The tradwife has landed. I thought it would have quickly flown away from our cultural consciousness by now—a distant memory of a TikTok trend where women in soft voices made papyrus for toddler art projects and grew their own rhubarb. But the tradwife influencers have had remarkable staying power.
They first came into mainstream consciousness around 2020—though apparently blogs like the Darling Academy, which extols “Homemaking, Femininity, & Traditional Family Values,” had already gained some popularity in the 2010s. That year, the phenomenon appeared on TikTok—just as TikTok itself was becoming a massive social force—allowing tradwife influencers to truly take hold in the culture.
Influencers like Hannah Neeleman’s “Ballerina Farm” feed brought a certain gauzy air to the enterprise. She could pop out babies and make pies on camera, in soft lighting. This was the pandemic era, and there was something about the tradwife’s pastel color schemes and vintage settings that felt atemporal and unaffected by worldwide contagion and mask wars.
We could dream of living outside of society’s tensions, on a farm. We didn’t need to worry about being infected by friends, because our babies could be our friends! A life full of nature and family, where solutions to food and play were handmade. Throw in a little “submit to your husband” rhetoric and pow! You’ve gone full trad.
It almost makes sense that the pandemic would popularize this mode of life. What’s surprising is that even as the pandemic is becoming an increasingly distant memory, the tradwife allure persists. Why?
While the pandemic popularized tradwives, it also accelerated the manosphere, the incel movement, and the general trend of dudes being angry. A recent study hypothesized that the appeal of tradwives for men was due to “protective paternalism”—in other words, a “belief that women need men to look after them.”
That’s a reasonable hypothesis, and it gives the tradwife-enthusiast men the benefit of the doubt. Protecting and providing for women is lingua franca for the manosphere.
But that’s not what the study found. It discovered that men are driven by resentment. Men that want tradwives are also men that score very highly when measuring adversarial or derogatory views toward women. Again, these dudes are angry.
So it seems that the staying power of tradwives could persist for men as long as those same men weirdly hate women for being a source of intimacy.
The days of a fictional Don Draper grabbing a woman’s ass in a business meeting were almost easier to understand. Men wanted that ass, and patriarchy taught them they could have it. Now, they want that ass, but they resent that they have to rely on women to get it.
The difference is that today, in 2026, these men secretly know that women have some power. Tradwives are a last-ditch attempt at achieving female subservience in a society that they know does not support female subservience. The temperance movement tried to bring about a more godly nation because religious pluralism was inevitable. Dan Quayle tried to ban explicit rap lyrics because hip hop had already become the cultural force he feared.
Tradwives underscore the inevitability of feminist equity. Tradwife influencers are merely messing with all of us. Their aim is fame. Their aim is money. Their aim is independence from the men that seek their submission. The Ballerina Farmer married rich and turned herself into a lifestyle brand tycoon worth millions. She doesn’t actually need the man she might be submitting to.
The current staying power of this movement owes only to the fact that women’s liberation has been a foregone conclusion. So tradwives will carry on with their homemade pantry staples and handcrafted barnyard playsets, but those won’t be enough to stem the tide of women’s equality.