In the summer of 2022, Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, flew to Texas to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Onstage, his tirades against immigration, gender studies, and LGBTQ rights were met with roars of approval. Orban has made it his mission to codify traditional family values into law—and dismantle democracy in the process. American conservatives are taking note. And paving the way for these extremist policies is a group of social media "momfluencers" touting the glory of traditional family life. Are Moms for Liberty and #tradwives the harbingers of a backslide when it comes to women’s rights...and American democracy?
In the summer of 2022, Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, flew to Texas to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Onstage, his tirades against immigration, gender studies, and LGBTQ rights were met with roars of approval. Orban has made it his mission to codify traditional family values into law—and dismantle democracy in the process. American conservatives are taking note. And paving the way for these extremist policies is a group of social media "momfluencers" touting the glory of traditional family life. Are Moms for Liberty and #tradwives the harbingers of a backslide when it comes to women’s rights...and American democracy?
This season's cover art features a photograph by Jonathan Wilkins.
White Picket Fence is supported by Planned Parenthood. For more information or to book an in-person or virtual appointment, visit plannedparenthood.org or call 1-800-230-PLAN.
Julie Kohler:
Recently, I’ve been going down… a social media rabbit hole.
Her Blessed Home:
I love being a homemaker. I get to dictate the rhythm of our day in a way I’d never be able to if I wasn’t home.
Julie:
Search for “tradwife”.... And a vision of tranquil motherhood appears.
Hannahlee Yoder:
I dress for the job of homemaker, mother, gardener, cook, mother, wife, nutritionist, activity coordinator, the list goes on and on and on.
Julie:
I know that what everybody puts on social media is a highlight reel. Their best selves.
But these particular momfluencers are providing more than just gardening tips and childcare musings. They’re selling… a lifestyle.
Estee C. Williams:
Tradwife, which means traditional wife. It is a woman who chooses to live a more traditional life with ultra traditional gender roles.
Julie:
A set of values. An ideology. Think of them as the PR firm for the “traditional” heteronormative family. Where women are feminine, housework is joyful, and motherhood …is sacred.
Her Blessed Home:
I didn’t even know what happiness was until I became a mom.
Julie:
All you have to do is look at the other hashtags they use, alongside “tradwife” – and things start to sort of… come into focus. Homemaking. Christian mom. Feminine not feminist.
I submit and I serve my husband. It is a blessing to be my husbands helpmate. And the bible has the man of the household, not the woman.
Julie:
It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off, social media trend. But what tradwives are doing is actually deeply political. By repackaging and idealizing a 1950s style of white Christian motherhood, they’re actually laying groundwork for an extreme right-wing agenda.
They’re building demand for a set of policies that encourage – or even conscript – women to that traditional role. And they’re distracting people from the politicians who are literally dismantling democracy – in order to enshrine that view of family life into law.
I’m Julie Kohler and this is White Picket Fence. This season we’re exploring mothers as a political force. Over the last two episodes we’ve examined the resurgence of a particular type of conservative, largely white activism…and its extensive history in the U.S.
But activism is not the only tool for political change. So for this episode, we’re widening the lens a bit and taking a look at the ways politics and culture intersect. And how a bunch of young women defending traditional family life on social media are helping move fringe ideas into the political mainstream.
The main tool in the tradwife arsenal — is the same one that’s deployed by groups like Moms for Liberty and conservative politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: nostalgia.
Eviane Leidig:
So the core ideology, the messaging that doesn't change, the nostalgia doesn't change, but what does change? It's the way that it gets presented.
Julie:
That’s Eviane Leidig. She’s a fellow in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on far-right digital cultures, especially those that focus on gender and sexuality.
Eviane Leidig:
There's a lot of trad wives who like to present a modern vision of what a contemporary homemaker looks like today.
Julie:
Eviane first got interested in the tradwife movement back in 2015, when she started noticing their hashtags popping up online. Tradwife, Tradmom, tradwifelife, traditional housewife,....
Eviane Leidig:
The trad movement is definitely a reactionary backlash to feminism. They believe that feminism forces women to “act unnaturally.” That forces women outside of the household.
Julie:
Since then, the trend has gone more mainstream —- thanks, in part, to a very savvy PR spin.
Eviane Leidig:
They tend to, in a way, actually use a feminist argument to say, well, it's my choice if I want to stay at home and be a traditional homemaker. But saying that it's a choice does neglect actually what the movement tries to embody, which is more than just a choice, but it's, it's a lifestyle that they are performing for others. And it's a community that actually gets created out of that.
Julie:
If you spend enough time consuming tradwife content, you’ll see the way they twist the “choice” language of feminism – against it. And the clever way that they build their audience by tapping into some very understandable feelings. Then, comes the misdirection: all of that exhaustion, anger, and resentment could go away if women just…stayed home.
Julie tradwife “ad”:
Are you tired of fighting your way through this endless capitalist rat race? Life’s burdens got ya down? Burnt out from trying to balance your career and your family? Well, have we got the solution for you! Embrace your natural purpose! Return to the home! But, with a contemporary spin! These days, you can even open your own credit card!
Julie:
It’s not surprising that the pandemic fueled this trend: Suddenly, moms found ourselves juggling an impossible workload. We couldn’t do it all. So…. we reached for our sourdough starters. And tried to exert a little control over what we could.
It’s also no coincidence that this trend took off alongside Trump-ism. Tradwives are advocating for a return to a status quo. In many ways, it’s the perfect complement to a backlash movement that aims to… “make America great again.”
Both offer a vision for how society can be better by embracing this yearning for what was.
Eviane Leidig:
Because what the far right does is that it elevates certain gender and racial as well as class aspects of the traditional trad lifestyle and, and uses that to insert its political ideology. And by gender and racial dynamics, I'm afraid explicitly to heterosexual relationships, as well as white middle class projections. And that is assumed to be natural and sort of maintaining the status quo. So this is where I start to see how far-right actors use Traditionalism to sort of project their vision of what is a utopian society and what men's and women's roles should be within that society.
Julie:
The tradwife trend is more than just a conservative pipe dream. We’re seeing instances where this marketing of traditional motherhood is colliding with a far-right, ethno-nationalist agenda.
In fact, there’s already a country where this concept of family – and women’s roles in it – is taking root: Hungary.
If you’ve been following Hungarian politics, it’s probably in the context of the country’s descent into authoritarianism. But what’s facilitated that shift is an embrace of nostalgia that sounds…a lot like the tradwife movement.
Right now, Hungarian leaders have an obsession with the country’s declining birthrate. A top national priority is getting women to have more babies. So the government has created a whole slew of policies that reward heterosexual marriage and childbearing.
If you’re a woman, in Hungary, with four or more children, you get a lifetime waiver on income taxes and subsidized loans for cars. And housing.
On the surface, this sounds kind of nice. I mean, what’s the problem if the government wants to help a few families buy minivans? But they aren’t just handing out tax breaks. They want women back in the home. And they’re suppressing any ideas – or people – that could get in the way.
And nobody understands this better than Andrea Pëto.
Andrea Pëto:
My name is Andrea Pëto. I'm a professor of gender studies at Central European University in Vienna.
Julie:
Andrea used to teach gender studies in Budapest, Hungary. But in 2018, her entire field of study was banned. Then, later that year, Central European University, which is dedicated to advancing democracy, was forced out of the country. And it didn’t stop there…
Andrea Pëto
The state audit office issued a report which was saying that women who have got higher educational degree, they are responsible for the demographic decline and the demographic problems. And the state should reconsider spending public money on women's higher education because this is counterproductive. It takes place from men, and the women are not producing children.
Julie:
So… How did Hungary get to this point?
Well, it all goes back to one man: Viktor Orbán, the country’s prime minister.
Up until recently, Viktor Orbán probably wasn’t a household name for most Americans. But as he became more and more extreme, people began to notice.
His rise to the top wasn’t a straight line. His Fidesz party began as an anti-communist youth organization, fighting for freedoms from Hungary’s Soviet-era dictatorship. When he first became prime minister, back in the 1990s, he was a fairly traditional, pro-west, free-market guy. At the time, he championed a number of economic reforms and oversaw Hungary’s entrance into NATO.
But Orbán’s political rise stalled – and his politics shifted – after he lost re-election in 2002.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
He didn't like losing, it affected him, you know, psychologically. And he started to come up with ideas about how if he should ever gain power again, that he wouldn't make the same mistakes, essentially, as what, as what he had done in the past. And the other thing that happened is that he, you know, he sort of transitioned from being this fairly standard pro west or a pro-American liberal to being more of a right wing nationalist.
Julie:
That’s Elisabeth Zerofsky. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She covers both U.S. and European politics.
After Orbán’s party was ousted, Hungary was ruled for a decade by the country’s center-left socialist party. But that didn’t go so well: The party failed to solve the financial crisis. And xenophobia and racism were on the rise. That turmoil led to the socialist prime minister’s resignation in 2009. And it was in that environment that Orbán ran for office again. This time, as a right-wing nationalist. It’s not clear whether his political beliefs really changed…or if the shift was merely pragmatic – a way to occupy a vacant political lane. But regardless of his motivation, it worked.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
Viktor Orbán came in, came back, he said, listen, I'm going to fix all of these economic problems. He won, got into office fair and square, and, um, he became Prime Minister of Hungary again in 2010.
Julie:
Back in office, Orbán put his campaign promises into practice. He turned his back on the Western countries he once embraced and began to tout a new ideology – illiberalism. Yes, ill-liberalism
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
It is often traced back to a speech that he gave in 2014 where he says liberal democracy as a system is failing. You know, the US is a mess, financially, it's a mess. They have, you know, imposed their problems on the rest of the world with their financial system. And, you know, look at these other countries that seem to be holding together much better. China, Russia, Turkey , they have different systems that are not liberal democracy, and that's the future. And we don’t want to be a liberal state, but illiberal state
Viktor Orbán 2014 speech:
Magyarországon építünk, illiberális állam, nem liberális állam…
Julie:
Illiberalism is a political philosophy that rejects democracy – free and fair elections, constitutional limits to power, basic rights and liberties. Orbán has used it as a way to centralize power.
Economically that meant stripping financial institutions of their autonomy and placing them under state control.
Politically, it meant changing the rules so that…no one could challenge Orban or the Fidesz party. In 2011, Hungary adopted a new constitution, which was passed solely through votes from his Fidesz party allies in parliament.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
And they passed a new cons constitution in a couple of, you know, weeks or months, I think. Which is quite fast. His party operates as a, you know, as a kind of machine, there's no dissent. He controls the media, They have a super majority, and if they wanna get something done, they can just, they can do it. And that's, that's a very, sort of efficient political machine.
Julie:
Armed with a new constitution, and a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, Orbán turned Hungary into a laboratory for illiberalism.
Here’s the thing about illiberal or authoritarian leaders: they frequently exploit moments of chaos or uncertainty to rise to power. In Orban’s case, it was economic uncertainty. By promising – and providing – a degree of economic stability, he was able to gain power – legitimately.
But maintaining that power requires attacking – and vanquishing – any potential political threat. Orban’s done this in a few ways. First, by identifying an “enemy.” Here’s Andrea Pëto again.
Andrea Pëto:
The illiberal governments are always looking for enemies because they don't have policy agenda. So gender studies, professors, George Soros, the migrants, LGBTQIT activists, rainbow Families, anybody can be, an enemy at any moment if that brings in votes or it brings any kind of economic gain.
Julie:
The enemy – no matter who it is – helps create a binary. You can’t have a victim – without a villain. In Hungary, it’s the traditional family that’s under attack.
In 2020, the Hungarian government amended the constitution again. Now, it redefines family to exclude same-sex couples. It requires that children identify with the gender assigned at birth. And insists that families provide kids with an “upbringing based on values stemming from our country’s constitutional identity and Christian culture.” That’s a direct quote.
By shifting the conversation towards protection of families…Orban can avoid talking about his rollback of legal rights. It’s a classic bait and switch.
Andrea Pëto:
Replacing women as agents of change, and talking about mothers as the only acceptable and desirable position of women in the society. Motherhood is a place for, dignity and appreciation and accepting and valuing women's work. And of course, this kind of social motherhood is going towards the direction when motherhood is becoming a paid profession. So, this kind of paid social motherhood, which, of course is well known from the history, from the fascist and from the Nazi family policies is somehow used in the liberal states, not only to create an ideological framing for keeping women away from the labor market, but also to create an alternative value system, an alternative vocabulary to the language of rights.
Julie:
This creation of an alternative value system – an alternative vocabulary to the language of rights – it’s a strategy. And American conservatives are taking note.
More on that after the break.
[Midroll Ad]
Julie:
It's August 2022. Viktor Orbán walks onto a stage, brightly lit in red and blue. And he's got an almost proud smile on his face as he waves to the crowd that's clapping and whooping. He approaches the microphone and starts his speech. And... it's in English:
Viktor Orbán at CPAC:
Politics, my friend, are not enough. This war is a culture war. We have to revitalize our churches, our families, our universities, and our community institutions. Hungary [applause] Hungary….
Julie:
Orbán is not speaking to his own citizens. He's in Dallas, Texas, speaking to pundits, politicians, and the GOP faithful. He's at... CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
American Conservatives have gathered to hear what a political leader from a small country 5,000 miles away has to say on one of their largest stages.
Viktor Orbán at CPAC:
We know that family is the place to transfer the values of parents to the next generation. If traditional values are gone, there is nothing that can save the west from going under. Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. To sum up, the mother is a woman, the father is a man and leave our kids alone. Full stop. End of discussion. [applause]
Julie:
They ate it up. So much so that Orbán became something of a cult hero for the American Right. Suddenly, conservatives are rushing to make the pilgrimage to Hungary. CPAC hosted its first-ever European conference there. Tucker Carlson broadcast from Budapest.
Tucker Carlson news clip:
The Hungarian government protects its border because it wants to protect its citizens. Why can’t we have this in America?
Donald Trump news clip:
People have a lot of respect for this prime minister. He’s a respected man. And you look at some of the problems they have in Europe that are tremendous because they've done it a different way than the prime minister.
Julie:
The CPAC Crowd sounds almost jealous of Orbán's strategy for gaining and maintaining power. He's attacking his opponents, AND portraying them as enemies of the state. And it works. Here’s Elisabeth Zerofsky again:
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
Viktor Orbán goes after the left viciously and ferociously. That is a big part of his politics. That is a big part of how he conducts himself. He says the left is a threat to civilization, and I'm gonna go after them. I'm gonna beat them. I'm gonna win elections, and I'm gonna be popular for it. That is how, you know, I think the U.S. conservatives perceive him in the U.S.
Julie:
They love Orban’s swagger – his “own the libs” style. It’s been a tactic that we’ve seen them use for years…
But what’s new is their growing embrace of illiberalism – and the government… as an enforcer of a very specific, very fringe social agenda.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
The government is the only place, is an institution that the right can control through, which can exert a cultural politics. And that's kind of what Orbán is doing, and that's what I think they see, you know, they see potential.
Julie:
And no one has absorbed Orban’s lessons – or deployed them more effectively than Ron DeSantis. In some ways, Florida has become a mini Hungary.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
Some of the things that you're seeing happening, of course, in Florida now with these kinds of takeovers of liberal colleges that you have with DeSantis, I think this is the kind of thing that they have in mind. Okay, we control the government in Florida. We don't control the culture, but we're gonna use the government to try to control the culture and recreate this kind of conservative traditional civilization that has been utterly destroyed by the left. And we're gonna do it, you know, without apology. And what's more, at the end of it, voters are gonna like it and they're gonna thank us for it.
Julie:
In other words: DeSantis is not gonna let popular opinion stand in his way. He and his GOP colleagues are using their supermajority to roll back rights and define the enemy.
Let’s take Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill. That was modeled after something Hungary did: In 2021, Orbán banned any mention of anything LGBTQ-related in sex ed classes. The next year, Florida Republicans introduced their bill.
Then – there are the attacks on education. We talked about DeSantis’s war on K-12 education back in episode one. But, like Hungary, he’s also going after higher education. Just last month, Republicans introduced a bill that would ban majors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies. And prevent public spending on efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
DeSantis has even taken a page out of Orbán’s book when it comes to the press. He’s currently trying to pass legislation that would limit free speech protections and make it easier for people to sue the media for defamation.
The kind of authoritarianism that once felt far away is now in our backyard. But as important as the parallels are, it’s also important to draw distinctions.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
Of course, in the United States, we don't have a tradition of that we're very much a sort of, you know, government doesn't tell me what to do, you know, get outta my backyard kind of a place. So we don't have this kind of tradition in the US for the most part.
Julie (interview):
Well, and federalism. So we have, you know, much more active state governments, etc.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
Exactly. Exactly. Right. Right. You can't, right? You can't, that's exactly the point. You can't do in the U.S. what you can do in Hungary. I mean, each state has, for the most part control over what, what kinds of policies they're implementing. So you can't just have somebody say, okay, gender, gender studies is illegal, and now it's illegal. You can't do that in the U.S.
Julie:
Power in the U.S. is a lot less centralized. It’d be much harder for a president to do here what Orbán did. But….
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
If one were to do it, a lot of the targets of that power would be of course rolling back rights that women in the United States have won in the last 50 years. And of course, obviously what happened at the Supreme Court with Roe v Wade last summer is the perfect, perfect example of that. I mean, these are some of the first kinds of, in this kind of reactionary conservative vision, those are some of the first rights to go. The connection is perhaps indirect, but the style of wielding power and the sort of end point end goal, that connection is quite clear.
Julie:
As a former communist country, Hungary also lacks the long tradition of civil society groups that we have in the U.S.
Elisabeth Zerofsky:
United States civil society, civic groups are very strong and very widespread and that sort of thing. And so in some ways, in order to wield power in the United States, you actually have to have civic groups or civil society on your side or under your umbrella or working for you.
Julie:
Which brings us back to moms. And the reason that groups like Moms for Liberty are so important to DeSantis. If he’s going to use authoritarian methods to enshrine his cultural worldview into law, he needs the veneer of popular support. A vocal contingency of mothers saying that this agenda benefits them – and their kids. And it’s why this entire movement needs influencers like the tradwives. Because if Moms for Liberty are the foot soldiers, the tradwives are the saleswomen.
Tradwives inoculate us against extremism by selling their cultural agenda as innocent. Pleasant. Desirable. They may not talk much about politics, but the agenda is there.
Eviane Leidig:
What the far right does is that it elevates gender and racial aspects that are predominates within trad communities and then uses that as leverage to push for its ideology.
Julie:
That’s Eviane Leidig again. She’s studied the relationship between tradwife influencers and extremist and anti-democratic political movements. Although a lot of tradwives shy away from saying the word “politics”…
Eviane Leidig:
I'm seeing, like Mrs. Midwest, starting to like and share far right content, explicitly far right content.
Julie:
Mrs. Midwest, also known as Caitlin Huber is one of the more prominent trad wife influencers. While her hundreds of thousands of followers might come to her for tips for skincare or beauty or raising kids… what they might not realize is that she’s showing them the path to radicalization.
Eviane Leidig:
There's been certain far-right accounts that have, with her permission, used her photos in their propaganda. And so she is very deliberately allowing for her visibility in the trad movement to be weaponized within the far right.
Julie:
Moreover, just like Moms for Liberty, Mrs. Midwest and her tradwife cohort are intentionally targeting a specific audience. Young women.
Eviane Leidig:
It does reflect a bigger trend happening right now when it comes to generational amnesia about feminism and women's rights. With Gen Z, we're also starting to see that generational amnesia in terms of the lack of education and awareness about how feminism and women's rights did allow them to, to enjoy their positionings in societies today because it was the efforts of previous generations.
Julie:
Under the glossy sheen of social media, tradwives are mainstreaming an extremist agenda. In a way that feels like a choice. At least for now. But what these young women are recreating is an ideal that was always rooted in racism and classism… and of course, sexism.
Eviane Leidig:
So it is presenting a very particular form of nostalgia that was not accessible to, to most people, quote back in the day. And that's sort of what they valorize. And the reality is that, you know, this lifestyle excluded large swaths of society. And so that includes as well their focus on what motherhood should be, and how that's projected in terms of who has the, the time and, and accessible means of care that they can provide for their families.
Julie:
So how do we combat that? And stop the growing threat of illiberalism from taking hold in the U.S. Well, it requires a lot of things. A full-throated defense of democratic institutions, values, and norms. Of our Constitutional rights. Our human rights.
But it also requires changing the motherhood narratives that we tell publicly. That we tell ourselves. Rejecting the false nostalgia that is being aggressively pushed on us – from angry men in MAGA hats or attractive tradwives in well-kept homes.
We are not going to be able to advance an alternative political agenda unless we acknowledge and uplift the different stories about who mothers are, what mothers look like, and what we fight for.
These are stories that have always been part of our society, we just haven't elevated them.
Dani McClain:
The traditional assumption in this country is that a mother is unemployed, she's working primarily in the home. Whatever power she has is being exercised within solely the domestic sphere. But for black women, that has not really been the case.
Tune in next week as we explore the other side of motherhood politics.
White Picket Fence is a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddy Foley and Taylor Williamson with production support from Abbey Delk. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Executive Producer is Jenny Kaplan. Original music by Sean Petell.
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