Make America Hot Again is at War with the Tradwives
As tradwife fantasies shift into summer, the right is testing out a more palatable brand of misogyny.
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The FYP of nearly every woman we know has been extra full of aspirational summer tradwife content recently. Chunky bebes frolicking in fields, picnic tables overflowing with meat (so much meat), herb gardens Martha Stewart would approve of. Sometimes I fall for it and I click over to these women’s profiles only to discover that it was all lead generation. They all want to sell me something. They’re selling courses on femininity, skincare made with tallow,sourdough starters and homeschool curriculums
Because, of course, the tradwife of it all is a scam. The real tradwives are women living lives like former tradwife
did, not dancing in their private ballet studio and posting it online like Hannah Neeleman of the brand Ballerina Farm. They’re women trapped in an abusive patriarchal system designed to strip women of all their agency.Tradwives on social media are working. Posting on social media is a job. They are running media brands and sometimes their husbands are behind the scenes reaping the benefits of a female breadwinner (pun actually intended). The hypocrisy of this has finally, it seems, boiled over on the right.
At the heart of this debate is influencer Emily Wilson (@EmilySavesAmerica), a popular conservative voice who you may know from a viral video where she said that slavery should be left up to the states. With a love of a filter, enviable highlights and a panache for drawing attention, Wilson recently sparked controversy by telling aspirants of the tradwife movement that they need to find a way to make their own money because they are just heading towards disappointment.
“I hate to call out my own party, but the young girls on the right promoting this tradwife bullshit…I suggest you get a hobby because guess what baby girl..you’re actually setting yourself up for failure.”
She followed up with a video stating that the men who crashed Grindr at CPAC were probably the tradwive’s husbands.
The response from traditionalist voices in the movement—particularly male commentators like Matt Walsh—immediately criticized Wilson. In a YouTube segment, Walsh said Emily was “annoying” and that she’s part of "a growing problem on the right...the problem in a word is feminism. Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve like marriage, family, Western Civilization itself, feminism militates against."
An Instagrammer/Youtuber named BernadineBluntly lambasted Emily for being a “bitter single woman” in her 30’s and said (as if it was a pejorative) that she’d probably divorce her husband anyhow. Bernadine said that Emily’s statement was an attack on women in their 20’s who really were living traditional values.
This conflict represents more than just social media drama. It highlights a fracture within conservative circles—between those promoting an idealized version of 1950s domesticity where mothers don’t work and those acknowledging the realities of modern life, where women work outside the home, experience divorce, face domestic challenges, and sometimes even raise children alone (gasp).
Wanna-be influencers have taken the drama up a notch, calling out White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for working with a child at home:
The tradwife content that has become so popular on social media emphasizes a beautiful and aspirational lifestyle while glossing over the difficulties inherent in being a woman in America today.
One of the biggest myths that Wilson called out is that there is no secret army out there of very wealthy men just waiting for their barefoot and pregnant bride.
Walsh, with 3.21m followers on YouTube is an influential thought leader on the far right. He says, in particular, that it’s a bad sign that Emily says women should earn money as an escape hatch because they don’t want to be trapped. Seemingly forgetting domestic violence exists, Walsh claims this planning is itself a violation of a marriage contract.
This is tapping into a broader sentiment growing on the right against no-fault divorce.
Walsh and the tradwives exist in the biblical conservatism side of the moment. Emily (Wilson) and her supporters exist in what Emily (Amick) has been calling the “mean hots” side. They are the people profiled by New York Magazine as “The Cruel Kids Table” and pushing to Make America Hot Again.
The Conservateur, a conservative magazine that seeks to attract the mean hots, recently ruminated on the tradwife/working woman schism by trying to stake out a ‘moderate’ position on whether women should have autonomy or not:
"What began as a well-intentioned backlash to feminist overreach has, in some corners, calcified into a campaign to confine womanhood to a single form: apron-clad, offline, and permanently at home. This debate is about far more than left vs. right or feminism vs. patriarchy; it strikes at the heart of how we honor women's God-given roles in both the home and the world. The stakes are high: get it wrong, and we either idolize a secular career ladder or romanticize a 1950s housewife ideal. Get it right, and we uphold a vision of womanhood that is faithful, wise, and profoundly freeing."
What's happening could be much more calculated than the headlines we are seeing that gleefully declare a schism in the party.