Is domestic womanhood inherently oppressive or liberating? The answer depends less on the lifestyle itself than on the circumstances in which it is lived. Where education, employment, financial independence, and the freedom to reject traditional roles are available, domesticity can simply be one way of living among many.
But when the freedom to refuse it disappears, the same way of life can become a form of confinement rather than a choice. It is this distinction that makes the growing trend of influencers and some online figures promoting the ‘traditional wife’ lifestyle, built around submission to men, deprioritising education, financial dependence on men, and adherence to traditional domestic roles, as the only natural and correct way for women to live, particularly concerning. What may be a freely chosen identity for some can feel profoundly disconnected from the reality of women elsewhere who are denied the freedom to decide whether they want such a life at all.
Striking Contrast
Right now, we are witnessing a stark contrast of events, where on one side, the UN calls Afghanistan’s women’s situation the ‘world’s most severe women’s rights crisis’, and on the other side, there is the rise of the ‘prioritise marriage and motherhood over education and career’ ideology among some conservative groups. On social media, there’s a possibility that many of us have stumbled upon documented video clips showing these two scenarios, where an estimated 2.4 million girls are excluded from secondary school in Afghanistan. Universities have been closed for women since December 2022. More than half of women surveyed by UN Women reported leaving home only once or twice a month, while nearly three-quarters said they feel unsafe leaving home without a male guardian. The growing shortage of women health workers, and the Criminal Procedure Code recognising only ‘excessive’ beating as domestic violence. Meanwhile, on that same social media forum, there is a rise of the ‘tradwife lifestyle’ movement in other parts of the world, where figures like Savannah Stone, being one of the newer faces of this ‘tradwife lifestyle’ movement, which stands for ‘traditional wife lifestyle’, state that ‘college is useless for women’, that women shouldn’t prioritize their careers at all, that women should be submissive to men, that there should be one vote per household (the man’s), and that it is wrong for women to serve in the military or police forces.
Structural Irony
That said, it’s worth looking at the contradiction between what some trad-wife influencers preach and what they themselves do. The women who are the faces of this movement often have lives that seem to contradict the roles they prescribe for other women. They preach that women should focus on the domestic household only, avoid prioritising education and their careers, prioritise motherhood, marry as early as possible, and have ‘more babies than you can afford’, while they are promoting a ‘financial dependency lifestyle’. They themselves are running organisations, being the leaders and faces of these organisations, earning, and influencing large audiences. They are not simply in the home performing domestic work. They are themselves doing the things that, according to their gender-role ideology, they say women shouldn’t be doing. On the other side, Afghan women have a completely different situation. They are living under a condition where they are almost having the same lifestyle that some tradwife influencers are preaching: being at home, homemaking, and submitting to their husbands.
But their condition is almost hell. Because here is an important ‘distinction’: choice and freedom, which these influencers have but Afghan women don’t. Afghan women simply didn’t choose to agree to this cage-like life, but they are forced into this, unlike these women, who chose domesticity while still genuinely having the ability to choose something else whenever they want. The mere statement by some tradwife influencers that every woman should follow this lifestyle can feel deeply disconnected from Afghan women who are suffering under imposed restrictions. They are generalising and preaching the same way of living and rules to every woman despite the circumstances of many women being very different, with many not having freedom of choice or say.
Serena Joy
This irony reflects the life of ‘Serena Joy’, a major character in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, where Serena Joy was a former conservative televangelist who campaigned for traditional female submission and a traditional lifestyle for women. The ultimate irony of her life is that she helped build Gilead’s oppressive, totalitarian cage society, only to end up trapped by her own rules. Once the regime was established, women were stripped of all rights, meaning Serena lost her power, her voice, and her career. She went from being a famous public figure to an isolated homemaker who was forbidden from reading, writing, or holding authority. Today, Serena Joy can be read as a metaphor for high-profile influencers in the ‘tradwife lifestyle’ movement who use modern technology, public platforms, and social media careers to preach that a woman’s only place is in the home. Like Serena Joy, these influencers ironically rely on the rights and freedoms won through feminist struggles, such as financial independence, political choice, and public speech, to advocate for a lifestyle that rejects those very rights for other women, while Afghan women are explicitly banned from letting their voices be heard outside the home.
Who Gets a Voice and Who Gets Muted
There is a telling asymmetry in who can speak about the lifestyle, with the voices of those promoting it being louder than those of women who are silenced and caged in their homes. The opinions of those individuals who are promoting ‘domesticity’ and ‘submission to men’ as the only right way of living for women are being broadcasted to millions, meanwhile, from August 2024, the Taliban officially ratified a 114-page ‘vice and virtue’ law that explicitly bans women’s voices from being heard in public spaces. Under Article 13 of this law, a woman’s voice is legally designated as a potential source of moral corruption. This means women are prohibited from speaking out loud, singing, reciting poetry, or reading aloud outside their homes if they could be heard by unrelated men. Moreover, women cannot travel long distances, board public transport, or visit health clinics without a male family guardian. They are also banned from public spaces like parks and gyms, with restrictions explicitly preventing them from attending school past the sixth grade.
When Lifestyle Forecloses Imagination
The very core of human imagination can be stripped away under an ‘enclosed lifestyle’, and when a way of living becomes a script saying ‘this is the only way’, it limits what people can picture for themselves. With no means for education, they are stripped of this very crucial right. UN Women’s 2026 brief makes the point with precision: The exclusion of Afghan women from education and employment removes the visible role models that show what is possible and narrows what Afghan women and girls can imagine for their own futures, and deferred aspirations risk hardening into structural loss. If the lifestyle is like a brutally restrictive cage, which is very close to what Afghan women’s lives are becoming under these restrictions, then this imagination itself can become constrained.
The Central Thread: Domestic Womanhood Is Neither Oppressive Nor Liberating by Itself
Taken together, these examples show that the debate is not really about whether women should choose domesticity or independence. It is about who gets to make that choice, and whether that choice can genuinely be changed. The way influencers are performing and selling this tradwife lifestyle on the internet to young women, stating that this way of living is the only correct way of living by submitting to a man who is the ‘leader’ of the household, not voting independently, prioritising marriage over college and career, not maintaining a separate bank account, remaining financially dependent on their husbands, and embracing motherhood and domesticity as their primary roles, as the only right way, while those who are actually experiencing the consequences of imposed domesticity are being silenced.
The same lifestyle, when enforced on Afghan women, produces what UN Women describes as women’s systematic erasure from public life. In America, the same lifestyle, when chosen, produces a lucrative media genre. The lifestyle does not differ; the freedom to leave it does.
The strongest thread here is that ‘domestic womanhood’ as a lifestyle is neither oppressive nor liberating on its own. What determines its meaning is whether women have the freedom to refuse it or not. When refusal is not an option, as in the case of Afghan women, home can become a place that erases one’s identity. In these situations, traditional lifestyles can feel like a trap, making people dependent and unsafe. Women often feel they must constantly monitor how they dress, speak, and move to avoid punishment. However, in those parts of the world, where refusal is possible, the same lifestyle can be a choice. It can be embraced, monetized, rejected, and changed throughout a career, without being permanent, showing it’s about freedom to choose, not about which lifestyle is chosen.
By: Anjali Kumari
Write and Win: Participate in Creative writing Contest & International Essay Contest and win fabulous prizes.
About the Author
