From power suits to prairie dresses: Don’t be fooled by the Trad Wife – she’s a Girlboss in disguise |
Thursday 05 March 2026 6:01 am | Updated: Wednesday 04 March 2026 6:39 pm
From power suits to prairie dresses: Don’t be fooled by the Trad Wife – she’s a Girlboss in disguise
By: Anna Moloney
Deputy Comment and Features Editor
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The trad wife isn’t a stay-at-home mum, she is a stay-at-home businesswoman. Don’t be fooled by the dream she is selling, writes Anna Moloney.
“The Girlboss is dead,” declared Vogue in 2023, hammering the last nail into the coffin of the female ideal that had reigned over the preceding decade: the rise and grind She-E-O, who got up at five, dropped the kids to school, all in time for a board meeting at nine – with a blowdry to boot. It was a narrative that shaped what some now call the “lean in” generation, a cohort of women shaped by ideas popularised by the book by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, who told women they could have it all: the career, the family and, ultimately, power.
By now, the problems of that model have become very clear. Hustle culture has led to exhaustion not fulfilment; the majority of women cannot afford help at home; and, more than anything, women have learned that climbing the corporate ladder is not all it’s cracked up to be. Leaning in did not always mean cashing out, while the memoir of a former colleague of Sandberg’s, Sarah Wynn Williams, published last year, recounted disturbing instances of Sandberg’s behaviour, not least her allegedly insisting her assistants come to bed with her on a private jet.
Sarah Wragg, who runs her own PR agency, told City AM about her own regrets over falling for the ‘have-it-all’ messaging. “If I had my time again I wouldn’t pick a career and three children. Externally it may look like the dream but it’s bloody stressful, completely exhausting and, ultimately, I’m not doing anything as well as I could.”
In the wake of this disillusionment, we’ve seen a new, but very familiar, ideal of womanhood come to the forefront, embodied, in its most extreme form, by the ‘trad wife’. Glamorised by the likes of influencers........