My Body, Whose Choice?
Exploring the Tradwife and Girlboss Hashtags on TikTok from a Feminist Intersectional Lens
Scrolling through TikTok one day, I came across a post of a woman making sourdough bread from scratch. The post appeared unremarkable at first, just another cooking video, until I noticed the hashtag #tradwife embedded in the caption. The tradwife is short for “traditional wife”, a popular social media trend where content creators encourage women to adopt a traditional lifestyle of staying at home and submitting to their husbands. Clicking on the hashtag, I came across hundreds of other videos that similarly used peaceful, domestic moments to convince viewers that a woman’s true purpose in life is confined to social reproduction tasks.
This is more than just a hashtag. Many of the posts represent highly conservative, if not far-right, views, which encapsulate current political divisions in the United States. The trend emerged in the early 2020s as a result of famous influencers publicly endorsing the far-right movement. From conventions where conservative young women express similar values to men dressed as U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents assaulting Immigrant women, the trends online are a stark reflection of the increasingly harmful effects of current US political leadership on women and minorities.
“At first glance, the tradwife and girlboss trends appear wholly different. Yet, they share a number of traits.”
It is interesting to compare the tradwife hashtag with another popular online trend. The girlboss hashtag represents a movement which promotes the idea of achieving female empowerment through hustle culture. Its origins lie in Sophia Amoruso, founder of the fast-fashion brand Nasty Gal, releasing an autobiography and using the term Girlboss to promote it. Aligned with neoliberal values like hyper-individualism and an entrepreneurial mindset, for the girlboss, only her own success is important; everything else comes second.
At first glance, the tradwife and girlboss trends appear wholly different. Yet, they share a number of traits. They are both packaged in appealing visuals, often including viral audios and memes. Af first, watching their videos feels quite light-hearted and fun. However, as one examines the content more closely, as I did in my master’s dissertation research, engaging with their content reveals a slippery slope towards exposure to posts containing ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, and misogyny.
The tradwife posts in particular romanticise reproductive labour by showing women performing domestic housework dressed up and in full makeup, with plenty of time to spare for leisurely activities. According to these posts, this is a woman’s true purpose. The fact that the work of social reproduction is often unrecognised in the economy and, for tradwives, presupposes full financial dependence on the husband is celebrated. In fact, one post portrayed this as a “getaway from the stressful corporate world”.
In contrast, the girlboss trend shows labour within the corporate world. Women striving to be successful are expected to work all day every single day to climb up the ranks and are, like the tradwife, expected to look good doing it. Housework here is reserved for underpaid cleaners and nannies.
As I discuss below, these trends pose challenges to online intersectional feminist activism.
A feminist intersectional lens on “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends
As I scrolled through “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends on TikTok, I became interested in exploring how these social media trends represent and promote oppressive ideologies, and what their implications might be for the mobilisation efforts of intersectional feminist activists who seek to confront these narratives. Feminist activists are also engaged in social media platforms, using it to disseminate feminist perspectives. How do these forms of online engagement and activism relate and respond to one another? How might we critically interrogate “tradwife” and “girlboss” trends from an intersectional feminist lens? These were the questions that guided my research.
Intersectionality here refers to the idea that multiple forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism and classism, are connected and that overcoming these issues requires us to address and fight against them as a collective.
I focused my research on TikTok because it provided a useful window into those trends. As a shared social media platform, TikTok is used by many young people and has become a hub for cultural and political expression across the ideological spectrum. I created two separate TikTok accounts, one to follow the #tradwife and the other for #girlboss. Both accounts were set for the US context to reduce the geographic scope. During the month of July 2025, I checked the accounts daily for related posts, collecting over 150 posts that contained the hashtags #tradwife, #girlboss and other associated hashtags. I then constructed a database, analysing each post based on their messaging, aesthetics and representation. I also documented top comments for each post to understand the response tactics by both supporters and activists who oppose those views.
Behind the Facade
Examining the narratives portrayed in the posts, a key finding of my research is that, despite differences among the two hashtag trends, both normalise beliefs that challenge intersectional feminist perspectives. Their narratives are accompanied and even highlighted by the help of visual styles and performances. While aesthetics are often used to ‘soften the blow’ of expressing oppressive views, they can also be political statements within themselves.
For example, as the examples below illustrate, several tradwife posts display serene views, bright colours and put-together women that are meant to show unpaid, gendered labour and subjugation in a light-hearted way. These posts serve as entryways for new users, seeking to slowly desensitise them towards more radical ideas around misogyny and white supremacy, which promotes a vision of women as subservient to their husbands. When filming the videos, creators simplify housework tasks by only showing the aesthetically pleasing sceneries and pretty aspects, such as baking sourdough bread, walking with the kids and getting spa treatments to “look presentable for the husband”. The girlboss posts, in contrast, glorify the corporate world with videos showing luxurious items and using influencers as role models. This content sells the romanticised idea that achieving a millionaire-like status is possible for anyone, dismissing the oppression that women, people of colour (POC), and the working-class face within the current capitalist system.
Source: screenshots from social media posts taken by the author. ‘sahm’ means stay-at-home mom.
Posts typically weave political beliefs with personal storytelling in ways that encourage disregard for others and spread harmful opinions, making them appear more publicly acceptable. As a result, the posts actively antagonise marginalised groups. The casual use of the word “illegals” when referring to migrants or queer people being labelled as mentally ill are just some of the tamer examples.
By going one step further, the posts also actively spread misinformation about feminist thinking and movements. Take, for example, a post where a blonde, white woman displays an illegible graphic without a stated source to blame feminism for the current state of the US economy. She states that women entering the workforce and earning their own income directly led to a drastic rise in living costs, as economic expectations shifted toward two-income households being the standard rather than a choice. This constitutes a harmful tactic that aims to legitimise their beliefs while undermining opposing ones.
Anti-feminist rhetoric also often includes racist, transphobic, and Islamophobic remarks, showing how oppressive ideologies intersect at multiple points. This ranges from tradwives labelling Latino communities as “illegal” and justifying the current ICE raids to girlbosses saying that a transwoman is “still a man” and cannot embrace the inherent feminine energy needed to become successful.
By spreading these ideas both through their messaging as well as making them seem appealing through visual methods, TikTok users pushing these trends challenge intersectional, collective action and discourage critical discourse that questions the underlying systemic oppressions of marginalised communities.
It is also worth noting that most of the creators I documented across both trends were conventionally attractive, young, white women. The deliberate exclusion of POC drives the disconnect and exclusion even further. POC were never included in the idealised worlds represented, suggesting that they do not have a place in them.
How online trends obstruct activists from making a real difference
Given TikTok’s large userbase and popularity, trends like #tradwife and #girlboss lead to clashes with feminist accounts and movements. In fact, communities focused on intersectional feminist activists are often being infiltrated and co-opted by these other trends. One tactic for this is what is called “hashjacking“, an abbreviation for hashtag-hijacking, where content creators use prominent network hashtags like #feminism to spread misinformation and harmful content. This tactic can severely undermine feminist community-building in social networks. This tactic can be coupled with doxxing, meaning the act of publicly revealing someone’s personal information without their consent. Doxxing has become a prominent tactic among more radically conservative users. While hashjacking can invite ill-intentioned users into feminist communities, doxxing can place members of these communities, especially POC users, in danger and at risk of being pursued by ICE.
Another tactic through which #tradwife and #girlboss content creators can co-opt and undermine feminist activism online is through what I categorise as trolling, also called nowadays “rage-baiting”. This involves deliberate attempts to provoke anger and frustration, a tactic that fuels hostility and diverts the attention of feminist users away from more constructive engagement such as uplifting marginalised voices and experiences within their own circles instead. During my research, I encountered multiple posts by tradwife content creators stating that feminism ruins femininity, or how, in the case of the girlboss trend, women not “hustling” every single day are losers.
Source: Comments from social media posts collected by the author.
This observation leads to what was perhaps one of the most interesting findings from my research, related to audience engagement. For example, documenting the comments on posts where tradwives give a general overview of their lifestyles, there were supportive and encouraging responses, but also harmful rhetoric and highly critical and hateful replies which demonstrated deep division within the audience. The screenshots above exemplify such comments. The first response shows support towards a tradwife by fuelling hatred against opponents, and the second comment is written by a self-proclaimed feminist arguing against submitting to the husband.
In relation to the tradwife trend, one subset of comments was particularly striking. As indicated in the screenshot below, I noticed the concept of choice feminism, which describes every choice a woman makes as ‘inherently feminist’, being used on multiple occasions by both supporters as well as satirically by critics.
Source: Comment from social media posts collected by the author.
Users responding with such comments risked legitimising racist and misogynistic ideas portrayed in tradwife posts – ideas that can actively harm and oppress marginalised communities in the name of “women supporting women”. By relying on this form of contemporary feminism within the subsection of comments, it leaves less room for real and intersectional conversations.
How should feminist activists respond?
While the “girlboss” and the “tradwife” hashtags are only specific examples of how online feminist discourse can be disrupted, they reflect a wider picture of how entertaining and often visually appealing trends aim to infiltrate the viewer’s subconscious with harmful ideologies and slowly radicalise them.
By keeping a close eye on how harmful rhetoric is repackaged into seemingly innocuous online trends, intersectional feminist activists can prepare more effective and informed counter-movements. This includes being able to discern between distracting rage-bait posts and serious content as well as being aware of aesthetics as a politicised tactic to lure people in.
Moreover, it is important to develop engagement tactics that confront internalised forms of racism and misogyny. Using surface-level responses, like choice feminism, comes across as performative and reinforces privileged perspectives without addressing the underlying, systemic oppressions that marginalised communities face. Activists need to make a conscious effort to amplify the voices of those who have long and continuously been silenced.
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Elena Keighobadi recently completed her master's degree in International Business and Politics at Queen Mary University of London. As a volunteer activist, she is very interested in how today's political climate affects activism. An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Data + Feminism blog.