The Rise of the South Asian Trad Wife

Anisha Kaur started noticing something strange: her cousins, just a few months younger than she was, had decided they were ready to be full-time, stay-at-home wives — at 22. “They’ve actively said, ‘Yes, I’m going to marry someone,’ and they’ve glorified the idea of not working or doing anything,” Kaur told The Juggernaut. “It’s horrifying.”

For the last few years, the “trad” wife, short for traditional wife, has seen a slow but steady rise. Think: 23-year-old Nara Smith in a $50,000 dress taking five hours to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from scratch for her husband and four children, or Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman milking cows and making cheese on her homestead for her husband and eight kids. 

Many have associated this trend with the political or Christian right, but Kaur said she’s noticing the culture seeping into her own. “Men in the U.K. South Asian community are now saying that an educated woman is ‘ran through,’” Kaur said. After South Asian women have fought hard for the right to education, work, and even get married later, why does it seem like some want to give it all up?