Frilly aprons, spotless kitchens, and homemade bread fresh out of the oven are some of the hallmarks of the online tradwife movement. Tradwives (short for “traditional wives”) document their lives on Instagram and TikTok, calling for a return to “simpler times,” but a powerful emotion simmers beneath the surface: rage. In a new paper, “The rage of tradwives: Affective economies and romanticizing retreat,” published in Feminist Theory, Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, and Sara Reinis, doctoral student at the Annenberg School, analyze tradwives’ dissatisfaction with women’s place in society that mirrors feminists’ frustration with living within a patriarchal and inequitable system.

Tradwives perform serenity, but their message is often fueled by a quiet fury not against patriarchy, but against feminism’s perceived failures,” Banet-Weiser says. “What’s striking is that the issues they point to hustle culture, the lack of care infrastructure, and the devaluation of reproductive labor are the very concerns mainstream feminism also addresses. Both groups are responding to the same broken system, but in very different ways. While each is rooted in women’s rage, the direction and consequences of that rage diverge sharply.

From April to September 2024, the researchers analyzed 50 accounts across Instagram and TikTok that directly embrace the title of tradwife and create posts explicitly promoting a lifestyle characterized by “traditional gender roles.” In analyzing this content, Banet-Weiser and Reinis document the many ways that tradwives and feminists mirror one another: each group frustrated with gender inequalities, but each advocating a radically different solution to these realities.

Source: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/annenberg-communication-analyzing-feminism-and-traditional-gender-roles-social-media