Project 2025 paints a picture of a future where all American women are tradwives.
We’re living in the era of the tradwife: Pick up your phone and she’s there, in a cute apron, waking up at 6 a.m. to make a perfect loaf of bread for her son’s breakfast. Or maybe it’s laundry day, and she’s bleaching her husband’s whites between dropping the kids off at school and giving us a look at her grocery haul.
I’ll admit it—I watch her too. There’s something both morbidly fascinating and deeply satisfying about peeking into the lives of tradwife influencers: women who film themselves working in the kitchen or garden, or caring for their carefully coiffed, shiny (and usually white) children. They espouse a world where men were made to be dominant and protect and provide for the family, while women were made to be subservient and care for the home. It’s not that they think men are “better” than women, some insist—these are just their “natural” roles, as god intended.
Plenty of cultural critics have pointed out the sinister alt-right leanings of the tradwife and how they mirror the current political climate around women’s rights. But as the November elections grow closer, I think we could pay closer attention to the role the tradwife plays. The figure of the tradwife isn’t just advocating for a cultural shift—she’s pushing a political agenda, whether she intends to or not. And it’s one we can’t afford to ignore.
She does not work, her public life is virtually nonexistent and her kids are frequently homeschooled. She’s a one-woman social safety net, just how conservatives like it.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a nearly 900-page policy agenda for the next Republican president—is dominating headlines for its regressive and alarming agenda. Some standout proposals include dismantling climate protections, dissolving whole departments like Education and Commerce, and putting draconian restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming care. But embedded in the framework of the document is a vision of social overhaul that centers the kind of gender roles and family structures that tradwives have been promoting all along.
Dig into the section that deals with the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, and you’ll find a plethora of language advocating for a return to patriarchal values and a definition of “family” that is very much rooted in Christian fundamentalism. The section calls for the next Republican president to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
This vision is echoed in specific policy imperatives: The plan calls for the redirection of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program’s dollars, which generally are intended to support poor mothers and their children, towards supporting “marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy.”
Within the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood program, Project 2025 calls for the prioritization of faith-based programs in allocating grants and encourages programs that affirm patriarchal gender roles. The project’s authors want to entirely eliminate the Head Start program, which provides support for low-income families, but do not suggest a replacement program.
When you add up the effects of these policies and the dozens more like them included in the document, you get a Reaganite agenda that places the entire burden of providing or paying for childcare back in the hands of parents, centering the nuclear family (and by default the mother) as the ultimate purveyor of childcare in America—as opposed to the social safety net. This is also the role of the tradwife: She does not work, her public life is virtually nonexistent and her kids are frequently homeschooled. She’s a one-woman social safety net, just how conservatives like it.
While Project 2025 conveniently spells everything out in one place, courts and legislatures across the country have been working towards this vision of the future. In recent years, conservative lawmakers in states like Texas and Louisiana have introduced bills attempting to roll back no-fault divorce, which since the 1970s has allowed people to file for divorce without having to prove spousal misconduct. These bills have coincided with a rise in right-wing support for “covenant marriage”—a type of legal marriage agreement that limits grounds for divorce. (Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is a notoriously big fan.)
“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” write the authors of Project 2025 (80 percent of whom, by the way, served in the first Trump administration). It’s a sentiment tacitly—and sometimes explicitly—echoed by most tradwife content, which shows women embracing their god-given role as a homemaker and child-rearer above all else.
It can be easy to laugh off trends we see on social media—particularly for those living in liberal states who aren’t yet being confronted with the impacts of the far-right’s crusade against women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. But I don’t think we can’t afford to laugh off the tradwife anymore. In a time when our dominant cultural definitions of feminism have become so skewed and divorced from politics as to mean simply “women doing whatever they want,” the tradwife life—one where she doesn’t have to work, and where she opted in to this—can be seen as a form of empowerment and liberation. And that’s deeply dangerous. Her popularity, to me, signals a dangerous cultural shift: one towards general acceptance of a world where women’s rights, the rights of queer people and people in nontraditional family arrangements—such as single mothers and adoptive families—are increasingly curtailed and eliminated.
In Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, scholar Sophie Lewis writes of the American family model as a mechanism for not just state control, but a replacement for the welfare state: “Rendering kin, instead of society, responsible for the poor … masquerading as the choice, creation, and desire of individuals, the family is a method for cheaply arranging the reproduction of the nation’s labor-power and securing debt repayments.”
Throughout history—though particularly now, as conservatives are increasingly saying the quiet part out loud—the family has always been a political structure. And right now, we’re experiencing the backlash to the rights won by queer people, poor people, people of color, and everyone else who does not fall into the Christian right’s version of what “America” and an “American family” looks like. That’s what systems of power do when they are threatened—they scramble for control, and they do it through both political and cultural avenues. I see the parallels between the rise of the tradwife and Project 2025 as a perfect illustration of this.
The first “front” for America’s future outlined in Project 2025’s forward is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” By willfully stepping into this predetermined patriarchal role—and selling it to other women online—tradwives are doing the work of conservatives for them.
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