How The Trad Wife Trend on TikTok Sells Biblical Gender Roles

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Believers is a series running throughout April, examining different facets of faith and religion among young people. In this reported op-ed, features contributor Fortesa Latifi examines what religion has to do with the trad wife trend on TikTok.

The trad wives of TikTok are seemingly everywhere.

Over the last year, we’ve seen the “trad wife trend” take off, glorifying what has been called a “seductive simplicity” in their lifestyle, one that uplifts traditional gender roles and makes the home the woman’s domain. Trad wives are women who value homemaking as a skill and lean into traditional gender roles, often by being subservient to their husbands. There are different brands of trad wives on social media — some wear modest clothes and grow their own food, while others wear modern clothes and have perfectly set makeup — but they largely share a few important qualities: their videos are palatable and appealing, making their lifestyle seem like a refreshing journey back to a world less complicated than our own, when women were in charge of making their homes beautiful and keeping their children fed.

There’s been plenty of pushback against this seemingly rising tide of influencers promising women freedom in the confines of their homes, and the movement has been tied to the far-right. But there’s also a layer to these videos that some say isn’t being fully realized. Under a thin veneer of idealized homemaking are ideals pulled from often fundamentalist religious values, some of which can be mechanisms of controlling women.

“The religious underpinnings can’t be ignored,” says Jo Piazza, an author and host of the podcast Under the Influence, which in part examines the trad wife phenomenon. “The tenets of trad wives that say women should be submissive to their husbands and give up all their agency are directly tied to extreme patriarchal evangelical views.”

You don’t necessarily have to be religious to be a trad wife, though many of the most famous ones are. Nara Smith, best known for making her children meals like cereal from scratch, and Hannah Neeleman, best known as Ballerina Farm, are both Mormons. Kelly Havens Stickle, a devout Christian, posts Bible verses under nearly every Instagram photo. While some trad wife influencers are overt about how religion dictates their lifestyle, others don’t talk about how religion may contribute to their gender roles. While they may abide by strict Biblical interpretations of gender roles and subservience derived from religious fundamentalism, they post aesthetically pleasing content that makes their religiously-driven lifestyle seem like a break from modern stresses. This, Piazza says is tailor made for young women.

“I do think some young women are drawn to this content because it is presented in a beautiful and idealized package on social media,” she says. “We also live in a time when the corporate world seems hostile to young women who want the flexibility to have both a career and family. And it seems this way because it truly is. So looking at pretty pictures of women who seem happy and fulfilled and content with their purpose in life is incredibly attractive.”

Liv, 20, sees the surge in the popularity of the #tradwife as similar to how TikTokers make jokes about getting a lobotomy. “It’s an acknowledgment of how messed up societal standards for women are,” she says. “Personally, I’m tired. My friends and I joke about quitting life and starting a coven when the pressure of life gets to be too much.” Between the rapid rollback of reproductive rights, an economy that’s leaving millennials and Gen Z behind the markers of adulthood their parents were able to achieve, and the inherent pressures of living as a woman in a patriarchal society, is it any wonder that young women are tempted to just give up and give in?

And, some find genuine happiness in being influenced by trad wives. Serena, 28, watches trad wife content as inspiration for her own motherhood journey. She’s especially drawn to Nara Smith, the model wife of Lucky Blue Smith, who has gained millions of TikTok followers from sharing a trad wife-adjacent lifestyle (Smith's content largely revolves around cooking, and isn't clearly influenced by religious norms, though the argument can be made). A typical video from Smith features an introduction like “my toddlers have been craving marshmallows… so today I decided to surprise them by making salted caramel marshmallows.” In Smith’s world, no craving of her children or her husband is beyond her abilities to make it from scratch, which she does while perfectly made-up. As a young mother herself, Serena says Smith’s videos “give me inspiration to be the best mom I can be. They give me a peaceful feeling inside. I now bake all the time, and I make my babies’ food from scratch. I spend so much time with my children. Since watching Nara, I go above and beyond. I love it. I love her.”

Homemaking can bring genuine joy, and there is nothing wrong with embracing that role. Labor in the home is just as worthy as labor outside of it. But trad wife content has layers. While it can uplift the role of homemakers — something that's so often denigrated in our society — it also says a lot about race and class, about values, sometimes about politics, and often about religion. And when we consume this content without interrogating it, we might be sold an idea that isn't giving us the reality of the lifestyle.

Tia Levings calls trad wife content a form of “lifestyle evangelism.” Some of these videos, Levings, a writer, ex-fundamentalist, and author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, said, are part of an effort to tacitly recruit people to the influencer’s religion by making it seem attractive via the kind of life they live. “The trad wives take ordinary cultural elements and desires, such as motherhood and staying home to raise one’s children, and fetishize it, elevating it to a heavenly calling that renders anyone outside of their homey-warm glow as less-than at best, bound for hell at worst,” Levings wrote on her Substack. “They pit ridiculous and fictional opposites against each other, revealing the fundamentalist binaries of their worldview.”

But this shiny picture of a simplified life isn't exactly truth. Levings told Teen Vogue that influencers can offer different “flavors” of trad wife, but they all adhere to largely the same rules for women, which are often dictated by religious control.

“There’s the sexy trad wife, but there’s also the homesteading trad wife. Fundamentalists find identity [in both of those portrayals],” Levings said, adding that fundamentalist Christians are good at portraying their lives in many different ways in an attempt to attract different kinds of people to the religion. “At the heart, the ideals are the same. It’s still strict gender roles, it’s still rules for women.”

Jennie, a 49-year-old creator who makes videos about her life as a former trad wife. In a conversation with Teen Vogue, Jennie shares that she was raised Mormon and married her ex-husband at the age of 20. By 23, she had her first child and says she was told by religious leaders that it was time for her to stop working and become a stay-at-home mom, thus beginning her descent into the trad wife lifestyle. What was it like for her? “My life was miserable,” she says. “It looked so good on the outside. [But] for me, living it, every day I would struggle. A lot of my life was really lonely.”

In her content on TikTok, Jennie attempts to dispel the myth of the trad wife fantasy by explaining what it was like for her. Everything looked perfect, she says, as her husband worked and she took care of their five children. But in reality, she had become trapped – she says she didn’t have her own income, her work history ended when she started having children, and her husband was in charge of their lives. After 24 years, Jennie’s marriage ended, leaving her without resources or employment history, she says. All those years of being a traditional housewife and taking care of her children and husband and nourishing them seemingly evaporated in a moment. Her goal in creating content around her life as a former trad wife is to help young women consider their options before committing to a trad wife lifestyle, or glorifying it. “Think twice before you get married, become financially dependent on a man, and give up [your] career and have babies,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to [choose between] being a stay-at-home mom or a corporate mom with kids in daycare.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue