As birth rates continue to plummet and fewer young people are getting married, the liberal media is doing everything it can to accelerate those alarming trends by smearing women who embrace traditional family life as complicit pawns in an imagined fascist takeover of America.
The latest example of this scare campaign comes to us from The Guardian’s Adrienne Matei, who claimed in a recent article that so-called “tradwives” are echoing Nazi propaganda and doing the bidding of President Donald Trump’s supposedly authoritarian regime. But while Matei is particularly vicious in her attack, she is hardly alone in her critique; many other publications, including Teen Vogue and activists on forums like Reddit, have joined in, disparaging “tradwives” as brainwashed simpletons.
“Tradwife,” short for “traditional wife,” is a term for women who embrace homemaking, marriage, and motherhood. In recent years, a number of tradwife social media accounts have gained substantial followings by posting videos showing cooking, cleaning, and other day-to-day mom tasks.
For most Americans, the concept of a woman raising children, keeping a home, and building a strong family is honorable, if relatively unremarkable given that it’s how most households have operated across societies for all of human history. But as Matei reveals, to the modern left, tradwives are a dangerous threat to democracy itself.
Matei’s central claim in “From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home” is that because the Nazi Party encouraged women to have children and American conservatives are also encouraging women to have children, that must mean Trump and Republicans are just like the Nazis.
Of course, that claim is both historically dishonest and logically absurd. The nuclear family with a father as the primary provider and a mother as the primary caregiver long predates the 20th century and is in fact the basic institution upon which all human civilization is founded.
The Nazis were unspeakably evil, but they were hardly the first or only group to venerate the family and encourage women to become mothers. Aristotle called the family “the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants,” the first building block of political life. Even the word “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning “household management.” Political and economic life begins in the family, the first and most natural unit of society.
Calling tradwives “fascist” because the Nazi Party venerated motherhood is like saying that anyone who wants clean streets and low crime is also fascist because the Nazis opposed litter and vagrancy. Under Matei’s impossible standard, any policy or belief that any authoritarian regime ever has embraced must be discarded.
To justify her audacious claims, Matei quotes historian Diana Garvin, who says, “What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses.” But that gets it exactly backwards. The state was never meant to be the universal provider. Families are primary; the state is secondary.
Ironically, while Matei accuses the Trump administration of being “paternalistic,” it is in fact Matei and liberals who want the state to act as a de facto parent of the population by creating a cradle-to-grave welfare state that erodes family and community bonds.
But the moment that fully reveals Matei’s ignorance is her assertion that the Trump administration’s “pronatalist” policies “suggest its goal is not only population growth but specifically more white births” by “rolling back reproductive rights.”
Apparently, Matei forgot to check the stats. White women, despite making up nearly 60 percent of the female population of the United States, account for only 32 percent of all abortions. Meanwhile, black women, who make up just seven percent of the female population, account for 40 percent of all abortions. The data clearly shows that it is liberals’ radical pro-abortion agenda that is the biggest threat to non-white mothers and babies.
This contempt for the family is nothing new. Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the family should be abolished. Friedrich Engels argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that the patriarchal family was a product of private property and class rule, and therefore had to be dismantled if socialism was to succeed. Engels further asserted that “the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.”
In recent years, left-wing activists and mainstream media “journalists” have picked up where the first generation of Marxists left off, recycling talking points that the family is suspect and women who embrace it must be shamed.
Black Lives Matter’s guiding principles, for instance, call for “disruption” of the nuclear family. Teen Vogue’s Julie Kohler, meanwhile, has portrayed “tradwife” influencers as a secret pipeline to authoritarianism. Eva Wiseman, also writing for The Guardian, has accused tradwives of promoting “fascist undertones” and “regressive gender politics.”
On Reddit’s r/Feminism page, the vitriol directed at tradwives is even more direct and aggressive. Users deride stay-at-home and even working moms as “creepy and disturbing,” accuse women of “Orwellian doublethink” for calling homemaking empowering, and even dismiss the trend as mere “patriarchy propaganda.”
But despite all these assaults, the traditional family maintains an enduring allure. In 2024, columnist Eva Wiseman, also writing for The Guardian, admitted that “tradwife” videos make homemaking look “so bloody delicious,” even to feminists exhausted by modern chaos. Still, Wiseman faulted the women posting tradwife content, as if finding peace in family life were some betrayal of the sacred sisterhood.
In reality, it was feminism that stigmatized homemaking. The “tradwife” trend is a natural backlash, rooted in women’s inclination to nurture. It is women exercising free will in a free country, choosing what earlier generations of feminists worked so hard to belittle.
Moreover, while liberals insist that rejecting homemaking and motherhood is the only path to “liberation,” the right does not demand uniformity. Millions of conservative women raise children while also working outside the home.
Charlie Kirk’s wife, Erika, beautifully expressed this sentiment at her late husband’s funeral, articulating what liberals fail to understand about the power of the marital bond and partnership. “Your wife is not your servant. Your wife is not your employee. Your wife is not your slave,” she said. “She is your helper, you are not rivals. You are one flesh working together for the glory of God. I was Charlie’s confidant. I was his vault, his closest and most trusted adviser, his best friend.”
Her words reveal what Karl Marx and today’s critics miss: traditional marriage and homemaking are not slavery. She affirmed a vision of marriage rooted in partnership and respect — not subjugation.
Feminism was once advertised as freedom of choice. Yet when women choose family today, they’re mocked as backward or even dangerous by the left. While liberals accuse conservatives of only valuing women for their ability to bear children, liberals are themselves telling women that they are only valuable insofar as they mirror traditionally masculine pursuits.
Children are our most valuable resource. They are the future. Whoever is entrusted with their care and formation bears a responsibility greater than any boardroom title. Acknowledging the dignity of that work – the work of raising a family – is a mark of a healthy society.
In the end, media smears say more about progressive insecurity than about women baking sourdough. What draws women to the “tradwife” life is not fascism but a deeper instinct to resist state dependency and recover the self-sufficiency of the home.
Real empowerment means respecting women’s agency, whether in the office or the kitchen. Strong families are the bedrock of liberty, the first school of self-government. A society that sneers at homemakers is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
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