These modern mums have taken the tradwife hashtag and made it their own

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Who mops the kitchen floor in your house? Or oversees the grocery shop and meal prep every week?
For generations, the burden of household labour often came down to traditional gender roles — dad went to work, while mum stayed home with the kids. Today, many families split these responsibilities or juggle them alongside dual careers.
But now some young women are choosing to quit work altogether and stay at home. They call themselves "traditional wives", or "tradwives".
The term was made famous by social media influencers like Nara Smith, a model and mother of three young children, with a fourth on the way.
She seemingly spends most of her day cooking food from scratch, from the cereal she serves her kids at breakfast to the hundreds and thousands she uses on their ice cream.
In highly curated clips posted on their online accounts, self-proclaimed tradwives tend to their gardens, homeschool their children and bake sourdough bread.
Imogen Dixon-Smith is a stay-at-home mum who "devours" tradwife content.
She discovered Smith's videos while trying to decide if she should stop working as an art curator to care for her daughter.
"I identified with the feeling of wanting to create the most nurturing and enriching environment possible for my daughter," she says.
Dixon-Smith is as far from the tradwife movement as you can get. The Sydney-based mum is gay, sports a shorn head and doesn't know anyone else with young children.
But she jokingly refers to herself as a tradwyf — the queer, feminist version.
"It feels camp, it feels intelligent, it feels like it has a satirical edge, but most importantly it feels entrepreneurial to me," she says of tradwife content.
So, what is it about this movement with its strict traditional gender roles that has struck a chord with mothers like Dixon-Smith?
Dixon-Smith feels "absurd" attaching herself to the tradwife movement but says her fascination with its content came at a time when she was deeply enthralled by the world of mum advice on TikTok.
That's despite Dixon-Smith having very little in common with the likes of Nara.
"Offering nutritious and homemade food was one realm where our ideals collided," she says.
Dixon-Smith admits that unlike the tradwives she follows online, she often feels as if she's not doing enough on the home front.
"Our house is not spotless. There are countless unfinished jobs around the place," she says.
"I still accept home-cooked meals from our parents for nights when I am run off my feet. And our dog doesn't get nearly the mileage she is looking for on her walks because we stop every five steps to look at a new flower."
The inability to secure a flexible work arrangement was one of the reasons Dixon-Smith decided to become a stay-at-home mum.
Childcare was also an issue. Dixon-Smith found herself reconsidering her daughter's care after a series of "underwhelming" tours of day care centres.
But her decision to stop work and become a stay-at-home mum was met with surprise from many.
"Queer individuals are assumed to follow a form of feminism that might chastise a woman for deciding not to work," she says.
"Being a woman who wants a career but was hesitant about utilising childcare in the first two years of my daughter's life, it became clear that there is no perfect option for women."
Stacey Knight describes herself as a modern-day homemaker and regularly posts on social media as Staying Home With Stacey.
The Australian-based influencer looks after two young children while her husband works and says her average day consists of tending to her veggie garden and chickens, and cooking food from scratch.
Knight worked as a nurse before she had children, but following the arrival of her second child, she "leaned into" being a full-time stay-at-home mum.
She says the tradwife lifestyle she's cultivated for herself and her followers online came about for a few reasons.
"You can save money gardening, growing your own food and cooking meals from scratch, and obviously there's the health aspect of it," she tells ABC Radio National's Life Matters.
But she describes her and her husband as a modern couple who are only traditional in the sense that he works while she remains at home with the kids.
"There's still a lot of support, open communication and equal rights, which I think is the most important part," she says.
Knight is therefore unsure of the tradwife term and its connotations.
"Tradwife doesn't mean to me the same sort of associated terms and views as it does in America … I just have a genuine interest in caring for my family, cooking, gardening, and a simpler way of life without the associated views of it," she says.
Much has been made of the far-right ideals that have recently taken root in parts of the tradwife movement, where notions of white womanhood is espoused.
But Kristy Campion from Charles Sturt University argues tradwife is an umbrella term.
"The tradwife phenomena is not just a right-wing notion. It also exists in the left wing. It exists in religious spaces and in non-political spaces as well," she says.
Being a tradwife is also something that many people simply can't afford to be, which partly explains its attraction online.
"It becomes more of an individualist fantasy or an escape. The idea of leaving the workforce and becoming a tradwife," says Dr Campion.
"Cost of living is so dire right now that many women don't have the choice of staying home with their children.
"Some women feel like they're being forced into the workforce in addition to continuing to carry the broader weight of domestic duties and domestic labour.
"So this is what we see far-right tradwives talk about … modern society as crushing women, as defeminising women and forcing them into unnatural ways of living."
But according to Dr Campion, these beliefs aren't centred on women's welfare but something far more political.
"They're seeing it from the perspective of modern society being controlled by feminism or left-wing politics," Dr Campion says.
Knight says that women fought not only for the right to work but also for the right to be able to choose.
"My choice [is] to stay at home and care for my kids and garden and cook," she says.
"People don't ask men why they stay home or why they do things. They only seem to ask the women."
Dixon-Smith agrees that mothers and caregivers should have the right to decide how they choose to parent and work.
"As most queer people already know, it's possible to inhabit a role or persona that feels most comfortable to you," she says.
"But mothers are under constant pressure from all directions to be a certain way … the perfect traditional wife and mother or to hold on to your career and reject traditional norms. None of it is helpful."