On its surface, a bunch of young women baking, folding laundry, and modeling cottagecore fashion on social media wouldn’t appear to have much to do with the rise of global authoritarianism. But these influencers, many of whom post using the hashtag #tradwife, short for traditional wife, are stealthily political. In addition to sharing sourdough cookie recipes and tips for how to achieve a “retro” hair flip, influencers model what they believe a good Christian wife should be: one who submits to her husband. With hundreds of thousands of followers, tradwives are becoming a cultural force, marketing a lifestyle and an ideology to young people online. And the nostalgic vision that they offer for how society can be better is the same one evoked by a vast right-wing political movement working to erode democratic institutions, values, and norms.
In the most recent season of my podcast, White Picket Fence, we examine the connections between the rise of authoritarianism — globally and within the U.S. — and cultural trends like the tradwives. Two places illustrate how these political and cultural forces intersect: Hungary, which under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has become ground zero for right-wing authoritarianism, and Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis and his supermajority Republican state legislature have passed a spate of laws that closely resemble Hungary’s.
Under Orbán’s leadership, Hungary has prioritized reversing the country’s lagging birth rate, enacting a number of policies that encourage heterosexual marriage and childbearing. Many, at face value, sound relatively innocuous. Women in Hungary with multiple children receive, depending on the number of kids, lifetime waivers on income taxes, as well as loans and subsidies to help pay for larger cars and housing. But Orbán is not merely encouraging the kind of motherhood that the tradwives perform. He is framing such “traditional” families as under attack — by Muslim immigrants, LGBTQ people, even Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros — and taking aim at these perceived threats. In 2020, Hungary passed legislation that ended legal recognition for transgender people. That same year, Orbán and the Fidesz party-controlled parliament amended the constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, banning adoption by same-sex couples, and stating that the country “protects children’s rights [only] to the gender identity” that they were assigned at birth.
Hungary’s erosion of rights doesn’t stop there. As Andrea Peto, a professor of gender studies at Central European University, told me on the podcast, Orbán is also working to “replac[e] women as agents of change [by positioning] mothers as the only acceptable and desirable position of women in the society.” As evidence, she cited a report issued by the Hungarian state audit office that cautioned against “pink education” (i.e., the overrepresentation of women in higher education). The report claimed that women with college degrees were responsible for Hungary’s demographic decline. By framing traditional motherhood as uniquely moral and patriotic, Peto said, Orbán provides a values-based rationale for “keeping women away from the labor market…[and] create[s] an alternative vocabulary to the language of rights.”
Many American conservatives have been fanboying over Orbán for years (former Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast from Hungary in 2021; in 2022, Orbán was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas). But Ron DeSantis has taken the conservative embrace of Hungarian-style illiberalism to the next level, leaning into the culture wars that Orbán has deployed to great effect. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Act bears a striking resemblance to Hungarian legislation that banned any mention of anything LGBTQ-related in K-12 educational materials. This past March, Florida Republicans introduced a bill that would ban instruction on gender studies, “intersectionality,” and critical race theory in public colleges and universities — an effort that closely resembled Orbán’s 2018 ban of gender studies in Hungarian universities. DeSantis has even taken a page out of Orbán’s book when it comes to the press. He’s currently brainstorming ways to pass legislation that would limit free speech protections and make it easier for people to win defamation lawsuits against the media.
It’s not that all tradwives are on TikTok explicitly stating their support for such policies (although some are certainly fans of DeSantis’s work). But many women — and mothers, specifically — do play a critical role in these efforts. It is why conservative advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty have been such indispensable partners to DeSantis, providing the veneer of popular support from moms who claim that this agenda benefits them and their kids. And it’s why the tradwives movement is such a complementary cultural force. As Eviane Leidig, Ph.D., author of The Women of the Far Right Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, told me on the podcast, some tradwives have explicit connections to right-wing groups, with some influencers permitting their images to be used in far-right propaganda. But even those that eschew overt references to politics mainstream the kind of family values that are frequently used to advance extremism in a way that feels like a choice — at least for now.
If we are to stop the growing threat of illiberalism from taking hold in the U.S., then we must reject the false nostalgia that is being aggressively marketed to us, whether it comes from angry men in MAGA hats or attractive tradwives in well-kept homes. Make no mistake: the #tradwives are not a harmless social media trend. Through their cultivated depictions of domestic bliss, they are building demand for a set of policies that encourage — or even conscript — women to assume traditional roles. And they are distracting their audience from the politicians who are dismantling democracy and eroding rights and freedoms in service of that vision.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
