Fiction Is Having a Trad Wife Moment—3 Authors on Bringing the Phenomenon to Life

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that trad wives have captured the zeitgeist. Scroll through TikTok or Instagram, and you’re bound to see a beautiful young mother cooking or baking things from scratch—and doing so dressed in couture, if you’re Nara Smith.

But the trad wife phenomenon goes far beyond social media: old-school staples like apron dresses, headscarves, and elbow-length gloves are dominating the runway, while hit reality TV shows like Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—which has surpassed The Kardashians in ratings—and Fox’s Farmer Wants a Wife depict the far messier reality of modern women trying to operate within the constraints of traditional gender roles.

Now, the literary world is lending its own critical eye to the trad wife craze. A handful of recent books are putting a new spin on the domestic thriller, calling our cultural obsession with these hyperfeminized figures into question. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden and Jo Piazza’s Everyone Is Lying to You are just two recent bestselling examples that reinterpret tropes from classics like Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

In 2026, the trend reaches a fever pitch, with three more novelists entering the discourse. Saratoga Schaefer’s USA Today Bestseller Trad Wife, released in February, follows wannabe influencer Camille Deming, who spawns with a demon à la Levin's Rosemary’s Baby. TikTok-famous cultural commentator Caro Claire Burke’s buzzy debut, Yesteryear, out this week, tells the story of viral sensation Natalie Heller Mills, who is transported back to the pioneer era she yearns for. (Anne Hathaway is already attached to star in the feature film adaptation.) Finally, Bram Stoker Award winner Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife, to be released this fall, sees journalist Jenny Kaplan investigate Mia Wright—the “trad wife queen” followed by millions—only to discover the dark truths behind the quaint town that has become her dominion.

Below, Schaefer, Burke, and Langan tell Marie Claire about the inspiration behind their books, social media’s role in the trad wife empire, and how the rise of trad wives correlates with culture and politics at large.

Marie Claire: What initially interested you in writing about trad wives?

Caro Claire Burke, author of Yesteryear: Everything that I’m interested in was things that I felt like I could access very easily through this topic. There are a lot of contradictions within trad wife discourse, like the irony of trying to sell subservience. That has been in women's literature forever—I think about The Stepford Wives, The Handmaid's Tale—so I don't even think it's necessarily new. It's a very established canon, and this felt like such a new way to access all of those same conversations.

Saratoga Schaefer, author of Trad Wife: I'm non-binary, and I wrote a horror book that's about someone who is a woman and who is in a very traditionally feminized role, [and] gets pregnant. That was very interesting for me to explore personally, because that was the horror for me. I like to write about things that confuse me, that I personally maybe don't understand or can't relate to. It’s a way for me to get into the head of somebody who's very different from me. That's what I was trying to do here—figure out the motivation behind the attraction to a lifestyle like this one.

Sarah Langan, author of Trad Wife: I think trad wives are really alluring. They're beautiful. They seem to be able to handle domestic life in ways that are really difficult. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in the trad wife algorithm that I think is what people love about them.

They also play into this cultural wave of wanting to put women back in their boxes. Cultural change is really scary, and we’ve had huge upheaval in the 2020s. Some people are really uncomfortable with that, and this makes them feel safe—this trend of exaggerating that existence in ways that are harmful.

I don't have an issue with a woman making a buck. My concern is that the algorithm wants this, just as it wants the manosphere, this exaggerated representation. It all goes back to this idea of trying to pretend that things are back to normal, especially in this post-COVID era, where we're not able to articulate what happened during COVID. Instead, it’s like, ‘Let's just go back to conservatism.’

MC: All three of these books fit into the genres of horror or suspense. Why might those genres speak to the trad wife trend?

CCB: Well, being a woman kind of is horrific. There are so many horror tropes around women, like the witch, the old hag, and gestation is another common theme. There’s something about womanhood where it's like, you can take the perspective of an autonomous person, you can have a protagonist, but they're never fully in control.

SS: The true horror of it, at least for me, comes from this social aspect and this way that we're regressing and putting all of these gendered binaries and boundaries on things like parenting and relationships. Horror is one of the very best genres to do that with because it gives you so much creative freedom and the ability to express these issues we're dealing with as a society.

SL: I think that the monster within is the scariest monster. The fears that I have, and I think are the most relevant ones, are what you don't know, and what you're living inside of and accepting without realizing that it's not okay. In Trad Wife, what I'm trying to do is put some paint on top of these invisible things so we can see them, these unseen assumptions about gender and about our roles in the world.

MC: The concept of trad wives predates social media, but how has social media shaped our perception of them?

CCB: Anything that does well on social media can capture the discourse now, like there is a little bit of the chicken and the egg where we’re stuck within the algorithm. I don't think it's accidental that all of our social media platforms are now owned by men who don't think women should have rights. Twitter was the birthplace of #MeToo, and that would never happen now because Elon Musk owns it. I think about Peter Thiel funding [28, a menstrual cycle-tracking app created by the founders of the conservative women’s magazine] Evie. I think of Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta and therefore Instagram and Facebook, and he talks openly about the need for a return to masculinity. These people are perfectly comfortable warping young women’s understanding of themselves.

SS: Social media has given us the ability to put ourselves inside of other people's homes, inside their lives, inside their families, and that’s something relatively new in terms of the human experience. That takes things to a very intense level that we haven't really seen before.

L: There’s value in being the person who runs the home. They're not just the glue for their children and their spouse. They're the glue for their community and extended families. Their full-time job is to love other people. I think we've lost that, or we perceive having lost that, because there's a necessity for two incomes now. It feels good to watch a stylized version of that on TikTok and think, ‘I could do that. I could be home, and I would give love, and I would be loved, and it would be amazing.’ Obviously, the issue is that these [influencers] are encouraging others to stay home, but they're working full-time to make this money. So it's a little bit of a pyramid scheme.

MC: Themes of performance, parasocial relationships, and agency were common threads in all of these stories. Why did these concepts feel important to explore?

CCB: The performance aspect is so interesting because with trad wives, you see elements of that both in religion and on social media. These women are trained to perform. You're performing for the Lord. You're performing for everyone around you. You're raised to believe that how you present as a woman not just impacts you, but impacts everyone around you. I think we all relate to this feeling of carrying so many different versions of ourselves and how exhausting that is.

SS: I think it all goes back to social media, which highlights this concept of performing and also selling, because we have these huge trad wife accounts that are monetized. There’s maybe a lack of transparency from those bigger accounts, of how they got there and what they're doing. Do they have generational wealth or not? Do they have other jobs or not? We are not being given the entirety of the truth. I think all of that ties into this intense whirlwind of emotions and reactions to trad wives, where it gets really unhealthy quickly.

I also thought it was interesting to explore this conscious choice to give up some power or agency (which in itself maybe is its own agency) to portray a certain role in your life or your family's life. In Camille's case, it's because this is how she was raised. She's raised to be this supportive, feminine presence in the life of her father, and then her husband. It’s also due to her need for validation, so she knows she is important to the people in her life, which I think a lot of people can relate to.

SL: I'm innately very uncomfortable with the idea of making money through your brand online. When you go online and say, I'm this, this is who I am, it becomes a mask, and now you have to be consistent with that mask. And for whom? The people behind these platforms are ultimately the ones who win, and then the mask kind of eats the face.

I also think it's scary to become a woman. Any time a woman comes of age, she notices eyes on her. The idea of becoming a trad wife maybe allows women to feel safe and protected, like it’s a way that they can bypass this entire system that seems to want to peg you and have eyes on you. They think, ‘I'll get the agency I can through this if I can't get equal pay.’

MC: What about trad wives do you think are so captivating, and what does our obsession with them (whether positive or negative) say about our current cultural moment?

CCB: I'm not convinced that people are following the path. I don't think there's really any evidence that people are becoming this. The women who have dropped out of the workforce are not making bread homemade. I think it's purely a tool of propaganda that people can use to argue over, which isn't nothing.

There's also a certain reality where I'm like, ‘You could also not follow them. You don't have to think about them.’ Natalie provides fury and entertainment and comfort, and all of these emotions to people who don't know her, and then people who don't know her provide engagement. Wouldn't your ultimate condemnation of them be not giving them any attention?

SS: I don't think it hurts that a lot of these trad wives are attractive white women with a host of children. That's the whole basis, really, of the trad wife movement: It's steeped in things like white supremacy and sexism.

Regardless of whether or not I have personal opinions about trad wives, the fact is, you are doing a lot of work. You are doing a lot of work on the home front. You're doing a lot on the emotional front because you are taking care of your family and your partner in a way that really puts them before you. And then, especially if you’re online, you're doing a social media marketing job. But when people look at it from the outside, it's like, ‘That's so great. You get to sit at home all day, you do whatever you want, you take pretty pictures for social media, and you get paid for it.’

That doesn't take away from the fact that it is work, and I think we need to recognize that. That kind of thankless labor can lead to burnout and mental health issues, and that's the stuff that we don't put online, because it's not pretty.

SL: I don’t know how many people are realistically thinking, ‘I want to dress like it’s the 1950s and work a farm and have seven kids.’ I don't think a ton, but I think the algorithm really likes it, which is corrupting. The more extreme you make something, the more clicks it’s going to have, and the more distorted our reality becomes.

I wanted to be considerate of these women in the book because the point I was trying to make was, we’ve got our arrows pointed at each other. It's all these people just trying to make ends meet and get their bills paid at the end of the month, shouting at each other, while the people running these platforms are getting rich and taking everything.