Don’t let a meme be your measure of virtue. 

The tradwife meme dominated 2024: Nara Smith dazzled with cooking videos, Estee Williams preached to her followers about Biblical submission, and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farms starred in a viral Times article. 

Although viral “trad wives” like Nara Smith have explicitly rejected the label, many conservatives have lauded the meme and its real-life adherents, seeing it as a sign that real womanhood is back in vogue. 

Memes are funny and enjoyable because they distill reality, simplifying it into a one-line joke, hilarious image, or in the case of the tradwife, a two-dimensional picture of womanhood. Yet as all of us ought to know, womanhood, family life, and spousal relations are wonderfully complex and vary incredibly from person to person. We can enjoy “tradwife” as a meme, but must exercise caution when applying it to our three-dimensional reality. 

I ought to be an example: I bake and cook weekly. I wear dresses. I’d love to have a big family. Though many of my interests scream “tradwife,” I also hope to make a career outside the home, something Instagramming tradwives deride. My personality, interests, and plans could never be encapsulated by a mere internet trend. A better measure of virtue and femininity — my faith — governs my life. 

Conservatives love to point out examples of left-wing virtue-signalling, be it masking, changing logos to rainbows for June, or preaching about tolerance while practicing the opposite. But we too can give in to the same desire to boil down the demanding, lifelong battle for virtue into a simple checklist of externals (sourdough starter in the fridge? Only dresses and skirts in the closet? Ten children running around your farm?). 

Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with living a traditional lifestyle. We err when we do so for the wrong intentions and judge other people for not following in step. 

For example, deeper reasons ought to underlie one’s openness to children than the mere imitation of curated tradwife content. If not, you risk using your children as tiny props in your aesthetic “trad life,” rather than recognizing them as the incredible gifts they are.

Don’t allow tradwife aesthetics to limit your idea of femininity. Long dresses and flowing hair are lovely, but they can never be ends in themselves, nor substitutes for the beauty of a selfless heart. If you enjoy the aesthetics of popular “tradwife” influencers, wonderful — just realize that’s not the only acceptable brand of feminine beauty. 

Likewise, refrain from judging the people around you on the basis of a meme. Something’s gone wrong if we feel threatened by the lives of virtuous people who don’t meet the narrow definition of “trad.” It’s even worse if we — even inadvertently — deter people from lives of generosity and selflessness just because they don’t feel naturally inclined to the right-wing aesthetic of family life. We all know men and women living radically virtuous lives whose “day in the life” looks nothing like that of Estee Williams or Hannah Neeleman. We ought to make more effort to imitate their lives than the shallow glimpses we get of “trad” lives online. 

Perhaps the saddest effect of adopting “tradwife” as your Ten Commandments is assuming your life cannot be beautiful or fulfilling before you buy a farm or birth children. Quite the opposite — we are all called to act as if there may be no tomorrow, while recognizing this period in our lives prepares us in crucial ways for future seasons of our vocations.

If you feel called to raise chickens, have a dozen children, or wear dresses in lieu of pants, more power to you. Just remember to evaluate your own life, and those of others, on the basis of virtue, not a meme.

 

Caroline Kurt is a junior studying English.