It’s a cold Tuesday afternoon. You’ve got five emails to write and another 162 sitting in your inbox demanding attention. But instead you’re doomscrolling on Instagram.

There she is. A “conventionally beautiful” woman wearing an expensive floral dress that is worth three months’ rent, baking sourdough in an immaculate kitchen you can only dream of owning. Her four beautifully behaved children, all with perfect white teeth, look on adoringly while her handsome husband milks a cow in the background.

You’re now drawn into this perfectly curated, nostalgic world. But these aren’t just any influencers. They’re tradwife influencers, women who’ve helped turn traditional domesticity into something aspirational. They embrace traditional gender roles, with husbands as breadwinners and wives responsible for the home and children. For some, this also means submitting to their husbands, meaning that they do not have any autonomy over household decisions. It’s his way or the highway.

As someone who was forced into marriage at 19 and expected to conform to traditional gender roles, I struggled to understand the attraction. Why were women drawn to a life I’d fought to escape? That curiosity became the starting point for my BBC documentary .

During our research, I encountered the familiar online fantasy: beautiful homes, expensive dresses and domestic bliss. But the biggest surprise came during filming, when I discovered that the British tradwives I met were a world away from those carefully curated images.

Take Molly, a deeply religious mother of seven whose life revolves around her family, faith and marriage. Having spent time living according to her rules, I can tell you there’s nothing particularly glamorous about the sheer amount of work involved. Molly homeschools her children, cooks every day, sews their clothes and gets through four loads of washing daily. She’s an incredibly devoted mother, constantly juggling about 10 things at once. I often felt I was just getting in her way.

As the eldest of six children who helped raise my younger siblings, I know how demanding a large family can be. Like my own mother, who was the OG tradwife but crucially didn’t have a choice, Molly barely had a moment to herself. She also wasn’t dressing up as a 1950s housewife for Instagram. For Molly, being a tradwife isn’t an aesthetic. It’s how she believes marriage should function.

Molly also believes her husband should lead and that she should submit to him. It’s something I struggled to get my head around, and seeing those beliefs play out in everyday life was sobering. It’s certainly not what you see in those romanticised Instagram and TikTok reels, and this is where I think we’ve got the tradwife movement wrong.

Online, it’s packaged as a lifestyle. Most of us consume the beautiful imagery without necessarily examining the beliefs underneath it. But equally, we can be quick to dismiss these women, reducing their lives to simplistic assumptions about oppression, religion and feminism. The reality is a little bit more complicated.

I met three women, Molly, Megan and Laura, whose interpretations of faith, marriage and traditional gender roles were different – they all existed on a spectrum.

Megan prioritises family and homemaking but doesn’t believe in submitting to her husband. Her marriage felt much more equal. Then there’s Laura, a relatively recent convert to Christianity who now coaches women on traditional marriage, charging hundreds – sometimes thousands – of pounds for her courses. Laura believes men are natural-born leaders in a way women aren’t. We had fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes protection within a marriage. What she regarded as a husband protecting his wife, I saw as potentially coercive and controlling.

Three women, three interpretations of what it means to be a traditional wife. All united by Christianity, but with very different approaches to marriage, money and submission. 

I went into this documentary with a healthy dose of side-eye. I assumed some of these women must be living under someone else’s rules against their will. But meeting them challenged my assumptions. All three told me they had chosen their lives. I realised I could respect the sincerity of someone’s convictions without sharing their beliefs.

The real danger is when we reduce these women to sourdough, floral dresses and immaculate homes. We risk overlooking the genuine choices they’ve made and the deeply conservative ideas some of them hold. I can respect a woman’s choice to be a tradwife, even if it’s a life I’d never choose. Submitting to a husband is something I can never get on board with.

We don’t have to romanticise tradwives or ridicule them. But we do need to look beyond the “wholesome” image curated online as if it is something to aspire to.

Because there’s a world of difference between a woman choosing how she wants to live and being told that’s where she belongs.

  is out on Monday 16 November, 10.40pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer