by Anna Papalexiou
In Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear, published earlier this year, a trad wife influencer – a term short for ‘traditional wife’, used to describe a growing online movement promoting the return to domestic and submissive roles – named Natalie Heller Mills wakes up one morning in 1855. No nannies. No industrial appliances hidden behind cabinet doors. No algorithm. No social media producer choreographing the supposedly spontaneous moments. The life she has been selling to millions of followers is now the only life available to her. The premise sounds like satire. As a description of what is actually being sold to young women across the world right now, it reads closer to a warning.
Scroll through Instagram on any given afternoon and you might encounter a young woman with a French braid, photographed from behind in a green field. The image is soft, pastoral, entirely familiar. Look closer. The text overlay reads: “Girls just want spring and remigration”. This is a real post, from a German group Lukreta that has been gaining momentum in the last few years. This is where the trad wife conversation needs to start: not with sourdough starters and linen aprons, but with the network those aesthetics have been built to serve.
Trad wife content presents a particular vision of women’s lives: domestic, devoted, unhurried. A farmhouse kitchen, children in matching outfits, a husband who provides while she nourishes. The content is calibrated to feel aspirational without looking explicitly political. It arrives at a moment of genuine collective exhaustion, when women are burning out under the impossible double burden of professional and domestic life with an algorithm that keeps offering an alternative that looks, at least from the outside, like rest.
Behind Natalie’s curated life in Yesteryear are nannies raising the children she barely knows and a husband who exists more as a prop than a partner. In one scene, Natalie encounters a former classmate at a supermarket and spends the entire interaction silently cataloguing everything wrong with the woman – her choices, her children, her appearance – while outwardly smiling and inviting her to visit the farm. The warmth is performance. The judgement is reality. When Natalie wakes up in 1855 and is forced to survive the actual conditions she has been romanticising, the premise and argument of the novel becomes apparent : the lifestyle these influencers are selling, built on romanticised notions of the past, turns out to be a trap rather than a dream.
The gap at the centre of this content is one of class. Trad wife aesthetics are available to a very small number of women, those with enough economic cushion to make domesticity look abundant rather than precarious. For most women watching and consuming this content, the fantasy on the screen bears no relation to the reality of a life organised entirely around the home, especially when money is short, when the relationship becomes controlling, when the isolation sets in. The reality behind the aesthetic – financial precarity, the loss of independence, the absence of any professional standing – is never shown. And a woman who has surrendered all of that has very little support to lean on when the hardship arrives.
This is where Savanna Faith Stone enters the picture. The 21-year-old American influencer built her platform on the softer end of this content: relationship advice, marriage tips, the virtues of femininity. Her early videos offer guidance on how to be a good wife, how to create a peaceful home, how to support your husband. “Have you tried putting on a sundress and cooking his favourite meal?” Her husband, according to her , is the head of the household and the final decisionmaker. A healthy marriage, in her framing, requires a woman to give up her career, learn to make food from scratch, maintain one shared bank account, and be fully submissive. This is entry-level content. Then the rhetoric escalates.
“Consent”, she has claimed, “does not exist in marriage. When you marry, your body belongs to your husband”. On voting rights, she is equally direct: women should not vote. She advocates what she calls a one family voting system, in which the husband casts the ballot for the entire household. Her reasoning is theological: husband and wife are ‘one flesh’, and so they should make one political decision together. Since the 19th Amendment, she argues, society has decayed because women’s interest became the focal point of politics (Zand, 2026).
This claim is worth examining closely, because it is not merely extreme – it is structurally coherent within the logic of the movement. If women are defined by their role within the family, rather than as individuals with autonomous interests, then women’s political participation becomes a category error. The 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote in 1920. Stone has participated in, at most, one or two elections. Her argument is that these hundred years of women’s political agency have been a mistake, that women’s citizenship should be absorbed into the household unit, represented by the husband. This is an argument against women as political beings dressed up as a lifestyle preference.
When Stone was invited to speak at the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio in June 2026, she softened her language considerably. The “women shouldn’t vote” rhetoric was modulated for a conference attended by 3,000 young women. The calculation was deliberate. Online platforms are for radicalisation; conference stages are for recruitment. Turning Point USA’s CEO, Erika Kirk, opened the summit by declaring that feminism treats things that make women uniquely women as obstacles rather than gifts. Speakers told attendees to marry young, prioritise motherhood above else, and have as many children as possible. These women, earning thousands of dollars for their minutes on stage, were preaching female powerlessness to an audience of girls (Zand, 2026). The hypocrisy is not incidental; it is structural.
The religious dimension of this project is the part that tends to get the least scrutiny, although it deserves more. In this ecosystem, God and husband become interchangeable sources of authority. Submission is reframed as spiritual fulfilment. The commercialisation of Christian faith into a compliance programme for women is nothing new. What is new is the scale, the reach, and the way it has been laundered through lifestyle content into the mainstream. When a podcast or a conference tells young women that having children beyond what they can sustain is what God requires of them,and when a woman who chooses not to have children at all is treated as making not merely a different choice but a betrayal of her purpose, the question that follows is simple: who benefits? Unplanned parenthood is one of the most reliable mechanisms for keeping women economically dependent. The answer has nothing to do with God.
This brings us back to Lukreta. The ARD investigative documentary released in February 2026 about the group was titled Heimat, Häkeln, Hetze – Homeland, Crochet, Hate Speech. Undercover reporters attended Lukreta events and discovered a well-connected network of young European women with ties to AfD parliamentarians, the European Sovereign Nations faction in the European Parliament, and international neo-Nazi circles. Their merchandise includes a sticker that reads “Remigration schützt Frauen!” which translates as ‘remigration protects women’. In January 2026, Lukreta marched alongside the French far-right group Némésis in a torchlight procession in Paris. Némésis presents itself as a women’s empowerment movement, using the soft aesthetics of femininity and community to appeal to young women online, before introducing them to an ideology built on racial exclusion and anti-feminist politics. Like Lukreta, it functions as a radicalisation pipeline dressed as a safe space for girls: a space where the entry point is identity and belonging, and where the harder ideology only becomes visible once trust has been established. Together, they are emblematic of how these movements are building a transnational infrastructure under the guise of women’s solidarity (DW Documentary, 2026; Ulrich, 2026).
The mechanism is identical to what we see across the Atlantic. The soft content, the braids, the handicrafts, the pastoral imagery, the femininity-as-virtue framing functions as an entry point for an audience that might resist a more explicitly ideological appeal. The aesthetic builds identification and trust before the harder arguments appear. And the harder argument, in Lukreta as in TPUSA, is femonationalism: the mobilisation of women’s safety and femininity as arguments for racial exclusion and the rollback of gender equality (Farris, 2017). “Girls just want spring and remigration” is not ironic. It is a recruiting slogan disguised as a meme.
The political consequences of this infrastructure are already measurable. The AfD, classified as far-right extremist by Germany’s own intelligence agency, won its first state election in Thuringia in September 2024, with a similarly strong result in Brandenburg that same month – the first time a far-right party won a German state election since the Second World War (Euronews, 2024). In the most recent state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, the party more than doubled its vote share, while the mainstream centrist CDU halved from 37 to 17 percent. At the federal level, the AfD emerged as the largest opposition party, and is currently projected to come first nationally in 2029 (Al Jazeera, 2026). Lukreta’s network now extends to France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. And although the content looks local, the infrastructure is transnational.
There is a reflex, when confronted with this material, to focus on the women producing it as either victims or villains. Some are ideological believers; others are skilled entrepreneurs who have understood what sells in an economy that polarises attention. Most are both. However, focusing on the individual figures keeps us from seeing the larger project, which is to make the dismantling of women’s autonomy look like a return to something softer, simpler, and more feminine. The sourdough starter is the Trojan horse. The pastoral dream and the political agenda work hand in hand, and they are more effective precisely because they are inseparable.
What this moment requires of those of us who are paying attention is to keep paying attention. Social media now shapes political consciousness with a reach that traditional institutions cannot match, and it does so through the register of lifestyle, identity, and community rather than explicit argument. Young women are being recruited – by content creators, by political networks, by radicalisation pipelines dressed as safe space– through what looks like recipes and relationship advice. By the time the politics become visible, the aesthetics have already done their work. For anyone who cares about what happens to women’s rights right now, the task is specific: name the politics inside the aesthetics before those aesthetics have finished their work. The Trojan horse only succeeds as long as no one names what is hidden inside.
Work Cited:
Al Jazeera. (2026, September 7). Germany’s AfD wins in key state: Is far-right on cusp of national rule? Al Jazeera. https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/7/germanys-afd-wins-in-key-state-is-far-right-on-cusp-of-national-rule
Burke, C. C. (2026). Yesteryear. Alfred A. Knopf.
DW Documentary. (2026, June 9). Investigating far-right women’s groups [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmvi1KR1rc4
Euronews. (2024, September 1). Far-right AfD ahead of rivals in Thuringia and on course for major gains in Saxony. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/2024/09/01/exit-polls-far-right-afd-ahead-of-rivals-in-thuringia-and-on-course-for-major-gains-in-sax
Farris, S. R. (2017). In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press.
Ulrich, S. (2026, May 28). Uncovering the transnational networks behind a women’s right-wing extremist group in Germany. Global Investigative Journalism Network. https://gijn.org/stories/uncovering-womens-right-wing-extremist-group-germany/
Zand, B. (Director). (2026, September 1). I met the tradwife who thinks women shouldn’t vote [Video]. Zandland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvy0yOVtUqw
Anna Papalexiou is a final-year Bachelor’s student in International Social Work at HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, with a minor in Gender, Culture and Society from Radboud University. She is currently completing an internship placement at a domestic violence shelter in Malta. Her interests include intersectional feminism, reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and the politics of care. She is the writer and host of The Social Mosaic, a Substack publication and podcast exploring gender, power, and social change.
