Tradwives and ‘marry me chicken’ – are social cooking trends damaging modern gender roles?

Long Reads illustration of a gender symbol in the style of a social media icon

There's also last year's 'girl dinner' phenomenon, a TikTok trend with over a billion views showing meals made up of a mish-mash of elements, which faced backlash by critics who warned it promoted disordered eating.

The current and by far most contentious trend to grace TikTokers’ ‘for you pages’ (FYP) is the ‘tradwives’ movement.

What is the ‘tradwives movement’?

Tradwife (shorthand for “traditional wife”) refers to a new and controversial group of mostly young women who reject modern gender roles, and instead promote the traditional role of the homemaker to millions of followers. These TikTokers regularly film themselves cooking recipes from scratch, such as homemade bubblegum, as well as cleaning the house and raising their children.

Nara Smith and Emily Mariko are two of the biggest TikTok creators who have gained the title of tradwives; Smith posts cooking mini vlogs, in which she prepares meals almost entirely from scratch while dressed in luxury clothes, narrated in dulcet tones. Her TikToks have accumulated over 438 million likes to date.

TikTokers are even filming themselves outlining the rules of what it means to be a tradwife. In a video with 1.4 million views and counting, TikTok creator Victora Lit sits in her car and speaks to the camera: “The number one rule as a tradwife: a man’s home is his castle, so he should be treated as a king”.

Hannah Neeleman — known online as Ballerina Farm — is a content creator heavily associated with the tradwives phenomenon. Posting her homesteading lifestyle on a 328-acre farm in Utah with her husband and eight children, the TikToker faced criticism this summer following a profile published in The Sunday Times. Tales of severe exhaustion and a lack of childcare (at the husband’s request) contrasted starkly to Neeleman’s idyllic portrayal of life on the farm’s account @ballerinafarmstore, where you can expect scenes of bread-baking, cow-milking and homeschooling. Neeleman told The Times she does not in fact “identify” with the term ‘tradwives’, insisting their content is simply "doing what God wants”.

Close-up of a mobile phone recording a young woman vlog preparing salad in kitchen at home

Where does the internet’s obsession with glamourising domestic labour stem from?

Dr Fiona McKay, lecturer in journalism, media and communication at the University of Strathclyde, believes a wider political climate is partially to blame: “Increasingly, we are seeing shifts to right-wing political ideologies all over the world, and with that come a backlash to the progression in recent decades that has blurred more stereotypically traditional gender roles and a return to more ‘traditional’ structures”.

“I think it also stems from a kind of post-feminist sensibility, which is the idea that we’ve come beyond feminism and it is not needed anymore because we have achieved equality. This assumes that any choice a woman makes is done from individual empowerment and women have the freedom to choose these kinds of roles. Often, however, this disregards more structural inequalities which still impact women and other minoritised groups.”

Smiling and cheerful young female food blogger wearing apron speaking to audience during live streaming on social media while preparing pizza and chopping vegetables in modern kitchen studio

So is living out of a 1950s housewife magazine a bit of harmless online fun? Vanessa Marr, principal lecturer, University of Brighton, argues there may be more sinister connotations underpinning these depictions of domestic bliss. “The underlying message is that if your fridge is Instagram-ready, your children happily eating vegetables you’ve grown yourself in a carefully curated lunchbox, or your boyfriend magically persuaded to ‘pop the question’ because you cooked a magic meal, then you have somehow succeeded,” says Marr.

And how do ‘marry me recipes’ and the ‘tradwives’ movement size up against women's real-life experiences outside of social media? “They buck the trend of conversations with women from my own research, which reveals exhaustion and frustration that in 2024 women in heterosexual relationships are still undertaking considerably more domestic and caring responsibilities than their male partners,” Marr explains. “That women should volunteer for this, apparently at the expense of their own (hard won) autotomy, feels like yet another misogynistic trick in disguise.”

On the other hand, the 'tradwives' movement may be a way of reclaiming the role, writes Hannah Mearns, VP, strategy and post creative strategist at VaynerMedia EMEA: “No one wants to be thought of as behind the times or irrelevant, which can sometimes happen in these debates, even if it wasn't the intention. So, for some content creators, I suspect the glamorisation of their position at home and domestic labour is their way of reclaiming and defending what’s theirs.

“They are flipping the most common narrative of 'tradwives' from subservient and lacking power to being leaders at the centre of the home. This, along with a heavy dose of nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times, where women's choices were undeniably more uniform,” she says.

Mearns recognises the current demure trend as another example of women reclaiming and “feeling motivated to express their version of femininity. Perhaps looking around and creating content to represent themselves, rather than letting themselves be defined by other people's ideas,” she says. Mearns also notes that followers may not look too deeply into the movement: “As with any TikTok trend, there are layers as to why they’ve become popular. An expression of gender roles might be at the core but many viewers might simply be there for the cooking, the home styling or the fashion. Which is as it should be. Platforms are there to enable all interests. The leaders of this trend have become excellent creators, generating a following by learning what works”.

We all know that social media is a curation of how we wish to present our lives online. The risk of the tradwife movement, however, is that it promotes a skewed view of the traditional homemaker role. “This desire to return to these 'tradwife' roles may appear to glamourise a stereotypical view of the past, but it may ignore the much less glamorous restrictions placed on women from earlier decades and how hard women fought for progress,” says McKay.

Could there be a danger, then, that the current tradwives movement may make a longer-term impact on modern gender roles at home? Seeing as one in four TikTok users are under 20 years old, and the majority of TikTok creators are aged 18-24, critics of the movement are concerned over the influence this content will make on younger viewers’ understanding of the division of labour.

“I would say this is where media literacy in schools and at home is really important. Young people want to engage on social media, and having the tools to do so in a critical and curious way is really key. Understanding why content may be created in a particular way, how content can be altered/edited, and who/what is benefitting from content being created is a really important thing to learn from an early age in this ever increasing digital world,” says Dr Robyn Muir, lecturer in media and communications at the University of Surrey.

However, it’s worth considering that multiple factors are at play when it comes to shaping young women's viewpoints. “There’s limited evidence of a direct cause-and-effect relationship between girls’ consumption of this content and their attitudes or choices. They make their decisions and form their attitudes based on various factors and circumstances, with the content they see online having different effects depending on the individual girl and their wider lives, social contexts and experiences,” says Emily Setty, senior lecturer in criminology, University of Surrey.

Most social cooking trends, however, are light-hearted – take “cucumber guy”, who’s recipes led to an unprecedented surge in demand for cucumbers. And although most TikTok trends tend to have a short lifespan, there is something disturbing behind a lifestyle which urges women to hold themselves to standards that are completely unreasonable.

“Today’s fairy tales are told in our social media feeds,” says Marr. “Women are told by women that this is what they must do to be happy; cook that dinner, grow that peach, and the world will be yours. It’s time we wised up, but ultimately, it’s about choice. Do it if you want to, don’t if you don’t, but don’t be manipulated into thinking it will make your life any better.”