Influencers Are Selling the Tradwife Fantasy to Teens—and It Looks Like It’s Working

The teen tradwives have wasted no time monetizing. Ava made a video pleading for brands to stop offering partnerships, since working is the “least sexy and feminine thing that I could do.” Last week she called that previous video satire and launched a website offering $50 sourdough starters. Another teen tradwife made her husband the star of an ad for robo-cooker Posha, filming him putting raw ingredients into a small machine. “I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t do the laundry. That’s my wife’s job,” he said cheekily. “But that all changes today.”

“Even though a lot of the rhetoric is sort of a rejection of neoliberalism and a rejection of feminism,” Rottenberg says, “we have to see [tradwives] as products of both of these movements and forces.”

It doesn’t seem to matter, to either brands or viewers, that most of these teenagers don’t have children yet. “I am in training right now,” Samantha Kay, a 19-year-old stay-at-home wife, joked in one video. “How can I be a good stay-at-home mom when I can’t even be a good stay-at-home wife?”

But as quickly as these teens go viral, they feel the consequences. One stopped posting after facing backlash for saying that women should never say no when their husband wants sex; she later commented on Instagram that a man, presumably angry at her posts, had shown up to her house and taken her picture. Even Ava, the most overtly rage-baity of the bunch, took a weeklong break from social media after receiving a swell of hate messages.

It’s understandably difficult to post when there are hundreds of comments warning them that they will regret their life choices. “The defensiveness, I think, is because women who are the two generations back—former tradwives—are also online,” Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women, says.

Caputa recently made a viral post warning the teens about the dangers of the lifestyle and the lack of options she faced when her marriage ended. On one hand, she was happy that these teens were posting on social media and “making something for themselves.”

But she worried that young people might find the lifestyle seductive without understanding the risks. “I felt like this life was sold to me,” she said. “I accepted it, I bought into it, and then I was living it and realized it was nothing like what I had thought it was going to be.”

Alena Kate Pettitt, one of the original tradwife influencers, argues that it’s actually an act of feminism to let these young women make their own choices and their own mistakes. At the very least, she says, these women will have a platform if their life falls apart. “Some of them will go on, have kids, stay married; some of them will get divorced,” she says with a shrug. “Then some people monetize their divorce.”