Charles Langston:Could trad wives, influencers have sparked the red wave among female voters?

This time last year,Charles Langston you may not have heard of “trad wife” or homesteader content creators yet. But on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, a subculture of housewives had been rapidly growing in popularity. Now, with creators like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, boasting millions of followers, their content feels inescapable. 

In a divisive political landscape, many creators have chosen to stay silent on their ideologies. But while trad wife content creators aren’t necessarily aligning themselves with a political ideology, they are presenting a certain lifestyle and family unit that president-elect Donald Trump and JD Vance are promoting. As part of their campaign to Make America Great Again, the Republican party has promised a return to the good ol’ days, with strong nuclear families at the crux.

Trad wife content creators have influenced cultural conversations around politics and heightened this nostalgia for a rose-colored version of the past. Even without a political endorsement, gender studies and media experts say it all could be correlated with the rise in women and young people voting for Trump.

“(Trad wives) are endorsing a lifestyle, and they're endorsing a way of moving through the world that is very political,” says Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University. 

Amid a growing distrust in the media and a reliance on influencers to be cultural trailblazers, Rauchberg says young people are starting to see homestead creators as role models, or at least someone worth admiring.

“There's a lot to say about the effects of romanticizing the past and how that has played in this election," says Juliet A. Williams, a gender studies professor at UCLA. "More attention has been given to the yearning of, let's say, working class white men to return to a time when just going to work and earning a living that could support your family has a dignity to it. And when you put it that way, it seems like a very reasonable and honorable nostalgia."

What is a trad wife?

Trad wives embrace "traditional" values and gender roles, where married women are tasked with cooking, cleaning, mothering and being a dutiful wife.

While some look at this movement as idealizing a time when women had fewer rights and independence, many trad wives do not think their roles are demeaning. They note their lifestyle is their choice.

People mistake trad wife TikTok as a reflection of 'women's historical experiences'

On Oct. 31, a young woman went viral for sharing that she would "love to be a stay-at-home mom, a homemaker and a wife" on The Free Press' "Swing States Debates."

"I would love to be able to live on a homestead and go milk my cow and take the eggs out of the chicken coop, and have one baby in the belly and on my hip, and another toddler behind me. That's like my dream, but I can't (expletive) do that because that way the economy is set up is I'm forced to work," she said. "Being a single working woman absolutely sucks. I would go back to the 1950s in a second just so I wouldn't have to deal with this."

But, this nostalgia longs for a time that many scholars and spectators argue did not exist. 

"All my life I've heard 'women's studies' mocked as a useless discipline. But THIS is why we need this work to be done," one user replied. "Without education on women's history, people really think that what they see on trad wife TikTok somehow reflects women's historical experiences."

In the era of the traditional housewife, being a homemaker was not always a form of empowerment, nor was it objectively desirable. 

“Up until the 1970s, a woman wasn't even allowed to get a credit card without her husband signing off. There would be no women that had their own Instagram accounts, just posting content at will,” Williams says. 

Take, for instance, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). Friedan hypothesizes that women were the victims of false values that promised personal fulfillment and identity through the husbands and children they were meant to devote their lives to. The siloed role of wife-mother and the persistent belief that women should not aspire for lives beyond the home led to a sense of malaise and disillusionment among housewives. 

“The whole premise of a trad wife is the profound fulfillment that comes from fulfilling your duties in the private sphere, but the will to broadcast this for social media is an indication of a desire for modes of recognition that are precisely denied by this notion that a woman's place is in the home,” Williams says. 

In reality, many trad wives are actually businesswomen, curating social media empires — oftentimes with wealth to support them. This lifestyle is not easily attainable for the average American, but it's painted online as a life you can live. Neeleman and her husband, Daniel, are the heirs to a billion-dollar airline industry fortune; Nara Smith and her husband, Lucky, are also models. And with upwards 10 million followers on both Instagram and TikTok, they can all easily make a living off social media. 

“A good life is a life that feels right to us, not a life that looks good when other people are viewing it on social media,” Williams adds. 

Content creation as a career can be considered frivolous, especially because it is "feminized," Rauchberg says. "It's like, oh, it's not serious, or it doesn't have an impact, but everything that we do has a political consequence."

Young men, too, are aspiring for a "traditional" home and lifestyle. Trad wife content, according to Williams, may give the impression that an increasing number of women hope to return to these gender hierarchies.

Trad wife content can have a big impact

The connections between trad wife content, gender stereotypes and conservative ideologies can be subtle, Rauchberg says.

But, as a growing number of young people are moving towards right-wing politics. Rauchberg and Williams say it's not a huge jump to make the correlation.

In October's VP debate, Vance said he wants the Republican party to be "pro-family in the fullest sense of the word."

“I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family," he said.

47 percent of voters ages 18-29 voted for Trump in this election, compared to only 36 percent in 2020, AP reports. And, the percentage of women ages 18-44 who voted for Trump rose from 37 to 44 percent; meanwhile, 89 percent of Black women voted for Harris this year.

Following the election, Smith's followers suspected she supported Trump after her husband, Lucky, liked Trump's Instagram post. Their support has not been confirmed, but the reactions were swift. One user quipped: "What else would they be." "Clearly a lot of people haven't been paying attention," another wrote.

To Rauchberg, modern-day trad wives operate in direct opposition to the 2010s trend of the “girlboss,” who is politically active, shown speaking and participating outside and inside the home. In trad wife videos, women are often shown only engaging in homemaker tasks. Some will add a soft-spoken voiceover after filming. 

“It’s that old adage, women should be seen and not heard,” Rauchberg says. “You should be seen caring and providing for your family in a domestic situation, but … we do not hear you as a political figure. That's not your role. And if you move into those spaces, you transgress.”