In 2026, why are millions of women consuming 'tradwives' content about returning to the home?

When my friend Rubina suggested we discuss tradwives on our podcast, Brown Girls Do It Too, in 2024, my response was: “What’s a tradwife?”

She explained that they’re women who embrace traditional gender roles. The husband goes out to earn the bacon while the wife stays home to cook, clean and raise the children. Some, particularly those with deeply held religious beliefs, also believe in submitting to their husbands.

The modern tradwife movement gained traction in America before spreading to Britain, fuelled by social media influencers whose idyllic videos of baking, beautiful homes and domestic bliss attracted millions of views. Rubina and I laughed. Our Asian mums were the OG tradwives; the difference was, they didn’t get a choice.

So why, in 2026, are millions of women consuming content about returning to the home? Having been forced into marriage at 19, where I was expected to conform to traditional gender roles, the idea of women willingly embracing submission was difficult for me to understand. I wanted to find out what the women choosing to adopt this lifestyle were getting from a life I’d run away from.

For my new BBC documentary, Young, British and Tradwife, I met women who have embraced this lifestyle. As part of the experiment, I became a tradwife myself and lived according to one woman’s rules. What surprised me was that I understood the appeal. Women are expected to juggle a burgeoning career, a loving relationship and well-adjusted, happy children with, preferably, a sourdough loaf in the oven – all while comparing themselves to other women on social media.

Despite progress in the workplace, women still shoulder a disproportionate amount of unpaid labour at home. According to 2023 figures from the Office for National Statistics, women do a third more unpaid work than men. Somewhere along the way, we’ve been hoodwinked from “having it all” to “doing it all”.

Against that backdrop, the tradwife world looks idyllic: floral dresses, beautiful homes and women pouring their energy into their families rather than a corporate machine. Amid the noise of modern life, there’s something seductive about it.

If you’d asked me in my 20s who I admired more, a woman running a company or a woman raising four children at home, I probably would have said the CEO. The tradwife movement exposes how much we undervalue domestic labour; it has made me confront how much I’d done so. But why? Raising children, cooking, cleaning and running a home are work. Essential work, in fact. Yet for generations, the patriarchy has dismissed it as just “women’s work”, even though it was what kept society functioning.

However, it’s ironic that women exhausted by the pressure to “do it all” are being sold an alternative where many still “do it all”, just at home. The women I met worked incredibly hard. They’ve chosen to pour their energy into their homes and children, but it feels like they are just swapping one kind of work for another.

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Crucially, the women I met had chosen how they wanted to live. I might not want the same life, but feminism surely has to include a woman’s right to choose a different life.

Where I struggle is when personal choice becomes an ideology about how all women should live, and when men get to dictate those choices. Travel further down the tradwife pipeline and homemaking can become something else: biological determinism. Men lead. Women nurture. Husbands make the final decisions. Wives submit.

Modern life isn’t working for a lot of women. But neither is a return to rigid gender roles. What about affordable childcare, flexible working and fathers sharing more caring responsibilities?

So, stay at home, or go to work. Bake the sourdough, or buy it from a supermarket. But let it be a choice.

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Young, British and Tradwife is on Monday 16 November at 10:40pm on BBC One (11:10pm in Wales, Tuesday 11:10pm in Northern Ireland).

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