Modern tradwives believe in creating families centred around a male breadwinner and female homemaker – but is it even possible for a family to survive on one income anymore?
Influencer Nara Smith is filming herself making Coca-Cola from scratch. “My husband mentioned that he was craving Coca-Cola the other day, and since we were out of soda I decided to make him some,” Smith purrs in her trademark deadpan, faintly lobotomised drawl. She’s wearing an ornate sequin dress as she swirls sugar and water around a pan, zests an orange, grinds a blend of spices into dust. The video has been viewed over 34 million times on TikTok.
Smith has made a name for herself online by creating ‘tradwife’ content where she performs domestic tasks such as baking banana bread or tending to her children (or making Coke from scratch). If you’re somehow unfamiliar, a tradwife – a portmanteau of ‘traditional housewife’ – is a woman who eschews gainful employment in favour of full-time domestic labour such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children, living off whatever ‘allowance’ their husband or partner doles out to them like it’s 1954. The unorthodox lifestyle first entered the public imagination in 2020, with British lifestyle influencer Alena Kate Pettitt popping up on daytime TV shows to extol the virtues of ironing your husband’s shirts, but since then the trend has taken on a life of its own – no doubt catalysed by the pandemic, a period when most of the world was forced to retreat in the domestic sphere.
The trend has been largely understood as a reaction against capitalism or a natural progression from the anti-work movement. “It’s not hard to look around and feel like the ‘equality’ our second-wave feminist forbearers envisioned for us was a scam; we were sold a dream in which we could ‘have it all’, but instead seem to have ended up doing it all instead,” Niloufar Haidari wrote in a Dazed op-ed on the tradwife phenomenon back in 2022. Why spend your days in a caffeine-fuelled fugue, wincing at every Slack and Gmail notification, when you could be swanning around a palatial mansion, going to the farmer’s market, and slow-roasting maple-glazed carrots?
There’s an understandable sense of horror at the thought of swathes of young women across the West quitting their careers and throwing in their lot with a man. But often the tradwife discourse misses the fact that, for most, this way of living is sheer fantasy: the reserve of a few TikTok influencers who, in any case, are performing for their cameras and have their own money stashed in the bank. Are there really any true tradwives out there? The female employment rate stands at 72 per cent in the UK, and almost 80 per cent in the US. Besides: is the tradwife life even possible?
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Jenna is a 31-year-old living in Alabama who describes herself as a tradwife. Speaking to Dazed, she explains that she does “all domestic work” in her relationship, including looking after their two-year-old child and often her 14-year-old stepchild too. But unlike the viral poster children of the tradwife trend, Jenna does not spend her days wistfully arranging flowers while a fat leg of lamb tenderises in the oven. She also works as a nurse practitioner on an ad-hoc basis and as a nursing school clinical instructor one day a week. “I usually work three days a week,” she explains. “But some weeks I end up working four days.”
Jenna is frank about the realities of her lifestyle. “I think it is very hard if not impossible to survive on one income. If it were up to me, I would work just two or three days a month to keep my skills up,” she says, adding that she had to get her second job as a clinical instructor out of sheer necessity. “We recently moved into a bigger, more expensive house and have not sold our old house yet, so I’m having to cover one mortgage payment while my husband covers other bills.” She adds that her husband earns around $100,000 (£77,960) as a support manager – and while that figure might sound decent enough to UK readers, it’s worth bearing in mind that living costs are considerably higher across the pond. One study published earlier this year estimated that a family of four living in Alabama would need an income of around $193,606 to live comfortably.
“I think it is very hard if not impossible to survive on one income” – Jenna
Kelly, 30, is a tradwife from Texas who works from home full-time as a franchise consultant. She explains that as her husband’s job requires him to travel regularly, she’s often left to take care of “all of the housework and childcare” in his absence – though she stresses that he does help her with cooking and the more technical elements of housework when he’s home. “I’m basically working three jobs – looking after the baby, my actual job, and running the house,” she says. “I think it is extremely difficult for couples to survive on one income, let alone a family.”
Like Jenna, Kelly has found the pursuit of the tradwife lifestyle to be a struggle. “It’s very hard and overwhelming at times,” she says. “We don’t have childcare, so our eight-month-old is home with me 24/7 while I’m working and doing everything else. I do not recommend this set-up to anyone – either quit your job or get childcare.” She adds that it’s still her “ultimate goal” to leave her career and become a full-time housewife. “My husband is working extremely hard to increase his income so I can eventually stop working,” she says.
As aforementioned, it seems likely the tradwife trend has taken off due to a widespread sense – particularly among young people – that the social contract is breaking down. In the UK, house prices have risen from around four-times average earnings in the mid-1990s, to more than eight-times today (rising to 14-times in London), while it seems every few months stories circulate about rents reaching record highs. It’s a similar story in the US, where house prices have soared by 47 per cent in the 2020s and over half of all renters are in unaffordable accommodation. While the inflation rate is now falling in both the UK and US, over half of Brits still feel worse off than they were five years ago and a recent survey found that a third of American adults don’t feel financially secure.
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♬ original sound - Ballerina Farm
It’s becoming ever clearer that hard work doesn’t always pay. In light of this it tracks that many young women feel like tapping out of the rat race and embracing a simpler, more ‘traditional’ way of life – but equally, how are these young couples seriously intending to buy houses and start families on one income, when doing it on two is already challenging enough?
The situation today is a stark contrast to the 1950s, the era so often idolised by tradwives. In the post-war years, housing supply in the UK generally kept pace with demand, with publicly funded council housing accounting for roughly half of all homes built, making the process of starting a family much smoother for the average person. On the other side of the Atlantic, real wages rose steadily while the government paid veterans benefits to 44 per cent of young men starting families. It’s not true that things were ‘better’ for everyone – in early-1960s Britain, for example, it was estimated that three million families lived in “slums” or grossly overcrowded conditions – but it’s fair to say that society was structured in such a way that made it possible for more people to survive on one income.
As Jenna has discovered firsthand, pursuing the tradwife life in 2024 is not as glamorous or straightforward as social media would have you believe. “I think influencers make the lifestyle seem easier,” she says. “Money does not seem to be an issue for a lot of them – and I guess they’re also earning income from their platforms.”
“I think influencers make the lifestyle seem easier. Money does not seem to be an issue for a lot of them – and I guess they’re also earning income from their platforms” – Jenna
Jenna is right to point out that many of TikTok’s popular ‘tradwives’ are full-time content creators – which isn’t really all that ‘trad’. This too is often left out of discussions about the tradwife lifestyle: a profile of Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm) in The Times refers to the fact that she was “a stay-at-home mother who has made a career out of being so”, but glosses over how much money she makes as a full-time content creator – and the fact that her husband is the son of a multimillionaire. Similarly, while Smith also married rich, she too must make thousands from her TikTok videos alone.
There are doubtless many women the world over who have married rich and promptly leapt off the corporate ladder (and, honestly, fair enough). But for the majority of real-life, working-class ‘tradwives’, things aren’t so simple. As Jenna and Kelly point out, starting a family in a one-income household in 2024 is nigh on impossible – and telling your husband to simply earn more or willing yourself to make it work won’t shift the dial either. But this sorry state of affairs begs the question: isn’t the tradwife tradeoff supposed to be doing domestic work instead of finding a job? Why sign up to do the majority of the household chores when you’re still spending hours of the day making content and ‘circling back’ on emails?
But we shouldn’t be too hasty in sneering at these women. Women still do 60 per cent more unpaid domestic work than men – even those of us who don’t identify as tradwives, and, yes, even those of us who like to think of ourselves in modern, ‘progressive’ relationships with men too. So while the beliefs and views of women like Jenna and Kelly might seem entirely alien to most modern women, perhaps we have more in common with them than we might think.