Living and Leaving the Tradwife Movement

Hi, my name is Aria Lewis, and if you search “tradwife” on any major social media platform, even Google, my videos come up. But I’m not a part of the movement anymore, and I thought it was time to share my story about how I was an enthusiastic, staunch defender of the movement for 2+ years, and how I eventually left.

Joining the Tradwife Movement

Let’s go back to the spring of 2023 when I first joined the tradwife movement. A few months prior, I had left my photography business due to health issues that kept me from being able to work well. My husband and I purchased a house on an acre of land, and we were finally able to start homesteading. At this point, I had never heard of the term “tradwife”, and I was new to the world of being a stay at home wife — I’d been working since we got married, with no intention of stopping (even after children) — until my health took a downturn and I found that I couldn’t keep up. So I left my job, my business that I had spent 6 years building, to become a stay at home wife at the ripe age of 21.

Well, your girl, even sick, can’t stay still, so I started sharing my journey into homemaking and homesteading on social media, and I was on my own journey in biblical womanhood/marriage, so I started sharing some of that too, and quickly found myself within the tradwife movement, almost completely on accident.

And I loved it.

HERE I found my people - the cottagecore aesthetic, the small homesteaders, the pretty dresses, the women who loved their husbands and their children and were working on making their homes a beautiful place. As a chronically ill, chronically burnt-out girl making a home for her and her husband, I had found my place, and I LOVED IT.

I started posting more tradwife-specific content, and my account really took off. In 2023, it was a huge thing, and people flocked to my page to laugh at my historically inspired clothes and my stay at home wife lifestyle - but there were about a hundred thousand who found me and enjoyed it, and suddenly, I was an influencer.

At this point, the tradwife community was mainly women in their 20s, who talked about biblical marriage, traditional gender roles, loving your husband and children well, cultivating a beautiful and peaceful home, cooking from scratch, and homesteading. There were obviously some people on the fringes who were extremists, or overly legalistic, but the main core group was not, from what I remember.

Well, as time went on, and I was able to focus on healing without having to work, I slowly got better, and started putting more time into growing my platform. I then got pregnant, and ended up very sick, and while laying on the couch throwing up, I kept posting videos and stories, and eventually in October of 2024 I started making a full time income. I had my daughter February of 2025, and that was a year of a lot of change for me. I was trying to balance motherhood, and working, because we needed my income, and I kept having to refute the claim that “it’s not traditional to work”. Over 2025, I gradually stopped making tradwife content, and by the beginning of 2026, I had phased it out completely.

But why?

Leaving the Movement

I left the movement for a few reasons.

For one, I had to keep clarifying over and over that it is actually traditional to work. It seems the main definition of a tradwife is a stay-at-home-mom who follows gender roles, is submissive to her husband, doesn’t have a work history, etc. There’s also a huge push for the 1950s aesthetic, but the 1950s are not actually traditional!

When I say traditional, I mean 1800s, 1700s, back to BIBLE TIMES. I do not mean 1950s at all. The clarification and arguments over and over again got incredibly tiring for a new mom, and I needed to step away from that.

As I distanced myself, I started to see a new surge of tradwives enter the scene - young, teenage girls who were newly married and full of thoughts on what it means to be a tradwife. I began to hear things like “I get to stay at home because I didn’t marry a loser” and other things that started to sound kind of prideful about not having to work. I also started to see a lot of young married women talking about extreme financial dependence on their husbands - don’t get me wrong, I don’t see any issues with being a SAHM, but I do think there ought to be some protections set in place - and overall, just began to feel more and more like the movement had changed and I didn’t fit in anymore.

Using the title “tradwife” had started to cause more harm than good, and it had become a stumbling block rather than a stepping stone. So I stopped.

And now? Well, people still think of me as a tradwife. I get it. And you know, that’s ok, because the core of who I am has not changed. I am still traditionally minded, in a traditional marriage. I still believe it’s best for children if their mother can be home with them. I also believe that working from home is traditional.

Being a mom has given me less patience when dealing with the online world. I suddenly found myself incredibly frustrated with people trying to be snarky/give backlash/be annoying for whatever reason. Being in a controversial camp such as “tradwife” was not helping with that, and I also found that as a mom feeling protective towards my child, I don’t want to be involved in controversies. When I was younger, childless, I could deal with the hate, argue with people for hours, but now - I just don’t have the time for that. I’m busy with better things.

So, as the movement had morphed, and as I also had morphed and changed and grown into a mother, I stepped away. And it’s been a good decision. I still wonder who I am, sometimes, but I’ve learned that I never fit into any boxes, whether self-imposed, or given by others. I've found that leaving a label lends to greater freedom of expression.

I hope that answers some of your questions about why I was so enthusiastically a part of the movement, and why I slowly left. No drama, nothing crazy - just a gradual shift.

Here’s to living outside of labels <3