"Tradwife" vs. Fourth-Wave Feminism: Why Are Young Women Reclaiming Domesticity?

She churns butter on camera. Millions watch. And somehow, it's a business.

Scroll for five minutes on TikTok or Reels and you'll find her: the woman in a linen dress, baking bread from scratch, talking softly about "serving" her husband. Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith, who makes cereal and chewing gum from scratch, have built audiences in the millions. The label "tradwife" (traditional wife) went mainstream in the early 2020s and hasn't slowed down.

Intersectional feminists have pushed back hard. But before we roll our eyes, it's worth asking a sharper question: why is this landing with young women right now?

It's not really about 1955

Here's the irony nobody can ignore. The most famous tradwives are running media businesses. Brand deals, sponsored posts, product lines. They're working women whose product is the image of not working.

That matters, because what's being sold isn't housework. It's relief from the exhausting double shift. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild named this back in 1989 in The Second Shift: women who work for pay still come home to a second, unpaid job. Decades later, the International Labour Organization estimated that women do about three-quarters of the world's unpaid care work.

So when a young woman who's juggling rent, a job she doesn't love, and the mental load of a household watches someone "choose" to do just one job, and do it slowly and beautifully, the appeal makes sense. The fantasy isn't the apron. It's having one job instead of two.

Economic anxiety is doing a lot of the work

Childcare in North America costs as much as rent in many cities. Wages for young workers haven't kept pace with housing. Hustle culture promised that the "girlboss" could have it all, and many women found out that "having it all" mostly meant doing it all.

In that light, domesticity gets rebranded as a rational exit rather than a trap. It's a retreat from a labor market that feels rigged.

Where the pushback is fair

Critics aren't wrong to be worried, for three reasons:

• Financial dependency is risky. A stay-at-home partner with no income, savings, or pension of her own is exposed if the marriage ends, if her partner dies, or if he becomes abusive. Economic abuse is a well-documented feature of controlling relationships.

• It's a class fantasy. Most families can't live on one income. The aesthetic hides the cost of land, farms, and full-time help.

• Some corners of it are political. Researchers who track online extremism have flagged tradwife content as an on-ramp to anti-feminist and far-right messaging about women's "natural" roles.

Where feminism needs to listen

Silvia Federici argued in 1975 that housework is work, and that it's unpaid because it's feminized, not because it lacks value. The tradwife trend, oddly, proves her point. It makes care work visible and even admirable. Feminism has sometimes treated homemaking as a lesser choice, and that left a gap that someone else filled.

bell hooks wrote that feminism should be for everybody. That includes the woman who wants to raise her kids full time. The real feminist question isn't "Is domesticity bad?" It's "Is it chosen, is it valued, and is she protected?"

The bottom line

The tradwife boom is less a return to the past and more a symptom of the present: burnout, expensive childcare, and a care economy that still runs on women's unpaid time. The fix isn't shaming women who choose home. It's building a world where home is a real choice, with pensions for caregivers, affordable childcare, and partners who share the load.

Something to reflect on: If care work were paid and respected, would the tradwife fantasy still be as appealing?

Sources: Hochschild, The Second Shift (1989); ILO, Care Work and Care Jobs (2018); Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975); Institute for Strategic Dialogue reporting on tradwife content.