They are called tradwives; women who choose to stay home, focus on their families and housekeeping and often agree to be subservient to their husbands.
They're part of an influential online community who reject feminism, and instead embrace traditional gender roles.
However they are also influencers of right-wing politics, says two New Zealand academics who have studied this area of online activism.
Sophia Sykes at Massey University has written a thesis on the subject.
Photo: 123rf
Tradwives fall into three main groups, she says.
“Conservative right, alt lite and then alt right, which is where you kind of get that more extreme iteration,” Sykes says.
While acknowledging that women have every right to choose prioritising family and home, there are “problematic” elements to tradwife culture, she says.
“As we saw with some of the more extreme tradwives, their position of influence is used to promote a very limited perspective on the role of women and other groups in society.”
Dr Veronica Hopner supervised the thesis and told Jesse Mulligan the other side of the tradwife coin is “crunchy mums.”
“They can be understood as a left-wing iteration of trad wife value systems.
“Both could prioritise traditional gender roles, home schooling, natural birthing. Both could also be supportive of limited government intervention in lives and potentially could be anti-vaccines as well.
“So tradwives often adopt [such values]to highlight their commitment to God or reject of modernism. Crunchy mums typically adopt them from what we could see in the literature, due to an idea of environmental awareness, a commitment to sustainability and a commitment to naturalism.”
There is some evidence of crunchy mums becoming more right-wing as they interact with tradwives, she says.
“Potentially that could happen because they're starting to get on social media sites that have got these shared common things between the right-wing tradwives and the crunchy mums and sort of start to go down into the trad wife territory.”
The movement is rooted in American culture wars, she says.
“A lot of the rhetoric that's playing out on their social media platforms, is simplistically speaking, a battle between traditional and conservative factions, or what they might call kind of progressive or liberal factions.
“Really central and important to these culture wars is the traditional, family structure, the role of men and women and the role of religion in American life.”
The US remains a deeply religious nation, says Hopner.
“We in New Zealand don't really have a good insight into this really deep Christianity, this deep-rooted religiosity that is really fundamental to big parts of American life.”
Feminism as an ideological movement is seen as taking women away from the biological, biblical and spiritual roles valued by conservative Christians, she says.
“These women really strongly believe in conservative family structures. So, feminism, in some ways, is seen as a threat to the strength of the family unit.
“Women in the workforce is largely seen as stepping away from the family unit. And also often was sort of represented as a way for the government to increase its tax revenue.”
The tradwife movement does not seem to have taken hold in New Zealand yet, Sykes says. Although they did come across an online community of “Christian mommy bloggers,” she says.
“We struggled to position them within the right-wing landscape, as we defined it, these women generally appeared to be fairly accepting of religious and racial diversity.”
She expects tradwife values to be present in New Zealand, however, in conservative Christian communities.
“But these are often very private and separate from mainstream social media and our research didn’t extend into those spaces.”
Conditions nevertheless are ripe for this largely American phenomenon to take root here in New Zealand, she says.
“Social media is borderless, and [some of] these women had followings of 20,000 to 200,000, sometimes even more."
So, if women choose to lead these kinds of lifestyles what’s the problem? Up to a point, there isn’t one says Hopner.
“I think the problems that potentially could arise are that they could use the position to influence or perpetuate contentious perspectives on wifely submission; they’re anti-abortion, we've seen with Roe vs Wade being overturned in America now, there's different states that have imposed very strict abortion laws.
“With alt right woman they're white supremacist so at the very least it's discrimination, prejudice, stigma, and the worst is the potential for violence.”
