All About #TradWives with Anne Helen Petersen

Welcome to #tradwife week on Under the Influence, where we take you down the gilded rabbit hole of the women who profess submission to their husbands and an intense adoration of puffy sleeved princess dresses. Joining us is the brilliant Anne Helen Petersen of Culture Study.

#Tradwives ooze submissive wifehood. Think women dressed like Donna Reed or Betty Draper. They cook, they clean, and they talk about things that I personally find very dangerous—about how women belong in the home and only the home or about how college steals the time that women should be breeding.

One thing that gets me about these accounts is that we always see them in beautiful dresses doing beautiful things. Like the nice things to do around a house. Pulling an apple crisp out of the oven. Or calmly vacuuming. What we're not seeing is the nitty gritty.

of keeping a house. We don't see anyone in a puffy sleeved dress cleaning out their toilet or pulling hair out of the shower drain.

This trend is only getting bigger and more widespread. But thankfully, there are a lot of smart women out there dissecting it.

One of those is the one and only Anne Helen Peterson. She is an incredible journalist, author, and creator of the Substack Culture Study, as well as the host of the podcast, Work Appropriate.

Much like I do, she has thoughts on #tradwives, and we're here to lay out a primer for what this world looks like right now.