‘Tradwife’ escapism highlights clash between modern work and care expectations
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The surging popularity of “tradwife” influencers reflects a desire for simplicity in a system that places “impossible” expectations on women, a group of researchers has argued.
In recent years, “tradwife” influencers have captivated audiences with their idyllic and aesthetically pleasing lifestyles centred on homemaking, childcare, and supporting their husbands.
While the popularity of tradwife social media content is undeniable, UK-based researchers Heejung Chung, Constance Beaufils and Shiyu Yuan at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Business School sought to understand what was driving the trend.
Rather than a desire to return to traditional gender roles, the researchers found that the popularity of tradwife content reflected growing disillusionment with modern work structures and burnout experienced by women seeking to balance dual workplace and care responsibilities.
“Young women aren’t rejecting equality, rather, they’re exhausted by inequality. They’re not nostalgic for male breadwinner models, they’re burned out by a system that demands they excel in paid work while still shouldering the bulk of unpaid care and domestic labour,” former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard said in the report’s foreword.
“When young women find the aesthetic of tradwife content appealing, they’re responding to the promise of calm in a world that offers them relentless pressure instead.”
After surveying 1,000 young women, the researchers found that the calm and luxurious lifestyle portrayed in tradwife content had widespread appeal, but most respondents weren’t sold on the male-breadwinner, female-caregiver dynamic.
A majority (79 per cent) of respondents found the relaxed lifestyle portrayed by tradwife influencers appealing. However, only 7 per cent felt positive about the idea of men making all of the household decisions, and 16 per cent were sold on women being primarily responsible for housework and childcare.
Most (70 per cent) also believed that tradwife content had a negative impact on society, and the majority said they wouldn’t personally adopt a tradwife lifestyle in the future. Fewer than 8 per cent believed they definitely would, while 22 per cent said they may adopt some aspects.
Scouring UK social attitudes surveys spanning decades, the researchers found that young women held more progressive attitudes than previous generations on average. Many expected fathers to shoulder more responsibility for care and domestic work than in previous generations.
The researchers argued that the popularity of tradwife content reflected a desire for a better work/life balance driven by “impossible” dual expectations placed on working mothers.
In recent decades, the most common paid work arrangements among UK parents have shifted from a norm where fathers worked full-time and mothers part-time, to a model where both parents work full-time.
At the same time, the division of unpaid labour within households remained “highly unequal”, subjecting women to “significant strain” as they balanced outsized childcare responsibilities with full-time paid labour, the researchers noted.
To address growing discontentment, the researchers called for bold policy measures to reduce overwork. These included shorter working weeks, expanded access to affordable childcare, supporting men’s involvement in care, promoting flexible work and ensuring that care work for both men and women was properly recognised and valued.
During the pandemic, the gender gap in time spent on childcare narrowed significantly as flexible work became the norm, the researchers found.
In 2014, men spent an average of 47 minutes per day on childcare, while women spent 87 minutes on average. This almost doubled to 89 minutes during the 2020 lockdown, compared to women’s 100 minutes per day.
This gap widened again following the pandemic, as workers were beckoned back to the office. Fathers’ average participation in childcare fell back to 55 minutes per day, while mothers’ sat at 85 minutes.
“Despite the growing preference for fathers to be more involved in childcare, many of the changes observed in recent years related to remote working – with the rise of return-to-office mandates and increasingly demanding work cultures – may limit fathers’ ability to assume a larger role in the domestic sphere,” the report said.
Analysing social surveys, researchers also found that both men and women held beliefs that working parents with young children should ideally work fewer hours than the current norm.
On average, young women believed that mothers of two-year-olds should ideally work 27 hours a week, below the current average of 30 hours. Young men indicated that fathers should work 32 hours, well under the 40-hour norm.
“This ideal-reality gap suggests broad support for reduced working hours for fathers and potentially greater involvement at home when children are very young, particularly among younger generations,” the report said.
“Both groups appear to favour a more balanced division of paid work and family responsibilities, with no evidence that the younger generation supports a return to traditional labour allocation.”
As mothers remained under pressure from inflexible work cultures and outsized care burdens, the researchers warned that tradwife escapism risked drawing women back towards a past that was “neither safe nor empowering”.
It also risked reinforcing a “narrow, hegemonic ideal of masculinity”, which limited men’s ability to be active caregivers to their children and form emotionally engaged, egalitarian partnerships, the researchers noted.
“Concerns remain that the glamorised portrayal of calm, domestic life can attract women, only for such content to be used to normalise or justify a more patriarchal order. This is especially troubling when many women report feeling exhausted, stressed, or facing burnout from the dual pressures of paid work and family care,” the report said.
“In these circumstances, tradwife content may appear to offer a solution – not through policy reforms that better support work–family balance, such as improved childcare provision or a general reduction in working hours (for example, through a four-day week) – but by reverting to older, more restrictive models of family life.”
