Selling the Tradwife: Lifestyle, Desire, and the Market

This event asks why the tradwife “model” resonates within social media culture and what makes it commercially compelling.
About this Event

If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.

Each attendee must have their OWN registration and email address.

Registration for external guests closes at 4PM on November 12. Registration will automatically close for outside guests at that time. Columbia/Barnard affiliates may register at the door.

Tradwives present traditional femininity as a desirable way of life - one organized around domesticity, marriage, motherhood, and family. Yet their growing visibility is inseparable from the commercial culture of social media, where lifestyles become content, identities become brands, and personal choices become objects of consumption. This event asks why the tradwife “model” resonates within this culture and what makes it commercially compelling. What is being sold when the tradwife is sold - and what does that reveal about contemporary desires surrounding gender, family, religion and the good life?

Speaker Bios

Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History and Past President of the American Historical Association. Her publications include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo (1996), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015). Her articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, ILWCH, Journal of Women’s History, Radical History Review, the International Review of Social History, and the Revista Brasileira de História, among others. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Diana Garvin is an Assistant Professor of Italian with a specialty in Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.  She conducted her postdoctoral research at the American Academy in Rome as the 2017-2018 Rome Prize winner for Modern Italian Studies. She received her PhD from Cornell University and her AB from Harvard University.  Garvin’s research examines the history of everyday life across Fascist Italy and Italian East Africa. In her book, (now available with University of Toronto Press) she uses food as a lens to examine daily negotiations of power between women and the Fascist state. 

Caroline Kline is Research Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, as well as co-editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She holds a PhD in religion from CGU, and her areas of interest include contemporary Latter-day Saint women's communities, feminist theory, and oral history. Her book, Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness (University of Illinois Press, 2022), explores Latter-day Saint women’s lived experiences in Botswana, Mexico, and the United States.

Moderator: Daniela Moraes Traldi is a historian of Latin America and of Women’s and Gender History. Her research examines the intersections of gender, race, politics, and religion in twentieth-century Brazil, with particular attention to the gendered dynamics of right-wing political movements and the role of extremist women in the wake of the Cold War. Daniela’s work has also appeared recently in Gender & History, Estudos Históricos, and the Hispanic American Historical Review. In addition to her academic work, Daniela is an experienced journalist. She serves as a senior collaborator with BBC Monitoring, the media analysis division of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and has worked for international organizations such as the United Nations in New York and in Southeast Asia. 

Event organized by: , Fellow SOF/ Heyman

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.