Tradwife

The Tradwife, or Traditional Wife, is an online female persona that’s been resurrected by influencers.

Some show the women venturing into their backyards, tending to their cottagecore gardens free from pesticides and other corporate contaminants. Institutional distrust notwithstanding, the vibe of the videos are peaceful, cozy, blissful even, emulating a sense of ease and simplicity. The women are graceful, beautiful, stereotypically feminine.

What if Women Really Went Back? Viral Thriller ‘Yesteryear’ Deconstructs the Dark Side of Tradwife Culture

PUBLISHED 6/5/2026 by

What if women really went back? That question sits at the center of Caro Claire Burke’s 2026 debut novel and viral summer read Yesteryear.

At a moment when tradwife influencers are building massive audiences by romanticizing domesticity, submission and “traditional” gender roles, Burke asks readers to imagine what life inside those arrangements actually looks like for the women who lived them—and what rights and freedoms were sacrificed along the way.

Yesteryear follows wealthy, polished (at least on the outside) tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills, who has built a carefully curated online brand around nostalgic femininity. But as the fantasy unravels, Burke exposes the gap between aestheticized womanhood and women’s lived experience.

Right-Wing ‘Tradwife’ Influencers Are Telling Young Women Lies About Birth Control

PUBLISHED 4/20/2026 by

Cancer. Infertility. Unintended abortion.

These are just a few of the fears young patients bring to Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a family physician in Reno, Nevada.

Curry-Winchell, medical director for the Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group, said the trend away from hormonal birth control has become pervasive in recent years among her patients between about 14 and 32 years old—the same age group most likely to say they get their health information from social media.

When she talks with young patients, Curry-Winchell hears concerns about sinister long-term impacts of hormonal birth control—and the language often echoes conservative influencers who have no medical training.

Doctors say what is at stake is not whether every patient chooses the pill or an IUD, but whether they can make evidence-based decisions about preventing pregnancy in a country with some of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations.

Forget the ‘Manosphere’—The ‘Meno-Sphere’ Is the Voting Bloc With Real Power

PUBLISHED 4/7/2026 by and

A recent report from centrist think tank Third Way predicts many of the “swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men” who supported Trump will sit out the midterms this year.

So who should progressive political strategists and hopefuls turn their attention to? The oft-forgotten, invisible aging woman, or, what we like to call the meno-sphere.

There are many good reasons to prioritize the electoral and mobilization potential of women over 50. Back in 1992, The New York Times published a piece called “Mighty Menopause,” which posited that the then-rise of Baby Boomer women in politics was a direct result of hormonal shifts and that the “biological changes wrought by menopause” ultimately bolster women’s “interest in power and increase their ability to use it.”

If ever there were a moment to prove that to be true, it’s now—as our daughters’ and granddaughters’ rights are rolled back, as communities are terrorized, as the power elite’s willful alignment with the rot becomes clearer by the day.

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by , and

Pronatalism is not simply about encouraging births—it is a political project rooted in racism and control. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children while coercing or punishing others for reproducing or parenting.

Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is a devastating example: a Black nurse and mother declared brain-dead, yet kept on life support for months to sustain her pregnancy under Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws. This is what pronatalism looks like in practice—the state asserting ownership over a Black woman’s body.

As Black feminists, we understand that reproductive choices are personal, but they are also deeply shaped by structural power. Pronatalist leaders and influencers cloak their agenda in the language of family and morality, but in truth, they seek to restrict autonomy and consolidate control. Reproductive justice, by contrast, insists on every person’s right to decide whether and how to have children, and to parent in safety and dignity.

The Return of the Tradwife Gospel

PUBLISHED 9/24/2025 by

When Erika Kirk took the stage at her husband’s memorial, dressed in white and preaching about virtue, guardianship and motherhood as women’s highest calling, it was not just a moment of personal grief. It was also a sermon drawn directly from the playbook of the 19th-century Cult of Domesticity, which elevated piety, purity, domesticity and submission as the cornerstones of “true womanhood.” While Kirk framed these ideals as a source of women’s strength, history shows that they have long functioned as tools of confinement and control.

The irony, of course, is that Kirk is now CEO of Turning Point USA—a position she could never hold without the very feminist progress she disavows. Tradwife rhetoric may promise dignity and purpose, but as the Cult of Domesticity and later social purity movements revealed, these ideals have always come at women’s expense. They strip away autonomy, enshrine patriarchal power and ultimately sacrifice women—even those who embrace the gospel themselves.

Dying to Be Men: American Masculinity as Death Cult

PUBLISHED 9/11/2025 by

Much as owing guns at home is most likely to injure or kill the people living with those guns than the supposed threats posed by home invaders, the violent discourse espoused by Charlie Kirk and many others has resulted in his murder in front of a crowd of thousands of students.

Kirk built his career on racism and misogyny, encouraging young Americans to the side of a fully radicalized and extremist Republican party that has abandoned any pretense of caring for Americans and instead has become a propaganda machine pathetically flaying to prove that they are all men.

I’m sorry for Charlie Kirk and all the other men like him that have been raised in this America and with these ideals of masculinity. I’m sorry that he decided to adopt this hateful ideology and to profit from it. And as the mother to a boy and a girl, my heart breaks for the America these children are growing up in. Here’s hoping we can save ourselves.

How the Trump Administration’s Conservative Policies and Messaging Are Reshaping Body Image Standards for American Women

PUBLISHED 9/10/2025 by

Body image and beauty standards for women have long shifted like fashion trends—one year in, the next out, often cycling every decade. Recently, Americans have seen a move away from body positivity and acceptance toward the ultra-thin ideals of “heroin chic.” Celebrity, influencer, and everyday social media posts alike are discussing dissolving their BBLs and turning to Ozempic or similar drugs to lose weight.

Women are sacrificing their health to fit into a very narrow standard of beauty. Ozempic, originally meant for diabetes management, has become a weight-loss tool for those who can afford it. “You can spend $1,000 a month and be thin,” says Dr. Caroline Heldman, Ph.D., author, journalist, and executive director of the Representation Project. Its long-term efficacy for weight loss has not been tested enough, yet the pressure to conform continues to grow.

This pressure is intersectional, both classist and racist. “About 300 years ago, we started to see the rise of white, thin purity as a way to differentiate white women from Black women with voluptuous bodies,” Heldman explains. Today, diet culture and society’s obsession with thinness still reflect these historic, racialized ideals, pushing women into unsafe beauty trends and fostering psychological distress.

Birth Control Fear-Mongering Prevents Women From Achieving Informed Bodily Autonomy

PUBLISHED 8/28/2025 by

The Republican attorneys general of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho—recently joined by Florida and Texas—are suing the federal government to restrict access to mifepristone, which is used in combination with misoprostol to terminate an early pregnancy, arguing that the abortion medication has lowered “birth rates for teenaged mothers” and is contributing to a population loss in their states, leading to a loss of political representation and federal funds.

You read that right: They want more teen pregnancies. It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. 

So where does that leave us? We must continue to fight all of these insidious tentacles as we work to ensure that women and gender non-conforming people of all races, ages, backgrounds and abilities can continue to tear down the systemic barriers that try to keep us from thriving and taking our rightful place in every arena.

Tradwives and ‘The People That People Come Out Of’

PUBLISHED 8/25/2025 by

For the first time in years, the number of U.S. mothers with young children in the workforce is shrinking—over 212,000 women left between January and June 2025 alone.

Childcare costs, in-office pressures, and a cultural nudge toward traditional gender roles are pushing moms out, while men in power nod along.

Meanwhile, the tradwife movement parades its perfect, baked-from-scratch, filtered-life versions of domesticity online, making the impossible look effortless.

It’s absurd. It’s dangerous. And it’s time we stop letting the economy treat raising kids as invisible labor.

In the Ms. Archive: Does Feminism Have a Problem With Femininity?

PUBLISHED 8/21/2025 by and

Femininity has long been the elephant in the room of feminism.

On the one hand, femininity doesn’t just name what it means, culturally, to be a woman—femininity lies at the heart of many women’s own sense of self. And yet, feminists identify femininity as a source of oppression, a straight-jacket imposed on women to keep us in our place.