Manicured fingers crimp the edge of a butter-soft pie crust. Out of frame, you hear the giggle of children playing contentedly, compliantly. You can almost hear that they’re freshly bathed. A beautiful woman smiles at you and leans in. She wants you to know her little secret: she can keep her crusts flaky, no matter what. How simple it seems. How serene. You put down your phone and realize you haven’t eaten lunch. And now you want pie.
The Reality of Modern Womanhood
The internet “Tradwife”, a subculture promoting gender norms aligned more with the 1950s than today, appears at first as a harmless fantasy. Why not watch a model-turned-mother-of-4 make chewing gum from scratch? But beyond its caricature of traditional femininity, the recent rise of the Tradwife in social media, literature, and cinema highlights how disappointed women are with trying to balance family and career.
Research on the women’s happiness gap shows that, despite enormous gains in workforce and legal equality, women’s self-reported happiness has declined. Women report lower happiness than men across both location and happiness measure. To state it plainly: women are more miserable everywhere, in every way. The same research shows that women’s life satisfaction, once reported as higher than men’s, has fallen significantly since COVID, as the pressures of the pandemic fell disproportionately on the shoulders of daughters, wives, and mothers. Apparently, little has changed since the 1989 publication of The Second Shift, a foundational book of research on the burden of working women. Mochschild & Machung’s found that, in dual-career families, women take on a significantly higher proportion of the “second shift” labor, which begins when the workday ends.
“Crushing it” at Work
Even as they struggle with the Sisyphean demands of domesticity, women continue to overperform at work. Women in full-time employment are more engaged, more motivated, and more burnt out than their male counterparts. But higher levels of engagement and ambition don’t always translate to career growth. Women are less likely than men to seek a promotion – a gap most pronounced at entry and senior levels. In the former, women are less likely to receive the career support needed to advance, and in the latter women don’t see a clear path to higher levels of leadership, and they identify their current leaders as unhappy and burnt out. Nearly a quarter of women who aren’t interested in promotions cite personal obligations as preventing them from taking on greater responsibilities at work.
This bears out in my clinical work as well. Many of the women I work with are considering passing up job offers, hunkering down in mid-level positions, and even selling their own companies to make space for their personal obligations.
The Fantasy of the Tradwife
After COVID, millions of women were adjusted to a new normal. Home “offices”, quick trips to the grocery store, and the sometimes-unexpected ease of conducting life from the place where life happens: our homes. Then the “Return to Office” mandates began. Between January and June of 2025, over 200,000 women ages 20 and over left the workforce. It turns out that the flexibility to work from home allowed many women to stay connected to the labor force while they shouldered the majority of household responsibilities.
Enter: the Tradwife.
She has eschewed work outside of the home for the satisfaction of being a wife and mother. She has agreed happily to having another child, then another, then maybe one more? She keeps the house, the garden, the farm, the children, the family’s image beautifully curated. She, herself, is shockingly beautiful.
The core of this fantasy isn’t ease, but rather the release of control. The Tradwife isn’t idle. She cooks, cleans, maybe even homeschools the (many) children. More important, though, is what she doesn’t do: Worry about finances, navigate corporate bureaucracy, respond to emails during bedtime. She hands the wheel to someone else and knits baby booties in the passenger seat. But what psychology tells us about giving up control is not consistent with the image on your Tiktok feed. People who externalize control experience relatively more depression, helplessness, and hopelessness. Does this mean that every woman who works in the home feels helpless and hopeless? Far from it – that life can be profoundly rewarding for people who choose it. But women often aren’t afforded the luxury of that choice.
Professional women, by and large, don’t leave their jobs because they prefer to work in the home. They do it because there is so little infrastructure to support mothers in high-intensity careers. This lack of infrastructure leaves employed women without the freedom to build a life that suits their values, their energy, their dreams. Without the time to even consider what those values and dreams may be. If you’re running a marathon and someone offers you water at mile 20, will you ask them for Gatorade instead? Likely you’ll take the relief of water, even if it doesn’t have everything you need. Working women, overburdened by their duties of care and competency, are idealizing a forced binary choice.
The Power to Choose
Many of the women I work with aren’t sure what they want, because they have no time to think about it. I ask about hobbies, and they muse about what they used to love doing. I ask about fulfillment, and they say some version of the same thing: I love being with my kids, but it’s draining. I enjoy my work, but it makes me feel guilty. Whatever version of the story they tell, the common threads are sheer exhaustion, and the fantasy of relief. So, what do we do? We explore the fantasy. What does life feel like in the fantasy? What values are at the core of those feelings? What would your real life look like if it were guided by those values?
There’s nothing wrong with the women who, exhausted and envious, watch Tradwives gather eggs and nestle them into chubby hands. There’s nothing wrong with women who leave the workforce to make a life in the home. What’s wrong is a system which makes women feel trapped by the crushing, unrealistic expectations of balancing career and caregiving. There is no inherent satisfaction in career, just as there is no inherent satisfaction in being in the home. Satisfaction is found in making choices that align with the life we want. Women in all domains need the support and the space to discover who they really are. Maybe you’re a career woman at heart, or maybe you’re a Tradwife. Maybe you’re something the internet hasn’t yet named. No matter what, the first step to relief is making the space to discover it for yourself.
General information, not advice for your situation.
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