Yet this focus on the present risks treating the phenomenon as historically unprecedented. In fact, tradwife ideals echo the ways domesticity and femininity have been repeatedly romanticised in periods of social change, in particular, by the early 20th-century German housewives\u2019 movement. <\/p>\n
German housewives associations<\/h2>\n
Housewives associations began to spring up across Germany in the late 19th century. These regional groups were brought together under the umbrella of the national Federation of German Housewives\u2019 Associations in 1915. The federation engaged in consumer and political lobbying, ran domestic training courses for young women and published newspapers and yearbooks that promoted their ideology.<\/p>\n
Like 21st-century tradwives<\/a>, the early 20th-century housewives\u2019 associations accepted the idea that men and women, while not necessarily unequal, were inherently different. They believed they had distinct roles to play within the family and in society more broadly. <\/p>\n Rosine Speicher, a member of the federation\u2019s committee and leader of the local housewives\u2019 organisation in Nuremberg, advocated for this idea. In the federation\u2019s 1933 yearbook she wrote that the family provided the ideal environment for the development of women\u2019s personalities. <\/p>\n The belief that women were fundamentally different to men went hand-in-hand with religious language in the early 20th century, as it often still does among today\u2019s tradwives<\/a>. One of the first studies of the German housewives\u2019 movement<\/a> highlighted how the leader of the federation, Anna Gerhardt, appealed to women using \u201ccultural-religious language\u201d. She evoked \u201can inner voice for a holy mission, demanding renunciation, self-sacrifice, discipline, education, and, above all, service\u201d.<\/p>\n Members of the German housewives\u2019 movement openly expressed anti-feminist sentiments. Speicher, for example, wrote in the yearbook that feminism had led to \u201cthe disgusting degradation of marriage to a primarily sexual affair\u201d. She believed this resulted in a \u201cfear\u201d of having children. <\/p>\n Speicher made the case for maintaining a traditional model of marriage in which women\u2019s role is one of service in relation to their husband and the children it is assumed they will dutifully bear. With this attitude, she anticipated views that circulate among many 21st-century tradwives<\/a>.<\/p>\n Alongside religious and anti-feminist ideas, the early 20th-century housewives, like some of their 21st-century counterparts<\/a>, also bought into and promoted ethno-nationalism. This form of nationalism imagines the nation as an ethnically homogeneous group. For the early 20th-century housewives, this meant people with Germanic roots, while some 21st-century tradwives have been linked with white nationalist ideologies. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/739385\/original\/file-20260602-57-o86voh.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
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