Shifting the Focus Towards “Tradhusbands:” A Black Feminist Examination of the Visible Tradwife and the Invisible but Integral Role of the Tradhusband

Abstract

Scholarship has seen recent growth in the study of the tradwife movement, yet the “tradhusband” has received almost no mention. Although tradhusbands rarely appear in tradwives’ content, when they do, they are only seen through the gaze of the tradwife. The tradhusband plays an integral but largely invisible role in facilitating the more visible figure of the tradwife. Adopting a postmodern and Black feminist lens, this theoretical article argues for the importance of locating the tradwife movement within hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity, suggesting that the tradwife and the tradhusband are two mutually co-constructed roles. This article offers the first definition in feminist academia of the “tradhusband” to describe the spouse or romantic partner of a tradwife. The tradhusband serves as a symbolic mechanism to display and prescribe the benefits of a traditional lifestyle, depicting the tradhusband as a “saviour” and “protector.” By excluding the tradhusband in the analysis of tradculture, we risk oversimplifying the construction of traditional gender roles in the tradwife movement.

As a social media movement, tradwives have received increasing attention in the past few years (Banet-Weiser & Reinis, 2026), particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Rottenberg & Orgad, 2022) when homemaking and lifestyle-based content saw general increases (Casey & Littler, 2022). Women who identify as tradwives adopt traditionally feminine gender roles and seek status through domestic labour (Mattheis, 2021). In a “post-feminist” age, increasing debates about the gendered division of labour have drawn further attention to the tradwife movement's critique of fourth-wave feminism (Proctor, 2022). In addition, shifting trends in the digital social media landscape have led to a rise in anti-feminist content, often referred to as the “manosphere” (Scott & Day, 2025). The tradwife movement is a key contributor to the manosphere due to its alt-right connections, espousal of anti-feminist toxic femininity, and complicity with patriarchy (Mattheis, 2021). Anti-feminist toxic femininity is a form of internalised misogyny (Antony, 2019), perpetuating “gender expectations that keep women subservient, quiet and submissive to men's domination and aggression” (McCann, 2022, p. 9).

As tradwives are the main content creators within tradculture, the male spouse is often seen as peripheral—even invisible—resulting in their neglect within tradwife scholarship. “Even as he is endlessly referenced, the husband is rarely seen” (Banet-Weiser & Reinis, 2026, p. 1). When they are seen, it is almost exclusively through the gaze of the tradwife. Given tradhusbands’ very limited social media presence, the audience's understanding of them differs from that of tradwives, who have their own voices and craft their own aesthetics. However, without a supplementary “tradhusband,” a tradwife persona cannot exist. By shifting attention to the role of husbands within the tradwife movement, the intimate connection between gendered displays of masculinity and femininity can be better understood.

This theoretical article introduces the term “tradhusband” to describe the spouse and romantic partner of a tradwife. Through a Black feminist lens, bolstered by a postmodern understanding of femininity, this article conceptualises how the two roles are mutually co-constructed. Part one defines the figure of the tradhusband and locates its role within tradculture. This section also stresses the importance of combining a Black and postmodern feminist lens to appreciate how gender performances and roles are co-constructed within the tradwife movement. Part two considers the tradhusband's invisible role as the facilitator of the tradwife's lifestyle through several symbolic functions that allow the tradwife to romanticise displays of patriarchal femininity; that is, the tradhusband is cast as “the saviour,” an ideal worker, and “the protector.” Part three explores a key consequence of the tradhusbands’ invisible role, a role that allows tradwives to romanticise submission to their husbands. The paper ends with a consideration of how, through co-constructed roles, people of colour can be excluded from participating in tradculture, should they wish.

Through understanding the symbolic but often invisible role of the tradhusband, research can better appreciate how traditional masculinity operates within tradculture. Traditional masculinity shapes, constrains, and even reinforces the performance of patriarchal femininity enacted by tradwives. In doing so, the tradhusband enables the tradwife to participate in traditional gender roles, romanticise the division of labour, and submit to patriarchal relationships. To position and locate the symbolic but often invisible role of the tradhusband within tradculture, we must first establish what we mean by a tradhusband.

The Construction of the Tradhusband

To my knowledge, “tradhusband” is a term invented by this author and used for the first time in academia. As a variation of tradhusband, “trad husband” has been used very infrequently in popular culture and media in a somewhat paradoxical sense, making this article's use highly distinctive. Male content creators, such as Hunter Leppard, sometimes use “trad husband” ironically as a stand-in for a househusband who performs domestic labour, but rarely subscribes to traditional gender roles; thus, they do not aspire to the ideals perpetuated by the tradwife movement. To avoid confusion caused by mislabelling, this article steers clear of diminutives like “trad husband,” instead combining “trad” and “husband” into one term with one clear meaning: the male counterpart of a woman who identifies as a tradwife.

Hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity demonstrate how gendered identities are mutually formed and dependent upon one another (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Hegemonic masculinity is defined as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of the patriarchy, which guarantees…the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (Connell, 1995, p. 77). Thus, hegemonic masculinity is an ideology that endorses men's dominant position in society, and to maintain such power, women are relegated to the subordinate (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). As a result, constructions of masculinity within U.S. culture are intrinsically tied to femininity, as they are mutually dependent upon each other (Connell, 1995). Indeed, the corollary to hegemonic masculinity is emphasised femininity. Emphasised femininity is “defined by its compliance with subordination and accommodation of male desires, which they consider central to men's dominance over women” (Hoskin, 2020, p. 687).

Tradhusbands must be positioned in the tradwife movement within the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity. Shifting the focus away from femininity to the construction of masculinity in traditional gender roles allows feminist scholarship to break away from a tendency to place singular attention on tradwives. Centring tradhusbands may illuminate how traditional masculinity and femininity are reproduced at the intersections of class, gender, and race.

Theoretical Frameworks: Black Feminist Thought and Poststructural Feminism

When combined as theoretical standpoints, Black feminist thought and a poststructural feminist lens are particularly useful for examining gender displays in the tradwife movement, as both illuminate how social roles are inextricably linked. Postmodern feminist conceptualisations consider how gender is socially produced (Weedon, 2010) through the repetition of societal gender norms within a “highly rigid regulatory framework” (Butler, 1990, p. 33). Gender is a situated performance, something one does, and is “the product of social doings” through interaction (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 129). Crucially, “gender is not created in a vacuum,” but is highly influenced by dominant historical and cultural mechanisms (Temmerman et al., 2018, p. 99). It is imperative to link ideas of “doing gender” within dominant power structures and social relations that form the backdrop for gendered acts to emerge (Swenson, 2009), offering a cohesive theoretical pairing with Black feminism.

A Black feminist consciousness is integral to examining the sociopolitical backdrop through which the tradwife movement operates, as constructed gender roles cannot be disentangled from other systems of oppression like race and class. Although limited research has examined tradwives through a Black feminist lens (Bower, 2024; Llanera, 2022), a feminist consciousness that diverges from the contemporary assumed Whiteness in feminism is vital (see Collins, 1996). Primarily focusing on the connections between tradculture and the alt-right, tradwife research often examines the construction of gender and its implications within the social media movement, but underappreciates the role of race in underpinning gendered constructions (Mattheis, 2021). Both forms of oppression play a vital role in understanding discourses in the tradwife movement, as race is essential to understanding White supremacy (Crenshaw, 2013), and gender is a key site where the structural power of Whiteness is maintained (hooks, 1981). Black feminism can help us understand that not all women are oppressed in the same way (hooks, 1989); however, they are all subject to intersecting modes of privilege and oppression (Crenshaw, 1991), providing a more nuanced understanding of how gender performances are constructed. Black feminism illuminates how the tradwife role is made possible by systems of power related to race and class, as White women were often dependent on the invisible labour of women of colour. Consequently, constructions of femininity were extremely White-centric, shaped by colonization, race-, and class-based tensions.

There are a wide range of Black feminisms, all of which emphasise the intersecting experiences of racial and gender discrimination in Black women's lives (Brewer, 2021; Smith, 1983). Black feminist consciousness acknowledges that Black women face oppression for both their race and gender, and as such, discrimination is a systemic reality for Black women (hooks, 1989). Due to this distinctive but longstanding history of interlocking oppressions, Black women may have a different social reality than White women. In particular, Black feminism recognises that the systemic reality of race and gender is intimately linked to slavery, colonialism, and the sexual and labour exploitation of Black women (Carby, 2009). To redress the neglect of Black women's systemic reality, Black feminism subverts traditionally accepted forms of knowledge, instead emphasising the value and validity of Black women's lived experience (Collins, 1986).

Black femininity has been subject to countless negative cultural stereotypes, including the construction of women's domestic role. In terms of contemporary femininity, White women were viewed as “ladies” and “genteel,” whilst Black women were historically dehumanized, masculinized, and seen as sexual objects in a post-slavery era (Palmer, 1983, p. 153). Black women's domestic gender performances were not afforded the same value as their White counterparts (Dow, 2014). Specifically, domesticity was often employed as a mechanism for conceptualising the nation through the everyday home (Harley, 1990). Middle-class White women were viewed as the centre of the home and therefore their domestic labour was glorified as defining the nation's future. This glorification served in sharp contrast to the domesticity of ethnic minority women, which was often undervalued and relied upon by White women (Kaplan, 1998).

Due to frequent negative cultural constructions, Black feminist literature strongly advocates for the need to defend Black womanhood (White, 1999). Furthermore, representations of Black identities need an intersectional awareness to ensure that racially based stereotypes about the Black experience (e.g., Jezebel and Mammy stereotypes for Black women; stereotypes regarding criminality for Black men) are not overly simplified (Whiteneir, 2019). Black feminism allows for an examination of the connections among race, gender, class, and anti-feminism, making it an important theoretical tool for considering the sociocultural mechanisms embedded in the tradwife movement and its relation to the tradhusband.

What the Tradhusband Role Makes Possible for the Tradwife

The tradhusband must be appropriately acknowledged within the tradwife movement, as the masculinity portrayed by tradhusbands is culturally co-constructed in relation to their wife's femininity. Tradwives reproduce ideas of heteropatriarchy and construct heterosexual men as “the dominant group in society or culture” (Kelley & Arce-Trigatti, 2021, p. 256). Although the audience is rarely presented with the tradhusband's opinions in their own voice, the tradhusband functions as a necessary counterpart to the tradwife. The tradhusband is responsible for providing financial support for the family, acting as an ideal worker to meet the family's economic needs. By doing so, the tradwife can retreat from the paid labour force and instead focus on fulfilling her desired role in the household. Because the tradhusband enables the tradwife to adopt the tradlifestyle, he is invariably cast into the role of “saviour” and “protector” in the hetropatriarchal relationship dynamic.

The Tradhusband as the “Saviour”

One of the most visceral ways the tradwife movement constructs the tradhusband is by romanticising him as a “saviour” from the second-wave feminist liberation movement. Tradhusbands are positioned as “saviour figures” who have freed tradwives from the pressures of the working environment and competitive capitalist landscape, instead allowing tradwives to perform domestic labour within the home (Pettitt, 2025). As a result, tradwife content typically focuses on the home as a physical space, a private refuge that creates a public/private binary way of thinking.

The tradwife movement actively rejects historical and contemporary ideas shaped by second-wave feminism that casts the housewife as a subordinate figure in need of liberation from the drudgery of housework (Johnson, 2000). Instead, tradwives promote anti-feminist values by sharing their own positive experiences of gaining status through domesticity (Banet-Weiser & Reinis, 2026; Love, 2020). However, when promoting anti-feminist views, the tradwife movement oversimplifies complex dynamics that shape women's rights, barriers in the workforce, and racial dynamics during the feminist liberation movement. For example, the construction of gender is inextricably bound and shaped by the economy, as women act as productive and reproductive labourers within a patriarchal capitalist society (Collins, 1986).

The tradhusband is positioned as the main facilitator of the tradwife's lifestyle, enabling tradwives to participate meaningfully in tradculture. As Pettitt (2020) described, “for the past 18 years, I have lived the Trad Wife lifestyle since meeting my husband at the age of 21. ¹ ” Estee Williams is a U.S. based content creator, who Dr. Phil recently described as the "face of the tradwife movement" (Cregan Hermstad, 2024, 02:20-02:28). Sharing a similar story to Alena Pettitt, Williams (2023) described how, “in 2019, I was frustrated in my personal life, struggling with college, and no relationship with God. In 2020, I met the love of my life, found my purpose, and devoted my life to Christ”. As illustrated, trad-content constructs the tradhusband and his support as a key milestone in the tradwife journey.

Arguably, by casting the tradhusband as the main facilitator of the trad lifestyle, tradwives are denied personal agency. Instead, after marriage or meeting their future husband, tradwives often defer to their husbands’ preferences or the expectations of tradculture, which guides their withdrawal from the workforce and adoption of domestic roles. In their attempts to grant themselves agency, tradwives paradoxically reinforce stereotypes of victimisation by constructing the tradhusband as their saviour. This construction aligns with Picart's (2003, p. 97) conceptualisation of “gendered helplessness,” which articulates how victims are often seen as people who need to “be protected from ‘evil’ and predatory forces because she is incapable of any acts of agency to defend herself.” Accordingly, the tradwife is denied personhood by virtue of her dependence on the tradhusband's supposed emancipatory role.

In addition, tradhusbands are constructed “saviours” by offering tradwives a life of domestic bliss that they claim to have always wanted. In reality, tradwives financially benefit from promoting a life of domesticity that is frequently inaccessible to the average woman (Banet-Weiser & Reinis, 2026). Tradwife content is highly curated (Bower, 2024), underscoring narratives of a fairytale romance. These narratives draw upon iconography from 1970s and ‘80s women's magazines’ depiction of lifelong relationships, in which “men are presented as princes on their white horses” (Temmerman et al., 2018, p. 107). Accordingly, the depiction of tradhusbands is also highly curated amidst visually appealing content and aesthetics (Bower, 2024). These narratives appear harmless on the surface, yet they are underscored by colonial, racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes that shape relational power dynamics, including depictions of the ideal worker and the ideal housewife.

Ideal Workers and Ideal Housewives

Tradhusbands are frequently represented as ideal workers in tradculture, as they are positioned as the primary breadwinner whilst the wife stays at home (Stotzer & Nelson, 2025b). Accordingly, tradwives are seen as “domestic angels” because they create a safe space at home for tradhusbands to return after demanding jobs. Tradhusbands are not expected to be wealthy, but they are expected to be successful enough to maintain the tradlifestyle and enable their wife to stay home. Although tradhusbands are seen as ideal workers, tradculture often suggests ways women should practice good money management (Storier, 2021), placing responsibility on women to manage a single income.

These gendered expectations for White housewives are generalized as expectations for all women. The trope of a tradhusband as the ideal worker disregards the interconnections among gender, race, and class, ultimately reproducing such hierarchies and ignoring the experiences and needs of people of colour (Love, 2020). For example, throughout the twentieth century, segregation, post-slavery, and colonial-rooted politics meant that immigrant and ethnic minority men faced significant barriers in the labour market, with women often playing key roles as contributors and primary breadwinners (Glenn, 1992). Despite their involvement in the labour market, however, women's labour was often underappreciated or seldom mentioned.

Black women, in particular, were scrutinised for their supposed lack of contribution to the labour force, further ignoring and undermining their contribution to the economy. Historic constructions of Black womanhood are explicitly bound with post-slavery attitudes surrounding patriarchal femininity where, unlike “the domestic ideal for white women of all classes, the larger society deemed it ‘unnatural,’ and in fact ‘evil,’ for Black married women to ‘play the lady,’ while their husbands supported them” (Higginbotham, 1992, as cited in Mattheis, 2021, p. 95). These historic attitudes still linger today, where working-class Black homemakers are often viewed as “pathological and weak” due to their supposed reliance on state welfare (Dow, 2014, p. 37). After conducting in-depth interviews with sixty African American middle-class women, Dow (2014) found that problematic stereotypes (e.g., “Welfare Queen”) of Black stay-at-home mothers resulted in significant stereotype threat. Black stay-at-home mothers felt pressured to highlight their husbands’ financial solvency rather than their reliance upon the state. White women are not subjected to the same cultural narratives that position Black homemakers as state-reliant (Kohler-Hausmann, 2015). Thus, the evocative imagery of the ideal worker continues to reinforce expectations of domesticity for White women exclusively.

The characterization of the tradhusband as an ideal worker effectively undermines the tradwife's agency. The neoliberal notion of “choice” in embarking on a tradlifestyle oversimplifies intersecting modes of oppression (e.g., disability, socioeconomic status, violence against women, wage gap disparity) that uniquely affect and constrain women's experiences (Crenshaw, 1991; Duncan, 2015). Of course, some tradwives appear to occupy privileged positions in making agentic decisions; however, they are also bound by the broader structure's oppressive nature and possess a form of agency that is more muted than it initially appears (Hennecke, 2024; Wiens & McWebb, 2025). For instance, Australian tradwife Jasmine Dinnis (2025), who advocates for traditional submission, took a break from social media in 2025, explaining to her followers that the immense pressure to go viral as a tradwife had become too overwhelming for her. Tradwives clearly experience pressure to create the illusion of a highly visually appealing lifestyle to promote the benefits of tradculture, but they may also find themselves constrained by pressures to successfully perform gender. By understanding that women's participation in tradculture is a form of constrained agency, we shift the focus back to institutional misogyny that condones and reinforces oppression.

The Tradhusband as the Financial “Protector” and Gendered Division of Labor

The romanticisation of the tradhusband as an ideal worker offers tradwives a sense of financial security, enabling them to pursue a traditional lifestyle within the home (Chapman, 2018; Stotzer & Nelson, 2025a). Tradwife content reproduces the idea that women should gain status by engaging in domestic tasks, specifically those categorised as “women's work” such as cooking and cleaning (Dadheech & Sharma, 2022). However, gendered labour divisions were “largely illusory for working-class households, including immigrant and racial-ethnic families,” where women often took on “income-earning activities in and out of the home” (Glenn, 1992, pp. 3–4). In proposing a nostalgic return to a time before women had considerable access to the labour market, tradwives perpetuate a long-held problematic tradition that minimises women's participation in the labour force prior to the 1950s, where their contributions were often seen as less legitimate than men's (Proctor, 2022).

In the 1950s, it was commonplace for White, middle-class families to hire ethnic minority and immigrant workers for domestic labour (Romero, 1988; Wooten & Branch, 2012). Despite this historical context, tradwives monopolise and reproduce aesthetics that exclude Black women and other women or colour from such glorified social roles. In nostalgically longing for an era where (White) women were relegated to the domestic sphere, tradwives conspicuously forget the accompanying contemporary cultural stereotypes that position Black women in roles of servitude, such as the “Mammy” figure (Crenshaw, 2013).

Moreover, the financial protector status of the tradhusband must be untangled amidst the matrix of class, race, and gender that shape Black men's ability to fulfil this role. Rather than locating Black men's mass incarceration within a post-slavery context shaped by institutional racism, they are frequently stereotyped as and reduced to deviant criminals (Baker & O’Connell, 2022; Council, 2025). These depictions of Black men occur alongside controlling images of Black women that characterize them as inherently matriarchal, domineering, aggressive, and irate (i.e., Sapphire), all of which have been theorized to contribute to the disproportionate number of Black women-headed households and the erosion of the Black family (Baker & O’Connell, 2022; Letiecq, 2024; Stivers, 2022). These narratives ignore the systemic oppression that Black men and women face and suggest that Black women must appear strong and resilient (Abrams et al., 2014)—narratives that White men and women are not subject to.

Tradwives’ desire to return to a nostalgic period where women performed the bulk of domestic labour in the household is a misrepresentation of the systemic reality of how domestic labour was performed. By misrepresenting how women performed domestic labour in contemporary America, tradwives continue to reinforce the chronic underappreciation of labour performed by women of colour and ignore the sociocultural conditions that shaped the Black family's participation in the labour market.

Romanticising Submission to the Tradhusband

A key consequence of the tradwife movement's depiction of the tradhusband as a saviour, ideal worker, and protector is the romanticisation of submitting to the tradhusband. Stotzer and Nelson (2025a) found that tradwives sometimes described great comfort in relinquishing control and authority to their husbands as the primary decision-makers, particularly among those who espoused anti-feminist rhetoric and who felt pressure to balance a successful career with domestic labour. By casting the tradhusband as a dominant “saviour,” tradwives are allowed a retreat from the neo-liberal workplace environment, ultimately reinforcing the link between patriarchal femininity and hegemonic masculinity.

For example, some tradwives endorse gender essentialist beliefs and construct submission to their husbands as a beautiful choice (Tebaldi, 2024) or a key aspect of “women's purpose” (Tebaldi, 2021). The tradwife culture dismisses second-wave feminist concerns that the home is a key site for the oppression of women, instead relying on the rhetoric of “choice” and agency to justify itself (Proctor, 2022). In doing so, concerns about the potential for abuse are minimised and relegated to a private issue.

Tradwives are clearly aware of the tension between gender and the home, but they circumnavigate this by suggesting that we operate within a post-feminist age. Both tradwives and tradhusbands romanticise nostalgic ideals of femininity where the housewife is celebrated and ascribed status, while also understanding that women's dependence on men places them at risk for abuse. Stotzer and Nelson (2025b) studied online tradwife content and found that tradwives endorsed a modern notion of femininity; “I am definitely a housewife in the right generation….I can have my own bank account, vote, own property, and have my husband come home to me in a robe with my hair not done, and he couldn’t care less” (p. 10). Rather than aligning with feminism, tradwives disregard its contributions and romanticise submission to the tradhusband, ignoring the complexity surrounding agency and submission in a patriarchal society.

To clarify, the majority of tradwife content advocates for women's biblical submission to their husbands (Sykes & Hopner, 2024). Biblical submission espouses distinct gender roles for men and women; promotes submission and partnership in marriage; and frames both parties as respectful, yet dependent on one another (Sampson, 2024). However, even within this biblical interpretation of submission, tradculture perpetuates an objectified view of womanhood under patriarchal ownership and denies tradwives agency (Stotzer & Nelson, 2025b).

Submission and Masculinity

In romanticising women's submission to men, tradwives’ rhetoric can have dangerous implications in terms of violence against women and the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity (Hearn, 2012). Because hegemonic masculinity centres power and dominance, violence is portrayed as a masculine ideal that confers status among men in society (Smiet, 2015). Tradhusbands’ adoption of masculinity centres men's avoidance of femininity; tradhusbands are constructed as the polar opposite of what is seen as feminine (i.e., so-called “antifemininity;” Smith et al., 2015, p. 164). By submitting to tradhusbands, tradwives walk a dangerous tight rope that places them at risk for violence and aggression. Indeed, studies have connected hegemonic masculine gender roles to male-perpetrated sexual aggression (Anderson, 2018; Leone & Parrott, 2018; Ray & Parkhill, 2023; Tomsen & Messerschmidt, 2020). Even in cases of non-violence, hegemonic masculinity legitimises violence under patriarchy. By glorifying the freedom that comes from relinquishing control to their male partner, tradwives reproduce cultural mechanisms of patriarchal domination. Even without being visible, submission to the tradhusband condones and perpetuates patriarchal domination.

Exclusion from Tradculture

Feminist scholarship has established that the tradwife movement is predominantly White women-dominated (Bower, 2024; Llanera, 2022; Mattheis, 2021), with Black women often seeking alternative identifying terms to distance themselves from the movement, such as “trad-fem” (Procope Bell, 2024). Tradculture, by its own namesake, restricts access for women of colour by generalising the experiences of White women to all women. In a society stratified by class, working-class women in the 1950s and ‘60s were often key financial providers (Glenn, 1992), a fact that tradculture is strangely silent about.

Furthermore, should they wish to participate in tradculture, Black men are likely not seen as “ideal workers” due to social structures that have historically privileged Whiteness. Rather, Black men are stereotyped as criminals and inadequate leaders and financial contributors to families (Council, 2025; Lee et al., 2026). In a similar vein, Black women have been scrutinised for supposedly not contributing enough to the labour market, as evidenced by the demonisation of contemporary stay-at-home mothers (Dow, 2014; Mattheis, 2021). Simultaneously, Black womanhood has been bound by negative cultural imagery, often casting Black women in roles of servitude to White women (Crenshaw, 2013). Consequently, the figure of the White, genteel homemaker displaying patriarchal femininity (tradwife) may not be an accessible ideal for Black women.

The framing of “traditional” gender roles necessarily excludes anyone not White. Although such exclusion may be intrinsically problematic—even if it is exclusion from a patriarchal subculture that is harmful to women—this exclusionary nature may reduce the likelihood of minoritized populations finding themselves in oppressive sub-cultures. Exclusion from tradculture may have the unintended consequence of minimising the pressure that women of colour face to enact certain displays of harmful patriarchal femininity.

Implications for Academia, Practice and Beyond

For further research, academic scholarship should broaden the focus of the tradwife movement to better appreciate the integral role of hegemonic masculinity. Activists should also be conscious of and consider how gender roles are co-constructed in the gendered division of labour and in online anti-feminism to avoid objectifying participants in tradculture. Shifting focus away from traditional femininity would allow further exploration of the tradwife movement's unique positioning within the Manosphere, given its woman-centred target audience. A pivot towards re-examining the tradwife movement through the role of the tradhusband could also allow for a more nuanced, less binary understanding of how gender functions in digital spaces occupied by the alt-right (see Scott & Day, 2025). Furthermore, approaching tradculture through a Black feminist lens can help deepen our understanding of co-constructed gendered performances, particularly how specific identities are affected, restricted, excluded, or renegotiated within the dynamics of gender-racial politics that shape tradculture. The role of the tradhusband cannot be forgotten in how we speak and write about tradwives, given that both roles are co-constructed and bound by patriarchy.

Concluding Thoughts

The tradhusband is a neglected figure in feminist scholarship and popular culture's depictions of tradwives, as tradhusbands rarely have an online presence and seldom appear in tradwife content. Accordingly, the audience's perception of them is shaped by tradwives themselves. This absence of the tradhusband begs the question: Does the tradhusband actually matter? Although the tradhusband plays a largely invisible role in the tradwife movement, a tradwife, by definition, cannot exist without a tradhusband. A poststructural Black feminist lens illuminates how tradhusbands and tradwives are co-constructed through respective hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity; the two cannot be disentangled from each other. Furthermore, through these theoretical lenses, we may understand how constructed gender roles, such as the tradwife, are made possible through systems of power related to race, gender, and class. Tradwives reinforce and reproduce contemporary constructions of gender that romanticise the domestic labour of White women, rendering invisible the integral roles that women of colour played at home and in the workplace.

The tradhusband serves a largely symbolic, invisible role; however, he is a necessary figure, as he makes the visible tradwife role possible. The tradhusband is constructed by tradwives as their saviour, their financial and physical protector, and consequently, the person to whom they choose to submit. However, the tradwife role is inherently limited in agency and restrained by the patriarchal social structure, heightened by tradwives’ construction of the tradhusband as the facilitator of the trad lifestyle. This article does not ignore or excuse problematic narratives promoted by tradwives; however, it does propose that men's participation in the tradwife movement is often overlooked. By understanding that tradwives exercise a constrained form of agency, we can shift the focus back to institutional misogyny that condones and reinforces intersecting modes of oppression. By doing so, we can better locate the role of the patriarchy within the tradwife movement.