From the Kitchen to the Moon: Women, Choice, and the Tradwife Myth

In this episode of On the Mones, Kate reflects on what it means to grow up as a young woman today as her daughter Audrey turns eighteen and prepares to vote for the first time. Named after Kate’s grandmother, born in 1925, Audrey represents three generations of women who have lived through enormous social change.

From marriage bars that forced women out of the workforce, to the feminist movements that fought for economic independence and voting rights, the freedoms women have today were hard-won.

So why is social media suddenly romanticising a return to “traditional wives”?

Kate explores the rise of the tradwife movement, the nostalgic aesthetic that makes it appealing, and the historical realities often left out of the story, including economic dependence and limited choices for women.

Along the way she looks at:

• why the tradwife aesthetic spreads so easily on social media

• the connection between tradwife culture and anti-feminist online movements

• the surprising return of anti-suffrage rhetoric

• why Australia’s mandatory voting creates a very different political system

• and what women’s rights have to do with astronauts flying around the Moon.

There’s also a detour into hormone pharmacology, a satirical wellness advertisement for the revolutionary Whole Body RetoX™, and a reminder that sometimes nostalgia looks better from a distance.

Because the real achievement of the last century isn’t that women must work, or must stay home.

It’s that women get to choose.

Whether you are in perimenopause, approaching menopause, or simply trying to understand your hormones, I've got you.

Read more about this episode at Medication Clarity Clinic, Kate's own medication education and telehealth consulting site: https://medicationclarity.com.au

Follow Kate for more no-nonsense health education at @prescribeorpass on Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to On the Moans, where we have conversations about hormones, midlife, and the moments that make us wonder, is it just me? I'm Kate. I'm a 48-year-old pharmacist and newly minted perimenopausal oversharer. This is where we talk openly about the changes we aren't prepared for, so we never have to feel alone in them again. I acknowledge the Camaragle people of the Iora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land which I am recording today. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land. Hello friends, I've been thinking a lot this week about women, history, and how quickly the world can change. My youngest child, my Audrey, has just turned 18, which means she's now old enough to vote, to take a part-time job whilst she studies at university, and to start deciding how she wants to show up in the world as an adult. And the reason she's called Audrey is not accidental. She's named after my grandmother Audrey, who was born in 1925. When my grandmother was born, television didn't exist. Commercial air travel barely existed. The world she grew up in went through World War II, the Vietnam War, the invention of television, the space race, and the Apollo missions to the moon. She lived through the rise of second wave feminism in the 1970s, the arrival of the personal computer, and the first mobile phones. And when she died at the age of ninety nine, the world she left behind had the latest iPhone and cars that can drive themselves. That's one human lifetime. From a world where women had very limited legal and economic independence to a world where women can become engineers, astronauts, business leaders, scientists, and voters shaping national politics. Which is why this week, as my Audrey turns 18, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up as a young woman today. Because at the same time as young women are entering adulthood with more choices than any generation before them, parts of the internet are suddenly romanticising, a return to a past where those choices didn't exist at all. Can you help me make sense of it? There's a trend circulating on social media at the moment that, at first glance, looks like something from the 1950s. Brilly lace aprons, cakes baking in a spotless kitchen. Interesting aside, when Betty Crocker first released boxed cake mixes in the late 1940s, they included powdered eggs, so all you needed to do was add water. But the mixes didn't sell well because many housewives felt it was cheating. It was too easy and didn't feel like real baking. So the manufacturers removed the egg from the mix and required women to crack a fresh egg themselves. Suddenly it felt like they had actually baked the cake, and sales skyrocketed. But anyway, the 1950s. Children playing quietly in the garden. A woman in a linen dress setting the dinner table as her husband arrives home from work. The lighting is soft, the kitchen is immaculate, the music is nostalgic. And the women in these videos call themselves Tradwives. Short for traditional wives. Women who promote the idea that the ideal life for women is one centered around homemaking, motherhood, and supporting their husband as the primary earner. Now, at one level, it seems harmless. Cooking, gardening, looking after children, one parent doing the job of bringing in the money, and the other doing the job of domesticity. Isn't this just one way of dividing the labour of being in a family? But the Tradwife movement isn't just about lifestyle content. Many of the influencers who promote it explicitly frame it as a rejection of feminism. They argue that women were happier before the feminist movement encouraged women to pursue careers and independence. But it's not clear to me how anyone would know that. Women in the 1950s didn't have the same platforms to publicly voice dissatisfaction, and the massive wave of feminist activism in the 1960s and 70s suggests the opposite, that many women were profoundly frustrated with the limits placed on their lives. Social movements of that scale rarely appear if everyone is content with the status quo. Which raises a fascinating question, is this simply a lifestyle choice or is it something else entirely? In my opinion, one thing that often gets lost in this aesthetic is the historical reality of what being a traditional wife actually meant. When people picture the 1920s, the thirties, or the fifties, they tend to imagine the polished version. The cute shoes and the lovely dresses. The roast dinner and the smiling husband with his whiskey sitting reading the paper while the cherubic children playing quietly, children should be seen and not heard, at his feet. But the reality was very different. For much of the twentieth century, women in Western countries simply did not have the same opportunities to participate in the economy as men. It wasn't a choice, it was just not possible. Universities restricted female admissions, many professions simply refused to hire women, and married women were expected to leave the workforce entirely. In fact, in many workplaces there was something called a marriage bar. If a woman got married, she was required to resign. And another point that I think about through the lens of my own grandmother who was born in 1925 is that women who were staying at home were not necessarily less capable than the men who were going to work. Many were just as intelligent, just as ambitious, and just as capable, but they weren't given the opportunity. So when we talk about the traditional household of the mid-20th century, let's not dress it up as though it was a freely chosen lifestyle. For many women, it was the only socially acceptable role available to them, and that economic structure has enormous consequences. Because if a woman has no independent income, she was completely financially dependent on her husband. This is true today too. Divorce carried huge social stigma. Women often had limited rights to property, and without an independent income, survival itself could be uncertain. So the romanticized image of the traditional household often leaves out a crucial piece of the context. Economic dependence removes choice. And the entire feminist movement of the 20th century was in many ways about expanding women's choices. The ability to work, to earn money, to own property, the ability to vote, and the ability to leave a marriage if necessary. Acknowledging that when we're having this conversation, we're mostly talking about Western industrialized societies. Places like Australia, the United States, to Canada, the UK, and parts of Europe, we're not talking about the huge diversity of cultural models that exist across the world. Many societies operate under very different economic and social frameworks. The Tradwife conversation online is happening primarily among a very specific demographic, relatively privileged, educated, upper middle class white women. Living in societies where women already have full legal rights and economic participation. Which makes the trend particularly interesting because the lifestyle being romanticized is one that the earlier generations of women fought extremely hard to move beyond. So why on earth is it gaining popularity? There are probably a few reasons. Firstly, social media aesthetics. It's simply that the content is beautiful. Vintage kitchens, fresh bread, gardens, children running around barefoot. It taps into the same cultural mood as cottage core and slow living. In a chaotic world, that aesthetic feels calming, but aesthetics can blur the difference between imagery and reality. Secondly, burnout with modern life. Because modern life, especially for women, can be exhausting. For decades the cultural message has been you can have it all. A career, family, success, balance, and that message is empowering. But in practice, what often happens is that women didn't just gain new roles, they kept the old ones too. Many women today are expected to build a career, raise the children, manage the household, carry the emotional labour of the family, maintain the friendships, maintain their own health and well-being, and somehow still appear calm and successful whilst doing it all. So the trad wife narrative promises something that maybe looks appealing. One role, one clear identity. Less juggling. It's a reaction to modern feminism. You can do anything, but you may have to do everything as well. So the trad wife narrative sometimes frames itself as an escape from that pressure, a rejection of the expectation that women must succeed in every domain simultaneously. You could argue, and in fact I will argue, that the trad wife movement actually mirrors something we see all the time in the wellness industry. Because both rely on a very similar kind of thinking. In wellness culture there's a powerful idea that natural automatically means safe, pure, and better for you. So people hear things like natural remedies are better than pharmaceuticals, ancient practices are better than modern medicine, distrust in modern medicine in general. But as anyone working in healthcare knows, natural is not a synonym for safe or effective. Arsenic is natural, cancer is natural, infectious disease is natural. Modern medicine exists precisely because the natural world can be extremely dangerous. And the tradwife movement uses a very similar narrative structure. It suggests that because something is traditional, it must therefore be better. But history isn't automatically a gold standard for well-being. So just as with wellness culture, the trad wife narrative sometimes relies on a kind of nostalgic filtering. You keep the appealing parts, the sourdough bread, the farmhouse kitchens, the calm domestic life, but you conveniently leave out the structural realities that come with that system. The economic dependence, lack of autonomy, limited choices, and the result is a kind of cultural version of what we see in wellness marketing. A very beautiful story about the past that works best if you don't look too closely at the details. Cher from Clueless said it best. Do you think she's pretty? What's a Monet? It's like the painting, see? From far away it's okay, but up close it's a big monet. Let's just go. And if you thought this way of thinking couldn't get any stranger, this is where the story takes another turn for the worse. Because alongside the Trav Wife trend, there has also been a conversation online, particularly in the United States, where some women have argued that women shouldn't have the right to vote. Yes, you heard that right. Women campaigning to remove their own political rights just let that sink in. They call themselves anti-suffragists. Their argument is that voting should belong to the head of the household, traditionally the husband. Now to be clear, this is an extremely fringe movement, but the fact that it exists at all is remarkable when you consider that women fought for decades to obtain the right to vote. In the United States, women gained the vote in 1920. In Australia, federally, it was 1902, which actually made Australia one of the earlier countries in the world to grant women suffrage. Yay us. Australia has something else that is quite unusual, but also really cool. We have mandatory voting. Once you turn 18, you're required to enroll and participate in elections, which is actually rare globally. Countries that have mandatory voting include Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Luxembourg, and Singapore. There are also a few places where voting is technically compulsory, but not strongly enforced. Even New Zealand doesn't have mandatory voting. Come on, my Kiwi friends. Neither does the United States, nor the United Kingdom, nor Canada. Most democracies rely on voluntary participation. Mandatory voting produces an interesting political effect because when voting is voluntary, something predictable happens. The people who are most politically engaged and the ones who have the education and the availability to vote are the ones showing up. And those people tend to sit at the edges of the political spectrum. We can see this dynamic being played out very clearly in the United States. Politics often gets pulled towards ideological extremes because the people who feel the most passionately are the ones who vote. In Australia, because everyone has to vote, the electorate includes a large group of people who sit somewhere in the middle. Regular folk who are busy with work, raising families, getting on with their lives, and those voters tend to pull politics back towards the centre. Mandatory voting essentially forces the political system to represent the full population, not just the most passionate activists. And of course, the democracy sausage. For those friends listening from around the world, at most Australian polling stations you'll find community groups running a sausage sizzle. So millions of Australians go to vote and then have a sausage in bread with onions and tomato sauce. Delicious. We may be the only political system in the world where participating in democracy reliably involves a barbecue in a school car park. Back to the trad wife situation, when you zoom out, the trad wife conversation and the voting conversation are actually connected, because the right to vote was one of the key mechanisms through which women gained political power. And that political power helped drive the legal and economic changes that allowed women to enter university, professions, own property, earn an independent income, and leave marriages if necessary. Those rights weren't automatic, they were fought for. Which brings us back to the central question of the Tradwife movement. Is it simply women choosing a different lifestyle? Or is it a romanticized version of a past that was actually defined by limited choices? Recently, Louis Thoreau released a documentary called The Manosphere on Netflix, where he explored a network of online communities that promote very rigid ideas about masculinity and gender hierarchy. I haven't seen it, I can't bring myself to watch it, especially when I have so many other great shows to watch. Why would I put myself through it? But as I understand it, these communities often argue that modern society has weakened men and that the solution is a return to more traditional gender roles. Men as providers and leaders, women as submissive partners and homemakers. And while the Tradwife movement isn't identical to the Manosphere, there is definitely some overlap in ideology. Both romanticize a past where gender roles were more fixed, both frame feminism as something that disrupted a supposedly natural order. And both tend to gloss over the historical realities of those systems, particularly the lack of autonomy many women experienced within them. So the trad wife aesthetic might look like sourdough bread and linen dresses, but in some corners of the internet it sits alongside a much more explicit argument about rolling back the social changes that gave women independence in the first place. There is nothing inherently wrong with choosing a domestic life, but historically the traditional wife role wasn't about lifestyle, it was about lack of options. And the ability to choose whether to work or to stay at home, to marry, to leave, is something women only gained relatively recently. So when nostalgia for the past starts trending on social media, it's probably worth pausing and asking a few questions. We are going to take a quick break from the episode to hear from today's sponsor. Detox was so 2025. Introducing my new product, Whole Body Retox Trademark. 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So if you've accidentally detoxed all your toxins, if your hormones are suspiciously stable, if your microbiome has become too peaceful, then it's time to deploy the reparasidification protocol. Whole body retox. Detox claims to remove things your body already removes and retox claims to put them all back. And now back to the episode. I got myself a little bit confused the other day thinking about hormone pharmacology. Because on one hand, we're told you can't take micronized progesterone transdermally. Progesterone is a steroid with 21 carbon atoms, and although it's lipophilic, it doesn't cross the stratum corneum in any reliable or clinically meaningful way. And even if some progesterone does make it into the skin, the skin itself contains high levels of enzymes, particularly 5 alpha reductase, which rapidly convert progesterone into metabolites like allopregnantolone before it ever reaches the bloodstream. So you might rub progesterone onto the skin, but it doesn't end up in the circulation in its active form or at levels high enough to protect the endometrium. But then if you insert a micronized progesterone capsule vaginally, it is absorbed systemically. Hmm, that made me pause for a moment. Because if estradiol can be given transdermally through the skin and also through the vaginal mucosa, like with femoring, which delivers systemic estradiol levels, then isn't vaginal progesterone basically transdermal delivery by another name? And then to make it even more confusing, estriol, which is applied vaginally, mostly stays local and doesn't produce meaningful systemic estrogen levels. Same route, different hormones, completely different pharmacology. Mind blown. So I thought, if I had to stop and think about this for a minute, you might have wondered the same thing. Let me explain. The thing to understand is that the root of administration and the molecule itself both matter. Just because two hormones are applied in the same place doesn't mean they behave the same way in the body. Take estradiol first. Estradiol is a relatively small lipophilic steroid hormone. That means it dissolves easily in fat and the outer layer of the skin, the stratum corneum, is essentially a lipid barrier, so estradiol can diffuse through that barrier and enter the small blood vessels in the skin. That's why patches, gels, and sprays of estradiol work. They deliver estradiol through the skin and into the bloodstream, producing systemic hormone levels without going through first past metabolism in the liver. Now the vagina is different again. The vaginal epithelium is much thinner than skin and very well vascularized, which means drugs absorbed there can enter the bloodstream quite efficiently. That's why a product like femoring, which contains estradiol, produces systemic estrogen levels even though it's inserted vaginally. Pharmacologically it behaves much more like transdermal estradiol than like a topical treatment. But now let's compare that with estriol. Estriol is a much weaker estrogen and when it's used in vaginal creams or pessaries, it's specifically designed to act locally in the vaginal tissues, improving the epithelium, restoring lubrication, and treating symptoms like dryness or irritation. Because estriol is weaker and rapidly metabolized, very little reaches systemic circulation, so it doesn't act like systemic hormone therapy. So even though estradiol rings and estriol creams are both placed in the vagina, their pharmacology and clinical effects are completely different. And then we come back to progesterone. Progesterone applied to the skin simply doesn't give reliable systemic levels. Between poor absorption through the stratum corneum and rapid metabolism in the skin itself, the blood levels achieved are unpredictable and usually too low to provide endometrial protection. But when micronized progesterone is given vaginally, something interesting happens. It's absorbed through the vaginal mucosa and reaches the uterus through what's called the first uterine pass effect. Essentially, the drug travels directly through the pelvic circulation to the uterus before being diluted into the rest of the systemic circulation. So the uterus sees high concentrations of progesterone, which is exactly what we want when we're protecting the endometrium in someone taking estrogen. So the take-home message is this estradiol can cross the skin and vaginal mucosa, leading to systemic hormone therapy. Femoring delivers systemic estradiol even though it's placed in the vagina. Estriol works mainly locally in the vagina with minimal systemic effects. Progesterone creams on the skin don't achieve reliable systemic levels, despite what the makers of wild yam cream will have you believe. Vaginal progesterone, however, can effectively reach the uterus and circulation. Same hormones, different roots, completely different pharmacology. And that's why in medicine how you give a drug can be just as important as what the drug is. The rights that women have today, the ability to work, to earn money, to vote, to leave a marriage, to build a life on their own terms, didn't appear by accident. They were fought for, often by women who were told they were unreasonable, difficult, or asking for too much. Which makes it interesting that at the same time parts of the internet are romanticizing a return to traditional gender roles. We're also living in a moment where women are doing things that previous generations could barely imagine. As I record this, Artemis II is on its way home from sending astronauts around the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. One of the astronauts on the Artemis II mission is Christina Koch, an American engineer and NASA astronaut. Christina previously set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, spending 328 days aboard the International Space Station between 2019 and 2020. During that mission, she also took part in the first all-female spacewalk. On Artemis II, she has become the first woman ever to travel around the moon, marking an historic moment in human space exploration and in the ongoing story of women's rights. A reminder that the freedoms women fought for didn't just change kitchens and workspaces. They changed who gets to explore the universe. Interestingly, Christina Koch uses her husband's surname, which strikes me as a reminder of how even extraordinarily accomplished women are still carrying traditions that place women's identities second to their husbands. But maybe that's a conversation for another episode. Now, this doesn't mean that every woman needs to become an astronaut or run a company or build a career or stay at home and make the sourdough. The whole point of the last century of social change is that women get to decide what their lives look like. Why would anyone want to take that choice away? Thank you for helping me think through all of these issues because they have been particularly on my mind this week. As I said, my youngest child, my daughter, has just turned 18. A fledgling adult, but already fierce and determined. Follow me on the socials TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube at Prescribe or Pass, and LinkedIn Kate Thomas of Thomas Dowling Consulting. I'll look forward to your company next time we get on the moans. Bye bye.