Tradwives and right-wing men: How an 'imagined past' drives fascist politics

Wouldn't it be nice to leave the commute and Keurig coffee behind? To stay at home and make strawberry preserves with your kids instead of responding to Slack notifications from some man who is not your husband? Take a deep breath and imagine: life on a farm where — with just a packet of seeds, a couple of goats and a few hours of wholesome, aesthetic work — all your family's nutritional needs are provided for by the socially-isolated pocket of land you call home.

This, at least, is the fantasy of the "tradwife" being sold online: nostalgia for the world of yesterday, where men were men and women were content to be their domestic servants. On social media, influencers churn butter and romanticize pseudo-traditional gender roles, preaching a back-to-basics, 19th-century way of life even as they remain glued to their 21st-century phones.

In a conversation with The Redoubt's Charles R. Davis and historian Shirin Sadeghi, co-host of Critical Support, Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte discusses the seductive myth of the tradwife and how this longing for an "imagined past" serves as the rotten core of today's reactionary politics.

CHARLES R. DAVIS: I'm very excited to have on Amanda Marcotte, a senior politics writer at Salon and host of the YouTube show Standing Room Only. Amanda is a pretty prolific writer on politics and feminism and reproductive rights issues, and she has also been, for several years now, writing and reporting about the trend of "tradwives." So, I wanted to actually start with that, Amanda.

I've been hearing about tradwives for like a couple years now and, as I understand it, it is like conventionally-attractive young women selling a sort of nostalgia for pre-pasteurization gender roles. And despite this, it seems to be something you encounter, not at a farmer's market but, ironically, primarily on TikTok and social media. Can you tell me what a tradwife actually is? And if it's just internet jargon for traditional mid-20th century conservative ideas of femininity, or if it's like actually something substantively different?

AMANDA MARCOTTE: I would say that it's substantively different in that it is, like you say, like a retro remix. It is very fascist in the way that it is trying to evoke an imagined past, right? Most wives have never lived the way that the sort of tradwife fantasies that are peddled online are.

And honestly, you hear it used in two separate ways. The term "tradwife," it started to mean kind of what it sounds like: just a traditional wife, which is to say it was used as internet jargon to talk about women who tried to live, I would say, the 1950s ideal gender roles — or even 19th century, in a lot of ways, kind of depending on who you're talking to. Which is: you don't work outside the home; you're economically dependent on your husband; your career is taking care of him, taking care of children, and taking care of the house.

And then what that has morphed into is an online trend on social media, primarily through TikTok and Instagram, because it's very image driven — women who sell this idea as a fantasy. I think the initial idea was that they were selling it to other women, and to an extent that's true; there's a lot of Instagram posts and TikToks about "here I am at home, and in my beautiful stress-free life with my beautiful children in my beautiful kitchen that is always clean, despite the fact that I cook so much," and often even wearing clothes that evoke, you know, either the 1950s or again sometimes like the 19th century. But I do think a lot of this content is actually consumed by men, depending on who the producer is, and there is a not small pornographic edge to some of it.

DAVIS: Are the influencers themselves consciously selling it to men, do you think? Because obviously there is that fantasy for men of like having a wife who is completely fine living in a socially-isolated farm setting with no opportunity to ever leave you; I can see that male fantasy aspect, and certainly there's the, as you've mentioned, 19th-century cosplay kind of aesthetic fetishization going on there.

But I'm wondering if it's the same set of influencers, right? Are there some just cynically selling this image to men and they know that? Or are there some that maybe started out trying to sell this to other women — and it just so happens that men are the ones consuming it and telling other women to follow this influencer?