The One About Black Women as Trad Wives

    

        Media teaches us who we ought to be. It teaches us what success is and what it is not. It teaches us who and what is desirable. It shapes the psyche of the next generation, for both better and worse. Social media holds a unique space because it represents the “real” world and its values in real-time. The social aspect of this medium allows for community building, collaboration, groupthink, and collective commentary on societal norms and injustices. Social media has replaced the traditional media's role of defining the status quo and with this new medium, comes new trends and values. Over the past few years, maybe due to the idle minds free to scroll TikTok during the pandemic, conversations centered on femininity and masculinity have increased on platforms across social media and all demographics. Within these conversations of masculinity and femininity, the Tradwife trend gained momentum among not only white women but black women as well. As with most social media sites like Twitter and TikTok, there always exists a Black sector of that space aptly named “Black Twitter” or #BlackTok. Black people have always carved out space for ourselves geographically and now, digitally. Dr. Jayme N. Canty highlights that “traditional geography does not signal a cultural reality or the ways historically marginalized persons find space to exist in a location” (16). The same is true of social media spaces. These spaces often coexist, seldom interacting except in instances where the oppressor intrudes to destroy or co-opt this space. As the Tradwife trend gained momentum in Black social media spaces, people questioned its authenticity to Black women, its role in uplifting patriarchal views, and its use to further ostracize Black women from their feminity.

What’s a Tradwife anyway? A Tradwife is a colloquialism for “traditional” wife. A woman who understands her role as a stay-at-home homemaker. She “is eerily perfect. Her home is spotless. Her makeup is on point. She makes nearly everything from scratch, usually in a perfect dress. In short, she's straight out of a 1950s sitcom” (Rascoe). These women are soft, beautiful, and loving; they appreciate and respect their husband’s position as breadwinners. In the white sphere, the most influential are light-haired, light-eyed petite women who wear florals or soft fabrics. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly when we factor in colorism, for Black women, the most popular (those with the highest followings) are also soft-spoken women, usually light-skinned and thin, and their hair a very loose curl pattern. The most popular of these Black women is Nara Smith. Darker-skinned women who lean into the Tradwife aesthetic wear their hair straight, sometimes blonde, speak softly, and promote traditional gender roles. They purport to lean deeply into their femininity because they already have one man in the house, implying they don’t need to be the other. Tiktoker SoftWifeLife, an almond-brown black woman, was asked “why are u whispering?” She responded, “there was a time in my life when life wasn’t so soft…  me speaking the way I speak is a reminder to stay soft, to stay feminine. There doesn’t need to be two men in this house. He’s the masculine and I’m the feminine and I love my role” (SoftWifeLife). Many Black women understand the unspoken truth beneath “there was a time in my life when life wasn’t so soft” because for Black women softness is a burgeoning option afforded to the few. 

Frances Beale addresses the plight of the Black woman in her article Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female. How would she perceive Black women’s transition into the soft life of Tradwives? Have we ever had an opportunity to be soft and “traditional?” Beale argues that feminist ideals based on traditional gender roles do not align with the lived realities of Black women, who were often forced into labor outside the home. “Most black women have to work to help house, feed, and clothe their families;” Beale later emphasizes that “Black women were never afforded any such phony luxuries” (Double Jeopardy).  This still holds true today. Black women make up 62 percent of the labor force for adult women (U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics). Furthermore, Beale would be against this “ideal model that is projected for a woman … to be surrounded by hypocritical homage and estranged from all real work, spending idle hours primping and preening, obsessed with conspicuous consumption, and limiting life's functions to simply a sex role” (Double Jeopardy).  Beale believed that for real change and revolution to happen for Black Americans, we need more competent doctors, lawyers, educators, etc, not domestic laborers wasting away their potential. 

Works Cited

Beal, Frances, and Radical Education Project (Ann Arbor, Mich). Double Jeopardy : To Be Black & Female. Radical Education Project, 1985.

Canty, Jayme N. Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South. State University of New York Press, 2025. Accessed 7 March 2025.

Rascoe, Ayesha. “'Trad wives' are trending. What does that say about feminism today?” NPR, 28 January 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/28/1227453741/trad-wives-are-trending-what-does-that-say-about-feminism-today. Accessed 7 March 2025.

SoftWifeLife. “Replying to @Jungle Love Jones thank you for your question. Its just a self reminder to stay soft and in ny feminine while my husband is home.” TikTok, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@softwifelife/video/7270266169309842730. Accessed 7 March 2025.

U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor force characteristics by race and ethnicity, 2022 : BLS Reports: U.S.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2022/. Accessed 7 March 2025.