Back to the Future? The Tradwives movement and the new forms of conservative consensus building

This paper aims to explore an idea of Anglo-Saxon womanhood which has emerged in recent years thanks to the ‘Tradwives’ movement, a small but growing community led by a number of online mentors whose motivational support is both eloquent and prolific. As the name suggests, Traditional wives believe that a woman’s place is in the home and that men and women should embody the distinct yet complementary roles of breadwinner/homemaker. With an emphasis on grounded values such as modesty, femininity, chivalry, family and community spirit, and an iconography which harks back to the 1950s, at first sight the movement appears rather quaint and inoffensive. It is only by looking closer that a form of kid-gloved nationalism and gender discrimination are revealed. By investigating a Corpus made up of two UK/USA websites, comprising a selection of articles and blogs, we will explore the array of different discourses, opinions and ideologies which surround and characterize the modern day ‘Tradwife’. A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) framework will be used to investigate the way language is employed throughout the corpus in conjunction with other semiotic resources; the tools pertaining to Corpus Linguistics will further serve to investigate frequently occurring terms and thematic collocations.