Why is trad-wife culture appealing to Gen-Z? It could be about work.
Are you familiar with the “trad wife” trend? A lifestyle popularized on social media platforms, like TikTok, where women embrace traditional roles as stay-at-home wives and mothers, often tied to conservative and religious values. The trend is widely discussed for its sudden rise in pop culture, as many people focus on the rise of traditionalism in times of crisis, and for its broad applications in sociology by names like Émile Durkheim and Carl Jung.
The trad wife gained popularity by advertising the stay-at-home lifestyle, including traditional values for women and raising kids in a nuclear family dynamic. But one specific detail about this trend often went unnoticed: a large portion of these newly-wed women were really young. Nara Smith, one of the most popular influencers on TikTok, is actually only 23 years old. She's a Gen-Z kid. Nara gained her popularity by making meals from scratch, as well as flaunting a pretty house and pretty husband online. She markets the housewife trope as a soothing lifestyle where you can spend your days baking in a meditative state, while your kids are in the room next door experiencing their childhood.
As mainstream as the “trad wife” is, there is not as much commentary regarding the other side of this trend, one that could be one of the reasons for the renewed popularity of traditional wives, particularly for Generation Z: the cultural shift on work. So, why is Gen-Z so drawn to the trad wife trope? Could this new wave of influencers and the societal discussion around Gen-Z work habits be related?
Why Gen Z is Rejecting Work
To answer this question, we must take a look at the shift in work culture over these last few years. It is not uncommon to find magazine headlines written as “Gen Z really are the hardest to work with” or “Companies are firing Gen Z employees soon after hiring them” – but is this reflective of a generational stigma or actually true? It could be a mix of both. Our elder siblings, the Millennials, faced corporate life much differently than Gen-Z does. We watched, over our childhood years, Millennials emphasizing the girl boss trope, flaunting their friendly coworking spaces and excitement about new tech jobs, all in an era of economic recovery from the great recession and before any global pandemics. But the scenario today is much more pessimistic.
The new Gen-Z work force is facing an entirely new reality when it comes to working, or even living as an adult. We have been given an imminent climate crisis, trapped amongst culture wars that are prompting a rise of hate speech, and we are living in an economic crisis that drastically impacts our quality of life. The 2020s came as a symbol of a polycrisis period in human history, which is transforming our relationship to the world and to our society, giving us new perspectives on what’s truly important. The relationship between work and Gen-Z has lost its grip, and the young people that enter the workforce are forced into the precariousness of freelance jobs and the insecurity of constant layoffs.
Like in dystopian novels, where there is a rise in exploitation of work and lower quality of life, the lives of working people are getting harder by the year. Everything is getting more expensive: in the United States, the average home cost skyrocketed by 74% over the last decade, while the average household income didn't necessarily increase with it. To this day, the federal minimum wage is still the same from 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
In the face of this perspective, we are seeing a shift in the way Gen-Z faces work altogether. It is not an enjoyable, natural step in life anymore, and it comes to us as an almost hostile component of adult life. If we understand that most people nowadays are living paycheck to paycheck or can barely afford a house, work is not seen as rewarding, but increasingly more as compulsory. If we can't buy the things we like, or travel, or party, why would we be encouraged to work?
Credit X @/PRADAXBBY
The Allure of the Trad Wife Lifestyle
Gen-Z wants a new purpose for living, an escapism that provides them survival without being bound to the workforce. On social media, we can find Gen-Z content talking about alternative lifestyles – especially during the pandemic, there has been a rise in the cottage core aesthetic, which romanticizes living in a farm and being connected to nature. There has also been a wave of new influencers practicing van life and digital nomadism, embracing these simpler lifestyles as an alternative to the frantic and hostile modern world. By the look of it, these nostalgia-driven lifestyles reminisce about the old world; a world that goes without so much technology and detaches from this global crisis we live in. This world also embraces ideas of the traditional family structure. Aren’t trad-wives just materializing their cottage core ideals? Are they guilty of not dreaming of labor, if labor is not a dream anymore? Perhaps if you were given the option to avoid working, to only live a “stay at home” life, you would take it too? If you had no good career prospects after a college degree in the field you were passionate about, what would encourage you to follow that difficult path?
Credit TikTok MEGS
“I do not dream of labor” takes over social media as Gen-Z rejects work
The Dangers of Dependence
As some reject the trad-wife trope, it’s important to understand the true motives that influence these women. The trad wife is a hyper-traditional approach to today’s world, where women are not just choosing to give up on their careers, but they are also choosing to depend on a man. We may argue that these women are drawn into a fantasy that is marketed on social media by wealthy trad-wives, while this reality may not be so bright, and upper-class trad-wives will not face the same struggles as a lower income parent raising multiple kids with no outside help. There’s vulnerability in giving up your career and financial freedom, and this risk may not be the best path to follow for every woman.
In fact, not building an independent life outside of marriage can be significantly dangerous to women. If her husband ends up being abusive or unfaithful, a woman’s options for leaving narrows down significantly without financial freedom. Overall, financial control plays a big part in domestic abuse. A 2022 article by The Atlantic points out the correlation, mentioning a 2014 survey that found that 98% of domestic-violence victims also experienced financial abuse. The article mentions the difficult dilemma faced by some women: “Either risk staying in an abusive relationship, or risk becoming homeless and facing poverty.”
Many women grow up learning about the dangers of being submissive to your husband or of performing unpaid labor for the sake of the family. Our mothers and grandmothers are living proof of this cautionary tale but, as we move into times of global crisis, the challenges we overcame as women are easily questioned and erased from collective memory, leaving us questioning everything we knew about our own freedom.
This dilemma has been widely discussed by feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. In the 1963 work “The Feminine Mystique”, Friedan argued that this idea of women as homemakers is isolating and a form of systemic oppression designed to keep women subservient. Society still idealizes love and marriage as the most important outcome of life. But throughout the last decade, Millennials refused this romanticized idea, but as we experience a new age of instability and crisis, we seek the answer in old habits, recovering our idealization of this savior romantic love.
There is no use in pointing fingers, especially when everyone is latching onto some alternative to this contemporary apocalypse, or worse, pretending nothing is really happening. But overall, as modern crises approach our lives more significantly by the day, our disillusionment with work and society cannot result in extremist and harmful practices. There are ways to redefine our relationship to life and to our communities without surrendering our freedoms to limiting values. The response to this global panic cannot be the harmful habits that the last generations spent so much time trying to denormalize, but perhaps we can find a new way of surviving – with new ways of facing life, with the decentralization of work, and towards the appreciation of community and cooperation, where women can stick together and craft a new idea of family that rejects our more painful traditions.