Are “Tradwives” Part of Our Past or Our Future—Or Neither?

How do conservatives think about gender roles? The answer appears to be changing: per recent research, many more conservatives today think women should “return to their traditional gender roles” than they did two years ago. What is less clear is what these survey respondents mean when they say women should be “traditional.”

After all, one of the oldest depictions we have of women in the Judeo-Christian tradition is found in a famous passage from Proverbs. The “Proverbs 31” woman “considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.” She “speaks with wisdom” and is “clothed with strength and dignity.” This vision of a traditional woman is very different from the hapless Lucy from “I Love Lucy” who (among other hilarious scenes) accidentally glues a fake beard to her face with cement glue. Which vision of “traditional womanhood” do conservatives have in mind? Is it the child-like Lucy who relies on Ricky for almost everything? Or the competent Proverbs matriarch, who takes her roles in both family and community life seriously? Or some other vision, perhaps rooted in the philosophical and political debates over gender and biological sex? When conservatives consider “traditional gender roles,” are they more likely to think of mainstreaming questions raised by Judith Butler regarding gender as a performance, or issues raised by Betty Friedan on “the problem that has no name”—or of something else?

To begin with the data: In February, three political scientists published an essay in the New York Times with the title Republican Men and Women are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave. The essay drew on valuable research from the “Views of the Electorate Research Survey,” which found in a survey conducted last November that almost 50% of Republican male respondents thought “women should return to their traditional gender roles in society.” In 2022, that number had been close to 28 percent. Similarly, the percentage of Republican women who thought “women should return to their traditional gender roles” was around 23% in 2022 but increased to 37% in 2024. This data shows a clear trend: increasing numbers of both male and female conservatives want more women to adopt traditional roles. 

But does this reflect a rapid shift in substantive views about gender roles, or perhaps a change in how questions about gender roles are interpreted? I asked one of the authors of the essay—Professor John Sides, who studies American political behavior at Vanderbilt University—whether the survey defined “traditional gender roles.” He confirmed that it did not. Popular media often assumes when conservatives think about traditional gender roles, they are envisioning “tradwifery,” a somewhat ambiguous concept that encompasses women making sourdough bread, living rurally, and wearing long, flowing dresses. Under this understanding of gender roles, as the essay’s authors point out, increasing conservative support for traditional roles would be in tension with the fact that “labor force participation among prime-age women has never been higher.” 

Understanding traditional gender roles to be equivalent to 'mom never earns a dime' is ahistorical, but more to the point, it’s also unlikely to be reflective of the way all (or even most) conservatives think about the issue.

But are women in the workforce and conservative views of gender roles really in tension? Understanding traditional gender roles to be equivalent to “mom never earns a dime” is ahistorical, but more to the point, it’s also unlikely to be reflective of the way all (or even most) conservatives think about the issue. As Brad Wilcox, author of Get Married, points out, the norm for married parents is “neo-traditional marriages,” meaning that most married parents work, but dad usually earns more of the money, and mom does more housework. For most families, both liberal and conservative, mom’s labor force participation waxes and wanes with family needs. Indeed, this has always been true. My great-great grandmother, Katharine Smith—lovingly called “Fitz” by all—died at age 102 shortly before I was born in the 1980s. Born in the 19th century, she started working full time for the New Jersey railroad after her husband died to support her young children. According to family lore, her children were cared for by her mother. Katharine would wake the kids up after she got home from work, so she could spend a little time with them. In this long generational line of women, my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and I have all worked more (and less), depending on the ages of our children, our husbands, and other family needs. 

Understanding the complex and changing views of conservatives on gender is unlikely to come without extensive qualitative research. In her superb book, Hannah’s Children, economist Catherine Pakaluk makes the powerful argument that it is impossible to understand fertility and birth rate statistics without conducting hundreds of hours of research interviews to understand the extremely complex thought-processes women (and men) apply to decisions about whether and when to have children. 

Similarly, my colleague Elliot Haspel and I recently conducted extensive research into homemakers and stay-at-home parents, many of whom are religious conservatives. While the survey we conducted through a third-party was enlightening, the focus groups were invaluable. We heard, for example, from a father who is a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Describing his religious beliefs as very important, he and his wife decided that it was a priority for them to have their children at home in the early years—in part to pass along their religion. However, due to family circumstances, it made more sense for him, as dad, to be home. Similarly, I spoke to a devout Christian couple, “John” and “Rebecca.” John stays home and Rebecca      works. They told me that although they hold “traditional” beliefs, they do not see those beliefs as in conflict with their family structure. As Rebecca told me:

Men should provide for their families. But not all families need providing for in the same way. The idea that “provide for” means “earn money” is a very thin and morally dubious idea; for one thing, many societies have functioned without a great deal of money changing hands and men had no less of a duty in those times and contexts to put their strength and leadership in service of their families. It is a mistake to think that men can only lead or provide by wage earning: a “traditional,” but ahistorical, view of the roles of men and women mistakes money for power and power for leadership.

In preparation for writing this essay, I talked with Elizabeth Grace Matthew, a mother of four, and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill, who said: “I see positive support for traditional gender roles as simply the recognition that, given the economic ability to make such a choice, more women than men will choose to be primary caregivers and homemakers.” Matthew noted that contemporary feminism was deficient in that it “has tried for 60 years now to erase this fundamental reality, insisting that the exceptions (i.e., women who want to work full time while their children are young) are in fact the rule.” Still, she emphasized that the tradwife phenomenon was an over-correction, since “[m]ost women do not want to have 10 children and bake bread from scratch, even given the ability to do so, just like most women don’t want to have one child and a full-time nanny and spend 70 hours a week on a corporate treadmill, even if they can.” Matthew believes that while some women may be called to hard-charging, full-time corporate careers, and others to the “tradwife” lifestyle, most are looking for a mix of domestic labor and economic production that “was, in fact, the norm for women until about 150 years ago.” 

In other words, when conservatives are thinking about gender roles for women, they may be thinking neither of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean-In” mantra, nor the vision of “tradwifery” offered by influencer Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farms. Instead, they are likely thinking of a life that picks and chooses elements of both, yet that is distinct from the progressive view of gender roles as purely performative. Or, as conservative legal scholar Erika Bachiochi argues in an article for the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, “To be fully human, work and home need to be better integrated and responsive to what I call the concrete duty of the moment, for both women and men.”

Similarly, Erika Ahern, a married, homeschooling mother of seven who also works in Catholic media, told me: “The caricatured gender stereotypes of 1950s housewives in pearls and gingham aprons that we associate with ‘traditional gender role’ language does a radical disservice to young people.” Instead, she prefers “to talk about finding ‘authentic’ feminine and masculine expressions, many of which do happen to look ‘traditional’ to Western eyes: women directly mothering their own children, men providing the means and commitment that allows women to flourish as mothers, prioritizing family over career, etc.” She does see significant differences between women and men, including (quoting her favorite saint Edith Stein), that “Women naturally seek to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole, to cherish, guard, protect, nourish, and advance growth is her natural maternal longing.” This principle neither forecloses or demands women have career aspirations … nor makes them lesser than men. Ahern added, “A woman can pursue all of these things without wearing a milkmaid dress” (referring to a popular trend in which so-called “trad” women wear “milkmaid dresses”).

In conducting such research, it would be tremendously helpful to have a sympathetic view of conservative women—and ideally the assistance of one! As Pakaluk notes in her book, she simply could not have conducted many of her interviews without the rapport created by the fact that she has eight children herself. “That kind of rapport was an excellent aid to interviewing a group of women who often feel misunderstood, misjudged, and marginalized,” she said in an interview. 

One of the most unfortunate parts about the ideological slant of academia is that it makes this kind of research difficult. Those looking for conservative women in “Women and Gender Studies” departments at most major universities are likely to look in vain. There are efforts to change this—such as the creation of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative at Arizona State University. In trying to figure out exactly how conservative’s views of women are changing and why, bridging the ideological divide is necessary to arrive at the truth. Why has conservative support for traditional gender roles increased? What does it mean for the future of family life? We can’t know without extensive research that—unfortunately—is unlikely in our current academic climate.

Ivana Greco is a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four, as well as a Senior Fellow at Capita.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock