I have found the “Tradwife” trend rather fascinating to watch. Though I don’t ply the murky streets of Tiktok, where most of the movement’s canonical material is posted, enough content has seeped out onto my YouTube and X feeds to give me a working understanding of the subculture.

To the uninitiated, “Tradwifery” is an emerging movement among some couples to upend conventional wisdom around marriage and family life in the West, especially in the United States, by re-establishing traditional gender roles. The moniker itself is a concatenation of “traditional” and “wife.”

Tradwifery’s leading lights are women who have opted out of formal employment, and are talking up the virtues of staying at home, bearing and rearing children, and submitting to the will of their husbands. Before marriage, tradwifery means virginity and pure courtship. Upon marriage, it implies a fairly stringent separation between the homemaker and protector-provider roles.

The movement is driven both by a nostalgia for a purportedly simpler past as well as a gathering sincerity among women about the unfulfilling and unidimensional nature of most formal employment, especially when contrasted with the meaningfulness of a well-ordered family life. There is something admirable here, especially the self-abasement that is a necessary precondition for this kind of life.

Naturally, as with any movement that dares to so much as acknowledge hitherto obvious differences between the sexes, the tradwife trend has found no shortage of opposition. Most mainstream coverage of the movement, none of which approves, hearkens to its connections with “the alt-right,” “toxic masculinity,” “the patriarchy," along with a thousand other such modern-day mortal sins.

As a result, the conversation around the movement, like much of modern American public discourse, has become woefully devoid of nuance. It has devolved into a two-sided quarrel, like a high school debate, complete with snarky but ultimately useless takes: tradwives are small-minded ignoramuses; the workplace is an unfulfilling rat race; feminism is a scam; women have rights. Yada yada yada.

From my perspective as an African who has grown up, and still lives, on this old continent, I can’t help but wonder how different this conversation would be if those participating in it broadened their horizons a just little bit; if they were to, say, take into consideration the experiences of their African counterparts.

African housewives

For, as it happens, Africa has the lowest rate of conventional labour participation for women in the world. For this reason, most married African women are technically housewives. What is, for a few well-off Western women, an aspiration connected to the past, remains the present reality for the vast majority of African women.

Yet most of these women wouldn’t qualify as housewives in the narrow sense in which the tradwife movement and its opponents define the term. For they not only work in the home, but often have a million other concerns going. They till farms, run shops, manage surprisingly prodigious financial collectives with their fellow women, and carry on many other such pursuits.

Almost all the women in the neighbourhoods in which I grew up belonged to this category. Their husbands were generally in formal employment, while they generally took care of their homes. Even now, whenever I have to fill out one of those pesky government forms that ask me to state the occupation of my own mother, the most truthful answer remains “housewife.”