Mother, wife and anti-feminist: the role of trad wives in far-right ambitions
Berta Gomez Santo Tomas, Pikara Magazine

Influencers who claim the aesthetics and values of the 1950s in the United States are a movement that is growing on the Internet and declares itself deeply anti-feminist.
This story was originally published in Pikara Magazine.
What is your VMS? This is one of the initial questions that a user may encounter when interested in the community of trad wives (shortened form of the English traditional wives, traditional wives, in Spanish). VMS stands for “ Value in the Sexual Market ” and measures the sexual desire that a woman arouses in a man: it is they who give a score from 1 to 10 and this varies according to the taste of each one.
The so-called trad wives – organised under this particular name – constitute a movement born on the Internet, initially a minority, but which has been gaining popularity and influence in public discourse in the United States and Europe in recent years. The profile of a trad wife , broadly speaking, is that of a housewife who prefers to serve her husband and have children rather than work outside the home. Christian women who oppose feminism, believe in biological determinism that divides the role of men and women in society and proclaim that families deserve social recognition. Their political ideology is in tune with the nostalgic authoritarianism of the extreme right.
The profile of a trad wife , broadly speaking, is that of a housewife who prefers to serve her husband and have children rather than work outside the home.
“These women, like men’s rights activists, perceive gender roles as the result of the sex economy,” explains journalist Julia Ebner in The Secret Life of Extremists (Temas de hoy), who has infiltrated one of these online groups to find out how they operate. “The heterosexual community, they believe, should be perceived as a market in which women sell sex and men buy it. Consequently, for these groups, a woman’s most important resource is her VMS,” she adds.
When the journalist asks one of the group members why other factors such as intelligence or humor are not valued, she answers that “femininity and age are the most important qualities to attract men. Education, career or workplace do not influence a woman’s MSV. Think about it, those values do not increase the sexual satisfaction of her male partner.” Another participant then comments that if Ebner does not want her MSV to go down, she should pay attention to her number n, “you know, the number of dicks. It is human nature for men to desire a woman less and less as her number n increases.”
Internet: place of origin and development
The trad wives movement emerged in 2012 as the female equivalent of The Red Pill : a misogynistic community on Reddit , the largest forum on the internet, which aimed to “generate discussions about sexual strategy in a culture that increasingly lacks a masculine identity.” Some of the forums have millions of members: PUA (pick-up artists), which teaches how to manipulate women’s minds to pick up girls; MGTOW, an anti-marriage community; or the largest and most violent platform to date, Involuntary Celibacy ( incel ), a men’s movement seeking revenge because today’s women don’t want to sleep with them.
“These groups pursue different strategies to regain male power, pride and privilege, but they all share a manifest hostility towards feminism, liberalism and modern gender roles.”
Although the Red Pill was initially – and still to a large extent today – a male-only movement, the female sector has already made its own contribution: there are around 30,000 women on Reddit alone who call themselves trad wives or red pill women . As Ebner explains, “these groups pursue different strategies to reconquer male power, pride and privilege, but they all share a manifest hostility towards feminism, liberalism and modern gender roles. They ridicule movements like #MeToo and accuse women’s rights activists of being feminazis.”
It would be a mistake to think that these communities only develop in dark places on the internet. “The incel rebellion has already begun ,” wrote Alex Minassian , a 25-year-old, on Facebook before killing 10 people in Toronto by running them over with his van. And the same goes for trad wives : the internet is just their meeting place, a space to share actions that have a solid anchor in their way of participating in the world.
Her posts and videos are full of pastel colors, bucolic landscapes, breads baked with “natural” ingredients, smiles and blond boys and girls.
Their ideological tentacles have pervaded mainstream social media . #tradwife is a hashtag with 43 million mentions on Instagram and 84 million views on TikTok, the social network where generation Z (people born between 1995 and 2009) spends the most time today. Under this umbrella, criticism of radical feminism, cooking recipes, parenting advice and ways to increase your VMS are gathered. Their posts and videos are full of pastel colours, bucolic landscapes, breads baked with “natural” ingredients, smiles and blond boys and girls. Traditional women follow a particular aesthetic on their social media profiles, that of the American wife of the 1950s.
But there is one big difference with them: if before this was simply the life that most women were forced to live by the fact of being women, the trad wives of the 21st century are working on a campaign to promote their patriarchal way of ordering the world. In other words, they are more like influencers from the 1950s: they use advertising language that sells returning home as an aspiration and a daily struggle against the established order. “I think my adult life has been very different from what is normal today: I am married and have been a mother since I was 18. Only God knows how much pain I inflicted on myself and others by not always listening to the voice of courage that I found at that age. It still causes me pain to live with the consequences of having relied on the common narrative of what female success is,” wrote Danish Ekaterina Andersen (@ekaterinaandersen), one of the most influential trad wives in Europe, on Instagram to celebrate her birthday.
“By promoting themselves, they actively participate in the public sphere in a way that would never have been allowed to a subordinate housewife in the historical sense.”
For the German philosopher Catherine Newmark, this work on social media gives them a very different status than in the past: “ Trad wives are not just housewives, wives and mothers, as they pretend to be,” she explains in an article published in Zeit onlin e. “As Instagram stars, they receive a lot of attention in the form of likes and comments, something that is not usually received for reproductive work, nor for the repetitive and dull tasks of cleaning and cooking in everyday households. By promoting themselves, they actively participate in the public sphere in a way that would never have been allowed for a subordinate housewife in the historical sense.” Newmark concludes that it is even difficult to imagine that this laborious work of self-promotion of identity – photo shoots, lengthy texts, recording podcasts and maintaining websites – is compatible with the “feminine” tasks that they pride themselves on performing.
Who wants to be a trad wife ?
The rise of the #tradwife movement cannot be understood without the neoliberal policies that have created a precarious, ultra-competitive labour market, where temporary work and insecurity predominate. Its neo-conservative discourse exploits the social unrest of the working classes in the same way as the far right.
They also deploy their hate speech towards the LGTBIQA+ community for disturbing their binary plans. In their forums, homosexuality can be cured and transsexuality, which is barely mentioned, is a monstrosity.
The diagnosis of today is as catastrophic for trad wives as it is for reactionary sectors: white women are unhappier than in 1950 and no longer have children because they must work double shifts, inside and outside the home. This nostalgic exercise offers a simple exposition that the data seems to corroborate and, at the same time, demonstrates their inability to move towards other imaginings: the wives of the extreme right consider that reversing roles and leaving their family role is not possible for the majority. It is then that the biological argument is deployed: women are programmed to be at home – as mothers and caregivers – and men are made to earn money in the productive system. And on this basis they also deploy their hate speech towards the LGTBIQA+ community for disturbing their binary plans. In their forums, homosexuality can be cured and transsexuality, which is barely mentioned, is a monstrosity.
Faced with declining birth rates, “we cannot renew our nation with other people's babies,” exclaims Ayla Stewart as a solution to the idea of the “great replacement” proclaimed by far-right parties
Ayla Stewart is one of the best-known trans wives in the United States, responsible for popularizing the use of the term in mainstream media after her support for former President Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign. Today, the first thing that appears on her website Wife with a Purpose is a message in large letters below her photo: “The most censored Christian mother in America.” Stewart, with a marked hyper-feminine aesthetic, claims to be an “ex-feminist” and supporter of “white nationalism.” What she considers censorship has occurred after years of publishing videos on different channels in which she asked women to join the “white baby challenge.” Faced with the declining birth rate, “we cannot renew our nation with other people’s babies,” she exclaims, as a solution to the idea of the “great replacement” proclaimed by far-right parties.
Stewart serves as a paradigm for the role that trad wives have played in the rise of the far right in recent years , transforming its image in a very specific way. As journalist Susanne Kaiser explains in her book I Hate Women (Katakrak), “These seemingly harmless women want to participate in an imagined race war with their feminine weapons (which boil down to the ability to bear and raise children). However, they also speak of a legitimate desire to feel fulfilled in a classic married life and motherhood and thus divert attention from extremist content. With their pretty, girlish faces and attitude, which can easily be mistaken for conservatism, these young women want to achieve normalisation in the middle of society.” By silencing the violent core of their ideology in marketing channels, these women are responsible for transmitting the idea, explains Kaiser, that an “identitarian lifestyle” can be pleasant, calm and, ultimately, desirable.
Increasingly, the #tradwife movement is influencing institutional politics. In Poland, the far-right Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015 thanks to the female vote: more women than men voted for a party that wanted to limit their reproductive rights and considered a “threat to LGBTI groups”. Why did they do this? One of the first measures taken by PiS after coming to power was to launch the Family 500+ programme, granting families a monthly allowance starting with the second child and a special bonus if it comes immediately after the first birth. A grant of 1,000 euros was also approved for women who gave birth to children with a terminal illness or severe disability. Mothers of four or more children would be entitled to a basic pension even if they had not worked, and the retirement age for women was reduced to 60 – that of men is 65.
Although these measures have benefited many families from an economic point of view, they have also expelled women from the labour market and impoverished households that do not fall into the normative family category. And what is worse: today we can see that the measures paved the way for the almost total prohibition of abortion – also in cases of malformations in the foetus – causing situations of extreme violence and even death for some pregnant women. As the thousands of feminist women who took to the streets to protest against this restrictive law have denounced, the aid from Familia 500+ empowered some at the cost of increasing the precariousness of others.
This sums up the situation of the trad wives movement well : by defining themselves first and foremost as anti-feminist, they will always be subordinate to feminism. Paradoxically, the visibility and public influence they have over millions of women is only possible thanks to the ideas they denigrate. But as the case of Poland shows, and their growing impact on institutional politics in the United States and other European countries, the fact that they are contingent figures linked to feminism makes them more dangerous than if they were a silent and self-sacrificing movement that retreats into the home.