The Instagram feed of Ekaterina Andersen, a Danish-Russian who describes her lifestyle as “lived Orthodoxy,” is an endless scroll of curated domestic bliss: flower crown workshops, embroidered aprons, hand-painted Easter eggs and perfectly set 1950s hairstyles.
With 149,000 Instagram followers and an Etsy shop where she sells cottagecore aprons she sews herself for up to €210, Andersen blends traditional values with an aesthetic between a Russian fairy tale and an American pin-up model. It has made her one of the most recognisable faces of the ‘traditional wives’ or ‘tradwives’ movement in Europe.
The movement gained ground in the US in the late 2010s and has taken off over the past five years, when the Covid-19 pandemic bolstered a cohort of influencers promoting the deliberate choice of domestic life over the often unworkable balance between career and motherhood — a 180-degree switch from the ‘girlboss’ ethos that defined the early 2010s. The trend quickly migrated to Europe, with influencers like Andersen continuing to grow their following after the lockdown as they became part of a broader public debate about gender roles.
For critics, the yearning for a return to traditional gender roles is little more than an escapist fantasy that could reverse decades of hard-won women’s rights. But advocates like Andersen — who has a background in theology and has co-authored a book on feminism — counter that feminism hasn’t lived up to expectations.
“All these years feminism has been telling us that in order to have successful lives, careers and education we need to minimise all the feminine in us,” Andersen argued in a post from 2022 pinned to the top of her account. “Traditional femininity isn’t about denying women education, interesting professions or general joy outside the home. It is about insistence on us being different from men and that difference being normal, good and deliberate.”
Andersen’s messaging and nostalgic aesthetics are striking a chord with a European audience in search of new role models, as millennials and Gen Z face a precarious job market, a lingering cost-of-living crisis and what seems an almost impossible path to home ownership.
“What the tradwife movement has done is to capitalise on the failures of liberal feminism,” said Cécile Simmons, a researcher focusing on gender and online harms at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank. “Even if you're a relatively privileged young woman in Europe today, you can see that that feminism doesn't really deliver for the vast majority of women: You haven't had a promotion in five years, inflation is going up, and you're burnt out.”
According to media analytics provider Meltwater, between January and April this year, hashtags like #Tradwife, #FeminineNotFeminist or #BiblicalWomanhood have experienced the largest surge in mentions in the Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden on social media platforms like X, Bluesky and Reddit.
Meanwhile, Google Trends shows that the countries that most searched the term ‘tradwives’ over the past year were Belgium, Germany, Norway, United States and Austria.
No tradwives without alpha males
Just as tradwife influencers are encouraging women to tap into their “feminine energy” and turn away from feminism, disgruntled young men are increasingly drawn into online communities where influencers dispense advice meant to help them reclaim status and prestige. In this world only assertive and successful “alpha males” are destined to secure wealth, power, and the most desirable women, explained Lucas Gottzén, a professor at Stockholm University specialising in masculinity.
While manosphere and tradwife content do not fully overlap, both arise from a rejection of feminism and seek to clarify and distinguish gender roles, encouraging men and women alike to lean into stereotypical traits. However, a key difference lies in the way they perceive the other sex. For tradwives, relationships with men are a source of fulfilment, whereas the manosphere often frames relationships with women as confrontational or transactional.
Unlike the relatively new tradwife wave, the manosphere took shape in the early 2010s on Reddit, later migrating to platforms like 4chan and Discord. What began as advice on dating and personal finance has since evolved into openly sexist and misogynistic spaces, said Gottzén.
“They’ve moved from this very obscure, relatively small fringe of the internet to social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok,” Gottzén told The Parliament. In Europe, as in the US, many of these groups were born in response to what many saw as a leftist group think, cancel culture or simply excessively liberal ideas — or ‘woke.’
Made by Americans, loved by Europeans
Javier Carbonell Castañer, a policy officer at the European Policy Centre (EPC) who studied the root causes of a feminist backlash among young men, flagged that the manosphere is already well established in Europe and particularly in Spain, whose traditionally macho culture has swung sharply towards feminism over the past decade.
One of the most polarised countries in Europe, Spain is a textbook case of how highly progressive laws can fuel misogynistic backlash online, noted Carbonell Castañer. Since Pedro Sánchez’s left-wing coalition government took power in 2018, the government has passed legislation that made it easier for trans people to change their legal gender and introduced menstrual leave.
In response, influencers romanticising a return to traditional gender roles have gained a stronger foothold in Spain than elsewhere. They span from fitness star Amadeo Llados, who amassed over 400,000 Instagram followers, to YouTuber ‘Un tío blanco hetero’ (“a white straight guy”), to Roro — a twenty-something woman with nearly 5 million Instagram followers for videos where she cooks elaborate meals for her boyfriend.
And even when there are no local influencers, manosphere and tradwife content remains pervasive and easily accessible to young Europeans, Gottzén said. “This is a global phenomenon, and our kids are online and watching YouTube and TikTok influencers from all over the world.”
An experiment run last year by Simmons, the investigative researcher, found that French women aged 18 to 25 who showed interest in abortion and contraception were spontaneously redirected towards American tradwife accounts through Instagram reels.
Nine out of 10 accounts recommended in Instagram reels focused on motherhood, and eight were accounts self-described as ‘tradwives,’ read the report.
“If you are a young woman and you research things that have nothing to do with ‘tradwives’ content, you [still] end up being recommended that content,” said Simmons, who has written a book on online misogyny.
Self-determination meets far-right politics
In the US, an ecosystem led by figures like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan played a central role in persuading young men to vote for US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Something similar is happening in Europe, where statistics have shown that growing support for far-right parties is the result of young men under 25 shifting rightwards.
For Carbonell Castañer, the appeal of the manosphere — whose audience often overlaps with the far-right electorate — lies in its leverage of individualism. “The manosphere speaks directly to young men,” he said. “It tells them: ‘It’s within your capacity as a person to get out of this situation.’”
That pitch, he continued, is often more compelling than the traditional left-wing call to organise and build movements. “That’s much harder,” he explained. “You have to trust others, and you have to think long-term. They [young people] don’t trust the future. And no progressive movement can exist without any confidence that there's going to be a better future.”
Similarly, tradwives influencers speak to a disillusioned audience of women, who ceased seeing their career as the ultimate source of fulfilment.
“The tradwives are very good at exploiting the perception that feminism doesn’t talk about wages and the socio-economic situation,” noted Simmons. “And so, they are offering their lifestyle as a way out of the system,” she said.
At the same time, while tradwife influencers are unlikely to make political statements or profess loyalty to a political family, the values they promote — such as a strong emphasis on motherhood and biological gender differences — clearly align with right-leaning ideologies and the priorities of a growing movement against gender ideology.
With their often numerous offspring — Andersen, for instance, is a mother of four — they embody the natalist policies championed by far-right and populist governments, which have made reversing Europe’s declining birth rates one of their flagship battles, with some even promoting women’s “right to stay at home.”
It’s the economy, stupid!
For Carbonell Castañer, the resurgence of traditionalist values has more to do with the real economy than with social media. “It's not just a cultural backlash, it's not just social media, it's not just pure sexism,” he said. His thesis, which he spelled out in a report published in April this year, is that young men’s economic status has declined sharply relative to women’s. In several European countries, the gender pay gap has reversed and women under 25 now earn more than their male counterparts, it stressed.
It is precisely the loss of wealth, purchasing power, and access to housing that has fueled frustration among young men, making them especially susceptible to the nostalgia for a bygone vision of masculinity as the one promoted by the manosphere, said Carbonell Castañer.
Lina Gálvez, chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, agreed that these trends can be traced back to economic interests. “In the context of a future lack of employment because of digitalisation and artificial intelligence, they [young men] are already thinking they will need less competition,” the Spanish socialist told The Parliament.
At the same time, she said that the strain on welfare budgets from Europe’s demographic crunch and increased defence spending was likely to put pressure on women to once again take on more unpaid care work. “If you want to cut social expenditure, you will need people to take care of others,” she said.
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