation of women, and criticising the pornography for normalising violence against women, which, OK then, Andrea Dworkin! If you’re interested in being a Tradwife, then, it’d be good to embody this contradiction from the off. 

2. Welcome The Fall Of Civilisation 

Tradwives definitely share some connective tissue with cottagecore, a trend that started gaining steam in 2017 amid an explosion of images that leaned into the fantasy of a romanticised bucolic lifestyle — see, for example, the imagery accompanying Taylor Swift’s 2020 lockdown album, folklore.

Apparently, implicit in a lot of the ideology of Tradwives, which includes the perception that a woman’s place is the home, is that a collapse of society will serve as a lesson to the dogged feminists who refuse to accept their natural fate as unpaid house servants. So remember to embrace the end of industrialisation and society itself as you embark on your Tradwife journey. 

3. Stop Wearing Pants

Also looming large in the Tradwife rulebook is that it’s bad to wear pants, so please stop doing this, you trouser sluts! The TikTok below, which seems like a very Christian variation of the subculture, is even captioned with the words “I don’t wear pants”, which is not actually funny but incredibly serious. 

Spinning off lines like “why don’t women dress like this anymore?” while wearing a dress is also the kind of thing you’ll want to go for.

4. Be White 

Every single Tradwife video that’s been making the rounds on TikTok seems to centre on a white woman, so it’s best to not be a woman of colour if you want to really embody the the aesthetic — after all, if you’re brown, you might just come off as oppressed.

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Image credit: TikTok, @esteecwilliams