Watch Dateline’s newest episode, The Cult of Tradwives: Part One at 9.30pm AEST, Tuesday 16 September 2025, on SBS or SBS On Demand.
An hour south of the brilliant lights of Nashville, Tennessee, 20-year-old influencer Cali prepares her subsequent meal. It’s additionally her subsequent social media publish.
In her quaint nation kitchen, she unscrews the lid of a jar of uncooked beef liver, reveals a chunk to the digicam, picks it up and swallows it complete.
“I’m fertility-maxxing,” she tells Dateline — and the digicam in entrance of her.
‘Fertility-maxxing’ is a social media development through which younger girls eat issues comparable to uncooked meat and uncooked milk within the perception it should increase their fertility — although this isn’t confirmed by science and actually can pose important well being dangers.
Cali hopes it should put together her physique to bear youngsters.
“I want 10-15 kids someday, God willing.”
Her days are centered on fertility, religion, and farming. This trifecta is on the core of her “training” to turn into one thing known as a ‘tradwife’, quick for ‘conventional spouse’.
For Cali, being a tradwife additionally means embracing extra historically female chores like “gathering eggs, milking the cow, cooking, churning butter, making ice cream…”
“I wouldn’t see myself chopping wood or like building houses or anything,” Cali says. “I think that’s more like [an] advanced job.”
She believes this delineation of gender roles is necessary in a time the place girls are “doing it all”.
“I think that’s kind of toxic,” she tells Dateline.
Instead, Cali believes “all women should be, like … in the kitchen”, she stated with amusing.
Wife supremacy? Trad residing and its potential hyperlinks to alt-right content material
The ‘tradwife’ motion is stuffed with girls like Cali, who’ve rejected careers in favour of returning to the kitchen and, crucially, posting about it on-line. They share scenes of homemaking, homesteading, and homeschooling, usually donning 1800s attire and preaching Nineteen Fifties gender roles.
Cali describes the approach to life of tradwives as a “stay-at-home mum, embracing homemaking duties, Biblical femininity, stuff like that”.
There is one factor that separates Cali from many different tradwife creators although: she’s single.
Despite this, Cali considers herself to be an aspiring tradwife and her content material incorporates lots of the hallmarks of conventional trad content material.
Accounts like Cali’s are emblematic of what the trad motion is: a revolt in opposition to the fashionable world and return to conventional residing. But for critics of the broader development of tradwife content material, in some instances the paisley attire and pastoral scenes are a pipeline to alt-right content material.
They warn that the message of tradwives is regressive and anti-feminist, and following that algorithm leads you to a world of subjugation and excessive content material. A rising variety of accounts additionally promote outright misogyny, alongside racist content material.
The tradwife motion can also be intently linked with conservative Christianity and plenty of tradwives — together with Cali — view this life-style as Biblically ordained. According to Cali, girls “were made to be mothers and wives” by God.
Cali views a part of the trad spouse life-style as practising ‘Biblical femininity’. Credit: SBS Dateline
Online, the ‘tradwife’ development first gained important traction across the time Donald Trump was first elected US president in 2016.
Some social media influencers related to the tradwife motion have audiences within the tens of millions.
The affect of tradwives
On TikTok, there are greater than 60,000 posts hashtagged tradwife, whereas on Instagram, there are greater than 113,000 posts. Other fashionable hashtags within the motion embody ‘tradwifeintraining’ and ‘tradwifelife’.
Tradwife content material is partly so profitable as a result of it is “selling this escapist fantasy” in keeping with Ruby Alexander, who has printed a Masters of Philosophy thesis on the parallel actions of tradwives and start strikers, girls who’re refusing to have youngsters in response to local weather change. She spoke to The Feed concerning the tradwife phenomenon in 2024.
“The reality of it is that it’s financially inaccessible for the majority of women because it’s not really possible for a family or a couple, or an individual even, to survive on one salary in the cost of living crisis,” she stated.
She stated tradwife content material monopolises on a nostalgia Western international locations have for the Nineteen Fifties as a “[perceived] perfect era” when girls are assumed to have had extra time to spend with youngsters, and never anticipated to work, however provides “that’s a contested history”.
“The 1950s housewife was only accessible to upper and middle-class white women.”
For Cali, the motion is about reviving conservative values that she believes assist maintain the household unit collectively. She says her mother and father’ divorce has a big impact on her need to turn into a tradwife.
“I wasn’t really raised with a mom per se, like she was always around, but just working all the time as a nurse,” she stated.
“I just knew since a young age like this is not how I will do it.”
The conventional life has given Calli hope that marriage can final.
But for some girls who’ve tried the trad life, the truth tore their households aside.
Abandoning the trad life
Enitza Templeton, 41, lived as a tradwife for 10 years.
“My whole entire life was dedicated to perfecting the craft of anything domestic, cleaning, cooking, decorating … Anything and everything domestic was my domain,” she advised Dateline.
She sits in her Denver dwelling, photographs of her marriage ceremony day, reminiscing concerning the greater than 10 years she spent in a conventional marriage that she says practically destroyed her.
Enitza says that as a tradwife, her position was “to have as many babies as possible”. Credit: SBS Dateline
Born to Puerto Rican mother and father, Enitza was raised as an evangelical Christian. She says it had been instilled in her since childhood {that a} husband ought to have complete authority over his spouse.
“I remember I’d have conversations with my dad like: ‘oh, I think being an attorney would be really cool’,” Enitza stated. “And his exact response was, ‘No, that’s a man’s job’.”
Instead, Enitza went to a small faculty for graphic design and acquired a job in an government suite, the place she says she was holding a watch out for a person to marry.
“Everything was secondary to just looking for a husband,” she stated.
After shifting to Colorado, Enitza married a fellow believer and commenced her new life as a tradwife.
She began studying homemaking from her then mother-in-law, dressing conservatively, and devoting herself fully to home duties. But over time, her sense of self started to whittle away.
“The curtains were perfect, and we had a fireplace … and I was very dead inside,” she stated.
“Knowing that I so actively and willingly did all that, it eats me up inside.”
While her husband managed their funds and made all choices in the home, Enitza stated it was her job “to have as many babies as possible”. After having 4 youngsters, together with one with advanced well being points, she fell right into a deep despair.
With the assistance of a detailed good friend, Enitza made the choice to go away her marriage in 2019.
“I wanted to be the mom I dreamed of instead of the wife he wanted,” she stated.
“If I want my daughters to do any different, I’m going to have to show them different.”
It was round this time, as she was embarking on her new life, that Enitza noticed the tradwife development began to take off on social media. Sharing custody of her youngsters and counting on meals stamps to make ends meet, the motion’s rising second spurred Enitza to create her personal counter content material.
She is now probably the most outstanding anti-tradwife voices within the United States.
The curtains had been excellent, and we had a fire … and I used to be very useless inside
Enitza Templeton
Potential harms of tradwife content material
According to Enitza, the trad motion’s core precept of submission to males can expose girls to coercive management and abuse. She says girls like Cali are too younger to know the true terror that awaits them.
“You don’t see tradwives in their 40s,” she stated.
Enitza fears the tradwife life-style can expose girls to coercive management. Credit: SBS Dateline
Enitza believes younger girls are blinded by the bucolic aesthetic of trad residing and do not perceive the true objective of the motion.
“The goal is to create disciples who believe everything you believe so that the girls can grow up and continue serving and the men can grow up and continue leading.”
More than only a technique to promote conventional roles, Enitza notes that the spiritual instructing of the trad motion tethers girls’s salvation to their husband’s satisfaction.
“So all of your performance, all of your cooking, all of your serving to your husband, if it’s not good enough, well, where’s your eternal salvation going to be? That’s a f—ing cult.”
Today, Enitza lives along with her boyfriend, who she says she’s going to by no means marry. She says she is unlearning the “traditional” requirements set for her in her marriage and making an attempt to unravel the instance she set for her children once they had been youthful.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”
With extra reporting by Kathleen Farmilo.