The hidden business of the submissive internet “tradwife”

A recent analysis of popular social media accounts reveals that influencers promoting a return to strict traditional gender roles are highly focused on generating revenue alongside their patriarchal messages. The study, published in *Psychology of Women Quarterly*, illustrates how the aesthetics of the past are used to normalize restrictive hierarchies while creating lucrative online businesses. These accounts encourage young audiences to adopt submission and financial dependence, even as the creators themselves earn independent incomes through their digital advertising labor.

Across platforms like TikTok and Instagram, a subculture of content creators known as “tradwives” has amassed millions of followers. These women promote a lifestyle centered on homemaking, homeschooling, and deferring to the absolute authority of their husbands. In their videos, they are often seen baking bread from scratch, wearing vintage aprons, and advocating for a return to historical gender and family roles.

To understand this online phenomenon, researchers turn to feminist theories regarding social hierarchies and power dynamics. Societies often maintain the status quo by treating certain cultural narratives as natural or purely inevitable. Within systems that prioritize White, heterosexual, middle-class values, a specific concept of womanhood emerges as the ideal standard.

Scholars refer to this culturally celebrated ideal as hegemonic femininity. This form of womanhood requires adherence to specific beauty standards, personality traits, and conservative values. While women who successfully perform this role may reap certain social rewards, their compliance ultimately supports a system that keeps them subordinate to men and helps marginalize other groups of people.

Elizabeth A. Miller and Elizabeth R. Cole, researchers at the University of Michigan, designed an investigation into how tradwife influencers operate online. The researchers focused specifically on White women in heterosexual marriages, as these creators are particularly revealing of how power and security operate within established social hierarchies. The team wanted to understand how these influencers justify a return to unequal gender roles while simultaneously gaining financial status for themselves.

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The researchers created a new TikTok account and interacted with hashtags like “#tradwife” and “#traditionalvalues” to identify the most popular creators in the space. They selected the five top White tradwife influencers based on social media popularity metrics. To gather study data, the team collected the 50 most popular videos from each of these five accounts, resulting in a compiled database of 250 highly viewed posts.

A team of trained reviewers systematically analyzed each video for specific themes and tactical approaches. They looked for content that prescribed traditional femininity, such as giving advice on how women should behave, dress, or practice their religion. They also checked for nostalgic invocations of the past, promotional language encouraging others to adopt the lifestyle, and efforts to monetize the content.

The results revealed a highly curated and uniform aesthetic across nearly all the content analyzed. In about 89 percent of the videos, influencers invoked the past through visual imagery or music. Creators regularly featured antique-style cast iron stoves, mason jars, and vintage clothing, often set to the tune of mid-century popular music.

More than 40 percent of the posts included explicit directions about how women should live and behave. Creators regularly advised their female viewers to prioritize marriage and motherhood over career aspirations. About one in six videos outlined specific appearance expectations, instructing women to maintain their physical figures and adopt specific beauty routines for their husbands.

In one video, an influencer told viewers to “doll themselves up” before their spouses returned from work. Another creator posted text reading, “Men are designed to be visual, and it’s a beautiful thing to embrace that as a wife.” The researchers noted that these messages reframe sexual subjugation and strict body regulation as loving expressions of appreciation for male providers.

Religious prescriptions also appeared frequently, with creators framing traditional gender roles as a divine mandate. Influencers advised viewers to pray for a submissive heart when they struggled to accept their husband’s household authority. Other posts emphasized procreation, telling young women that raising children is a moral imperative and directly criticizing modern women who choose to remain child-free.

Some influencers even presented intellectual submission as an attractive relief for young women. One creator posted a video of herself baking with a caption stating, “Letting my husband lead our family is quite relaxing if i do say so myself.” The content consistently encouraged viewers to defer to male authority in matters spanning from everyday family finances to political opinions.

To make this lifestyle appealing to modern viewers, the influencers rarely depicted domestic work as tiring or arduous. About half of the videos showing household chores portrayed the tasks as completely effortless. The women were often shown completing their homemaking duties at a leisurely pace while wearing flawless makeup and perfectly styled hair.

These polished depictions hide the physical and emotional exhaustion historically associated with running a household and raising young children. The content glossed over the severe vulnerabilities inherent in complete financial dependence on a spouse. Only a small fraction of the videos mentioned any downsides to the lifestyle, such as the genuine economic challenge of living on a single income.

While the influencers claimed to reject modern careerism, their digital footprint told a very different story. Nearly 63 percent of the posts featured explicit tactics designed to generate revenue or boost engagement algorithms. Creators actively modeled the tradwife lifestyle while using product placement to sell meat subscriptions, branded home goods, and cosmetics to their viewers.

The analysis also examined how these creators engaged with topics of race, finding that it was almost entirely absent. Only two of the 250 videos explicitly mentioned race, and both instances involved an influencer denying that the tradwife lifestyle was linked to White supremacy. The researchers observed that this silence is characteristic of how dominant racial ideologies operate, as they are often treated as an unspoken societal default.

By presenting very specific, exclusionary family structures as a return to a timeless tradition, these accounts reinforce modern racial and gender hierarchies. The creators use the language of feminist choice to market a life philosophy that ultimately aims to eliminate those very choices for women. In doing so, these influencers exploit real modern frustrations with work-life balance to sell a reactionary political worldview.

The researchers acknowledge that looking at video content provides only one perspective on the tradwife phenomenon. The study did not measure how audiences actually interpret or use these social media posts in their own lives. Viewers might watch the content purely for entertainment, aesthetic inspiration, or baking recipes without ever internalizing the patriarchal messaging.

Future investigations could examine the comment sections of these videos to see how women actively negotiate and debate the ideas presented by tradwife influencers. The study authors recommend strong media literacy programs for young internet users. Teaching teenagers how to recognize digital marketing tactics and curated aesthetics can help them navigate restrictive gender messaging online.

The study, “Selling the #SubmissiveWife: How White Tradwife Influencers Commodify Traditional Femininity,” was authored by Elizabeth A. Miller and Elizabeth R. Cole.