{A} psychological spell was cast upon American women: The glamorized “girl boss” mentality of perpetual hustling encouraged the pursuit of an ambitious career at the expense of, well, everything else. It celebrated usurping stereotypically masculine authority and chanted that “the future is female.” An ideal girl boss was an independent, financially stable woman who rose through the corporate ranks and outperformed men. Fashion entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso, who coined the term in her 2014 book #GIRLBOSS, defined it as a woman “in charge of her own life,” who “gets what she wants because she works for it.” But Amoruso warned that it “takes a lot of hard work to get there, and . . . it takes even more hard work to stay there.” Women who adopted the lifestyle suddenly supported the capitalism they had previously condemned; since they couldn’t destroy the so-called patriarchy, they would rule it.
The girl bosses began dying almost immediately after flowering. The movement promised empowerment, never happiness. Amoruso claimed that girl bosses get what they want — but did women want to be on the board of trustees? Perhaps unsurprisingly, women who climbed a company ladder and entered a certain tax bracket found themselves feeling unfulfilled. The time spent in the office often resulted in a suitably padded bank account but no husband, children, or even friends; professional accomplishments led to failure in all other realms. But even the career success was fleeting: Amoruso led her nearly multi-million-dollar fashion company Nasty Gal to bankruptcy. Now, the unsatisfied girl bosses have the same question that Betty Friedan attributed to miserable suburban wives in 1963, for which she had proposed work as the cure: “Is this all?”
A brave few girl bosses have confessed their discontent, enabling the romanticization of and desire for stereotypically female roles. Careerist women, debilitated by burnout, scroll endlessly through work emails and wonder, “Would being a stay-at-home mother be worse than this?” The traditional lifestyle that had been degraded relentlessly became an attractive alternative.
Thus emerged the self-described “trad wives,” popular women on social media who promote homemaking and marital subservience. Do not confuse them with the familiar category of stay-at-home mothers; there’s an ideology driving their domestic responsibilities. They prefer dependence over independence, femininity over feminism, and household labor over paid work. Everything revolves around Cs: Christianity, Commitment, Cooking, Cleaning, and Children — although some are childless. You may wonder, what are their struggles? The self-admitted sources of stress are “what to make for dinner,” “wearing the appropriate apron,” not owning enough dresses, rearranging decor, and “overspending at the thrift store.”
Seen on a quick scroll through social media, the stylish spouses appear like the anti-girl-bosses. The trad wives subvert “pro-choice” rhetoric by reassuring us that they choose to be submissive, insisting that they willfully abdicated agency and defer to a husband’s authority. The girl bosses emphasized assimilating to male roles, whereas trad wives emphasize distinction. “We are the bread makers, not the bread winners,” the women in cinched aprons coo on TikTok. The apparel is deliberately feminine — even when worn in a more macho venue, like the gym.
Yet the trad wives on social media are hardly traditional, even if they might consider themselves Christian and right-leaning. There are two other Cs to add: Content Creator. They profess their selfless commitment to humble servitude yet seem unable to do basic chores without recording themselves. The social-media project exploits family — especially children — to cultivate a personal image for strangers to admire. The glamorized exaggeration of domesticity in service of an illusion is destroyed by the self-evident impracticality: gardening in a white gown, taking hours to make a peanut butter sandwich from scratch (allegedly at a child’s request), whisking in an empty bowl.
Would a truly traditional woman devote so much time and energy to making traditionalism itself trendy? The supposed trad wife is not so much a home-maker as a home-marketer. The filming devices in the home establish a panopticon where the husband and children are pawns in an advertising campaign for the woman’s self-image. Her priority is documenting — not serving — the family. Indeed, we must remember that the social-media attention is profitable, which might explain why promiscuous women who previously had pornographic OnlyFans accounts suddenly decided to embrace clothing and produce trad-esque content instead. Ultimately, a trad wife’s video material is herself, not what she does.
Traditional values and roles deserve cultural admiration — especially now, since the media (despite their obsession with “representation”) are allergic to positively depicting anything considered right-of-center. But the trad-wife trend promotes such values for their aesthetic appeal; virtue has little to do with it. Here are the instructions for trad-wife certification: (1) Marry the right man, (2) Implement traditional roles in your marriage, (3) Learn to cook, clean, and be a good host, (4) Have a hobby, and (5) Maintain your beauty. But there is little explanation for why these things are good or what makes them traditional. Trad becomes a trap, luring women to a lifestyle without any moral or intellectual framework for appreciating why traditions are worthwhile, fulfilling, and respectable — and without critical analysis, there’s little opportunity to revise and improve such traditions in the modern era. Those who then pursue trad-ism do so superficially and, eventually, will arrive at the perpetual question: “Is this all?”
Ultimately, the trad wives aren’t the counterpart to the girl bosses. The two demographics employ different means for the same end: self-promotion. The death of the girl boss was the birth of the trad boss who turns domesticity into a career. She isn’t traditional, she’s merely continuing the games of little girls, dressing up and playing pretend.