I’m a sociologist. Here’s why I think tradwives want to ‘make patriarchy great again’

“Tradwives” say they are opting out of a culture that undervalues women at home. But a closer look at who they are and what they promote tells a different story: The mainstreaming of far-right politics through the language of “traditional values” like femininity and domesticity.

Short for traditional wives, tradwives are popular influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Tradwife content is characterized by its appeal to “nature,” its reinforcement of “traditional” gender roles and its use of 1950s nostalgia alongside rural, off-grid homesteading aesthetics.

If we want to interpret the growing popularity of tradwives sociologically, we need to do three things.

First, we need to determine the statuses an individual holds and the roles associated with these statuses at a given time. We also have to explore how individuals make sense of them. Second, we need to examine how an individual’s statuses and roles are constituted by, and shaped through, social institutions. Third, we need to consider what function these institutions play in upholding social structures.

Doing so can help us recognize that cultural trends, like social media tradwives, are not random phenomena but products of broader socio-political currents.

The tradwife influencer identity

Research has found that while tradwives tend to be politically right-wing, important variations exist among them. Conservative tradwives — women who discuss “femininity” and “traditional” gender roles — are closest to the political centre.

Others, including alt-lite and alt-right tradwives, are more ideologically extreme. They mobilize anti-feminist, anti-immigrant and white supremacist rhetoric. At times, they have clear ties to far-right political organizations.

If we want to understand what their rise to popularity since 2024 indicates about the contemporary political landscape, and if we want to understand these women’s role within right-wing reactions to feminism, then we must start by undertaking the three requirements listed above.

‘Traditional’ femininity remains unchallenged

To start, we must ask: what roles do tradwives attach to their status? What is the purpose of being a tradwife?

Emerging research indicates that tradwives define themselves as wives and mothers. Their roles include homemaker, defender of “traditional” values, and, at times, bearer of the “white race.” Tradwives depict their countries as being under siege by cultural pollution, miscegenation and non-white migration. Accordingly, tradwives frame themselves as moral entities “restoring” the West.

Other researchers like Eviane Leidig, a researcher in online extremism and radicalization, have explored the role of women in far-right politics. These analyses suggest that women play a key role in normalizing and mainstreaming hateful ideologies by drawing on influencer culture. They take you into their homes, show you their children and talk to you about their everyday lives.

Yet, slipped into videos of tradwives baking sourdough bread are comments about “our migration problem” and how they felt compelled to home-school their children because of the “woke ideology” running amok in public schools.

Once your interest is piqued, you are directed to less regulated platforms that traffic in more overt hate.

What tradwives are actually defending

Next we must ask: how have institutions like work, family and media shaped the roles attached to being a wife and mother?

Research demonstrates that women face greater cultural expectations to undertake housework and relationship labour than men. Men are more likely than women to report that society values the contributions of their paid work more than it does their household labour. Women tend to report the opposite.

Sociologists have explained how the institution of work was designed around the male-breadwinner and female-homemaker model. Men were paid a wage that could provide for their family, while women performed unwaged labour in the home.

But families have changed. Dual-earner families are on the rise because women have been forced by economic necessity into joining the paid workforce (not simply because of feminism, as tradwives argue). Despite these changes, the institution of work has remained resistant to accommodating women.

Tradwives frame their lifestyles as countercultural. They claim only professional, working women are valued culturally, and that institutions have abandoned them as traditional women.

But the construction of femininity they promote — one bound in “traditional” ideas about labour — remains institutionally salient. While it may have been critiqued in the 2010s “popular feminist” climate, no large or enduring structural shifts followed. The gender wage gap in Canada remains sizable, especially when factors such as race and immigrant status are taken into account.

Institutions that uphold social structure

Finally, we must ask even broader questions. For example, how do tradwives contribute to the reproduction of unequal structures of race, class and gender?

Tradwives frame a highly specific form of femininity — domestic, heterosexual, submissive and often implicitly white — as natural, desirable and morally superior. By presenting it as “natural” rather than socially constructed and affirmed by social institutions, tradwives obscure the structural foundations of “traditional” femininity and help make existing inequalities seem inevitable — even healthy.

What forces made this possible? In the case of tradwives, the answer is not a mystery: Institutions that were never fully reformed, gender norms that were critiqued but never dismantled and a political moment that has made the far right newly palatable.

Tradwives did not create these conditions, but they are also not just a niche internet esthetic. They are right-wing women actively trying to preserve those structural inequalities and “Make Patriarchy Great Again.”