Not the Solution We Proposed: Feminist Psychological Insights into the Tradwife Phenomenon

Abstract

This special issue examines the phenomenon of the tradwife—a “retro feminine” figure who performs extreme domesticity on social media. The rise of the tradwife is familiar, yet also reflective of the current technopolitical moment. To introduce this special issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, we first explore a set of cultural forces that we believe have paved the way for the tradwife's recent ascendence. We contend that tradwives used social media to sell a message perfectly-tailored to the moment: They championed old-school gender roles by tapping into women's dissatisfaction with feminist progress; they showed off laborious domestic pursuits during coronavirus disease 2019, when people's attention narrowed to the home; and they evoked nostalgia in ways that echoed far-right political communications. Next, we summarize seven articles published in this special issue. The first three articles use feminist theories and content-coding strategies to describe the visual and ideological landscape of the tradwife. The next two articles identify how sexist and patriarchal ideologies characterize men's roles in the tradwife phenomenon. The last two articles contend with women's experiences living and leaving the tradlife. Finally, we name several open questions about the tradwife phenomenon that feminist psychological theory and methods are well-equipped to answer.

By publishing a special issue about “tradwives,” Psychology of Women Quarterly is delving into a topic with high visibility and mainstream prominence. Since 2018, when the term was first published in a New York Times opinion piece (Kelly, 2018), #tradwife content has proliferated. The search term returns over 120,000 Instagram posts, 4.25 million Google hits, and even an entry in the Cambridge English Dictionary (Gupta, 2025). Defining the “tradwife” is its own empirical challenge (illustrated by the articles in this special issue), but the trend's essence is “retro domestic femininity:” the tradwife has a curated online presence, where she engages in conspicuously time-intensive household labor (e.g., baking bread, homesteading, homeschooling), and hearkens back to a supposed past of clearly defined gender roles (Bower, 2025; Hesse, 2024; Sykes & Hopner, 2024).

For all the attention it has garnered, this “tradwife” moment, and its attendant pushback, actually feels familiar. The 2000s saw public debates between homemakers and women in elite careers (Hirshman, 2005) and between career mothers and stay-at-home moms (Zimmerman et al., 2008). In the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly successfully framed second-wave feminists as anti-homemaker, despite evidence to the contrary (Levenstein, 2014). Look back even further—the 1950s (Weiss, 2000), the 1910s (Eby, 2019), the nineteenth century (McHugh, 1999)—and you will find a public concerned with the proper roles of wives, both inside and outside the home.

At the same time, there are elements of the tradwife phenomenon that seem uniquely born of this particular technopolitical moment. In this introductory article, we first explore the conditions that have primed the public to embrace the tradwife (again). Namely, we explore frustrations with and tensions within feminism, the disruptions of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the reach afforded by social media, and a worldwide resurgence of populist and far-right politics. Next, we provide an overview of the exciting articles contained within this special issue, identifying some themes and foundational claims presented herein. Finally, we issue a call to psychologists to build on this work, using psychological theory and research strategies to further catalog the impacts and implications of the tradwife.

What Brought Us to the Current Tradwife Moment?

Frustrations and Tensions Within Feminism

The ascent of the tradwife coincided with a perception that the feminist revolution had stalled (England et al., 2020). Feminism's second wave was followed by a doubling down on capitalism and individualism known as neoliberalism (Fitz et al., 2012; Gamble, 2019). Women had made strides at work (England et al., 2020), the domain where neoliberal ideals of success could be realized (Richards et al., 2025). But, they made fewer strides at home (Hirshman, 2005), where men have yet to carry 50% of the workload (e.g., Dours & Eaton, 2026) and are much less likely to take on the mental load of planning and organizing what needs to get done (Palmwood & Liss, 2026). This bifurcated progress has been called an “unfinished revolution” (Gerson, 2011). Because gender equity was not fully achieved, women wound up facing higher expectations of paid work without any significant decrease in their responsibilities at home (Blithe & McCarver, 2017). In some domestic domains, such as childcare, the workload norms even increased. Mothers employed outside of the home today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers in previous generations (Bianchi, 2011; Low, 2025), as if women must prove their devotion to their families in light of their paid employment.

Primed to take advantage of these frustrations, tradwives positioned themselves as an alternative, if not an antidote, to feminism, with many identifying as former or reformed feminists (Bower, 2025; Basker, Farvid et al., 2026a). In their view, feminists have devalued the feminine, both through encouraging women to take on masculine pursuits and by rejecting feminine roles and aesthetics. This is seen as a misbegotten agenda, which tradwives seize on in order to blame old-school feminism—rather than capitalism or men's reluctance to do their share—for the dissatisfaction and struggles of contemporary women (Hesse, 2024; Stotzer & Nelson, 2025).

What gives these claims some traction is that they exploit a vulnerability and tension within feminism itself. Feminist scholars have long held a complex and often ambivalent relationship with femininity. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1949) viewed femininity as a social construction linked to subordination, and Bartky (1990) argued that feminine embodiment was tied to oppression. These critiques contributed to a wariness and suspicion of traditional femininity within feminism. Later strains of liberal and neoliberal feminism also embraced masculine values, emphasizing, for instance, women's entry into traditionally masculine spheres. The second-wave push for labor force participation, the Lean In Movement (Sandberg, 2013), and the rise of Girl Boss “confidence culture” all privileged monetary success and career-oriented competitive achievement (Farvid et al., 2026b).

Although imperfect, these feminist arguments should be understood in the context of broader oppressive gender structures. That is, given patriarchal gender constructions, the quickest way to access power was to take on the roles and traits that were valued: Namely masculinity, including the masculine domain of paid labor. Nevertheless, these strands have been critiqued by scholars of feminism. Some have questioned whether a feminism so focused on personal empowerment took the focus away from structural change, reinforcing capitalism, neoliberalism, and individualism rather than dismantling them (Zeisler, 2016). These strains of feminism have also been taken to task for reinforcing the cultural valuation of masculinity over femininity. The systematic devaluing of the feminine has been called femmephobia (Blair & Hoskin, 2015; Hoskin, 2020), a framework developed primarily in queer and trans contexts, and useful for understanding how traditional femininity is often “othered” in feminist spaces (Hoskin, 2020, p. 2320). As noted by Hoskin, “while feminists have a long and continued history of addressing the systemically unequal treatment of women, oftentimes, the blame for such treatment has been placed on femininity itself rather than the ways femininity is devalued” (Hoskin, 2020, p. 2320).

At the same time, other feminist traditions have sought to revalue the feminine. Cultural feminist thought, including the focus on the ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982) and accounts of maternal practice (Ruddick, 1989), regards caregiving and relationality as fundamentally valuable and morally significant. However, cultural feminist approaches have been critiqued for the thin boundary between affirming feminine-coded practices and taking an essentialist stance that entrenches fundamental gender differences (Liss et al., 2024). Of course, the difference between re-valuing the feminine in a feminist way versus a gender essentialist way is that the former involves men taking on feminine roles too, because they are so valuable, whereas the latter keeps the feminine confined to women, thus keeping women in a box. The “choice feminism” of the twenty-first century also attempted to recast traditionally feminine pursuits, such as marrying and raising children in lieu of paid work, as inherently feminist, provided that they reflected women's choices (Ferguson, 2010; Hirshman, 2005). Of course, domestic pursuits remain largely unvalued, and so the fact that these “choices” are overwhelmingly selected only by women—in a context that actively socializes women into these roles—remains a concern for gender equity (Hirshman, 2005).

Thus, feminism's relationship to femininity is complex and marked by enduring tension. Tradwives have exploited this vulnerability, flattening the feminist position and painting feminists as universally hostile to femininity (Bower, 2025). Tradwives, however, were responding to women's very real sense that in order to “get ahead,” they had to reject their femininity and embrace masculine values, qualities, and self-presentation. Thus, tradwives have been able to position themselves as a movement that can resurrect the beauty and glory of the feminine aesthetic and feminine values, while ignoring the feminist structural critique of how femininity has been traditionally linked to subordination. Of course, they themselves embrace a flattened type of femininity, one that is fully linked to heteropatriarchy and does not have room for varied sexual expressions (Hoskin & Blair, 2024). The irony is that tradwives are articulating a form of a “feminist” argument—echoing cultural feminist logic or embracing the ethos of “choice feminism” (Miller & Cole, 2026)—but devoid of any structural analysis: an argument that glorifies patriarchy rather than fighting it.

Stay at Home: COVID-19 and Social Media

The COVID-19 pandemic was an inflection point that further paved the way for the tradwife. Stay-at-home orders and the stresses of the pandemic made the neoliberal push to maximize individual achievement and success seem like an empty promise. Care work was desperately needed both at home and at school, pointing to its value and importance. However, women were the primary ones to do these largely unpaid and undervalued tasks (Alon et al., 2020; Bahn et al., 2020); even in the extreme circumstances of school closings and social distancing, men by and large did not step up to the demands of care work. In the COVID-induced “she-cession,” in which women disproportionately left the workforce (Andrews, 2020), women's hard-won and much-vaunted workplace gains were revealed to be fragile. The neoliberal feminist missive to “have it all” became unsustainable for many, and something had to give.

At the same time, during stay-at-home orders, people across the political spectrum were embracing traditional feminine aesthetics and activities. People started knitting and cross stitching, making bread from scratch, cooking elaborate meals, and planting gardens (e.g., Gammon, 2020; Mark, 2020). Time typically spent socializing with others or commuting to work could be redirected toward domestic pursuits. Being at home brought the home into focus, and creating a warm and comforting home environment felt appealing and comforting.

While we were isolated, social media allowed people to connect around these shared interests. Online spaces flourished where people could share their domestic pursuits, such as those that claimed the “cottagecore aesthetic” (Bowman, 2020; O’Luanaigh, 2023). Cottagecore was followed by people across the political spectrum (Hopner & Sykes, 2026) and made domestic femininity feel warm and beautiful. Tradwives rose at a similar time, also embracing domesticity but reframing it as part of an essentialist gender hierarchy. Due to “algorithmic tendrils” (Hopner & Sykes, 2026), many women who were interested in feminine aesthetics and cottagecore got fed tradwives content, allowing the movement to spread and grow. Of course, the women promoting the tradwife movement were social media influencers, often spending hours curating their feed and earning significant money doing so (Miller & Cole, 2026). In this way, tradwifery was a kind of remote work, perfectly suited for women homebound during quarantine. So while the tradwife movement popularized leaving the paid workforce to pursue domesticity, its popularity was driven by savvy entrepreneurs.

Bathed in cozy-sounding nostalgia, tradwives capitalized on the seemingly unmet promises of neoliberalism and the difficulty of having it all, and they combined it with feminine aesthetics and viral social media marketing. “Feminists did you wrong,” they told us. “You cannot have it all, and you should not try to be masculine. Embrace your femininity and essentialist gender roles.” In doing so, tradwives seemed to tell their followers, “you can return to a simpler past.” Social media was critical to the explosion of this movement not just because it offered a space for connection during stay-at-home orders, and not just because it made the movement so easily commodifiable. Social media was also essential to the tradwife's success because its artificial, curated nature made it well-suited to the task of invoking false nostalgia (Maares et al., 2021). In longing for an imagined past, the tradwife made a happy bedfellow to the recent worldwide rise in far-right politics.

A Far-Right Resurgence

This entrenchment into an idealized vision of the past was also influenced by the fact that, for many, the social disruption that happened around COVID-19 felt destabilizing. In a time of instability, people often look to an imagined past when things were simpler (Routledge et al., 2013). Many tradwives trade on nostalgia, filling their social media feeds with evocations of 1950s housewives or antebellum Southern belles (Bower, 2025; Miller & Cole, 2026), even though that lifestyle was only available to White, wealthy, heterosexual women (Coontz, 2005). Populist and far-right political movements—on the rise globally (Obradović et al., 2020)—also trade on nostalgia. They promise the return of a “simpler” or “better” past in order to build popular support (Kenny, 2017). It follows, then, that there is a good deal of overlap between tradwife content and right-wing and alt-right political messaging (Mattheis, 2018; Sykes & Hopner, 2024). To wit, the tradwife figure has helped to uphold White supremacist ideology by longing for a past that was marked by even more explicit racial subjugation than exists today (Bower, 2026; Miller & Cole, 2026).

Another major aspect of that desired “simpler” past, in the tradwife worldview, was a stark gender binary. Tradwives often long for a time when “women were women, and men were men,” a time of clearly defined gender roles. Thus emerges, both implicitly and explicitly, strong anti-transgender sentiment. The recent rise of transactivism has been painted in some reactionary discourses as a threat to the gender binary and the gender system as a whole (Akram et al., 2025). Thus, the tradwife movement became interwoven with anti-trans, gender essentialist rhetoric. Tradwives have shared right-wing talking points about transwomen unfairly entering women's sports and transgender rights threatening the nuclear family, and they have used the phrase “real women” to implicitly exclude and criticize transwomen (Stotzer & Nelson, 2025). This fear of “gender-ideology,” and this scapegoating of transpeople, is a key ingredient in the rising acceptance of populist and far-right political agendas (Akram et al., 2025).

This last decade of pivotal tensions and disruptions could have ushered in a recommitment to feminism. We could have had national conversations about men's (lack of) participation in the domestic sphere or the importance and value of care work for everyone. We could have avoided scapegoating and instead focused on structural improvements. But that is not what happened. Instead, we had a wave of nostalgic retrenchment that paved the way for both our reactionary political times and for the rise of the tradwife. The goal of the current special issue is to explore this tradwife phenomenon from a wide variety of perspectives using a wide variety of methodologies. Across seven articles, these authors provide an overview of the tradwife figure, offer theoretical perspectives on her origins and impacts, and call for continued research into this phenomenon.

Articles in This Special Issue

This special issue offers a solid view of the current landscape of tradwife content online. Collectively, these works reveal tensions in how “tradwives” are defined: what does it mean to self-identify as a “tradwife,” or to instead reject the label (Hopner & Sykes, 2026)? If someone refuses the label yet engages in that online space, should they be subject to critiques of the movement (Farvid et al., 2026b)? Is the concept useful offline to understand women living in traditional marriages who may or may not explicitly accept the label (Rappaport et al., 2026)? Basker, Farvid et al. (2026a) begin this issue, with their first contribution, by offering their definition of the tradwife. Further, they make a case for the tradwife as a “postfeminist” figure, a woman befitting a time when feminism is seen as passé. Grounded in an incisive analysis of recent cultural shifts, these authors identify postfeminist and alt-right messages communicated by perhaps the first famous tradwife, British influencer, Alena Kate Pettitt. By guiding us through key cultural precursors and grounding their analysis in an originator of the trend, Basker, Farvid et al. (2026a) provide a fitting introduction to the issue.

The next two articles continue this blend of cultural analysis and feminist theory, supported with insights from broader datasets. Miller and Cole (2026) offer an analysis of the most popular TikTok posts from the top White tradwife influencers, documenting how they prescribe femininity, invoke a nostalgic past, promote tradlife, and monetize their posts to generate income. This foregrounds an important aspect of the tradwife phenomenon: Their social media presence is not just a medium for communicating gendered ideology, it is also a business. Their analysis reveals the ways in which tradwife influencers are profiting while implicitly and explicitly normalizing extreme beliefs borrowed from the racial and sexual politics of a previous generation. In their second article in this issue, Farvid et al. (2026b) use visual motif analysis to examine influential tradwives from Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok. They identify four visual subtypes of “tradwife,” each illustrated with compelling images. Further, they explore how these figures communicate regressive, patriarchal, and individualist ideologies.

Given that the unfinished revolution remains unfinished in part because of men's reluctance to pick up the slack at home, it is important to grapple with men's role in the tradwife phenomenon. Two papers in this issue tackle this question. First, Bower (2026) offers a theoretical examination of a nearly-invisible figure: the tradhusband. Acknowledging that these men are eclipsed online by their content-creator wives, the author applies a Black feminist lens to describe how the roles of “tradhusband” and “tradwife” are co-created, built on contrasting and complementary ideals of masculinity and femininity. She further argues that trad-archetypes like provider and ideal housewife provider and ideal housewife are made possible by the overlooked labor of Black women. Finally, Bower (2026) explains how economic forces and limiting cultural images exclude Black men and women from the tradculture that they help make possible. Next, Robnett and Hammond (2026) provide evidence that men's perceptions of and appreciation for the tradwife movement are connected to multiple facets of sexism. The papers share a focus on men, yet also reveal the span of methods present in this issue, from Bower's (2026) pure theory to Robnett and Hammond's (2026) complementary application of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Across these diverse methods, these papers converge on a shared takeaway: Men's place in the tradwife phenomenon seems to be grounded in problematic—hostile, essentialist, and limiting—views of women.

The final two papers grapple with the lived experiences of women within this movement. Rappaport et al. (2026) offer an amalgamated case study of a therapist whose client embodies tradwife values. This paper offers insights for mental health practitioners who hold different values and worldviews than their clients. The authors acknowledge the threat of trauma and disempowerment for women living “tradlives,” while also conveying empathy for women in traditional marriages. Whereas this case study focuses on women who embrace the tradlife, Hopner and Sykes (2026) ask what leads women to reject the tradwife label. In their netnographic analysis, the authors present views from women who have “de-tradded” in multiple ways: rejecting the label but embracing the lifestyle, or even leaving the whole lifestyle behind. The tradwife figure is not wholly new, nor is disillusionment with the lifestyle. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote of “the problem that has no name,” the “desperation” of housewives and the lack of fulfillment from “husband and … children and … home” (1963/2001, pp. 62–63). In Hopner and Sykes's (2026) feminist storytelling, the insights of some of these modern “de-tradded” TikTokkers could very well have been written 60 years ago.

A Call to Psychology Researchers

The papers in this issue largely utilize qualitative methodologies that in many cases were borrowed from fields such as sociology and communication studies (e.g., visual motif analysis, netnography, feminist storytelling, etc.). This is appropriate for a nascent topic with little psychological literature directly examining it. These papers can serve as a strong exploratory foundation on which to derive hypothesis-driven research questions regarding the appeal and consequences of tradwife ideology. As psychologists, we hope that this issue sparks conversation and launches further qualitative and quantitative work that firmly centers the psychology of the tradwife phenomenon.

There is much room for future psychologists to connect the current tradwife moment with existing psychological theories and concepts. Why are tradwives popular? Feminist psychologists have already helped us understand the persistence of essentialist understandings of gender. For example, researchers have investigated the enduring appeal of gendered scripts in heterosexual romance (Brumbaugh & Doherty, 2024) and the steadiness of gender stereotypes (Eagly et al., 2020). Robnett and Hammond (2026) give us an intriguing example of how ambivalent sexism contributes to the appeal of tradwives. Excitingly, this seems like the tip of the iceberg in utilizing ambivalent sexism to understand exactly what tradwives are selling and to whom. Future work could analyze how benevolent sexist ideas are portrayed in tradwife content, document both benevolent and hostile responses to tradwives, and even experimentally examine how priming benevolent and hostile sexism could heighten the intake of tradwife ideology or change people's reaction to it.

A core idea within ambivalent sexism is that only certain women are worthy of the special care offered through benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996), and we see this echoed in the racial dynamics of tradwives. As Miller and Cole (2026) point out, tradwives enact a White femininity that can extract benefits (such as access to the wealth and power of privileged White men) from a system that oppresses women who do not share their race and class. The racial dynamics of tradwives is well-theorized in this special issue (see especially Bower, 2026; Miller & Cole, 2026; and Rappaport et al., 2026), paving the way for empirical work that documents the extent to which racism fuels tradwife ideology and appeal. In a similar vein, researchers might examine links between anti-transgender prejudice and interest in tradwife content. Gender essentialism, which has been shown to fuel anti-transgender prejudice (Wilton et al., 2019), is not only evident in tradwife content (Farvid et al., 2026b), it may also be a key reason why certain men like it (Robnett & Hammond, 2026). And of course, class plays a key role here as well. Elite women set the cultural standard that staying out of the workforce to focus on mothering is ideal (Hirshman, 2005), leaving working-class women to face the double bind of criticism for “abandoning” their children for paid work or becoming a “welfare queen” too lazy to earn a living (Dodson, 2013). Likewise, tradwives offer an aesthetic and lifestyle made possible by wealth (Miller & Cole, 2026), yet rarely seem to acknowledge the resources required. In all these ways, the lifestyle advocated by tradwives reaches far beyond gender prescriptions, thus providing fertile ground for feminist psychologists to demonstrate the mutual reinforcement of intersecting systems of oppression. The irony is that although feminist psychologists may critique the tradlife as oppressive, it is an oppression only available to women with privilege.

The question of who is viewing tradwife content, and why, feels wide open, as it is little examined in this special issue. Certainly, some viewers must see tradwife content as aspirational. Others may be “hate-scrolling:” taking satisfaction from mocking and critiquing the cultural performance of tradwives, akin to the documented phenomenon of hate-watching reality TV shows (Cohen et al., 2021). What differentiates these camps of followers may be of great interest to political and personality psychologists. Further, under what conditions might these two groups blur? Given the nature of social media algorithms and the vulnerabilities of social cognition, such as the mere exposure effect (wherein repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking; Zajonc, 1968) and the third-person effect (wherein people underestimate their own susceptibility to media messaging; Davison, 1983), it seems possible that viewers who are initially critical of tradwives could still be meaningfully influenced by their content. Future researchers would do well to investigate how and why attitudes shift over time in diverse viewers of tradwife content.

Even among those who recognize the problematic aspects of the tradwife message, responses may range from empathy to judgment. As we edited this special issue, we repeatedly saw tensions between sympathetically understanding the perspective of tradwives and critiquing their contribution to a shift toward the alt-right. Tradwives are walking a narrow tightrope: They are attempting to achieve financial and personal fulfillment in the midst of patriarchal gender roles, while at the same time, narrowing the tightrope itself. Reviewers commented that authors were at times sympathizing too much with tradwives and other times judging them too harshly, a balance made trickier in the political landscape of a highly scrutinized academia. As editors we saw room for both reactions. As such, the issue conveys well-placed empathy in a clinical case study of a “tradwife-adjacent” woman navigating marital, family, and religious dynamics (Rappaport et al., 2026), and it contains more forceful critiques in broader papers highlighting the structural forces fueling the tradwife movement (e.g., Bower, 2026). Future researchers may wish to explore this tension, perhaps by examining how empathy versus judgment responses influence women's desires to de-trad, or by testing how feminist pushback on the tradwife movement is received based on its balance of individually placed empathy and systemic critique.

Much of this special issue, and the introductory article, has concerned itself with theorizing about the relationship between feminism and the emergence of tradwives, and yet there is no empirical documentation of how feminist identification, attitudes, or behaviors relate to perceptions of and engagement with tradwives. Many hypotheses could be derived from the observation that the half-finished feminist revolution, wherein gender equity in the workplace has far outpaced gender equity at home, created conditions ripe for the appeal of tradwives. For example, are people with more equitable partnerships at home less attracted to tradwife content than those in unequal partnerships? Does the gendered dynamics of those partnerships matter (e.g., same-sex couples, heterosexual couples where women outearn men)? Are people who believe that feminism has already accomplished all that it can particularly drawn to tradwife ideology? How does endorsement of different types of feminism, such as womanism, cultural feminism, or liberal feminism (Henley et al., 1998), relate to engagement with tradwife content? The theorizing in this special issue has laid an especially strong foundation for future research to examine these kinds of empirical questions.

Psychologists are well-suited to uncover the impact of tradwives, a pressing next question named by scholars in this issue. Experimental and longitudinal methodologies could uncover how tradwife content that both explicitly and implicitly sells a retro version of submissive femininity shapes viewers’ perspectives and behaviors. For example, when does viewing tradwife content have a real effect on women's own ambition and sense of self (Hirshman, 2005)? In particular, future researchers could tease out whether tradwife content is shaping viewers, whether certain viewers are drawn to tradwife content because it reinforces their existing perspectives, or whether both causal paths are mutually reinforcing. Psychological theories such as the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) may illuminate how the aesthetics of tradwife content operate as a peripheral cue to persuasion for audiences who are nonchalantly scrolling social media, and thus less keen to scrutinize the actual arguments of tradwife ideology. Under what conditions might viewers be more apt to recognize the contradictions of tradwife influencers, such as monetizing the message that wives should not earn a living, or how the conspicuously labor-intensive nature of homesteading and homeschooling is likely incompatible with the time-consuming production of social media content, never mind more basic domestic responsibilities? Findings from research rigorously investigating these questions could fuel social media literacy interventions that encourage critical engagement with the more central routes of tradwife persuasion.

Media literacy interventions have been tested for years, aimed at curbing negative media influence on a host of outcomes (Cho et al., 2025). Recently, scholars have focused on science misinformation as a particular social media risk. Within an ecosystem of right-wing-fueled scientific mistrust (Kerr & Wilson, 2021), tradwife influencers may be able to launder misinformation that promotes their political ideologies. This may already be happening in trending posts that use scientific misinformation to warn women off of hormonal contraception (Weber & Malhi, 2024; Westwood, 2025). As such, future researchers might determine the degree to which misinformation is present in tradwife posts. They might also identify which types of media literacy strategies (e.g., Panizza et al., 2022) or misinformation-spotting interventions (e.g., Simchon et al., 2026) are most effective against these influences.

Conclusion

In 2005, feminist legal scholar Linda Hirshman publicly lamented the seeming trend of women choosing homemaking over paid work, and in doing so, curtailing their financial independence and cultural power. Looking to the future, Hirshman stated, “feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own” (p. 23, italics hers). Decades after Hirshman's warning, the tradwife is positioned as one such solution to a still unequal world Basker, Farvid et al. (2026a). The empirical and theoretical arguments presented in this special issue, however, make the case that this ideal perpetuates deeper issues, rather than solves the problem of the unfinished feminist revolution. As feminist psychologists, this is not the solution we proposed. Yet, the tradwife, decade after decade, still captures attention. This only exposes the continued urgency of Hirshman's call, of the need for feminists, including feminist psychologists, to enact better solutions.