Subservience has never looked so stylish, one sourdough starter at a time.
Following the birth of Nara Smith’s new child, it’s no shock that conversations surrounding the trad wife trend infiltrating Tiktok for you pages have come back around in full force, and domesticity couldn’t get more chic. For what screams trad wife more than a net worth of $6 million and a cluster of ring lights and cameras capturing your perfected stay-at-home lifestyle? Whether it’s a step-by-step sourdough starter kit or a homemade butter churning video, trad wife content typically features stay-at-home mothers and wives who advocate for a domestic life of by-scratch cooking and child-rearing, serving their husband with an aesthetically curated dinner plate once he returns from a day’s hard work. But at the underbelly of muted colour palettes and milkmaid dresses is the soft sell of submission disguised as empowerment, and we seem to be buying it. The message is the same one women have been fed for centuries: your worth lies in how well you serve, how beautiful you look doing it, and how quietly you manage not to ask for more.
As a student who can barely whip up a decent spagbowl, I wondered why trad wife content from mostly American content creators was pushed by my algorithm. And more so, why are these videos getting millions of likes and comments? It’s somewhat easy to see the appeal. In a world where free time has become more of a status symbol, the fantasy of being able to stay at home and cook from scratch is quite palatable. The trad wife aesthetic seems to be the perfect antidote to the modern-day chaos of 9-to-5s and living pay-check to pay-check — why struggle when your biggest problem could be whether your hand-churned butter has the right consistency?
But scratch the surface of that rustic sourdough loaf, and the whole thing starts to taste a bit stale. Unpaid labour, financial dependency, and a life confined to the same four walls isn’t all that these videos make it out to be. Their well-lit vlogs and recipe videos conveniently cut out the less glamorous side of motherhood — dirty dishes, laundry piles, and crying babies are a distant thought in this social media utopia. The modern trad wife has scrubbed all traces of gritty domestic labour down the drain. The reality is that real housework isn’t sellable; there is no affiliate link for emotional exhaustion. When the chaos of life does sneak into shot, screaming toddlers and day-old leftovers are met with disapproving comment sections. Authenticity seems to only be watchable when it is desirable.
Rather, the labour documented by their five grand set-ups is simply a social signal of class. It’s easy to forget that most trad wife influencers are not exactly living on a one-income budget in a terraced house. They’re living in minimalist mansions, with sponsorships that fund their ‘traditional’ way of life. With enough cash to hire an extra pair of hands, the spotless countertops and undisturbed filming start to make a bit more sense.
With the slow sanctioning of women’s bodies in current politics, the social media revamp of conservative ideology is even more worrisome. It’s not really the homemade cookies or floral-patterned aprons that are the issue; it’s the subtle selling of something more sinister. That our role as a woman is one defined by our duty to the home, and we are being subliminally convinced, one scroll at a time. Feel free to enjoy the trad wife trend of stay-at-home cooking; but remember, if the trad wife trend tells us anything, it’s that the patriarchy never really went away — it just got a TikTok account and a ring light.
