What's It Really Like to Be a Stay-at-Home Girlfriend?

Spoiler: The junior tradwife life isn't as rosy as it looks online.

- ERIKA W. SMITH

By this point, you've definitely seen a tradwife come across your social feeds. Watching their videos is like getting slingshotted into the past. Clad in 1950s-style aprons, newborns strapped to their chests, these women make cereal and snack crackers from scratch while embodying ultratraditional gender roles. "The man, he is the provider, the main breadwinner....The woman, the wife, she is a homemaker....She does the cooking and the cleaning," declares Estee Williams (@Estee CWilliams) to her more than 190,000 TikTok followers in one video. Taken collectively, #tradwife posts like these read like a pre-Feminine Mystique guide to middle-class white womanhood one that's attracting a growing number of younger, unmarried women eager to try out the lifestyle for themselves as stay-athome girlfriends, or SAHGs.

Perhaps the sheer size of these popular fandoms is the appeal. Nara Smith (@NaraAzizaSmith) and Hannah Neeleman (@BallerinaFarm), mega-influencers whom many view as tradwives, have 7.6 million followers on TikTok and 9 million followers on Instagram, respectively. Perhaps it's the aspirational homes, the carefully curated hair and makeup looks, all those picture-perfect baked goods. Maybe it's the promise of a more secure, less stressful life-a tantalizing lure for overworked, underpaid young women. Or maybe all of the above are why terms like "Stay-at-Home Girlfriend," "Life as a Stay-at-Home Girlfriend," "Stay-at-home

GF," and "SAH GF" each have somewhere between 23 million and 43 million posts on TikTok alone.