Gianna Hayes
News Editor
On Nov. 10, Terry Reeder, visiting assistant professor of religious studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, delivered the final lecture in the fall 2025 Academy of Religion Series entitled, “‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’: Trad Wives, Pronatalism, and More” to an audience in Lean Lecture Hall. She began by introducing students Brenna Chasney ’26 and Josie Fleischel ’26 to discuss how and why students are fascinated with the phenomenon of tradwives.
Both Chasney and Fleischel learned about tradwives through social media. The content they reported seeing promotes nostalgia, associating femininity with domesticity, where a woman’s ideal station is tending to their husband and children. Fleischel pointed out the hypocrisy in tradwife content creators earning money for posting videos about a lifestyle that promulgates men as the sole breadwinners. “[Tradwife videos] would not be possible without feminism, and without the ability for these women to actually publish their lifestyles.”
Fleischel and Chasney made several remarks addressing the choices that affect women who are susceptible to traditional wife content, noting an underlying rhetoric of purity related to choosing to forgo contraceptives (IUDs, birth control). Reeder, Fleischel and Chasney all emphasized the political implications of misinformation pertaining to reproductive health — especially in states where abortion is criminalized.
Fleischel cautioned the audience with her closing remarks, saying to “be mindful of the content you consume and take in everything with a very large grain — or block — of salt.”
Reeder then transitioned to the more traditional lecture segment of her talk. She defined “tradwife” as a phenomenon, tradition and aesthetic that is a subset of the pronatalist movement. “Not all tradwives are pronatalist, but all pronatalists embrace at least some ‘traditional’ roles for women,” Reeder said. She classified pronatalists into two main categories by scholars — religious pronatalism (including Mormons, Roman Catholics and the Quiverfull belief) and existential pronatalism, which Reeder called nationalist pronatalism.
Reeder gave several examples of prominent figures from different pronatalist beliefs while explaining the tenets of each sect. According to Reeder, Mormon pronatalism focuses on marriage and encourages children, while still allowing couples to use birth control measures. She contrasted this with Roman Catholic pronatalism, which disavows all birth control except natural family planning and emphasizes that the primary purpose of sex is to have children. Quiverfull Christians — from Psalm 127: 3-5 — believe that married couples should have as many children as humanly possible, even at the risk of death, per Reeder Examples of different pronatalists ranged from Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Duggars (from the TV show “19 Kids and Counting”) and Vice President JD Vance.
Speaking about existentialist pronatalists, Reeder noted President Trump’s efforts to promote in vitro fertilization and his self-proclaimed title of “the fertility president,” as well as Elon Musk’s many children and his claim that “low birth rates are a much bigger threat to civilization than global warming.”
Reeder explained that nationalist and Christian nationalist interest in pronatalism are exclusive to their in-group, usually consisting of the nation-state, civilization, Western civilization or Christian children. “The trouble with our nationalist pronatalists and our Christian nationalist pronatalists is that they want to combat these falling birth rates and falling fertility, but only for children in their nation-state or, as Musk and Collins say, only children in civilization,” Reeder said. “Other pronatalists have outright said that the worry is Western civilization, and some of our religious pronatalists, including our tradwives, are worried about Christianity.”
Reeder continued, “This is where Christian nationalism becomes a dangerous and racist phenomenon with all its permutations of pronatalism and tradwives,” connecting tradwives and pronatalism to the Great Replacement Theory, which she described as a “white supremacist conspiracy theory that says there’s an agenda to replace or get rid of all white people.”.
To close, Reeder invited Chasney and Fleischel up to join her for a Q&A session.
Joan Friedman, a retired religious studies professor who was in attendance asked, “how much of this is new? I remember Phyllis Schlafly saying women should stay home and be traditional wives … I remember Anita Bryant doing the same thing — how much of this is new other than the fact that that kind of stuff can now be on social media?”
Reeder responded, saying that “both Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant … that’s pretty much where everybody puts the current phenomena as starting. To me, one thing that’s new is because of social media, I think there’s more about the phenomena we don’t understand yet. I didn’t hear college students talking about it. I didn’t hear it connected with wealth, and the turn towards Christian nationalism and nationalism is very dangerous. Maybe it was building from [Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant].”
