trad wives and bad faith

Much attention has been paid in recent months to the trad wife phenomenon of social media and many theories have been proposed so as to explain the emergence of this reactionary and regressive internet subculture. These proposed explanations range from good (e.g. Marxist critique of the stifling nature of existing under late-stage capitalism and the ways in which a longing for comfort can become conflated with a longing for oppressive gender roles) to very bad (e.g. trad wives are a reflection of women’s natural predilection towards submission). I am also not the first to point out that while the specific branding of the trad wife influencer is a recent development, there have always been anti-feminist women, anti-suffrage women, etc. In the analyses of these reactionary movements by women against women’s rights since the emergence of women’s rights as a political movement up until today’s trad wives, I have yet to encounter what I believe to be the most salient explanation for what motivates this vehement opposition to the expansion of women’s freedom: bad faith.

Sartre says, “we are condemned to be free.” Freedom is hard. It means responsibility for oneself and one's actions. It requires decision-making and binds one to the consequences of that decision. Bad faith is a term which I personally encountered in The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir, though I believe it was originated by Sartre. Bad faith is essentially a reaction to the inherent difficulty we all face in accepting ourselves as free. It is when we act inauthentically. That is when we act in a way that is incongruent with the actions we would have taken if we were truly acting freely (i.e. acting in a way that is in line with our desires and values and not caving to the external pressures of our society). 

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir describes three archetypes of the woman acting in bad faith. For our purposes, the “woman in love” provides the best explanation for the trad wife and her ideological predecessors. The “woman in love” is not simply a woman who is in love; she is a woman who rejects her freedom by merging her identity with that of her male object. Thus, the psychology underpinning the ideology and lifestyle of the trad wife is not a genuine desire for repressive gender roles and the life of oppression and submission they force upon women. Rather, it is born out of a desire to avoid living with the terrifying reality that we are free. 

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References:

Aho, Kevin. (2025). Existentialism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2025 Ed.

de BEAUVOIR, Simone. (1948). The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel Press Kensington Publishing Corp.