Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
When Millennials invented the girlboss, Gen Z responded with the tradwife, complete with homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereals and BMIs of 18 after popping out a half-dozen kids.
It makes them easy to hate.
Typically conservative and Christian, these women have traditional marriages, embracing the idea that it's OK for a woman to stay home, take care of their kids, and tend to the hearth.
It's a mindset, a lifestyle, but also an aesthetic that traffics in 1950s nostalgia.
Tradwives are also magnets for hate and judgment. "I'm sorry, 50 years ago was not a place I ever want to be back," quipped The View's Whoopi Goldberg, mocking these women's embrace of the older ways of structuring homes and marriages.
The critiques aren't totally wrong: Tradwives are sometimes performative, a made-for-social-media phenomenon that can look a little ridiculous. The most successful ones are the most extreme, curated, and out of touch. The more modest ones, who traffic in budgeting tips and great recipes, garner smaller followings and less fame.
But this cultural movement warrants celebration, not contempt. Tradwives don't want domestic servitude. They want the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker to count as respectable options for the 21st-century woman.
Tradwives are feminists, too.
reason.com/2025/11/20/tradwives-are-feminists-too
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Producer: Liz Wolfe
Video editor: John Osterhoudt
Graphics: Lex Villena
When Millennials invented the girlboss, Gen Z responded with the tradwife, complete with homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereals and BMIs of 18 after popping out a half-dozen kids.
It makes them easy to hate.
Typically conservative and Christian, these women have traditional marriages, embracing the idea that it's OK for a woman to stay home, take care of their kids, and tend to the hearth.
It's a mindset, a lifestyle, but also an aesthetic that traffics in 1950s nostalgia.
Tradwives are also magnets for hate and judgment. "I'm sorry, 50 years ago was not a place I ever want to be back," quipped The View's Whoopi Goldberg, mocking these women's embrace of the older ways of structuring homes and marriages.
The critiques aren't totally wrong: Tradwives are sometimes performative, a made-for-social-media phenomenon that can look a little ridiculous. The most successful ones are the most extreme, curated, and out of touch. The more modest ones, who traffic in budgeting tips and great recipes, garner smaller followings and less fame.
But this cultural movement warrants celebration, not contempt. Tradwives don't want domestic servitude. They want the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker to count as respectable options for the 21st-century woman.
Tradwives are feminists, too.
reason.com/2025/11/20/tradwives-are-feminists-too
---
Producer: Liz Wolfe
Video editor: John Osterhoudt
Graphics: Lex Villena
