What Trad Wives Are Selling Is Not Traditional Motherhood

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So says Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

While technically a law of physics, it arguably applies to social movements as well. Look no farther than the rise of the “trad wives” trend for evidence that social dynamics in some places are swinging back hard against the Sexual Revolution.  

Arguably, no other social movement in history had a greater effect on the norms of human behavior than the Sexual Revolution. Throughout Western civilization, the family structure was paramount. And while people certainly broke social norms that kept the nuclear family intact with things like adultery, polygamy, and nonmarital births, those behaviors were outside the norm. 

The Sexual Revolution didn’t just gradually etch away at social norms—it exploded them almost overnight. Divorce, promiscuity, adultery, and now even polyamory, once anathema, earned not just legal protection, but social celebration. 

Included in the wreckage was the denigration of motherhood and the remaking of fatherhood as disposable. Feminists reframed motherhood as fundamentally in conflict with what they termed “women’s empowerment.” Marriage became what Betty Friedan famously termed, a “comfortable concentration camp.” The stay-at-home mom became a subject of a decades-long shame campaign. 

Now all that is boomeranging back on itself, Newton’s third law-style, in the form of a bizarre social media trend that has come to be known as the “trad wives” movement.  

You’ll find trad wives on social media platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram, where they post videos of themselves cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and serving—quite literally—their husbands their meals. On my Facebook, these videos are served up to me whether I want to see them or not.

There are different “strains” of “trad wives,” if you will. There are the crunchy, homesteading types that post endless reels of themselves growing their own food in gingham dresses without makeup and with half naked children at their ankles. Then there are the Betty Boop types that dress in 1950s style costumes and post videos of themselves vacuuming and dishing up dinner for their hungry husbands when they walk in the door. Then there are the wives that film themselves cooking and baking with every last ingredient from scratch, all while dressed in elaborate outfits and makeup done to the nines. 

What they have in common is their pride in traditional motherhood. And it’s tempting to want to like it. A return to traditional family life. Isn’t this what we are for? 

Today’s mothers don’t need to watch videos of would-be pinups making bread from scratch at two in the afternoon. They need authentic human relationships to model mothering in a way that is manageable in today’s world.

But there is something…off about it all. These women dress like they are in an episode of Little House on the Prairie or Mad Men. They make everything, including toothpaste in one of my favorite episodes, and paper for kids crafts in another, from scratch. They fawn on their husbands in a way that would make a 1950s housewife blush. They speak in robotic voices with A.I. undertones. They seem contrived. 

They are beyond an unrealistic portrayal of traditional motherhood to the point of parody. And they aren’t, in fact, realistic. 

For starters, they are not traditional stay-at-home mothers. They are social media influencers making money for their content. They have monetized their domestic life, which is their right, but it makes them earners by definition. Their work requires child care and filming equipment to turn their home into a studio. They are working moms, and they are essentially running a reality show that doesn’t actually depict the reality of what goes into being a so-called traditional wife, because they are making money as social media personalities using their families as props. 

Which gets to the inherent contradiction in the trad wife phenomenon—namely the notion that you are being a “traditional” wife while making your home an open book for millions of internet strangers. There is nothing traditional about filming v-logs of your morning routine with your children, embracing your husband while putting on your makeup in your bathroom, or plating dinner for your family while garnering likes, money, and comments from strangers with halo ring lights just outside the shot.  

And further, the in-your-face-ness of the supposed traditional nature of their family life has a boastful element that seems designed, like so much of social media content, to induce envy, shame, and a sense of worthlessness and failure in those who are comparing themselves to what they are seeing. In short, trad wives aren’t authentically traditional in that their homes and private lives are monetized studios. Instead, they are part and parcel—wittingly or unwittingly—of social media shame campaigns that invite viewers to look at something embellished, phony, and contrived, and feel inadequate. That does nothing to help or promote traditional motherhood. 

Today’s mothers don’t need to watch videos of would-be pinups making bread from scratch at two in the afternoon. They need authentic human relationships to model mothering in a way that is manageable in today’s world where women are raising children apart from extended family, child care is exorbitantly expensive, community networks are crumbling, and economic pressures make many women feel they have to work even when they don’t want to. 

The trad wives trend undoubtedly comes from a natural and moral impulse to reject the lies of the Sexual Revolution, starting with its devaluation of motherhood. But trad wives on Tik Tok most certainly aren't going to revive motherhood in a post-revolutionary world. They are only making it into another lie. 

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).