The Tradwife Trap: Sourdough, Silicon Valley, and the Far-Right War on Women's Independence
At the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, wealthy influencers pitched a dark fantasy where women are happiest without pesky distractions like bodily autonomy or the right to vote.
The Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit this month featured selfie stations, magenta smoke machines, and free Pilates classes. A hype squad waved signs in the aisles to get the young female crowd pumped before speakers hit the stage. Vendors sold Christian lip tints and bracelet stacks. Between breakout sessions, attendees posed for photos against backdrops designed to make the whole thing look like a Coachella fever dream.
And then a 20-year-old tradwife influencer named Savanna Faith Stone stepped up and told the self-dubbed “cute-servatives” assembled there that they don’t deserve the right to vote.
Yes, Stone believes the 19th Amendment was a mistake and endorses “household voting” where only the husband casts a ballot. If you’re single, gay, widowed, or your husband is incapacitated (or simply wrong about everything), too bad. No votes for you.
Of course this was a moment designed to rack up headlines. The audacity is the point. But it also can’t be ignored. Because over the last decade, we’ve watched once-fringe right-wing ideas get mainstreamed by MAGA with frightening velocity.
Here’s the actual problem the right is trying to solve: the roughly 18-point gender gap in presidential elections.
This genuinely terrifies Republican strategists. But rather than alter their far-right agenda to persuade women at the ballot box, there’s another path more in MAGA are embracing out loud: just eliminate their votes.
And if you’re going to sell that Christian nationalist pitch — if you’re going to tell women to enthusiastically surrender the rights their foremothers fought decades for — you can’t send in a man in a suit to do it. You can’t send in a frumpy fundamentalist in a floor-length denim skirt. You need someone who looks like she belongs on The Real Housewives of Orange County.
The most effective opponents of women’s suffrage in the 19th century were women like Ida Tarbell and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Married women, mothers, and proper ladies earnestly explained that politics would contaminate women’s natural purity, drag them out of their elevated domestic sphere, and ruin our great nation.
They lost that battle. But decades later, Phyllis Schlafly was a practicing attorney whose life’s work was derailing the Equal Rights Amendment.
The packaging is all that’s changed.
The women headlining the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit have freshly Botoxed faces, body-hugging dresses, and pricy hair extensions that are giving aspirational girlboss. The tradwife influencers all over TikTok urging you to lovingly submit to your husband are, ironically, their families’ breadwinners.