Why the tradwife trend is totally logical

August 2, 2026 — 5:00am

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In May 2024, an American football player with the incomparably American name of Harrison Butker gave a college commencement speech in which he singled out the “ladies present today”.

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker told the female grads of Benedictine College, a private liberal arts school in Kansas.

While many of them might go on to lead successful careers, Butker said, “I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Butker told the grads that his wife, Isabelle, “would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother”.

“Isabelle’s dreams of having a career might not have come true,” he continued, “but if you asked her today if she has any regrets, she would laugh out loud and say, ‘Heck, no!’ ”

Isabelle was not on hand for a fact check but, regardless, Butker’s folksy speech became a lightning rod for American gender relations, stuck, as they are, between incel culture, the manosphere and the “tradwife” trend on the one side; and feminism, threats to reproductive rights, heterofatalism and a fertility crisis on the other.

The speech also inspired a podcast, called “Diabolical Lies”, co-created by Katie Gatti Tassen and Caro Claire Burke.

Burke, a former conservative Christian who was “radicalised” after reading Noam Chomsky, was even further inspired to write what has become the biggest book of the year.

Yesteryear, Burke’s debut, is a psychological thriller about a “tradwife” social media influencer who wakes up and finds herself on a prairie farm in 1855, which is to say, in the real, muddy and violent........

© The Age