The “tradwives” are not ridiculous: they are the symptom of what we refuse to see
What worries us most about this movement is not the aesthetics, but the language. The “tradwives” speak of choice, empowerment, autonomy; categories and concepts created from feminisms. They speak in feminist terms. But they do so to legitimize agendas that have historically pursued objectives contrary to women’s rights.
Every time a woman appears on social media baking bread in a linen apron with a beatific smile, we feminists have a predictable reaction: we mock her. And that reaction masks underlying issues we’re not taking seriously.
At the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, we have spent years focusing on what truly structures the lives of women in Mexico and Latin America: both the discourses and the material conditions. And we see tradwives (traditional wives) not as a passing fad, but as the visible symptom of three converging crises: an economic crisis that has made the work of millions of women precarious, a care crisis that has become evident since the pandemic, and a crisis of meaning that feminisms have not been able to name with sufficient honesty.
The exhaustion of the neoliberal promise of emancipation for women
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create the problem. It made it visible. In 2020, female employment fell by 4.2% globally—54 million jobs lost—and the subsequent recovery was slower than that of men, partly because women bore the brunt of the unpaid care work that the crisis triggered: children out of school, elderly people without support networks, homes transformed into makeshift hospitals. Many of these women never returned to the labor market. And their absence reveals a care crisis that had been building for decades.
A crisis linked to the absence of care systems, but also to the neoliberal triple promise of women’s emancipation: that we could have it all. A successful career, fulfilling motherhood, and a sexually and emotionally satisfying partner. This myth of the woman who “can do it all” sounded like liberation, but there was a catch: no one redistributed the burden of care. No one asked who would pick up the children, who would care for the sick, who would provide everything a family needs to function. The answer, as always, was women—now with a full workday on top of it all. Spoiler alert: we’re exhausted.
And it is precisely in this exhaustion that the tradwife movement resonates. Because what it offers is not just an aesthetic of embroidered tablecloths and freshly baked bread: it offers community, purpose, identity, and immediate social recognition. In a labor market that for many women means precariousness, invisibility, and a double shift without merit, the promise of “dedicating yourself to what truly matters” has an emotional power that we cannot afford to ignore
There is, however, a catch that must be addressed. The tradwives who star in these videos are, for the most part, upper-middle-class women whose family income makes this choice possible. But those who consume this content the most—those who most internalize it as a desirable lifestyle—are working-class women for whom leaving the workforce is not a romantic choice. It is a long-term economic vulnerability disguised as a vocation.
Feminist vocabulary against women
What is most concerning about this movement is not the aesthetics, but the language. Tradwives speak of choice, empowerment, and autonomy—categories and concepts created within feminism. They speak in feminist terms. And they do so to legitimize agendas that have historically pursued objectives contrary to women’s rights.
This is what has been called post-feminism: mass culture absorbs the vocabulary we built through decades of struggle to declare that equality has already arrived, that specific policies are no longer needed, that every woman who “chooses” to stay home does so freely, period. When individual free choice becomes the only argument that counts, defending policies of structural equality becomes difficult.
What’s happening with women’s suffrage?
Javier Albarrán, a PAN politician from the State of Mexico, who is also a content creator with a target audience focused on young people, stated recently that electoral decisions would be more reasoned if people voted for their home and family.
Household voting — the proposal to replace women’s individual votes with a family vote cast by the “head of the household”—might sound like social media hype, but it’s not. In the United States, voices within the conservative movement have begun to openly argue that women’s suffrage was a historical mistake, that it “distorts” the will of the family, and that the natural political unit is not the individual but the household. In this scheme, the tradwife doesn’t vote: she delegates.
This is no coincidence. It is the logical consequence of an ideological project that has been laying its foundations for years: first, you convince women that their place is in the home, and then you argue that from the home they don’t need their own political voice. The tradwife movement and household voting are not separate phenomena.
What is most unsettling is the speed with which these ideas migrate. Latin America has its own history of late and hard-won women’s suffrage—Mexico only recognized women’s right to vote in 1953—and in a region where conservative movements already have a presence in congresses, political parties, and the media, no one should underestimate the speed with which the unthinkable becomes debatable. Latin America shifted in the last political cycle from progressive to conservative governments.
“Tradwives” are not the enemy
The answer to women’s exhaustion cannot be for us to go back home. It must be the shared responsibility for care work among the state, families, the market, and communities, as well as policies against job insecurity, which disproportionately affects women, and the construction of public infrastructure that makes a dignified life possible without having to choose between career, family, or mental health.
But we also have to name what lies behind the linen apron aesthetic: a political project that uses women’s legitimate exhaustion to lead us, step by step, towards the loss of economic autonomy, public presence and, in its most radical version, political representation.
Tradwives are not the enemy. They are women who have found an individual response to a structural problem. Our work— as feminists, as institutions and organizations, and as a society—is to create the material and narrative conditions for the autonomy and freedom of all women.
SOURCE: Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute (ILSB), by Silvia Soler Casellas, interim director of the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute. Social media: @ilsb_ac. https://grupoanimal.mx/opinion/tradwives-no-son-ridiculas-sintoma. Published (en español): 16 July 2026.
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🗓 Lunes 27 de julio | 11:59 hrs.
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by Paola Flores
In Mexico, there are 14.9 million young people – almost half of all those between the ages of 15 and 29 – who are out of school without having finished high school, working in conditions that are not enough for them or in poverty even while studying. On Saturday, August 15, 150 of them meet in Mexico City not to diagnose that data: to decide what to do with it.
The Alliance for Decent Work calls them “opportunity youth”, updates the count every year with public data and in 2026 it reached 49% of the total. One in two.
What that number does not say is that they do not want to. Of the 15.4 million young people who do have a job today, seven out of ten earn less than what it costs to cover the basics of a house and six out of ten do not have medical service or are accumulating a pension. And having formal employment does not solve either: of the 6.4 million young people with Social Security, three out of ten earn less than double the basic basket.
Who is left out is not a matter of luck: Of the 3.8 million young people who do not study or work because they are taking care of someone at home, 3.5 million are women: nine out of ten. And at school, the family’s income decides: in households with higher incomes, 95 out of every 100 adolescents continue to study; in those with lower incomes, 59.
The most difficult thing to explain is not the number, but its speed. In 2023, these young people were 52% of the total; today they are 49%. Three points in four years. If the country continues at this pace, reducing the problem by half would take more than 30 years: those who are 15 today would be close to 50 before seeing it.
We did not produce that figure alone, and there is the most concrete value of working in alliance. A single organization can accompany cases or win litigation; What it cannot do alone is to agree with others what is counted, sustain that measurement year after year and make it demandable. In the Alliance for Decent Work that has already happened: there is a common definition, a count that is updated and an agenda with a name. Articulation is not putting logos together on a poster: it is arriving at the same table with the same number.
And here’s what may not be obvious: Those who gather on Aug. 15 are not a sample of those 14.9 million. There are 150 young people who have already organized themselves and who are already paying the cost of doing so. They support collectives, ombudsmen’s offices, community media and workers’ organizations in Mexico and Central America. His own diagnosis is that there is a lot of energy and few fundamental changes, because the problem is not that young people do not organize, but that they organize each one on their own. Hence the three objectives of the Meeting: to connect these organizations in a shared agenda and strategy, to carry out together a political action that is seen, and to come out with a common instrument of work. It doesn’t take a crowd to move an agenda: it takes a network that agrees.
What remains is not a report, but five collectively constructed letters
That is why on August 15, within the framework of International Youth Day, the Regional Meeting of Politically Active Youth will be held, convened by Systemic Change, A. C. in coordination with more than 20 organizations from eight countries: Manifesta, Asuntos del Sur, the Iura Pro Homine Bar Association, the Alliance for Decent Work, Racismo MX, the Radical Eskuela and GOJoven Honduras, among others. Admission is free and by application: more than 260 applications arrived for 150 places.
The day is not made of speeches: the groups rotate through four simultaneous workshops, facilitated by specialized organizations. One reviews the legal rules that allow or prevent organizing; another, the fear and wear and tear of those who sustain collective processes; the third, how algorithms work and how to build your own counter-narrative. The fourth is called “Who pays the cost?” and is facilitated by the Alliance for Decent Work with the Future is Young network and the Center for Innovation and Environmental Culture: there they map where the money comes from in each territory and what alternatives already work.
At 1:00 p.m. everything stops for a collective political action, and the afternoon closes with an open assembly and a stand-up of political comedy – there are truths that the solemn format does not allow to be told. What remains is not a report: it is the Political Deck, five cards built collectively, each with an inalienable slogan and a tactic applicable the following Monday. It is the second edition, the first was in Guatemala, and it left the RADAR Pact signed by organizations from seven countries.
Decent work for young people in Mexico is not going to come alone: we have been seeing for four years that it does not reach that rate. It will come when those 14.9 million stop being a figure in a presentation and become an actor with an agenda and with the ability to demand. On August 15th, 150 of them and they are going to spend the day doing exactly that.♦
Paola Flores is director of Systemic Change Advocacy, A. C. and a member of RADAR.
SOURCE: https://grupoanimal.mx/opinion/14-9-millones-razones-15-agosto