Before Tradwives, There Was Another Movement Keeping Young Women at Home. They’ve Grown Up, and They Have a Warning.

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Tradwives come off like a modern phenomenon, a social media chimera spawned by MAGA, fed by women’s exhaustion over “having it all,” and wrapped in a pretty apron. In some ways, that’s true—the Nara Smiths and Ballerina Farms of the world only went viral in the 2020s. But the earlier round of the submissive-woman-as-influencer experiment ran long enough ago—hawked on tape, book, and DVD—that the women involved are now in their 40s or older. Some are becoming the loudest voices warning against the movement.

Bernadine “Bluntly” Barber, a former trad Instagram influencer—here she is dancing in a milkmaid dress gifted to her by the alt-right magazine Evie—has opened up on Instagram and just this month spoke out in the New York Times against the abuse that can thrive in marriages with such a power imbalance. Enitza Templeton, a former tradwife with more than 247,000 TikTok followers, uses her platform to warn young women they may one day regret forgoing education. Templeton describes how a wifely fixation on pleasing one’s husband can leave women emotionally and physically depleted.

Earlier this month, former advocates of stay-at-home-daughterhood Elizabeth and Anna Sofia Botkin issued two apologies on YouTube (and published a lengthy written self-critique) to women negatively impacted by the form of submission they once advocated, when they argued that young women should remain home under their father’s authority until they got married and thereafter could live in submission to their husbands. The sisters’ 2005 book, So Much More, and 2007 film, Return of the Daughters, spawned the stay-at-home-daughter movement, a training ground for the wifely-submission pipeline. It was a stopgap encouraged by Christian patriarchy-preaching ministries to keep women from ever being outside the authority of a man—and usually, out of college, where they might learn Marxism, or worse, feminism. While young women stayed home, they perfected domestic skills, preparing for marriage. Some helped with their father’s business or ministry. A few served as nannies (unpaid or poorly paid) for submissive wives from their churches—training for the day they would have their own big broods of kids.

“We have come to the very painful conclusion that we believed and taught some very destructive things when it came to stay-at-home-daughterhood,” Anna Sofia said as part of their YouTube apology.  (Elizabeth and Anna Sofia did not return Slate’s requests for interviews.)

The Botkins’ repudiation was decades in the making, but together, these recent reversals do not merely represent the rise of a counterculture and its subsequent rejection. They are a sign that gender-based authoritarianism is unsustainable, even among the biggest advocates for women’s submission.

Before Instagram, TikTok, and the invention of a cutesy nickname, “traditional wives” were cultivated through digital and even analog media produced by proudly patriarchal ministries—a term that, among evangelicals, could describe churches or faith-based businesses. Some ministries sold Christian products and books that made female faith synonymous with submission. They similarly featured lovely women whose example lured in other girls and women. (Social media now supersizes that reach.) Sometimes without even referencing—or being aware of—its roots, believers and wannabe influencers alike have successfully co-opted old Christian patriarchy talking points, at the same time that survivors of these past movements have grown up enough to have regrets and speak out.

Some stay-at-home daughters turned submissive wives are now becoming the opposition. They can attest that the effort to train women in submission started long before it popped up in our scrolls.

Few secular Americans know about Vision Forum Ministries, which was founded in 1998 and shuttered in 2013, following allegations that founder Doug Phillips sexually abused Lourdes Torres, a stay-at-home daughter who met Phillips when she was a teenager and served as an unpaid nanny for his kids. Vision Forum Ministries, which sold a range of books, CDs, DVDs, and toys in its catalog, was a mainstay in many homeschooling Christian homes. Vision Forum offered Hazardous Journeys for fathers and sons—wilderness trips for learning “dominion.” Meanwhile, on Father Daughter Retreats, men learned to “lead,” “woo,” and “win” their daughters to become “industrious, family-affirming, children-loving, women of God.”

The ministry preached and promoted patriarchy, a supposedly God-ordained hierarchy that places fathers in divine authority over the home, church, and society. Women were expected to submit to their husbands, and children to their fathers. This raised a complication: What about young adult women who have not yet married?

“Stay-at-home daughters were essentially tradwives in training,” says Cait West, author of Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy. “Everything we did was to support a future as a helpmeet to a man.”

In my years reporting on survivors of the stay-at-home-daughter movement, I’ve heard stories of parents denying their adult daughters postsecondary education or requiring daughters to work without pay for the family ministry or business. Many felt trapped in a home with a father who abused them.

“The essential fact of fathers not letting their daughters leave home after they turn 18 is abuse by definition,” says West. “It’s financial abuse. It’s emotional abuse. It’s spiritual abuse. A lot of the time, there was also physical and sexual abuse.”

Vision Forum sold a DVD of a speech by Geoffrey Botkin, Elizabeth and Anna Sofia’s father. In it, he described how when Anna Sofia was born, he placed a hand on her tummy and prayed for the eggs the Lord had placed inside her—seeing the infant as the generational mother of tens of millions. He said Elizabeth could remember him talking to her about marriage when she was in her high chair. Botkin had a 200-year plan for his family detailed on “an Excel spreadsheet with all of his children’s names on it, and all of the projects that he planned out for them,” notes Elena Trueba, a writer working on a book about the stay-at-home-daughter movement. “One of those projects was a book for his two daughters to write.”

At ages 15 and 17, the Botkin sisters did just that, writing So Much More, a text warning that “college campuses have become dangerous places of ongoing anxiety, wasted years, mental defilement, and moral derangement.” Vision Forum sold the book and the Botkin sisters’ film Return of the Daughters, which was produced by their father’s ministry. It featured other stay-at-home daughters and fathers who touted the benefits of leaning into domestic roles and preparing to be (submissive) wives.

Torres, who has since settled a lawsuit against Vision Forum’s founder, appeared in Return of the Daughters. In the footage, she seems like a shining example of a camera-ready stay-at-home daughter. She finally went to college in her 30s. Today, Torres is a self-possessed artist, designer, and “alchemical witch” who has a skincare line and does Tarot readings. She went through stages of emotion seeing the Botkins’ 15-minute video apology, she says. She thought it was beautiful and heartfelt. Then she started watching the two-hour version, which features Elizabeth reading a 36-page apology that reinterpreted scripture. She felt a shift. She didn’t really want to hear all that: “Don’t tell me what the Bible says according to you.”

The Botkins haven’t exactly become progressive. Their written mea culpa assures the reader that they’ve since learned the “sciences” of Biblical interpretation and application. They assert they’ve become “more consistent and confessional Christians who hold fast to the God-ordained differences between men and women.” But, they also acknowledge the picture of fatherly “protection we painted was one that—in real life—often left young women more vulnerable in the end.”

Among the written apology’s plentiful Bible citations are references to Phillip Kayser, who runs Biblical Blueprints, where Elizabeth and her husband now work, raising the specter of at least one of the Botkin sisters having traded out an old authority figure for a new one.

West, the stay-at-home-daughter turned memoirist, worries the Botkin sisters’ claim that they now “know how to really read the Bible” could be perpetuating new harm by “locking people into believing this new version of what womanhood is.”

Torres points out that ultimately, though, the Botkins were hardly responsible for the movement. Rather, “they are the victims of those teachings.” Torres asks where the heck their father is in all this, “and all the other men who helped to make this happen. Where are the responsible people?”

Today’s tradwife content hums along in a broader cultural ecosystem where pastors are openly questioning women’s right to vote and reproductive rights are shrinking. The sort of patriarchal pastors who were once considered fringe and whose influence could only be bought and sold via mail-order catalog or in person at a conference or ministry event are now getting interviewed by mainstream media. Their brazen sexism gets stitched hundreds, if not thousands of times, serving as rage bait for feminists and as fuel for red-pill fantasies. And the women they platform, like Tilly Dillehay, get featured on Turning Point USA’s Culture Apothecary podcast, to promote a (fee-based) online “wife school” course that teaches that good wives submit to their husbands.

Such Christian patriarchy fosters a microcosm, a practice level, for coaxing women (starting from girlhood) into dangerously subordinate, submissive roles. Packaged for the internet, it can all look promising to the right audience—until one experiences it long enough in practice. Whether the present-day incarnation of tradwives understands the roots of their movement or not, they are embedded in the fertile ground of these prior influences.

“And even more dangerous are the political leaders—elected and not—who see the ideology of women’s submission as key to building their own political power,” notes Heather Cronk, founder and co-director of Project 21:12, a group of former evangelicals organizing against Christian nationalism.

After years of hush-voiced over-the-top cooking for her husband and not complaining about the tradwife label as she rode the trend, now even Nara Smith has recently backpedaled. It’s at a time when some women who found “traditional” roles that they believed were mandated by God, now, years later, stand knee-deep in the damage. Whether they are still biblical inerrantists or more flexibly spiritual, they all offer a warning: Female submission opens people up to lasting scars. Increasingly, a chorus of the scarred are broadcasting that warning.