There is a particular irony in watching a woman use the freedoms feminism fought to secure to explain why feminism has failed women.
The “tradwife” is a movement of modern-day influencers who advocate for women’s role to once more be determined by the stay-at-home wife and mother. These women use their social-media platforms to promote this ideology, often alongside increasingly controversial political opinions. Savanna Stone, a young American influencer who has publicly said that she does not believe women should have the right to vote, has become one of its more provocative faces. She has also repeatedly defended her position by arguing that women can debate publicly without possessing the right to vote.
Stone is not alone. The wider tradwife movement has increasingly blurred the distinction between advocating for a particular domestic arrangement and advocating for a particular social order: one in which men provide, women submit, and femininity is defined through marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Academic research published this year has similarly identified anti-feminism as a recurring feature of tradwife discourse, with influencers framing feminism as a threat to femininity and family life. But there is an important distinction that seems to have been lost somewhere between the sourdough and the political manifesto: being a homemaker is not anti-feminist. Believing women should have to be homemakers is.
Feminism did not emerge because women were incapable of cooking dinner. It emerged because women were expected to do little else. For generations, marriage could determine a woman's legal and economic existence. Women's access to education, employment, property, political participation and financial independence was restricted in ways that entrenched their dependence upon men. The feminist movement challenged that structure. The campaign for women's suffrage established women's political citizenship; campaigns for access to education and employment expanded women's economic opportunities; reforms to property, marriage and family law progressively strengthened women's independent legal and financial position. The significance of those changes was not that every woman would consequently want a career. It was that she could have one. Feminism did not replace the instruction “women must stay home” with “women must go to work.” It challenged the word must.
A woman could become a doctor, or a secretary, or a lawyer, or a teacher. She could marry or remain single. She could have children or not. She could work throughout motherhood or leave the workforce to raise her children. She could return to work later. She could divorce. She could own property. She could earn her own money. She could participate in politics. She could speak publicly about what she believed. The point was never that there was one correct feminist life. The point was that there should no longer be one prescribed female life.
And this is where the modern tradwife movement becomes intellectually confused. Its strongest argument is one feminism can accommodate entirely: that women should not be ashamed of wanting marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Its more radical argument is that feminism itself is responsible for making women miserable, and that society would be better if women returned to the hierarchy from which feminism helped liberate them.
Savanna Stone may not call herself a feminist. She does not have to. But the life she has built, the business she runs, the audience she commands and the choices she is able to make are all profoundly shaped by the political and legal transformation of women's lives that feminism helped bring about.
That is the part of the tradwife conversation that is so often missing. The modern tradwife does not exist in some untouched corner of history. She exists because history changed. Stone can choose to be a wife who stays at home. She can publicly advocate for female submission. She can tell other women that feminism has made them miserable. She can reject the idea that women should participate in the political sphere. She can build an online following around those beliefs. She can monetise her domestic life. She can become a business owner. She can speak to millions of people without requiring a husband's permission to publish her opinions.
That is not a life untouched by feminism. It is a life lived because of feminism.
The freedom to reject feminism is itself a feminist inheritance
The feminist movement did not fight for women to become one particular kind of woman. It fought for women to have the capacity to determine the terms of their own lives. That distinction has somehow become obscured in contemporary discussions of feminism. Feminism is increasingly caricatured as an instruction manual for how women ought to live: work full-time, reject marriage, reject motherhood, be sexually liberated, be financially independent and never want anything that resembles the domestic life of previous generations.
That is not feminism. A woman does not become anti-feminist because she wants to be a housewife. She does not betray feminism by enjoying cooking, cleaning, raising children or allowing her husband to be the principal breadwinner. The feminist question is not what does a woman choose? It is can she choose? And perhaps more importantly: can she change her mind?
I am, in every sense of the word, a feminist. A radical, brings-it-up-at-the-dinner-table, eternally-angry, feminist. My mother, meanwhile, is what the internet would probably call a “tradwife”: a traditional homemaker, a stay-at-home wife and mother. But before she became that woman, she had an office job. She was miserable. I remember having to drag her out of bed in the mornings to go to work, and watching the exhaustion follow her home at the end of the day. She was not fulfilled by that life, and eventually, during my teenage years, she decided she had had enough. She chose something different. My mother became a homemaker. My father went to work, and when he came home, there would be a glass of wine waiting for him and a home-cooked meal on the table. It worked for our family. There was nothing inherently anti-feminist about it. In fact, what was beautiful about it was precisely that it was a choice. My mother was not born into a world in which she was expected to stay at home. She had worked. She had experienced another life. She knew what she did and did not want, and she was able to make a decision about how she wanted her own life to look. And, crucially, neither of my parents ever believed that the arrangement that worked for them was the only morally acceptable way to live. They did not believe that women belonged in the home, or that men belonged at work. They believed that this was the arrangement that suited us. Because my mother being a homemaker was not the antithesis of feminism. It was one of the choices feminism made possible. The feminist achievement was not that my mother could leave the house and go to an office. It was that she could decide she did not want to. She was not less of a woman because she worked, and she was not more of a woman because she stopped. She simply got to choose.
As did I when I chose to have a career in law, a career my great-grandmother would have been forbidden to enter, and that my grandmother would have had to have fought for the limited spaces in law schools allowed for women. Now, law is a female-dominated career, with 55% of lawyers in the UK being female. I had that choice, and that choice was never challenged by my parents, but rather celebrated. That is the beauty of feminism.
Stone is entitled to believe that women should be wives and mothers. She is entitled to structure her marriage according to whatever consensual arrangement works for her and her husband. She is entitled to dislike feminism. But once the argument becomes that women should surrender political participation, economic independence or autonomy, the language of "choice" becomes much less straightforward. Because the defining achievement of feminism was not to replace one compulsory model of womanhood with another. It was to make compulsory womanhood less compulsory. The feminist achievement is precisely that Stone can stand in front of a camera and say: I don't want the life previous generations of feminists fought to make possible. She can say it because she has the freedom to reject it. And if she genuinely believes that women should not have that freedom, there is a remarkable contradiction at the heart of her position: she is using the very freedom she wants to restrict in order to advocate restricting it.
Stone's lifestyle is possible because women now possess legal, economic and social freedoms that women of previous generations did not. She has the right to enter contracts, own property, conduct business, participate in public life and express political opinions. She has access to an enormous digital public sphere in which she can construct an identity independent of the traditional gatekeepers of female speech. She is not trapped inside the home. She has chosen the home. A choice that is only possible because our grandmother's and great-grandmother's fought tooth and nail for women to have even the most basic of rights.
And then there is the business
Perhaps the most revealing contradiction in the modern tradwife phenomenon is that its most successful proponents are often exceptionally entrepreneurial.
Stone is not simply sitting quietly at home. She has built a brand. She has an audience. She has turned her beliefs about femininity into content, and that content into a business. She has something that generations of women could not have possessed in anything like the same form: an independent public voice capable of reaching millions without the permission of a husband, father, publisher or political institution.There is an almost comic contradiction in a woman making money from telling other women that modern feminism has corrupted them. It demonstrates the extent to which feminist gains have become so normalised that women can use them without recognising them.The ability to make money independently. The ability to build a company. The ability to speak publicly. The ability to enter the public sphere. The ability to determine one's own marital arrangements. The ability to choose motherhood rather than have it imposed. The ability to choose domesticity rather than have it imposed. The ability to tell millions of strangers that you think women should submit wholly to their husbands and be homemakers, whilst being a businesswoman with a subservient husband who mopes behind you holding your tote bag.
These are not natural conditions. Women fought for them.
Feminism did not promise women happiness
Perhaps this is the most important misconception of all. Feminism never promised that freedom would make women permanently happy. Freedom is not a mood. It is not a guarantee that every woman will enjoy her job, love being financially independent, want to date, want to remain childless, want to have children, want to marry or want to live alone. It is simply the removal of the proposition that society should decide those things for her. Stone can look at modern womanhood and conclude that she prefers something else. She is allowed to. She can look at the exhaustion, loneliness and economic pressures experienced by many women and conclude that the feminist project has failed. She is allowed to argue that too. But she cannot demonstrate the failure of female autonomy simply by exercising it. She cannot demonstrate that women have too much freedom by using that freedom to build a business. She cannot demonstrate that women have no voice by speaking to millions of people. She cannot demonstrate that feminism denies women choice by choosing a life that previous generations of women were often denied the choice to refuse. The tradwife's strongest argument is therefore also her strangest contradiction. She is living proof that women's choices have expanded. She simply wants to convince us that they should contract again. And perhaps that is why the question we should ask is not whether Savanna Stone is a feminist. She clearly does not need to be. The more interesting question is whether she understands how much feminism she has inherited. Because she is not living in the world before feminism. She is living in the world that feminism changed. And she is using that freedom to tell women they would be better off without it.
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