Gen Z women don’t long to be tradwives

Fox News is riling up the MAGA grandmas again, giving them false hopes that their daughters and granddaughters are on the verge of moving back home to embark on a life of providing their elders a dozen grandbabies to brag about on Facebook. “Gen Z women are embracing the ‘tradwife’ trend, study finds,” read the headline of a recent video, which featured presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump crowing that “kids” are “turning back to the church” and “starting families at an early age” against visuals promising viewers that a whopping 47% of young women crave that June Cleaver life.

This message is one that the Fox News audience, which leans toward aging Republicans, is eager to hear. That’s especially true of the demographic of women who watch the network, who are also the prime audience for Hallmark movies about wayward daughters returning home to marry the boy next door. The problem is that it’s just not true.

There is no evidence that Gen Z has plans to marry or have kids young, and despite the wishful thinking of Christian conservatives, they remain the least religious generation in the country. And it’s especially silly to imagine that young American women want to leave the workplace and enter traditional marriages where the wife is financially dependent on her husband.

But it wasn’t just Fox News trumpeting the study. MAGA podcaster Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, gushed over these numbers, tweeting, “The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.” This is a false dichotomy, which Katie Miller knows all too well. Like nearly three-quarters of mothers with children under 18 at home, she has a job, even if it is just being a terrible podcast host. She’s been on something of a tear on X recently, railing against the alleged societal destruction that women’s equality has wrought. On Thursday, she complained that “the teen birth rate has fallen 72%” since 2007, blaming birth control and women “chasing careers” for this alleged tragedy. Many commenters pointed out her hypocrisy. Miller not only works, but she also didn’t have kids until her 30s — well over a decade older than the high school kids who anger her by prioritizing prom and graduation over baby-making.

The study used to justify this MAGA wish-casting was run not by a reputable pollster but by EduBirdie, an online service for college students that promises, “We’ll do your homework while you live your life.” A questionable outlet, the company obtained the results through a methodology so shady it verged on outright dishonesty: They used a definition of “tradwife” that bears no resemblance to the term’s actual meaning.

The questionnaire defined “tradwife” as a woman “happily married with kids, stable life, normal job.” But that’s not a tradwife; that’s just a wife. Being married while working is standard operating procedure for many feminists. And it is very much not “trad.”

While the term “tradwife” has no set definition, nearly everyone familiar with the term would agree that it describes traditional gender roles, the two biggest tenets of which are submission to a husband’s authority and avoiding paid work outside the home. Other options underscored how slanted the questionnaire were: “trophy wife/rich partner, never working,” “ultra-successful, independent, famous —even if single” and “partnered, childfree, building a creative career, traveling together.”

The option on that list that was actually closest to a tradwife is the “trophy wife,” which only 14% of women selected — and it would probably be even lower if they hadn’t put their thumb on the scale by implying a life of luxury and leisure. The other two choices appear to have been worded as to discourage respondents from picking them, as if creative or independent women don’t get married or have kids. Considering how blatantly the survey was slanted to encourage women to pick what obviously describes a modern, middle-class marriage — which is not “trad” — it’s actually pretty funny they still couldn’t get half of respondents to pick bog-standard heterosexual normality.

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The larger write-up of the study shows how much its results are the exact opposite of what Fox News was implying. Eighty-eight percent of those polled described themselves as “ambitious,” with 75% saying they saw no conflict between having a relationship and having a job. Beyond the dubious and prejudicial methodology, the poll was conducted online, which further undermines its trustworthiness. There were not apparent controls, for example, to ensure it was only Gen Z women responding. (I filled it out myself, and I’m Gen X.) But the findings about Gen Z women actually wanting to work do comport with more reliable data, which shows decades of increasing numbers of women seeking higher education and financial independence.

In response to a Salon inquiry, an EduBirdie spokesperson insisted that “the term ‘tradwife’ isn’t necessarily associated with not working.” This is stretching the word’s definition past its breaking point. While it’s true, as EduBirdie told Salon, that many of the online influencers peddling the “tradwife” life are actually paid professionals who make money off creating content, this hypocrisy doesn’t exonerate them. It shows they are selling a fantasy of female dependence to gullible audiences, one they have no intention of living themselves.

Fox News played the same word game, with Lara Trump saying women can continue “having independent pursuits of their own” while also having a family — which happens to be what feminism has always advocated. Except, of course, feminists have also pushed for policies that make this possible for women, such as affordable daycare, while also calling on men to do their fair share at home. Obviously, no one on Fox News is advocating for any of that. Instead, this brand-new definition of “tradwife” just sounds like the worst of all worlds: women having to work and handle all domestic responsibilities without any help at all. For the wealthy hosts of Fox News, who can afford stay-at-home nannies and maids, this may not seem like much of a lift. But for most women, it’s a nightmare.

Conservatives like Trump justify this nonsense by attacking a strawman version of feminism, accusing feminists of telling women to “focus on your career” and do “the whole marriage thing later.” It is true that people — not just women — are marrying later than they used to, but that’s not because of being bullied by feminists into it.

In 2023, New York Times journalist Anna Louise Sussman did what few seem to have thought of — she actually asked single women why they weren’t married yet. Contrary to right-wing stereotypes, these women were not cackling at their desks while ignoring plaintive marriage proposals pouring in from dozens of eligible suitors. Most said they hadn’t met anyone they could marry, since the dating pool is overloaded with men who aren’t interested in marriage, or worse, are erratic or cruel.

That, as I wrote last week, underscores the real dangers of the tradwife discourse. Conservatives are unwilling to tell men to shape up and become more enticing marriage partners. That would require men to embrace feminist behaviors like treating women as equals and doing their fair share of housework. Implicit in all this pressure on women to get married is pressure for them to lower their standards. But that comes at the cost of not just personal happiness, but often basic mental and physical well-being.

This was illustrated in a recent CNN interview with former tradwives — women who actually stayed at home and submitted to their husbands, not the ones peddling this fantasy on social media for cash. These real-life tradwives described hellish experiences, both for themselves and their children. They were deprived of basic health care, education and even a sense of self. They spoke of being shamed for every aspect of their personality, right down to the tenor of their voice, and being made to feel they were stupid and had no capacity to make decisions for themselves.

Even Fox News seems aware that the actual tradwife lifestyle is a hard sell, precisely because there’s so much room for abuse. So they’re trying to redefine the term as trad-light, promising viewers there’s a way where women can be both independent and free, while also adhering to traditional duties, such as handling all child care, elder care and domestic work on their own.

One can see the appeal of this fantasy. It allows older Fox News viewers to reject taxpayer-funded child care and expect their adult daughters to be readily available to them, while maintaining the illusion that they’re not sexists. But women actually being treated as equals requires more of society than just meaningless platitudes. It means letting go of the expectation that women provide free emotional and physical labor, and it requires expecting more of men.