Are Women Finding Protection in Traditional Gender Roles?
How the Erika Kirk brand of CEO is preying on young women’s fear
Today’s guest post is written by psychologist Vanessa Scaringi, PhD who also wrote Social Media’s Pretty Privilege Problem for the Raising Her Voice community last year. Like RHV readers, Vanessa is passionate about women’s rights and calling out the ways they’re being dismantled. As women, many of us are feeling fear—for ourselves and our daughters. Vanessa argues that this fear is part of what makes tradwife and similar content so appealing to young women right now. She’s got a point: if I only had to worry about my next sourdough starter or batch of homemade candles, that would be a huge relief at this moment. (Aha! Maybe that explains why I suddenly started knitting again last night after many years.) But that relief would be short-sighted. Comments are open to everyone today so let us know if you can relate!
Erika Kirk has been appointed CEO of Turning Point but her trajectory is performative and rooted in a desire to demonstrate patriarchal values with a slight wink to the audience that says, “we really shouldn’t be CEOs in our own right though.”
Kirk went from a robust Instagram following of 340k followers to over 7 million followers since her husband’s death. She is obviously appealing to an established base of conservative Christians but she is also likely to garner interest and support from women who are unconsciously scared of an unrecognizable future shaped by diminishing rights and a sociopolitical landscape that is chock-full of hypermasculinity. In this moment, women might prefer the perceived safety in making themselves small and more traditionally feminine.
In the years since the dismantling of Roe, women have slipped further into submission by adopting or, at least, performing traditional gender roles. And I worry that the fear that women are experiencing will only worsen. If we aren’t intentional about our response, we risk being set back even further. For the tide to change, we have to understand the renewed appeal of traditional gender roles—and I am pretty convinced that it has to do with fear. Fear their rights will continue to wither away, fear of an unrecognizable landscape when it comes to healthcare and bodily autonomy. Fear of an unpredictable future. How could we not be terrified?
The fear makes sense. The demands to “toughen up” during pregnancy are disturbing and the rhetoric surrounding our voting rights is deeply troubling. When rights feel precarious and the political landscape grows more hostile, retreating into familiar roles can feel like safety—a way to contain chaos by clinging to certainty. Doubling down on traditional femininity becomes, paradoxically, a means of self-protection. Marginalized groups have historically found safety and protection in blending. These days when I think of women adopting more traditionally feminine roles, I often think of immigrants assimilating to dominant culture. It is sometimes too dangerous to stand out.
This fear might be pushing women to somehow protect themselves by adopting a very loud and prominent message to “get back in the kitchen,” as one lovely internet troll told me to do in 2024.
I wonder if talking more openly about the urge to perform gender more intensely from the framework of fear could help us out of this mess. But beyond naming fear as a motivator to blend in, we have to continue shouting from the roof tops that this is not the moment to get small.
The tradwife trend is far from new at this point, but it is also not a fleeting trend. In early 2024, I warned of the impacts of women leaning into this “softer life” as a means to avoid facing a bleak future fighting for their basic rights. Gen Z women are not doing well. They face an epidemic of mental health issues including higher rates of suicidality and increased eating disorders. The trend has sustained itself—garnering more momentum and potentially more dangerous effects. In order for women’s rights to have a fighting chance of not completely disintegrating we need all hands on deck. But as with any change process, awareness is key. Women need to recognize the fear that may be drawing them toward the tradwife ideal, while also acknowledging the emotional pull of what seems to promise simplicity and safety in uncertain times.
To be clear, when talking about adopting more traditional roles, I am not referring simply to providing or caring for your family. Many families require a total restructuring when there are children thrown into the mix, sometimes out of necessity, especially given astronomical childcare costs. Additionally, pivoting away from an intense job offers a family balance and harmony. At this point we are all pretty aware that hustle culture can be miserable and has many mental health ramifications.
But beyond those practical choices lies a cultural current that’s hard to ignore. From the superficial aesthetic trends like linen aprons and milkmaid dresses to the more tangible and far reaching rise in families/women opting to homeschool their children (which doesn’t necessarily have to be rooted in traditional gender roles, but often will be), young women seem to be moving toward more rigid expressions of gender, further jeopardizing women’s freedom and hard-won rights
Performing gender roles has been a long-standing interest area of mine and so has the idea of maintaining an identity of being a strong woman. A devout feminist, I argued as an undergrad that it was important for women to maintain the ability to earn regardless of marital or financial status. The progress women have made in the last century is incredible and yet the back slide we are facing is very worrisome.
I have studied traditional gender roles and the psychological costs of strictly adhering to them. The relationship between rigid gender roles and poor mental health has long been identified. In graduate school, I studied stay-at-home fathers’ mental health and their overall satisfaction with life. Spoiler alert—the more we adhere to rigid gender roles, the lower our satisfaction with life. The men who were less invested in conventional gender norms reported significantly greater happiness and fulfillment
My training as a psychologist has helped me to understand how change works. It is slow. Change requires meeting people where they are at, making small observations and interpretations that sink in over time. There’s a “if you can’t be them, join them” vibe to the ‘tradwifing’ we are seeing. Fitting in always feels “safer” initially. But we need to help women wake up because by staying on the sidelines, they are playing right into the attacks on them.
Things will not get better if we look the other way and adopt a so-called softer life where we have no real say in our futures. Erika Kirk might be offering the illusion of safety in a culture that keeps reminding them they’re not safe but jumping on the bandwagon of shielding oneself from fear by following the path of least resistance is not the answer. And while Kirk has rebranded submission as serenity and invites fearful women to join her, our task is to draw attention to this seduction and encourage women to own their strength and resist openly.
Look out for Vanessa’s upcoming book, co-authored with Kathryn Garland, LCSW, slated for release in 2026. Hunger Wounds: Healing Relationships with Food and People in a Disconnected World explores how attachment styles and social disconnection shape our relationships with eating.
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Love the paper "Worse for Women, Bad for All,” from psychologist Magdalena Zawisza and her colleagues exposing just how much this promise of male protection and provision in exchange for women’s compliance with "traditional femininity" is a mirage, as benevolent sexism actually correlates with a greater acceptance of intimate partner violence toward women, a larger gender gap in unpaid domestic labor, and fewer women in the paid labor force — as well as lower economic productivity, shorter healthy lifespans, more collective violence, and more antidemocratic tendencies for everyone. In other words: No matter how perfectly you perform the patriarchal ideals of “womanhood,” no matter how many babies you have, how many sourdoughs you bake, or how much pilates you practice, you are less likely to be safe or secure in a society that celebrates those ideals.
Really good article, retreating into femininity I guess may seem maybe like a way to protect one selves? Like they are abiding by some rules. Except the goal posts keep moving.