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<p>A portmanteau of “traditional” and “wife,” the online “tradwife” trend evokes “traditional” values, religious faith, and antifeminism. Some have amassed sizable—and profitable—followings as content creators, despite their professed belief that women should eschew the economic sphere. This mixed-methods study examines 23 creators’ digital self-presentation to explore how they navigate this tension between their entrepreneurial creator labor and their performance of traditional values. Using a qualitative analysis of over 2,000 individual Instagram Stories and a computational text analysis of the creators’ website texts, we find that they obfuscate the tension between their occupation and ideology by obscuring their entrepreneurial labor, as well as by rarely featuring explicit political discussions on their Instagram Stories and websites. Instead, we argue these creators represent a “soft sell” of political ideology, thus enabling the mainstreaming thereof, allowing for wider visibility, and maintaining plausible deniability. Our study introduces the “tradwife creator” to distill differences between earlier self-identified, ideologically explicit tradwives and their later iterations. The findings contribute to our growing understanding of how political ideology, commerce, and labor intersect in the creator economy.</p>

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Breadwinner or breadmaker: analyzing contradictions in tradwife creators’ entrepreneurial labor, political ideology, and digital self-presentation

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月5日

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  • Roxana Mika Muenster,
  • Margaret E. Foster

摘要

A portmanteau of “traditional” and “wife,” the online “tradwife” trend evokes “traditional” values, religious faith, and antifeminism. Some have amassed sizable—and profitable—followings as content creators, despite their professed belief that women should eschew the economic sphere. This mixed-methods study examines 23 creators’ digital self-presentation to explore how they navigate this tension between their entrepreneurial creator labor and their performance of traditional values. Using a qualitative analysis of over 2,000 individual Instagram Stories and a computational text analysis of the creators’ website texts, we find that they obfuscate the tension between their occupation and ideology by obscuring their entrepreneurial labor, as well as by rarely featuring explicit political discussions on their Instagram Stories and websites. Instead, we argue these creators represent a “soft sell” of political ideology, thus enabling the mainstreaming thereof, allowing for wider visibility, and maintaining plausible deniability. Our study introduces the “tradwife creator” to distill differences between earlier self-identified, ideologically explicit tradwives and their later iterations. The findings contribute to our growing understanding of how political ideology, commerce, and labor intersect in the creator economy.