Aprons, TikTok, and a Backlash in Disguise

Cover image credit: Stacey Ngiam

The “tradwife” is easy to spot, even if she resists the label. She meanders through TikTok in vintage dresses, coaxing sourdough starters, praising domestic order, and hinting (sometimes coyly, sometimes defiantly) that a woman’s true place is in the home. The term gained traction during the pandemic, when ordinary chores were re-enchanted into performance art for restless audiences.

Image credit: Blog of the American Philosophical Association

There is no single definition of the tradwife, but the type is recognisable: immaculate, maternal, and devoted to the ideal of traditional gender roles. Yet this is not just an innocent retreat into homemaking. What looks like lifestyle content is also an ideological signal, with submission repackaged as empowerment.

The popularity of tradwifery is perplexing. In a world where more women than ever hold degrees, offices and political power, how does a movement that insists on women keeping to the kitchen flourish? The tradwife is a symbolic and political phenomenon: part historical backlash, part postfeminist performance, part class-dependent option and part political theatre. 

Susan Faludi’s Backlash argued that anti-feminist pushback do not arise once equality is achieved, but when it appears within reach. Backlash is a preemptive strike, meant to stop women before they cross the finish line. During the second world war, America’s factories saw an increase of 27% female workers in 1940 to nearly 37% in 1945, only to be rolled back by advertising and policy urging them back to the kitchen. In the 1980s, just as professional women gained ground, media panics cast them as infertile, lonely, or dangerous to children. Each retrenchment came at the moment women edged closer to real transformation. 

By this logic, the 2010s and early 2020s fits Faludi’s hypothesis almost too neatly. Women had not achieved parity, but their presence was impossible to ignore. They outpaced men in higher education, broke into professions once closed to them, and had narrowed wage gaps. Culturally, feminism had gone mainstream: #MeToo and Time’s Up reshaped discourse on workplace power, while the 2016 presidential race made the prospect of a woman in the White House imaginable, if not realised. Politically and socially, women seemed closer to a tipping point than ever before.

The 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade crystallised this moment. The ruling was framed by its defenders as a restoration of “moral order,”. This move was yet another reminder but its to women that their autonomy remained could be taken away when it threatened prevailing moral orders. Like earlier retrenchments, the decision reminded women of their boundaries, that progress would not be linear. If Faludi showed that backlash in the 1980s was amplified by glossy magazines and television dramas, today’s retrenchments thrive on algorithms.

The tradwife is not, in reality, a mass movement. 98% women still aspire to combine work and family, but online platforms give her disproportionate visibility. Instagram’s aspirational aesthetics and TikTok’s bombardment make domestic submission appear both stylish and subversive. This amplification makes a loud minority look like a cultural wave, arriving just as women appear on the cusp of substantive equality. In that sense, the tradwife phenomenon does not contradict Faludi’s thesis but updates it: backlash has always relied on exaggerating women’s discontent, and digital media simply accelerates the cycle.

What distinguishes the tradwife from her mid-century forebears is how she frames her decision. She is not compelled by wartime necessity but by “choice.” Postfeminism insists feminism succeeded, and thus any choice a woman makes, be it her career or the kitchen, is equally empowering. Under this logic, submission can be marketed as rebellion. Yet, this framing is misleading.

Choices do not emerge in a vacuum; they are shaped by class, culture, and constraint. It is far easier to “opt out” of paid work if one has a husband with a steady salary, reliable childcare, or the cushion of inherited wealth. Online, these material contingencies vanish, and domesticity is presented as universally attainable. What looks like agency is in practice stratified by class and wealth.

The contrast is especially stark outside the West. In South Asia, surveys show that only 32% of women of working age were part of the formal labor force as of 2023, not because of preference but because of structural barriers, family expectations, or restrictive laws. In countries such as Afghanistan, recent edicts barring women from secondary schools and many jobs collapse any distinction between choice and coercion. In the Gulf, the homemaker ideal is sustained by migrant domestic labor, often under exploitative conditions. These women, bound by the kafala system, cannot present caregiving as “choice”; it is labor extracted under coercion.

The “tradwife,” then, is not just an Instagram filter on domesticity but a marker of privilege: in the West, it can be marketed as empowerment precisely because women have the exit options—education, income, legal rights—that many others lack. Where Western influencers frame homemaking as a provocative choice, millions of women live it as a foregone destiny. The rhetoric of empowerment is a luxury; only those with genuine alternatives can claim that submission is freely chosen.

It is deeply ironic that feminism expanded women’s options, and tradwives now use that expansion to argue that freely choosing the narrowest path is itself feminist. By referring to the return to domesticity as rebellion against “neoliberal girlboss” feminism, the tradwife transforms an old prescription into a provocative choice. Submission is marketed not as defeat but as subversion—resistance that only serves to re-emphasise traditional gender hierarchies.

Image credit: Institute for Family Studies

Moreover, the cultural valuation attached to these choices is rarely neutral. Tradwife rhetoric moralises domesticity, purity, naturalness and duty, while denigrating paid work as corrupting or unmoored. The neoliberal “girlboss” inverts the scale. Ambition, market success, and achievement become virtues. Both scripts moralise choices in order to police social boundaries. This matters because the “just let people choose” defense is structurally lazy. It permits institutions (markets, media, the state) to abdicate responsibility for the conditions that make some choices palatable and others perilous. Choice rhetoric can therefore mask unequalities when public policy is being shaped to favour one domestic arrangement over another.

The revival of domestic ideals is not apolitical nostalgia, but backlash. As Faludi argued, moments where women appear poised to consolidate gains are precisely when counter-movements mobilise. The “tradwife” figure is one such mobilising device.

By romanticising childcare and homemaking, conservative actors can recast feminist advances in employment and reproductive rights as socially corrosive, while presenting retraditionalisation as cultural repair. This move is especially potent when wrapped in the language of protection. Child welfare and family stability become rhetorical weapons that justify policies restricting women’s autonomy, from abortion bans to attacks on workplace DEI initiatives. The tradwife is not just baking bread; she is planted evidence that women are happier - and society healthier—when feminism retreats. 

The tradwife, then, is not a whimsical lifestyle trend, nor merely the online cousin of mid-century domesticity. She is the latest iteration of a cycle Faludi identified: when equality threatens to solidify, counter-movements emerge to redraw the line. The tools change, from advertising in the 1950s, fear-mongering through the media in the 1980s, and the 2020s’ algorithms, but the function endures. What looks like empowerment is often repackaged submission, sold as rebellion and moralised as authenticity.

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