Frilly dresses and white supremacy: welcome to the weird, frightening world of ‘trad wives’

“In some more traditional relationships (but not all) the man disciplines the woman either physically (like spanking) or with things like writing lines and standing in the corner,” one woman advises another on the Red Pill Women forum, an online community of rightwing, anti-feminist women.

Welcome to the weird and frightening world of trad wives, where women spurn modern, egalitarian values to dedicate their lives to the service of their husbands. My research into this far-right subculture began during the writing of my book on the far right and reproductive rights. I was curious to learn how the movement, determined to reduce women to reproductive vessels to aid white male supremacy, recruited women to its cause. The answer was a toxic combination of anti-feminism, white supremacy, normalised abuse and a desire to return to an imagined past.

Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

And, of course, they’re white. One meme I encountered on Telegram during my research summed up a good trad wife as being “knowledgable about her European roots” and who “loves her family, race and culture”. Leading the tribe is far-right influencer Ayla Stewart, who shot to social media fame when her notorious “white baby challenge” went viral after she declared: “As a mother of six, I challenge families to have as many white babies as I have contributed.”

The motive behind the white baby challenge, and much of trad wife culture, is a fear of the so-called “great replacement” – a baseless conspiracy theory that believes white people are being “replaced” by migrant people from the global south, while feminists repress the white birthrate via abortion rights. To defeat this so-called “white genocide”, as one Stewart fan expressed it, far-right women need to “Make White Babies Great Again!” On far-right Telegram channels, I found posters following her lead. One far-right woman posted she planned to have six babies, as that was above the “optimum replacement rate”.

What Stewart and her acolytes’ examples show is how the trad lifestyle is fixed to two essential components of fascist ideology that govern the modern far right: white supremacy and patriarchy. What’s concerning is how these aims are becoming more and more influential as the global far right pushes to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence and reproductive rights, and their ideas gain traction among mainstream rightwing political parties.

During his time in the White House, Donald Trump weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment and domestic abuse, while Spain’s far-right Vox party is vocal about its desire to overturn laws protecting women from gender-based violence.

The reversal of Roe v Wade met the far-right demands that women be removed from the public sphere into the domestic, and be pinned to reproduction. Poland’s far-right government tightened its already draconian abortion ban. Far-right leaders in Hungary and Italy continue to contest the right to abortion, and in Slovakia the far-right L’SNS party has repeatedly tried to bring in a ban. At the recent National Conservatism conference in the UK, Conservative MPs joined writers and activists who combined anti-migrant speeches with those urging women to have more babies.

Far from trad wives being a niche subculture confined to internet chatrooms, the movement’s core tenets have gripped mainstream politics – and women and their allies should stop at nothing to defend their hard-won rights.

• Sian Norris is a freelance investigative journalist and the author of Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global