Inside the Lives of Lady Preppers

THERE’S A WELL-KNOWN maxim among preppers—particularly the small but growing subset of female preppers—that you prep for Tuesday, not doomsday. On the day I interview Krystal C., a 37-year-old military vet turned prepping influencer in Utah, it is a Monday, and I am not prepared for that day or the one after it. That morning, I left my phone at home as I dropped my daughter off at daycare, and I haven’t seen my keys—both car and home—in weeks. (I’ve been stealing my husband’s set or simply going without.) Unlike me, Krystal has been prepping since childhood.

She learned prepping from her grandparents, although they didn’t use that term. “We called it being responsible and deliberate living,” Krystal says. It’s a sentiment she shares with Lisa Bedford, author of the Survival Mom book and blog and de facto founding mother of the female prepper movement. “Even to this day, 17 years later, I don’t really think of it as prepping,” the 50-something content creator says. “I really think of it as just taking care of my family and being proactive.”

Both women started seriously prepping around 2009, roughly two years before the term prepper entered mainstream consciousness. In 2011, Doomsday Preppers debuted on the National Geographic channel, and that image of preppers—predominantly white men in paramilitary garb, determined to protect their heavily armed bunkers at all costs—has endured. I spoke with 10 women for this story who all told me that while that type of prepper does exist, a more practical, family-focused approach to prepping has emerged in the 15 years since, and it’s a movement led by everyday women—often the mom next door.

Even though prepping is in Krystal’s DNA, she, like many others, got more serious about it after some kind of disaster. For her and Lisa, it was the Great Recession in 2008. For Zani Sunshine, a 45-year-old homesteading prepper—and one of the few highly visible Black female influencers in the prepping community—it was Hurricane Katrina and then the 2016 presidential election. Marcy R.,* another Black female prepper, started cramming her New York apartment with extra food and water after witnessing 9/11. Sue M., a 66-year-old entertainment paralegal in Los Angeles, started prepping due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For other women, like Ambrosia Luzius, a 41-year-old emergency management professional, it was not a once-in-a-lifetime disaster but the ordinary miracle of motherhood that pushed her into prepping.

Amy Edelman, 67, does not consider herself a prepper, but she did coauthor The Emergency Playbook, a how-to guide to everyday preparedness, and has a “zombie closet in the basement” filled with canned goods and vegetarian MREs (short for “meals, ready-to-eat,” originally developed by the U.S. military). When Superstorm Sandy knocked out the power in Amy’s house for a week, she decided to get a few more flashlights and stock some water in her basement. When inflation spiked the price of tomatoes, she went to her local garden center and bought what she needed to grow her own. She has a bugout bag (the colloquial term for the pack of essentials you prepare in order to flee your home) and knows how much it should weigh based on her body weight (15 to 20 percent). But she hasn’t road-tested it by walking three times around the park yet, which is something she recommends in her book.

Despite Amy’s aversion to the “prepper” title, she shares the same goal as pretty much all the other women I interviewed: “to change the reputation around prepping to something that’s more lifestyle-y.” She wants readers, particularly women, to realize that “you can do all this without losing your sense of normalcy.”

But here’s the thing: Female preppers already know that. They reject the notion that they are doing anything unusual. Instead, they see themselves as guided by ancestral common sense, rediscovering one lost art at a time, and their lives are richer—in some cases, literally—for it. The more I talked to these women, the more I realized…they may be right.

Women’s Work

Prepping is defined as “the management of stockpiled household items in anticipation of market disruption,” according to a study published in the journal Sociology. In other words, it’s on us: Women are the primary shoppers for the vast majority (78 percent) of U.S. households, per Numerator, a consumer data and market research firm; and moms, in particular, do 80 percent of grocery shopping in households where a spouse or partner is present, according to Pew Research Center. They also take on more of the mental load of household management.

Women tend to be the organizers of diaper bags, the meal preppers, and the schedulers of doctor appointments, Krystal says: “This is all very natural. Women have always been caregivers and nurturers, and that sometimes gets swept to the side.” In fact, it’s the traits least associated with the “typical prepper” lifestyle that Krystal and other female preppers say make women arguably better suited to the task of prepping than camo-clad men doing Red Dawn cosplay. Male preppers “don’t have the same pressures and responsibilities of caring for everyone on a day-to-day micro level,” Zani, the homesteading prepper, says. “They may be the breadwinners, but they’re not usually the ones doing the family management.”

Historically, male preppers have been more visible for their focus on tactical preparedness, like combat and survivalist skills, but Lisa has been an early adopter of what’s now known as “practical preparedness.” This is essentially an extended version of household management that revolves around water and long-term food storage (which includes gardening, canning, and, on occasion, freeze-drying), first-aid supplies, and “everyday” activities, like practicing situational awareness. Lisa started out the way most women preppers do: buying extra shelf-stable groceries for her family. Her husband was in the construction industry during the housing crisis, and she wanted to make sure that if his business went under, their kids would still be able to eat.

The threat of food insecurity also drove Ambrosia to start prepping as a new mom. She’d just finished grad school but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had difficulty finding a job. So she and her family had to go on WIC for a few months. Wanting to take back control of caring for her family, she told her husband that she wanted to use 20 percent of their weekly food budget for long-term food storage. “When we did that, it changed so much for us,” she says. “Here we were a family that was struggling. We were going to food pantries, and now I’m giving away food to our neighbors.”

This approach continues to serve Ambrosia and her family well as they’ve been less affected by the supply chain issues, rising inflation, and food shortages of recent years. “If I buy flour today, it is X price. There’s no arguing that tomorrow is X plus one, and next year is X plus two. So if I buy it today and my brain is thinking long-term, I’m saving myself money today, but I’m saving future-me money, too,” Ambrosia says. “That’s the way I’ve told people like, ‘Hey, I’m not crazy.’ I’m not preparing for a shit-hits-the-fan [SHTF] situation. I’m just preparing for the regular future with hiccups.”

Black female preppers, however, are not necessarily prepping only for the occasional layoff. They’re focused on societal collapse, too, Zani says. Prepping is new to her majority Black, female, and urban audience (she currently has more than half a million Instagram followers) because “there’s a lot of things that we have to deal with and think about that white people do not.” When you’re just trying to survive amid the systemic racism and oppression of today, it’s difficult to think about, much less plan for, tomorrow. Still, Zani’s advice to her followers sits squarely in the practical preparedness realm. “I try to press upon them that this is not just for the end of the world,” she says, but that prepping for things like job loss and natural disasters can be helpful for anyone no matter how they feel about what’s going on. “If you do lose your job and you have food in your house, that’s going to help you get through it better.”

The Politics of Prepping

Long associated with Second Amendment–sponsored protection (Krystal refers to ammunition as “Freedom Seeds” in one Prepping 101 video), prepping—and most preppers—have been assumed to be politically conservative. Indeed, many are, but over the past 10 years Zani has seen a political shift among preppers. In fact, all the women I spoke to either identified as being on the liberal side of the spectrum or were careful not to share their political views. (For all of the prepping content creators, aside from Zani, it’s bad for business.)

Sue even sees prepping as a way to reach across the aisle. “There’s so much division and hate right now in the world, it’s nice to find common ground with people,” she says. “A lot of these prepper people, I suspect, have very different political views than I do, but that’s not what we talk about.”

Incidentally, the right to bear arms was the one political view shared by all of the women I spoke with, except for Amy, who actually advocates against gun ownership in her book. Another quality preppers tend to have in common is a general distrust of the government, Krystal says. They don’t believe that the government is coming to save them when disaster strikes—or worse, they’re worried that government agencies will seize their preps. “I’ve been doing this on social media for so long, I’ll see people that are like, ‘I’m prepping because Biden ran.’ ‘I’m prepping because Trump ran,’ ” she says. “I remain very apolitical.… If you’re worrying about a certain scenario, prep for it.”

Similarly, Des, a 30-something prepping content creator and single mom in the Northern California suburbs, doesn’t “share too much” of her political views online because the way she sees it, a power outage or flash flood doesn’t care who you voted for. Disaster doesn’t discriminate; it impacts everyone.

But a SHTF situation wouldn’t impact everyone equally. On average, Black Americans receive less Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) relief funding than white Americans, and their communities take longer to recover in the wake of natural disasters. That’s why Zani isn’t afraid to ruffle a few (a lot of) feathers with her political views; the stakes are too high. “As a Black woman, I can’t stay silent, especially since I’m just waking up my audience and this is something that might heavily affect them,” she says. Zani notes that her audience has not had the privilege to prepare because they’re forced to spend the majority of their time, energy, and money simply trying to survive systemic racism and oppression. “That’s why [Black] people aren’t thinking about job loss, natural disasters. It’s just, ‘Where is this country going?’ ”

Prepping for the Next Generation

The urge to prep stems from uncertainty about the future. For many women, including myself, that uncertainty only amplifies when they become moms. Morgan Rogue, 42, a prepping content creator and mom of three in the Texas suburbs, sums it up perfectly: “I’m going to be prepared for anything so they don’t have to go through anything.”

But while many moms are interested in prepping (and have the Costco receipts to prove it), Krystal often hears from these followers that they don’t know how to get started. She tells them, “Your diaper bag is already better than some guys’ bugout bags.” Then she encourages them to take that approach and apply it to other areas in their lives. That, in essence, is practical prepping and why women, particularly mothers, are natural-born preppers.

Morgan has involved her children with prepping “since birth” simply by doing everyday prepper activities, such as packing bugout bags, around them. Now that her kids are older, she gamifies preparedness drills, like seeing who can get out of the house with their bugout bag the fastest.

Des also uses games to pass down preparedness skills (like situational awareness) to her 7-year-old daughter. Her goal is to inspire and empower her daughter, not scare her, so she incorporates things like a prepper version of “I Spy” where she asks her daughter to spot anything that might look out of place when they’re in public. Other times, she encourages her daughter to help her figure out the safest place to park. The goal is to encourage kids to be more vigilant in everyday situations, Des says.

Ambrosia also weaves in preparedness lessons and uses her garden to help teach her 5-year-old daughter where food comes from, how to grow it, and how to prepare it to last longer. She also dresses her daughter in boys’ clothes because they’re more “durable” and “thicker” and makes sure she’s always wearing practical shoes. She teaches her children the importance of having an exit plan in place and a predetermined meeting spot to reconvene if there’s an emergency.

Former New York City resident Marcy now lives “on a family compound” in South Carolina with her four adult children, their spouses, and her grandchildren. Being a mother has always impacted how she’s prepped, but becoming a grandmother has recently changed her approach because she makes sure to stock extra diapers, baby formula, and infant medication. “I tried to get my children to join in, but they said I have enough food for everybody,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s in one ear, out the other.”

Meanwhile, Sue’s 31-year-old son is “not on board at all” with her prepping. “He doesn’t have the worrywart mentality,” she says, “so my son thinks I’m being ridiculous.” Even though he doesn’t live with his parents, Sue and her husband (who has gotten on board) make sure to prepare with him in mind.

“Most preppers feel lonely and isolated in their prepping because our families want nothing to do with it,” says Zani. For these preppers, community—either in person or online—can be a lifeline.

Finding a Sisterhood at the End of the World

When Des started prepping in 2017, she looked for advice and, she hoped, community on social media. What she found left her feeling “a bit discouraged.” At the time, Des says, the online prepping community was “extremely male-dominated” and often tinged by that trademark “gloom and doom.” But the landscape is changing.

In 2022, a female-focused subreddit r/TwoXPreppers branched off from r/preppers, an ostensibly coed prepping platform where the majority of posts were nonetheless driven by male-centric concerns. Despite its biologically based name, the forum provides a trans-inclusive and pro-LGBTQIA “place where women can talk about prepping for their specific needs.” A month after its creation, it had 7,500 members while the original preppers subreddit boasted 292,000. Now, r/TwoXPreppers has grown in influence—up to 33,000 weekly visitors—while r/preppers has actually shrunk to 137,000.

But prepping platforms aren’t limited to Reddit. In April 2026, a small group of female preppers created the “Women Only Survival Preppers” group on Facebook. In just a few short months, more than 13,000 women (including myself) have joined. “We absolutely need a safe space, and I really think that this group is fostering that,” says Storm, a 57-year-old prepper in Wabash Valley, Indiana, who joined in May.

Given Ambrosia’s background in emergency management, she’d also joined prepper Facebook groups over the years. But she was especially drawn to the women-only group because it reminded her of her grandmother, who’d tried to teach her preparedness skills as a child. Ambrosia now admits she didn’t really listen. “I’m trying to gather all that knowledge, and that’s why I started networking with other women in prepping,” she says. She sees herself as part of this “underbelly movement” of women rediscovering—and, just as important, sharing—forgotten knowledge passed down by the women who came before them. “We’re kind of just relearning it together,” she says. “Women are unique [in that we] don’t learn something to keep it and to knowledge-hoard. I’m learning something, and that day or the next day, I’m teaching another woman.”

Sue joined the group for similar reasons: “I just thought I would really like to get to know other women who are doing this,” she says, adding that she admires how “self-sufficient” some of the other women are. When we speak, she’s been a member of the Facebook group for less than two weeks but has already learned a lot from other women’s posts, particularly about gardening and raising chickens.

Lest you think “Women Only Survival Preppers” is a virtual Lilith Fair at the end of the world, I should remind you that it is, after all, still a Facebook group, where the ordinary pitfalls of human interaction still apply. There have been controversies around LGBTQ issues, debates around abortion and vaccines; in July, one woman was even banned for posting the address of another (a.k.a. doxxing). Still, all the women I interviewed agreed that it was better than the alternative: dealing with men.

For Marcy, the women in the female prepper Facebook groups are more mature and confident and have more common sense than men in similar groups who seem to focus on only one thing. “Everything was about weapons, weapons, weapons,” she says. While firearms are part of prepping for Marcy, having a stable food supply, first-aid skills, and a strong community dynamic is more her focus.

In fact, Marcy left three coed prepper groups “because the men were out of control,” she says. She often read “very degrading and disgusting” comments, and even though they weren’t directed at her, she still felt attacked. Storm and Sue confirm that they’ve also seen no shortage of misogynistic comments in other coed online prepper spaces. Krystal doesn’t even use her last name due to threats she’s received online, and other content creators also talk about pushback from male followers who say that female preppers don’t know what they’re talking about or that they’re not “real” preppers.

The women-only groups also provide a safe space for female preppers to discuss one of the biggest threats to them in SHTF scenarios: sexual violence. Storm doesn’t mince words when she talks about the threat men pose to women. “Forget when shit hits the fan. Women are raped by men every day,” she says. “Do I think it’s going to get worse? Absolutely.” The threat of men is why Sue, after “being very anti-gun for many years,” recently bought a pistol and started taking shooting lessons. “I still don’t think anyone needs a semiautomatic weapon, but…I also think, unfortunately, that’s a skill [gun familiarity] you should have,” Sue says. “[I] hope I never have to use it, but I don’t want to be in a position where I wished I had learned.”

While all of the women I spoke with found their positive prepping community online, Ambrosia is one of a select few with an in-person prepper group, and she’s also encouraged all of her friends to prep. Krystal has friends who come over with the food they’ve grown, and they’ll can together, and also run different drills. “Community is so important because if you want to be completely self-reliant, you’re going to end up relying on others,” says Krystal. “Lone wolves do not survive long.”

Morgan has also held preparedness classes in her community, although it hasn’t been the best place to meet fellow female preppers since the majority of attendees have been men. She’s thinking about holding a women-only event because, she hypothesizes, women may be more comfortable around other women.

Planning for the Worst, Feeling Their Best

The preppers report that prepping benefits their mental health. They used words like safe, secure, grounded, optimistic, and peace of mind to describe the impact it’s had on their lives. Zani, who has had depression since she was 13 (for which she currently takes medication), says she used to have “extreme anxiety all of the time” when she was working a traditional full-time job and living in a city. She was burnt out from trying to balance work responsibilities, a household budget, and child-rearing duties. Prepping and homesteading have allowed her to depend less on money, so she “can have a freer lifestyle,” she says. “I very, very rarely have any anxiety whatsoever now.”

Prepping may be one of the only actions that both comes from and alleviates anxiety. “Fear leads us to do some pretty productive things,” says Lisa, likening prepping to getting an annual mammogram. “Not many women like going in for a breast exam—having those smooshed between metal plates doesn’t feel good—but there’s that little, tiny bit of risk, that little, tiny bit of fear that makes me think, Maybe I should do that.”

That was the case for Morgan, who says prepping cured her doomscrolling habit. Now, she uses that time to learn an off-grid cooking method, tend her garden, or simply go for a walk. It’s made a difference for Amy too: “All I read these days is how stressed-out people are,” she says. “But if you do something every day to prepare, you don’t have to worry about it.” In other words, if you think of prepping as a last-ditch effort to stave off the apocalypse, you’re going to live your life like that. If you think of it as taking everyday action to adapt to a changing world, you’re going to live your life like that.

Still, a perspective change doesn’t promise an instant fix. “I am incredibly depressed about what’s happening in this country,” Sue says. “I don’t drink; I don’t do drugs. This is how I’m coping.” Prepping makes her feel she’s “in control,” which has, on some level, alleviated her anxiety. It’s also encouraged her to be a lifelong learner, which she says has benefited her brain health, especially as she’s grown older. “I’m now thinking about things I have never thought about, and I have to figure out different strategies and learn how to do things I’ve never done before,” she says.

Even just working through the mental exercise of If X happened, what would I do? has provided Des with a new level of self-confidence. “That mental exercise is sometimes all you need to feel that much more prepared if you had to respond,” she says. “When an incident happens, I’m not resorting to anxiety and fear; I’m resorting to action and training.”

“I’m just preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best,” Marcy says. But while she’s glad she’s prepped so much throughout the years, she still has difficulty living her life. As one of the few single preppers I spoke with, she admits she does get lonely sometimes. Since divorcing her husband decades ago, she finds it difficult to trust anyone outside her family (it’s for this reason that she chooses to comment anonymously on the women-only prepper Facebook group). “People will take your kindness for stupidity,” Marcy says. “I’m not going to let you in my house. I’m not going to let you know what I have.”

Des is also divorced, and although she doesn’t blame the divorce on prepping, she does admit that it was a factor. “It’s really hard to get other family members on board.… You usually have one person that’s gung ho about it and wants to take action, and the other person needs a bit more convincing,” she says. “That was the case for me. I found that the more I tried to convince [my ex-husband] we should do this, it sounded like panic.” While that was not her intention, she understands how it might have come off that way, because prepping is “not the normal track for most people,” she says.

Many of the women preppers I spoke with, however, said their partners were at the very least supportive of their lifestyle, and some had become more involved with prepping over the years. Some, like Sue, even said that prepping has had a positive impact on her marriage because it gave her and her husband a shared hobby: gardening. “It’s a new, exciting chapter in our relationship because after you’re married 32 years, you figured nothing’s going to be new anymore,” Sue says. Gardening has also helped Sue live a healthier life overall. Usually, when she’d get home from work, she’d flop onto the couch and watch TV. Now, she goes outside to check on her tomatoes. “It’s a little way to be more active [and] get fresh air,” she says.

Following the Lady Preppers’ Lead

Since starting this article, there’s been a chemical leak in California, a deadly earthquake in Venezuela, flash flooding in Texas, wildfires in California, and a suspected Iranian hacking of water systems across seven states, including my own. “Most of the things that we prep for are things that happen all the time, unfortunately,” Krystal says. As a millennial, she’s witnessed so many “once-in-a-lifetime” events—terrorist attacks, multiple wars, a Great Recession, a global pandemic, and dozens of climate change–related natural disasters—that they’ve become normal. “When people say, ‘You’re doing all of this, and nothing’s going to happen,’ I’m like, ‘Whoa, where have you been the last 30 years?’ ” Krystal says. “It’s been a rough go.” As a fellow millennial, I have to agree.

The more I talked to these women, the more I became convinced that some level of preparedness was necessary for my life. To customize my approach to prepping, Lisa told me to begin tracking what I was already eating and how many everyday supplies (toilet paper, laundry detergent, etc.) I used for two to three weeks. Then to ask myself: What can I do to replicate that as long as possible, using food that I can store long-term?

I’ll be honest: I haven’t been that methodical. I’ve bought a few canned goods and cases of water, dabbled in the airtight-food-storage game, started assembling bugout bags for myself, my husband, and our daughter, and taken a class in CPR and first aid.

I’m nowhere near close to having years’ worth of prepped food like some women preppers, or even having a casual zombie apocalypse closet like Amy, but my meager preps have already come in handy. One weekday night, I noticed my husband opening up a can of black beans from my small but mighty prepping pantry. (I knew it was one of these cans because I’d taken to writing the expiration date on the top with a black Sharpie.) “Did you take this from my stash?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I forgot to get black beans at the store,” he admitted reluctantly. “So I’m really glad we had this extra can, in case of an emergency.” He was mocking me, but still, I think I made my point.

Even though we didn’t need to break out the gallon-size water bottles I’d bought at Costco when it seemed like our regular water supply might be at risk, it was good to know that if we had to, we could’ve. And as the women preppers promised, I even started to feel a small yet significant shift in my mental health. The situation was scary, especially with a young child at home, but I felt—for lack of a better word—prepared.

And Krystal was right about diaper bags being underrated proof of women’s everyday preparedness. My car keys were in there after all.

*Name changed for privacy