Tradwife and freelancer: The new housewives and entrepreneurs

The traditional office is losing women at a pace no HR department saw coming. The figures repeat themselves, year after year, across almost every developed country, and they are striking: 72% of working women say they’re actively looking for ways to work from home, one in four European digital professionals already operates on a freelance basis according to Eurostat, and in Spain 12% of the startups founded in 2025 were exclusively female.

At the same time, on social media, a very different story is racking up billions of views: the tradwife movement —short for traditional wife—, which the Cambridge English Dictionary has just added to its 2025 edition as an official new word.

Two responses. Two seemingly opposite paths. And yet, the same underlying question that more and more women are asking themselves, sometimes quietly: what do I do with a work model that has stopped working for me?

The (aesthetic) return to the home

The term tradwife describes a woman who voluntarily chooses to put family, home and intentional living at the centre of her priorities. Communities like Tradwife Club —which presents itself as the first online space dedicated to traditional families— describe it as a conscious choice, not as an imposition. To understand what is a tradwife? in the movement’s own voice, that’s the framing they use for themselves: vocation, intentionality, partnership within the couple, and a rejection of the career-at-all-costs model that dominated recent decades.

The phenomenon itself isn’t new. Women who leave their careers to dedicate themselves to the home have always existed, still exist, and always will. What’s new is the staging. Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) has nearly ten million TikTok followers documenting any given day between children, cows and freshly baked bread. Nara Smith has gone viral filming herself making cereal, gummies or bread from scratch, with no packaged ingredients.

The visual codes repeat themselves —flowing dresses, ancestral baking, rural landscapes, children playing in kitchens bathed in golden light— and together they form an audiovisual genre with its own identity. An aesthetic that has resonated globally and has opened, almost unavoidably, a serious cultural conversation.

Researchers at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, led by Professor Heejung Chung, have looked at the phenomenon carefully. And what they’ve found complicates the more ideological reading of it. Only 10% of women and men in the UK believe she should take care of the home and he should provide the income; more than 60% think both should contribute financially.

What the tradwife surge does reflect, according to the study, is something more prosaic: generational exhaustion. A generation of young women confronting punishing workdays, poorly distributed caregiving responsibilities, and a double-burden model that, simply put, doesn’t add up for them.

The self-employed: The flip side of the same exhaustion

The other response to that same exhaustion takes a different direction: leaving the contract behind, setting up your own project and working from home on a self-employed basis. The data confirms that the trend is more established than it appears. Platforms like Malt recorded a 39% growth in freelancer sign-ups between 2020 and 2021, and 91% of those making the leap had previous experience as employees, according to the Freelancing in Europe report.

The most in-demand services —community manager, virtual assistant, freelance copywriter, graphic designer, coach, social media manager— have quietly become the backbone of the new female entrepreneurship. If you log onto any freelance platform today, most of the active profiles in these categories are women.

What’s interesting is that the motivation is practically identical to what drives a large part of the tradwife movement. Balancing time with the children. Skipping the commute. Setting your own schedule. Not having to justify a doctor’s appointment. Getting out of a corporate culture that many describe as exhausting or, simply, incompatible with the rest of their life. The diagnosis, fundamentally, is the same. What changes is the prescription: one chooses the home as her main space for fulfilment; the other reorganises paid work on her own terms.

The movement’s paradox

There’s one fact both sides of the conversation acknowledge as striking. The most visible tradwives aren’t, strictly speaking, “pure” homemakers. They are also full-time content creators, with managers, advertising contracts, product lines, published books and paid speaking engagements.

Hannah Neeleman, before becoming the movement’s muse, trained as a ballerina at Juilliard and is listed as co-CEO of the family business Ballerina Farm, as The New York Times reported. Nara Smith remains a professional model. A large part of the most viral tradwife content is produced, in practice, within the logic of digital entrepreneurship.

The movement itself addresses this tension openly. Tradwife Club, for example, devotes explicit space to what it calls “the influencer paradox” and argues that conversations about money —real budgets, savings, household financial planning— are as important as any aesthetic. They present it as a natural evolution of the debate and as an honest response to outside criticism.

What the conversation rarely includes

Beyond the imagery, the material difference between a freelancer and a tradwife without her own income is economic in nature. The first invoices in her own name, pays taxes, saves, decides. The second shares the family economy with her partner in a much greater degree of interdependence. And that interdependence, when it’s informed and well planned, works perfectly. When it isn’t, it leaves the woman in a position of vulnerability that the data describes clearly: in the United States, a woman’s household income drops, on average, by 41% after a divorce.

That’s why voices inside and outside the tradwife movement itself agree on the same point: financial literacy, access to family accounts, and the ability to generate one’s own income are basic safety matters, regardless of which life model each woman chooses. It’s a conversation that comes up more and more, including within the movement itself.

Two different ways out of the office

Both trends —the one that reclaims the home and the one that reinvents work on your own terms— are pointing at the same underlying problem: a social organisation that doesn’t make it easy to raise children, care for others and work at the same time. Each proposes a different way out, with its own virtues and costs, both worth looking at honestly without idealising either.

The tradwife finds value in a life centred on the home, in time spent present with the family, and in a division of roles that many describe as a relief from the pressure of the “girlboss” model that dominated the past decade. Her main point of attention —recognised also from within the movement— is planning the financial side carefully so the model is sustainable over the long term.

The freelancer, in turn, finds value in scheduling autonomy, in owning her own business, and in the possibility of continuing to build her professional career at her own pace. Her challenges are income insecurity, the administrative load and the real risk of extending the workday beyond what’s healthy.

Perhaps the most useful question, in the end, isn’t “tradwife or freelancer?”. It’s another, more practical one, that any woman can ask herself without having to pick a side: what concrete arrangements —in my relationship, in my finances, in my time, in my professional project— allow me to work, raise children, rest, and keep the capacity to change my mind five years from now? That question, not aesthetics and not the algorithm, is probably what will actually make the difference. Whichever path is chosen.