Being a tradwife CAN be a spiritual or personal ambition. But some people really, really want it to be political

How American Christianity masculinized and politicized, and how that affected women

Illustration from The Dispatch.

To today’s woman, it seems almost ludicrous to imagine not being able to vote—something as archaic as pioneer dresses or butter churns. But it’s not anymore. Beth Allison Barr, a historian at Baylor, told the New York Times this spring that she used to teach “household voting”—where every household gets one vote, usually cast by its patriarch—as a “fringe” idea. Now, she said, it has begun to bleed into the mainstream.

This is the apex of the political tradwife movement. There is an important distinction to be made here before I go further: being a tradwife is a lifestyle choice, with spiritual and sociocultural beliefs factoring into it. Being a tradwife is sometimes the family’s best economic arrangement; sometimes it is just the family’s preferred arrangement. It does not necessarily correlate with the suppression of women’s political rights or professional ambitions.

But in the political reading—it does. Barr once taught household voting as a thing of the past, just like making butter from scratch, wearing dresses all day long, and women not working outside the home. But all these things are back. The aesthetic spread first, galvanized by influencers and consumers, but it has now progressed to the point that it is furnishing a Constitutional proposal.

Two kinds of tradwives: real and direct-to-camera

“Tradwife” is a term gifted by the modern era—of course young Internet netizens thought to compress two words, traditional and wife, into one. It is a nickname for influencers who cosplay a traditional lifestyle, wearing dresses and making all their food from scratch while posting their content online and earning millions (think Hannah Neeleman and Savanna Stone); in the truer sense, it refers to millions of American women who really do live out traditional gender roles—women who have children, become stay-at-home mothers and never go back to work; women who suffer from chronic illnesses and cannot work; or women wealthy enough to afford to stay home without needing formal employment.

This category of tradwife has not always gone by the name tradwife, but it fits the most important elements. Women who primarily manage the home. Women who work, but don’t have formal employment. Women who concentrate on raising their children while their husbands act as breadwinners. Some of these women like to wear skirts and dresses all day. Many of them like to bake from scratch. Many of them—in fact, many women, trad or not—wear cute linen aprons. They may even teach their daughters to adopt similar lifestyles or impress Christian values upon them. However, these tradwives do not necessarily feel the need to convince the mainstream to adopt their lifestyle. Many of them are live-and-let-live.

These women may fall under the “Silent Majority”—the same name as the chunk of voters to which U.S. presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump have petitioned for support—a demographic to which politicians and pundits find it incredibly useful to assign viewpoints without evidence.

These tradwives may at least be described as the Silent Majority of tradwives. They have existed from the beginning of American history. There has never been a time in the United States without tradwives; such is the patriarchal culture that sees us hail Founding Fathers but no Founding Mothers. All those mothers were at home.

The history of the tradwife movement

The influencer tradwife is relatively new, and it is a gift of—and a reaction to—the feminist movement. Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne describes this in detail. Du Mez explores how American Christianity became a masculine, and political, movement.

The industrialization of the late 1800s, she explains, alarmed advocates of the era’s family model, where wives primarily managed the home and men often managed the farm or the shop. Du Mez says that, as men transitioned to corporate work—becoming underlings, clock-punchers—their “very manhood seemed in question.” Simultaneously, new waves of immigration and advances in women’s rights—women’s colleges opening and women’s bloomers normalizing—threatened conservative conceptions of themselves. Unrest grew among white Christians who sensed the fragility of their position at the top of the social hierarchy.

Politicians sensed an opening.

In Du Mez’s telling, it started with Theodore Roosevelt, whose strenuous, martial manhood—re: the Spanish American War and the Rough Riders—turned personal toughness into a political credential. It continued with pastors like Billy Graham, who found it at least profitable to stir up congregations with rousing speeches about masculinity of Jesus Christ—whom Graham once described as “a man, every inch a man,” the most physically powerful man who had ever lived. World War II drove home the need for masculinity and Christianity: American men wanted to feel brave, strong, and capable, and they wanted to engage in a battle for good versus evil. Or, at least, that was the rhetoric that propelled them to the front lines.

This rhetoric also solidified the politicization of gender roles—and the weaponization of Christianity to enforce it. Men had come not just to acknowledge, but to depend, on the idea that they were distinct from women. And once men returned home from World War II and needed jobs, women were pushed back to their “God-given” roles in the home.

Nevertheless, the wheel of progress continued to turn; women’s rights slowly continued to advance. As Democratic presidents like FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ thwarted Republican aims until about 1970—and as the civil rights movement progressed and the Sexual Revolution cropped up in the 1960s and 70s—conservatives found themselves feeling increasingly persecuted, or at least isolated, in a progressive world.

But conservative politicians, thought leaders, and pastors had noticed the profitability that came from exploiting traditional gender roles, and the persecution felt by conservatives provided them an opening.

And I phrase this cynically—they noticed the profitability—because many of the people who advocated for a return to traditional gender roles either did not conform to those roles themselves—in the case of the women—or confused genuine religious motivations for political goals—in the case of some of the most prominent men in the movement.

There were a host of women prominently involved in the launch of the modern tradwife movement, and none of them conformed strictly to Biblical gender roles. They all sought influence and profit and did so by defying the very positions they advanced. There was Beverly LaHaye, who told women to stay at home and concentrate on sexually satisfying their husbands while writing books and organizing political movements.

There was also Phyllis Schlafly. An attorney, author, and activist, she campaigned against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which does nothing more than explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. Schlafly said that women’s highest priority was the home—while also campaigning for office, not once but multiple times. She offered women who were increasingly being asked to do more and more—be educated, work, and continue homemaking—a way out: all they had to do was homemake, and in fact, that was God’s design for women in the first place, and women who followed it would invoke the blessings of God.

While there were prominent women who advanced tradwifery with great success, there were even more prominent men, as is fitting for a position that depends on calling women to stay at home. But that was not the primary goal of the men who sponsored traditional gender roles in this period; they wanted political authority concentrated in the hands of white men (re: themselves), and they took up whatever cause could deliver it—segregated schools first, then gender roles, then abortion. Bear in mind that this was one movement; these men were allies of one another.

There was Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Heritage Foundation and said that what politicized Christian conservatives in the 1970s was the removal of tax exemptions from racially segregated Christian schools and colleges. Because segregation was no longer a tenable public position, they turned to religious liberty and a return to tradition—which naturally placed white men at the head. Weyrich was equally frank about the arithmetic. In August 1980, at the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas, he told several thousand assembled preachers that Christians suffered from a “good government” syndrome of wanting universal turnout, and that he did not share it: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” Elections, he said, are never won by majorities, and the movement’s leverage rises as turnout falls.

The briefing was convened by Ed McAteer, a former sales executive who had founded the Religious Roundtable to bring preachers with national audiences into electoral politics. Schlafly, Tim LaHaye (Beverly LaHaye’s husband), and other spoke there. The Washington Post described the audience as almost entirely white and middle-class. That same year, the Republican Party struck the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform after four decades of endorsing it.

And there was Pat Robertson, who built the Christian Coalition out of the wreckage of his 1988 presidential run and found that nothing activated middle-class Christian donors more than a threat to traditional marriage. His 1992 letter against Iowa’s state equal rights amendment described feminism as a socialist assault on the family and told recipients their money would stop it.

In time, Christian conservatives became synonymous with white masculinity. At least, this is Du Mez’s argument. Her narration of events concludes with the back-and-forth partisanship that followed Reagan—wild pivots from George H.W. Bush to Clinton, from George W. Bush to Obama—and eventually from Trump to Biden and back to Trump again.

This is the main point. As the left crystallized around advancing the rights and success of women and people of color, the right coalesced around protecting white men.

These are not the only issues separating the left and the right. But this is the issue when it comes to gender or diversity politics.

And whether or not the right’s focus on protecting white men is called-for is up for debate. What is not up for debate is the intertwinement of traditional gender roles, or tradwifery, with politics.

The age of social media has ushered in increased visibility for proponents: pastor Doug Wilson has made national headlines with televised interviews and sermons calling for the household vote; Dale Partridge posts continuously to Twitter about the failings of women; U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who famously blamed the country’s failings on “childless cat ladies” miserable about their life choices; and female influencers like Savanna Stone, Erika Kirk, Estee Williams, and Lori Alexander, all of whom advocate for women to stay home, have babies, and concede greater political autonomy to their husbands.

This isn’t something to ignore. The consequences for American politics are startlingly real

In sum: there are neutral forms of tradwifery, and then there are politically-charged ones, propelled by voices with ulterior motives like profit or authority. Distinguishing the two is critical in everyday life, especially for young adults who are being increasingly targeted by messaging from the latter.

In an October 2024 survey, a fifth of Americans confessed hoping that the 19th Amendment should be repealed. This year, Ipsos reported that nearly a third of Gen Z men globally—31%—believe that wives should always obey husbands, and 33% say that husbands should have the final word on major decisions.

This is a marked uptick from Baby Boomer men (13% and 17%). Meanwhile, 18% of Gen Z women, against 6% of Boomer women, agree that wives should obey husbands, while 15% of Gen Z women versus 9% of Boomer women believe that women should not appear too independent or self-sufficient.

In essence, it appears that the message is catching.