Who Gets to Define the ‘Good Woman’? Why a 1970s Feminist Debate Still Shapes Women’s Lives Today

A woman in a flowing linen dress pulls a tray of freshly baked bread from a rustic oven. Flour covers the counter, children run through the kitchen, and a farmhouse sits in the background. Then she turns the camera around. She films herself on an iPhone. Within seconds, she uploads the video to TikTok, where it reaches millions and brings in money through brand deals.

The irony is hard to miss. The modern “tradwife” may present herself as an escape from modern life, yet she broadcasts, monetises, and sustains her lifestyle through the very technologies and freedoms she claims to step away from.

This contradiction is not new. It echoes 1970s America, when women who had gained greater access to public and political life used those freedoms to fight against expanding women’s rights. Through Phyllis Schlafly and the women of STOP ERA, we see an earlier version of this paradox: women using political power to defend traditional gender roles. Schlafly herself was not an outsider to elite education or professional life—she held a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis and had trained in legal reasoning before becoming one of the most influential conservative activists of her era. Today’s tradwives similarly use social media, entrepreneurship, and financial independence to promote a lifestyle that often rejects feminism—the movement that helped make that independence possible.

In 1976, as America marked the bicentennial of its founding declaration of liberty, women were fighting a civil war of their own: a struggle over what freedom should mean. Half a century later, the tradwife phenomenon raises the same question. If feminism fought to give women the freedom to choose their own lives, what does it mean when some women use that freedom to choose the domestic life feminism once challenged?

Tradwives present themselves as stepping away from modern capitalist life, yet their movement relies heavily on capitalism and technology. We can see the same contradiction in the 1970s. STOP ERA activists, many tied to the Christian New Right, ran campaigns, lobbied legislators, wrote speeches, and rallied supporters against the Equal Rights Amendment. These actions placed women in public and political roles that traditional gender expectations had long tried to keep them out of.

The same pattern appears today. Hannah Neeleman, known as Ballerina Farm, has turned domestic life into a profitable digital business. Her platform is not simply a personal project but part of a much larger economic structure: she is married into the family of JetBlue founder David Neeleman, a billionaire aviation entrepreneur whose wealth and business empire provide significant financial backing and stability. Through social media, brand deals, a commercial farm, and product lines, she earns money from homemaking. Yet her content often frames domestic life as an alternative to modern capitalist society. The contradiction is clear: domesticity itself has become a business, supported by substantial inherited and marital wealth.

This matters because the economic reality of leaving paid work is far more precarious than tradwife aesthetics suggest. In most modern economies, financial independence is tied to continuous labour market participation. When a woman exits paid employment to become financially dependent on a spouse, she also exits the systems that accumulate long-term security: pension contributions, employer matching, and compounding retirement savings.

This vulnerability is intensified by no-fault divorce. In jurisdictions where divorce does not require proof of wrongdoing, marriage can be dissolved unilaterally, without assigning legal blame. While this framework was designed to reduce adversarial legal battles, it also means that a non-earning spouse cannot rely on marriage as a permanent financial guarantee. If a homemaker has spent years out of the workforce, she may re-enter the labour market with reduced earning potential, while also facing the loss of shared household income.

The long-term consequence is most visible in the pension gap. Pension systems are built on continuous contributions over time. A partner who remains in paid employment typically accumulates retirement savings through employer pensions, state contributions, and investment growth. A partner who leaves the workforce to perform unpaid domestic labour often does not. Even in divorce settlements where assets are divided, pension entitlements are frequently based on individual contribution histories, meaning the non-earning spouse can retire with significantly lower financial security. This creates a structural imbalance: one partner’s retirement is secured through decades of paid work, while the other’s is contingent on marital stability.

This matters because promoting homemaking as an ideal lifestyle can obscure these risks. A woman who leaves paid work may lose income, financial independence, and long-term security. The issue is not whether domestic work has value—it clearly does—but whether women are encouraged to rely on another person for financial survival without fully recognising the legal and economic structures that make that dependence fragile. Modern tradwives do not simply step away from modern freedoms; they use them to build, share, and profit from a lifestyle that often rejects feminism.

The political side becomes even clearer through Phyllis Schlafly. STOP ERA, founded in 1972, stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges.” Schlafly argued that the ERA would take away women’s existing protections, especially those tied to marriage and motherhood. Yet while defending domestic womanhood, she became a highly active political organiser. She travelled, spoke publicly, lobbied lawmakers, and mobilised conservative women. She encouraged women to embrace homemaking while also pushing them into political life.

This contradiction sits at the heart of the tradwife phenomenon. Tradwives can reject feminist ideas while still using freedoms that came from women’s liberation. The ability to speak publicly about traditional womanhood, build an audience, and choose domestic life exists only because society has already been reshaped by feminism.

Ultimately, feminism was never meant to tell women what to choose; it was meant to make choice possible. The real question is not whether a woman chooses the boardroom or the kitchen, but whether that choice is truly hers.

But the tradwife aesthetic exposes a sharper truth: it is not simply that women are choosing domesticity within feminist freedoms, but that those freedoms are being repackaged and sold back to them as a vision of “natural” submission. The iPhone filming the sourdough, the algorithm amplifying the apron, the brand deal monetising motherhood—none of it is outside feminism’s world. It is inside it, profiting from it, and quietly rewriting it as if women’s liberation were only ever meant to end in retreat.