Are ‘tradwives’ relevant now in conservative movement?

Two years ago, the conservative movement seemed captivated by the ideal of the “tradwife” — a rejection of modern feminist thinking and an embrace of traditional roles for men and women, where the woman stays at home taking care of the children, cooking and managing the house while her husband works. This new standard showed up in politics, too, such as when Republican Sen. Katie Britt (Ala.) filmed the rebuttal to then-President Biden‘s final State of the Union from her kitchen, appearing more like a soccer mom than a senator.

But as President Trump‘s coalition has shifted, some conservative women who tried the tradwife life, seeking influence and online fame, have burned out. More broadly, the conservative vision of the ideal housewife is not widespread enough to make for policy bolstering it, as evidenced by the all-out firestorm online over a White House proposal to pay stay-at-home parents.

At the same time, podcasters who preach the Christian “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) mom gospel — like Allie Beth Stuckey and Alex Clark — still top the charts in their respective categories. Prominent GOP women, like former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, have stepped back from full-time work to focus on raising children. Katie Miller, a popular conservative podcaster whose husband Stephen Miller is White House deputy chief of staff, was one of many online to trumpet the results of a sketchy survey earlier this year that suggested a majority of Generation Z women wanted to be married with children and have their husband as the top earner.

“The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace,” said Miller, who recently gave birth to her fourth child. “Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

So, which is it? For some family policy experts and those who track such trends, there does seem to be a shift away from the tradwife in how conservative women, in particular, are viewing their ideal role. While baking sourdough every day, wearing dresses to work in the garden and homeschooling children form a rosy aesthetic for an Instagram page, conservatives’ interests in reviving traditional housewife and motherhood roles has yet to translate into political reality — even after nearly two years of control in Washington.

One explanation is that the tradwife remains nebulous and mostly aspirational. Hadley Heath Manning, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum who writes about family policy and gender issues, said there’s a gap between some more appealing tenets of the tradwife aesthetic — like spending more time with the kids, having time to keep a tidy home and embracing femininity — and the underlying philosophical extreme some advocates want, which includes submission to one’s husband.

“Anything is more fun when it’s just a pop culture trend, and when it becomes politicized, gets less fun,” Manning said. “There’s a fascination with it, but if you dig into the polling about what they want, it doesn’t really align with the strictest or most conservative view of a traditional wife.”

That gap also demonstrably cleaves young women from their male peers. In a 29-country survey by King’s College London earlier this year, 31 percent of Gen Z men agreed that “a wife should always obey her husband,” against 18 percent of Gen Z women. That’s an increase from baby boomer men, 13 percent of whom agreed (compared to 6 percent of baby boomer women).

Brad Wilcox, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and professor at the University of Virginia, is one of the leading academic experts on marriage and family life. He said that while data reflects an increased interest from young conservative men and women in the tradwife ideal, the men seem to have internalized it even more as a reaction against social change.

“This is particularly salient for conservative younger men who I think both look at the broader culture as having moved too far to the left and also kind of feel like men’s status is eroding their pathways to providing,” Wilcox said. “Marriage and family life are becoming more precarious, more difficult, and they’re looking for a cultural turn to the older ways of family life to lock in their position and place in American life and the American family more particularly.”

Many of those men voted for Trump and Republicans in 2024 for similar reasons. But there’s a political downside to marrying the tradwife movement to the GOP: It has created an easy attack lane from the left. After Britt’s State of the Union response, liberal commentators panned her approach as fitting in with a Republican goal to diminish women.

“It’s no accident that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt issued the Republican Party’s response to the State of the Union address from her kitchen table, since the kitchen is precisely where the GOP would prefer we women spend most of our lives,” freelance writer Andrea Grimes wrote at the time, in chorus with others.

That’s not a surprising connection to make, Manning said.

“Without a real clear definition of what a tradwife is, it becomes easy to say, ‘Oh, they want every woman to be a tradwife, they want to go backwards in time, they’re nostalgic for the time before the 19th Amendment or time before women had equal rights,’” Manning said of those on the political left vis-a-vis the right. “And that’s certainly not the mainstream position of the Republican Party or, you know, any major group that I know of on the right.”

Conservative women and men alike acknowledge the good that the tradwife set of values becoming more mainstream has done for the cause. Erika Bachiochi, legal scholar and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the online tradwife movement has helped bring some tenets of family values into focus for the better, even though the “staged” aesthetic is not itself worth pursuing.

“I’ll be very happy for the online right to move beyond applauding the commercialized performativity of the tradwife phenomenon, even as it has brought welcome attention to the long-ignored goods of the home,” Bachiochi said. “For women and men to cultivate the virtues needed for a happy family life, they need models and mentors in real life, not staged images on the screen.”

Manning also said the tradwife trend glamorized the success of the married-parent model for raising children, itself a proven sociological reality.

“I do think the recognition of what social science says about what’s best for families and what’s best for children has always been the same,” she said. “It’s best for children to be in a family with a married mom and dad, to be in the same household with a married mom and dad. That’s never changed. And so the tradwife thing did put more of a, you know, online sexy hashtag around that.”

Despite the fervor for aspects of the tradwife life, even close to the centers of power, mainstream Republican politics has been slow to cement any of these ideas into policy. Wilcox said that comes from the generational gap — most politicians are still millennials, Generation X or boomers, who grew up in an age of feminism that cut across both parties, while their younger, very online staffers are the ones looking ahead to a future restoration of traditional gender roles, spurred on by the influencer class.

“It’s certainly the case when you talk to staffers on the Hill on the Republican side, their support for, you know, kind of a more conservative cultural agenda, like around reviving the male breadwinner model, is much more common now than it would have been, I would say 15 years ago,” Wilcox said. “But again, we’re talking about a generational difference, and they’re not the senator, they’re not the congressman or congresswoman, but they’re, you know, the next generation, so to speak.”

Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Helen Huiskes, Senate reporter.

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CONSERVATIVES BALK AT HUCKABEE SANDERS’ WORK REQUIREMENTS AD

The latest flash point for the online conservative civil war is a video of a guy playing video games and eating snacks.

It’s an from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), who is running for reelection this year. The video depicts a young, frumpy-looking man playing video games from a beanbag chair while covered in Cheeto-like snacks. Sanders, as the camera cuts to her, introduces him as “Brad,” who has “made relaxing into a full-time profession.”

The ad goes on to trumpet the new Medicaid work requirements, which the state is rolling out as part of Medicaid changes Congress passed in the reconciliation bill last year. About 20 percent of Arkansas’s Medicaid recipients are expected to lose coverage next year due to the work requirements.

But the controversy over the ad was not really about the underlying policy, which conservatives generally love. The use of a young white man as the poster child for undeserved welfare quickly stoked online fervor, with critics arguing it unfairly “demonized” white men — the core of the Trump voting coalition.

“The backbone of the 2024 coalition that President Trump, Charlie Kirk, and so many others worked tirelessly to build was young white men,” wrote Jack Posobiec, a right-wing media anchor and conspiracy theorist. “Why is the GOP now demonizing them a month before the election?”

An account linked to Steve Bannon’s podcast, “Bannon’s War Room,” posted a video of the ad and linked it to the GOP message going into the 2026 elections.

“With young men already checking out of the GOP, this is who Republicans decided to make the problem,” the post read.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) also joined the fray.

“Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubles down on young, white, male, gamers as the face of welfare fraud,” Mace wrote in response to Sanders’s post. “And she gets roasted for it.”

While the criticism is somewhat based in political reality on a national level —recent polling shows young men are warming back up to Democrats over Republicans — in Arkansas, Sanders’s appeal isn’t unfounded.

Kevin Corinth, in an analysis of census data for the Center for Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute, ran the numbers and found that a majority — 61 percent — of those expected to be affected by the new work requirements are white.

“The ad’s loudest critics object to the depiction of Brad as a white man. Some believe a woman and especially a black person would have been a more realistic choice for the ad’s protagonist,” Corinth wrote. “In reality, there are far more white people than black people among the population subject to the state’s Medicaid work requirement, and while women outnumber men the difference is modest.”

Sanders, for her part, hit back at the criticism directly.

“Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad,” she wrote in response to her original post with the video. “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.”

THREE MORE THINGS

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who left the job in August after giving birth to her second child, will join Fox News as a contributor. More here.

The Justice Department is reportedly looking into whether there was misconduct in the handling of Watergate. Some Republicans, including President Trump, have suggested interest in the idea of exonerating former President Nixon’s legacy. More here.

The White House reportedly told Attorney General Todd Blanche to slow-walk action on abortion, namely, waiting until the midterms are over. More here.

WHAT I’M READING

Nancy Vu in National Journal: MAHA influencers have doubts about their Senate leader

Clara Molot in Vanity Fair: Erika Kirk Doesn’t Really Want to Talk Politics. So How’s She Going to Lead Turning Point USA?

Are ‘tradwives’ relevant now in conservative movement?

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