The Tradwife Persona

For a great many women, tradwife is an identity. Tradwives are women who believe in what is considered as traditional gender roles usually including "hetereosexual marriage with masculine dominance and feminine subservience, child-rearing, homeschooling,  and right-wing political ideals". In his article, Proctor examines three well-known online tradwife persona: Alena Kate Pettitt (The Darling Academy), Caitlin Huber (Mrs. Midwest), and Ayla Stewart (Wife with a Purpose). 

His focus is on how forms of racism and sexism manifest in their performances to "1) establish tradwifery as a legitimate practice and form of identification, 2) illustrate how a person should act/talk/live to be considered a tradwife, and 3) establish themselves as part of a community of tradwives". 

Tradwifery is inherently sexist and explicitly anti-feminist since women are portrayed as subservient to men and feminism is attacked calling for a return to so-called traditional feminine gender roles. Many tradwives call their ideology and lifestyle "choice feminism". In other words, as the choices are made by women they are automatically declared to be feminist choices.

The decisions to stay at home “may be presented as entirely personal. However, they are inseparable from the profound crisis of both work and care under neoliberal capitalism” (Rottenberg & Orgad 2020). So those women who choose to not work are exercising a privilege to embody a traditional version of feminine gender roles, as these traditions are often “frozen moments in history arbitrarily chosen from the cultural repertoire as “the’ authentic expression of the national collective” (Christou 2020). Indeed, very likely these arbitrary historic traditions themselves are complete inventions (Hobsbawm 1992). For instance, it is a myth that women in the far past didn’t work. They were wives and mothers, but also worked the fields, brewed mead, sold and bartered goods, spun wool, and very often worked alongside guildsmen to learn a trade (Shahar 2003). By framing the woman’s role in the home as ‘traditional’, tradwives continue a long project of delegitimizing women’s contributions in the workforce as separate and less valid than the formalized economy of male labour (Milkman 2016).

While sexism is quite obvious, the link between tradwifery and racism is comparably more subtle. The movement promotes white, western heteronormative ideals of gender roles taken from white middle-class US-Americans in the 1950s. The construction of the fragile woman was something white women had access to, not Black women, as the distribution of labour was different among the Black population. The tradwife movement is not explicitly racist or extremist. However, tradwife culture is useful to white supremacists.

In 2018, Ayla Stewart (censored several times) described her site as "an online forum which brings together people interested in God's plan for happy families and wives dedicated to traditional homemaking. It also serves youth interested in an alternative to feminism and liberal ideology". While Stewart is vocal on issues of feminism and ethnicity, Caitlin Huber and Alena Kate Pettit shy away from overt statements and focus more on institutional and corporate aspects of their personas and making money.

Huber has a ‘Shop’ tab on her blog that links out to allow purchase of her “favourite things”. She does not produce these items, but in the site’s frequently asked questions, she explains: “I get ad money from YouTube from my videos, and when I do a sponsorship, I will negotiate to get paid. I also get a little money from any links that I offer to y’all from Amazon!” (Huber 2022). She is letting us know (with a colloquial “y’all”) that even though she is making money from this, she’s really just like us: a normal person, where ‘normal’ is code (for all three women) as white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgendered, neurotypical, and able-bodied. Pettitt takes corporate agency a step further by offering her own books on ‘Traditional Lifestyle & Etiquette’—co-authored by herself and The Darling Academy—for purchase via Amazon link.

The author points out that while the concept of tradwifery clearly contains aspects of misogyny and white supremacy, not all tradwives are anti-feminists or white nationalists (Proctro, 2022).

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- Proctor, D. (2022). The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized White Domesticity. Persona Studies, 8(2), 7-26; link
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