Why digital exhaustion fuels vintage dreams

In what has been a truly chaotic social media landscape in 2024, a curious phenomenon has captured the attention of millions of women: the rise in popularity of the #tradwife. These are women who adopt a 1950s-style housewife lifestyle, complete with beautiful dresses, and focus on domestic chores like cooking, cleaning, and raising children while their husbands work . The numbers tell an interesting story. Videos tagged #tradwife have racked up over 800 million views on TikTok, with engagement rates that would make most brands envious. It is a vision of carefully curated domestic bliss. But while the aesthetic may be retro, the psychology behind this content’s viral success is thoroughly modern.

Tradwives: When anti-feminist fantasy meets modern marketing

Take a look at today’s traditional bride movement on social media and you’ll find two very different styles at play. There are examples like Hannah Neelman of “Ballerina Farm,” who generally keeps things sweet and subtle. She wants to show off her farm life and domestic bliss, and avoided political statements until her recent photo shoot with the ultra-conservative Evie magazine.

So you have Estée Williamswho does not hesitate to say where she stands. With nearly two million followers watching her TikToks, she’s boldly pushing her “feminine NOT feminist” message, questioning whether women should care about college and how prenups go against the sanctity of marriage. Same move, totally different playbooks – one is made up of dreamy photos of farm life (with the occasional revealing collaboration), while the other directly says the quiet part out loud.

Tradwives: the complexity of “choice”

Despite their different approaches, these women rely on the same response to negative reactions: “we are not political; we don’t express our opinions, we just present our lives. Williams even goes so far as to state, “We’re not trying to take away what women have fought for…we just think our goal is to be housewives who submit to their husbands.” She ends her political statements with a nice little “personal choice” bow.

However, psychologist Marc Travers don’t buy it. He points out that casually dismissing a 50-year battle for gender equality with a simple “not for me” slogan has consequences: a classic social media strategy using seemingly innocuous content to spread more extreme messages.

However, regardless of their political or feminist leanings, the reality is that women from all walks of life fall into this rabbit hole of hours of perfectly filtered domestic bliss content. And there’s a wild irony here: these artisan women are using their hard-won freedom of choice to promote a way of life that, at the time, left women with little choice.

Even though we have spent countless hours dissecting their stories – from the infamous LA Times expose on Neelman life, to question the misogynistic undertones at play, maybe we’re missing the real story here. The problem is not just knowing what these traders advocate or not advocate. Is this why this carefully curated vision of domestic bliss that millions of modern women “follow”?

Tradwives: the psychology behind the appeal

The call is not necessarily to reject gender progress or historical nostalgia. It’s about something more immediate, the crushing weight that weighs on women when they try to “have it all.” Like the the motherhood penalty continues to worsen and support for parents in the workplace remains stuck in the past, those dimly lit morning routines and elaborate meal prep videos don’t really sell domesticity — they sell escapism.

As Reshma Saujani He says, “We are asking women to function in a workplace built for men with wives at home while continuing to shoulder all the burdens of care at home. The system is not broken. It was built this way.” Young women today are juggling building their careers, maintaining their relationships, staying fit and always being available online. As millions navigate endless hours of perfectly curated domestic life, a pressing question arises: Is professional women’s content just another form of social media? brain rotdoes the appeal lie in a seductive fantasy of opting out of the modern rat race?

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This fantasy of simplification resonates particularly strongly with millennials and Generation Z, generations raised on girlboss empowerment and hustle culture, only to be confronted with stagnant wages and increasingly blurred lines between work and private life. While successful professional content creators run lucrative digital businesses monetizing their image of domesticity, the lifestyle they promote is economically out of reach for most women today. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when a single income could support a middle-class family, today’s cost of living crisis means that most households need two incomes to survive. The irony is strong. These influencers sell an inaccessible national fantasy while mastering the capitalist systems they claim to reject.

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This calculated performance of “traditional values” extends well beyond pretty Instagram filters and viral TikToks. As journalist Olivia Giovetti points out in his analysis for Concern USAThere’s a darker side to this seemingly harmless American cultural trend. The glorification of female submission and domestic “abandonment” can reinforce harmful gender norms in societies where women lack basic legal protections, education, or financial independence. While our daily news feed includes events like the loss of women’s human rights in Afghanistan and the ongoing threat to our own reproductive rights here at home, it also demonstrates a stark contrast. Western traders have this choice. They succeed from positions of privilege, able to accept or not accept traditional roles thanks to the very freedoms they seem to reject, while millions of women around the world remain trapped by patriarchal structures without any choice.

Tradwives: the future of this trend

The phenomenon also reveals something deeper about our relationship with social media. In the age of authentic content and BeReal moments, the tradwife aesthetic embraces obvious artifice. The filters are visible and the staging is voluntary. Like the glossy women’s magazines of decades past that sold impossible standards of domestic perfection, these accounts offer a digital version of the same fantasy. It’s performance art aimed at an audience who understands the game but still wants to play the game.

What’s next for this curious corner of the Internet called commerce? As with each of these media trends, there is of course a risk of oversaturation. Yet the underlying anxieties driving this trend, rooted in feelings of burnout, are unlikely to lead anywhere. So maybe the real story here isn’t about gender roles or domestic skills, or women’s choice versus women’s choice – but about the way social media continues to evolve as a space where we let us collectively address our contemporary anxieties through carefully constructed fantasies. What we need to pay more attention to is how these displays of domestic perfection can take a toll on our mental health as we measure our own realities against often impossible ideals. And as we scroll through streams of homemade cereal and hand-lettered lunch notes, are we in danger of losing sight of the deeper systemic barriers that make the idea that women can “have it all” so frustrating and meaningless.