We Found The REAL Reason Gen Z Wants To Be Tradwives

I mean, what if I don't want to live the way you live?

Oh, don't be ridiculous, Andrea.

Everybody wants this.

Everybody wants to be us.

What if I don't want to live the way you live?

I mean, what if I, what if I, don't want to live the way you live?

Don't be ridiculous, Andrea.

Everybody wants this.

When I was a teenager, this was the image of being a feminist.

I definitely consider myself an entrepreneur.

Not only am I an influencer, but I'm also a designer, a tech entrepreneur, an advisor and investor.

Whenever there is a quote unquote glass ceiling, there's an iron woman right behind it.

You're a couple years out of New School– Not even, just, just a few months.

It was being a girlboss, a powerful, career-focused woman who made it to the top of her field.

Now, I don't exactly know what you do or how you do it, but when you walk through these gates, things start happening.

But for teenage girls these days, it's all about living a soft life, not reaching the top of the corporate ladder, but instead quiet quitting.

Being a stay-at-home girlfriend or even a tradwife.

We like cooking.

We like running a home. We like supporting our husband.

Trad content is wildly popular on social media.

It's got this beautiful farmhouse aesthetic and dreamy images of plush domestic bliss.

It's a relaxing reprieve from the chaos of modern life.

But to me, a journalist who's been covering right-wing media for nearly a decade– Sweet home Alabama A lot of the tradwife discourse online sounds suspiciously similar to the types of things I hear from dark-money-funded think tanks in D.C.

When you get married to somebody who does all the thinking for you, it is so nice.

You used to only hear that kind of talk coming from guys like this.

I think there is an argument to bring back the "Mrs." degree.

That's a really good reason to go to college, actually.

You will find a husband.

How did this suddenly go mainstream?

So I went onto the homestead and into the kitchen and to a Turning Point USA conference to meet some real life tradwives and find out who they really are and what they think.

I just don't wanna get bullied by teenagers.

My husband gets up way before I do because I actually have a lot of trouble waking up for alarms, and he grabs Misha.

That's our toddler son.

Sort of like, steers him into my room.

It's like my favorite part of the day.

We come downstairs, I make some breakfast and then sit down and do our morning prayers together.

Esther is 24 years old and lives in Ohio.

She's exactly what I picture when I think tradwife.

People would say that I live very traditionally because I have a toddler.

I'm pregnant with another child. I got married young.

My husband and I are devout Catholics.

She also seems to have nailed the soft life.

I really love having the space to unfold slowly and kind of center yourself in the morning.

And I do understand why this is appealing to some young women.

While our grandmothers were told to look pretty so you can marry a man who will take care of you.

Millennial women like me got a more empowering feminist message in the 2010s.

Sorry I'm late, but I had some very important business to attend to.

Hashtag girlboss.

We didn't need to rely on a man to have our own bejeweled American dream.

We could be a She-e-o.

As a baby millennial, I was set on living the girlboss life.

I wanted to work in politics.

But when we tried to lean in, a lot of us just fell down.

How do you have time for everything? How do you balance it all?

I don't. I'm very tired all the time.

Finding a job is hard.

All the fucking girlboss feminist bitches lied to me.

I don't have goals.

I don't have ambition.

I only want to be attractive.

Why am I not allowed to just vibe?

Some of those She-e-os ended up creating the same toxic workplaces as their male counterparts, and certain types of women weren't allowed to girlboss even if they wanted to.

The girlboss wasn't trying to change the way our economy works.

She was just trying to succeed for herself in a broken system.

Girlboss feminism is so deeply rooted in capitalism.

In 2016, I became disillusioned with the whole girlboss thing.

I became a journalist and traded in my pantsuit for a sweatsuit.

Now Gen Z is coming of age and surprise, surprise, being a worker in America still sucks.

The gender pay gap has only narrowed by 4 cents since 2003, and their degrees feel worthless as entry level jobs disappear.

I totally get why some young women just want to escape to the prairie and bake sourdough. But I couldn't help but wonder, does wishing for a family necessarily mean young women are becoming more conservative?

The right-wing movement certainly hope so.

They've gone all in on recruiting young women who want out of the corporate rat race.

They're investing big in a new class of social media savvy pundits who push conservative messaging to young women.

The feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce.

They're cashing in on the girlboss backlash too, shaming women who don't want to have children, or who want to have a career by calling them– A bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.

There are a lot of successful 35 year old orthopedic surgeons that have cats.

The right wing youth group, Turning Point USA, is at the center of this messaging push.

Turning Point USA, is at the center of this messaging push.

Last summer I attended one of the youth conferences.

they host, Ground Zero for all things trad.

I wanted to do Air Force.

I wanted to do FBI, was interested in police work, all of that.

But then I really came around to the perspective of what's more important in life? Is it going to be more important to me to have kids and a family and a future, and that that will last forever?

Or a career that, yes, could help people, but also isn't going to be relevant in a few years.

And Charlie really says to choose one. And I thought about it.

I was like, oh my gosh, like, I've not been choosing the right thing.

I've changed from not wanting to have any kids to I could see myself for 4 or 5.

Right-wing activists have also launched a women's magazine they called the Conservative Cosmo.

In between fashion tips and celebrity gossip, Evie magazine features articles fearmongering about the dangers of birth control, focusing on your career, and delaying having children.

Evie's editor-in-chief, Britney Hugoboom also created a period tracking app that encourages natural family planning instead of the pill or an IUD.

And she sells a supplement called Toxic Breakup to use after quitting hormonal birth control.

Most of the app's funding came from right- wing billionaire Peter Thiel.

This fits right into the larger, reactionary right-wing movement, led by groups like the Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society.

They've spent decades dismantling the social safety net established in the New Deal and chipping away at reproductive rights.

And their scheming paid off big in 2022 when they overturned Roe v Wade.

Even tradwife influencers who aren't overtly political, their lives track well onto the 1950s inspired conservative vision of America.

A Christian family with a man at the head and a subservient wife.

He goes out to work.

She joyfully keeps the home and minds the children.

Their efforts seem to be working.

In 2024, the youth vote had its largest swing towards Republicans in 20 years, especially with young white women.

Democrats were stuck in outdated girlboss messaging.

Meanwhile, Republicans had someone on the ticket who understood trad mentality all too well.

We have women who think that, truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey, instead of starting a family and having children.

If my choice was between being a stay-at-home mother and doing Excel spreadsheets, I would definitely be a stay-at-home mother.

Right now, Esther does work.

She's an adjunct professor of philosophy and classics at a university nearby, where her husband, JB, is a PhD student.

I don't think that having a career in general is important to me, but having this job is important to me.

Teaching students, doing philosophy, reading these great books.

This is so amazing and meaningful.

It's not easy because it's just really hard to have sort of moved away from a one-income household paradigm.

The standard of living is just adjusted for having two people working.

Esther and JB don't have a lot of money.

How do finances and income factor into your decision about having children?

They don't.

I mean, if we were like, homeless, we would be like, this is really scary.

We need to, like, be very careful not to have any more children right now.

But the decision to have children was just not something that was influenced by, like, our standard of living.

Have you had any unexpected costs with pregnancy?

Yeah.

The big one for me is the midwife.

That's happy baby.

I had a OB-GYN, but I ended up switching to a midwife for what I considered safety reasons.

After a painful experience with a kidney infection during her first pregnancy, Esther needed more personalized care.

Whoa, that's super nice. I could pass out.

That is so nice.

Midwives are not paid for by insurance, and it takes like half of my adjunct paycheck.

There's other things, too. Like prenatal vitamins.

I've got approximately 1 billion prenatals today.

When my midwife talked to me about what the recommended diet was for a pregnant woman, I'm like, there's no freaking way.

Like, probiotic kefir's kind of expensive.

Yogurt is kind of expensive.

We would look at like, even like breakfast cereals and be like, oh my gosh, one day when we're fabulously wealthy, we will buy, like, Rice Krispies.

And I remember just seeing like $50 worth of groceries.

And it's like all we have for like this whole week.

And then like the person next to us has like multiple gallons of milk at a time.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, like multiple gallons of milk at a time, right?

But it was just still kind of like psychologically hard for me to be, like, pregnant and like, like wanting to like, like make everything good in my, like, new little house and then having to buy the, like, possibly spoiled chicken from Kroger, you know.

Like, what am I supposed to do?

Have a ton of kids.

I mean, get married when you're too young, have more kids than you can afford. Have as many kids as you can afford, have more than you can afford. Have a million kids.

Less burnout, more babies.

A more helpful suggestion came from a family friend. Go on food stamps.

She was like, there's this thing called WIC, and there's this thing called CHIP, and there's this thing called SNAP.

And like, is really important that you not feel any shame about that because it's for like, poor pregnant young mothers, like, this is who it's for.

They also got on Medicaid.

Not sure that's part of the right's vision of the perfect 1950s tradlife, but even some of the women at the Turning Point Conference weren't buying that version.

They've just kind of been preaching, like always make a family, make a family, make a family.

And it's just, I believe that women should have some sort of career field and stuff, while also being able to have a family.

I would love to settle down.

The issue is that women are being priced into having to work, so it's not really an option.

Well, I mean, I think the goal of the government should be to help the working class point blank period.

But there's another key part of the tradlife that I'm still curious about.

Last summer, I spent more time at Turning Point conferences than I did with my own family.

The aesthetic of trad that conservatives create is always the same.

A beautifully decorated farmhouse in a perfect pastoral setting.

And online trad influencers like Ballerina Farm show us a vision of labor that's connected to the earth and produces tangible goods. A contrast to many jobs today, where the fruits of your labor are usually just increased shareholder value.

So I went to rural New Hampshire to meet another genre of tradwife, the homesteader, to learn what the soft girl life is like on an idyllic farm.

I get up early.

I'm up by six most mornings. In the winter, I'm making a fire, doing yoga, and then I go right to farm chores for a couple hours before work.

Jesse and Andy got married young, but other than that, their life doesn't look like Ballerina Farm at all.

Who is doing most of these morning tasks?

It's mostly me. I would say that I'm the I'm the farmer and I'm the outdoorswoman.

My husband does a ton of the housework.

Lots of things that make our life run.

My great domestic contribution is I love to clean.

Physical labor tasks, we often split those things 50/50.

Heavy hauling, shoveling, splitting and stacking wood.

I probably take a little bit more of a lead, but that's just because I like doing that stuff. Yeah you like it.

But yeah, we're always sharing.

But you definitely are like, Chief Rock Hauler. Yeah, the project lead.

You're Assistant Rock Hauler. She'll delegate things to me.

I think that what was women's work and what was men's work is really hard to define.

Like, I don't even know how we get clean towels.

I don't know where they come from.

Another departure from the homesteading fantasy?

Jesse works a corporate job, and so did Andy before he was recently laid off.

Right now, Jesse is the primary breadwinner.

It has slowed down our ability to do large scale projects on this property.

It's hard to do things like replace our roof, replace our front door.

It's also slowed down the timeline on another big goal and a key element of tradlife.

If the margins were less thin for families in this country, we would have had kids sooner.

Housing was very expensive and took a long time, and we're extremely lucky.

Most people our age have not been able to buy. Health care costs.

If that wasn't as much of a factor, we would have had kids younger.

Yeah.

Jesse is approaching the decision to have kids differently than Esther, but both of them value and prioritize family life.

I hope for the opportunity to stay home with my kids for at least their younger years.

I spent a whole day on the farm with Jesse.

When you complete the swing and slide motion, they're both together.

Yeah yeah.

Afterwards, I was tired.

Is this how the Ballerina Farm lady feels all the time?

As someone who comes from a lineage of homesteaders, is the soft feminine life of homesteading a realistic vision of the past? No.

A lot of that work is presented in a very leisurely or pleasurable way.

When, I think in reality, for many women, it was not.

I understand the longing for a life where you don't have to work outside of the home, when that's a financial reality for most households.

It's very difficult to be a one income household.

So then how do these tradwife influencers make it work?

When I got back from Jesse's, I started looking a little more into Ballerina Farm.

Or Hannah Neeleman.

First things first, she's married to the JetBlue heir.

So there's that.

But they're actually not even a one-income household.

Ballerina Farm isn't just an Instagram handle.

It's the name of her online store, which has over 50 employees.

And I'm pretty sure your average 1950s homemaker didn't have a personal assistant and a homeschooling teacher.

She's not even the only one with a second income stream.

Many of the biggest tradwife accounts are selling you more than just their lifestyle.

Nara Smith, Calvin Klein It turns out that being a tradwife influencer is really just like being a girlboss.

The girlboss and tradwife are two sides of the same capitalist coin.

They're both turning their life into a personal brand and business.

Both claim to be empowering, even feminist, but they're only for a certain type of woman. And they're isolated from their communities while they amass giant fortunes.

It's very aesthetically driven.

It's about what looks good.

It is a job to create that aesthetic, and that's the work that they're doing, rather than the work of homesteading itself.

Man, they make a lot of sourdough bread.

I don't have time for that.

It seems like they're always making bread.

I wasn't expecting to relate to tradwives at all. But what I heard from Esther and Jesse was not so different from what I and most other young women want.

The ability to choose whether or not you have kids and when to do it.

The ability to choose whether you want a career and to have time for family alongside work.

Most importantly, they want policies that make those choices possible.

Do you think that healthcare should be free?

Yeah I do.

I don't think it's in conformity with sort of traditional Catholic values to have people in debt for long periods of time, for emergencies.

I think that's really evil.

Esther's traditional values aren't stuck in some bygone era.

They're relevant to the pressing issues of today.

She relied on SNAP and Medicaid during her pregnancy, but Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill makes severe cuts to both of those programs. Medicaid insures two out of every five American children and pays for 40% of all births. 50% in rural areas.

And SNAP is the most effective anti-poverty program in the history of this country.

Three out of every five people who get food stamps are in families with children.

Kids raised in SNAP-supported households perform better in school, and they grow into healthier adults.

The supposedly pro-family MAGA movement wants to take these programs away from American families.

Meanwhile, Democrats have totally abandoned family values and trad to Republicans, even though elements of that life appeal to women across the ideological spectrum.

I don't feel like anyone in power shares my values.

I think part of the reason that the right has recaptured the back- to-the-land movement, which was originally a liberal hippie movement, is that the way that they are promising people to have satisfying, beautiful lives is by looking backwards.

And when the left fails to find a vision of that that looks forwards, that is very easy to do.

In my reporting, I found that most women don't make choices about marriage and family based on social media trends or even political propaganda.

A lot of them, like Jesse, are worried about the expense.

A Democratic Party, which doesn't build its foundation on "No single mother will work without healthcare" is, you know, unacceptable and is not selling an acceptable life, let alone a meaningful or deep or beautiful life.

What if Democratic politicians made supporting families a core progressive value and ran on real pro-family policies like Medicare for all, paid family leave, free universal childcare, and a higher federal minimum wage.

Who gets to say what traditional is anyway?

Trad can mean economic security for all families and valuing women's labor both in and out of the traditional workforce.

Conservative propaganda and tradwife influencers are selling us a fantasy.

In reality, we need each other to get through the tough times.

We rely, first of all, on babysitting.

We have family friends in town who help watch our child sometimes.

They help with other things.

The Crosbys just gave us a box of their old baby clothes.

There's lots of community functions.

We have a monthly festival that we bring Misha to.

Esther and JB are on their parent's health insurance plans.

And this house actually belongs to Esther's former professor.

They're staying in a room here for free while they establish their own careers.

Immense generosity from them.

Huge yeah.

Would you say traditional values are inherently conservative or liberal?

No. Many traditional values are inherently communal.

People help me all the time.

I can only get my wood stacked because people show up and help me stack wood.

People will quietly pay their neighbor's heating bill if they have a little extra that month, and they know that somebody else doesn't.

There are tangible losses that come with heightened individualism.

I think individualism is a very modern phenomenon.

It is traditional that we comes before I.