Last week, a long-awaited sequel to Desperate Housewives was announced. A little later, on the same day, Meghan Markle gave an interview to her friend, Jamie Kern Lima, in which she gushed about 'working on everything in the space of hospitality and home and entertaining and food.' Just hours later, the season trailer for the Real Housewives of Miami was released and fans of modern-day housewife content rejoiced. While once upon a time it felt like there was almost nothing as crass as a woman admitting that she didn't work, today it seems like there's nothing as desirable — as aspirational and aesthetically appealing — as a woman admitting she doesn't work. Welcome to the great housewife re-brand.
Look around, wherever you may be and you’ll see the signs: homes, meals and kitchens have become works of art, impeccably-situated, warmly-lit, mouthwateringly-delicious. Framed in the gallery of social media, their very existences have become something to be in awe of. There are trad wives ferrying their small armies of children around with seemingly minimal effort; there are Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow, building empires on the back of their homemaking abilities; there are the Real Housewives, glamorous ladies who lunch and now there are the women who kickstarted the phenomenon back in 2004: the Desperate Housewives.
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Earlier this week it was announced Kerry Washington has signed up to a reboot of the incredibly popular show, called Wisteria Lane. 'On the surface, all the Wisteria neighbours are living the dream: beautiful homes, gorgeous families, shiny SUVs in the driveway,' says the initial report of the Desperate Housewives spin-off. 'But behind those white-picket fences and smiling Insta posts are SECRETS.'
Meanwhile, The Real Housewives of Orange County's eighteenth season — the series that bore the Real Housewives franchise — wrapped in November 2024 with its biggest audience in five years, averaging 3.1 million total viewers and 1.6 million in the 18-49 demographic.
But beyond TV, housewifery is taking a real hold on women's daily lives - especially amongst Gen Z. On TikTok, 'stay-at-home girlfriend' has more than 37.3 million views, 'life as a stay-at-home girlfriend' has 37.8 million views, and 'stay at home GF' has 36.2 million. The interest - positive or negative - is clear. Make no mistake: it's never been more en vogue to be part of the movement promoting domesticity.
'People used to ask me, "What’s your dream job?" I never knew the answer. I realised it’s because I don’t dream of labour. I dream of living a soft, feminine life and being a hot housewife. It’s as simple as that,' influencer Kendel Kay (@kendelkay) said in a video with 1.6 million views from September 2023. If once they aspired for careers, today's influencers are overwhlemingly aspiring for domestic stability.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was passé to admit to being a stay-at-home mother, wife, or partner; former Chief Operating Officer at Facebook Sheryl Sandberg's 'trickle-down' brand of feminism, posited in her 2013 manifesto Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will, encouraged women to 'lean in' to their careers at the expense of being with their families. A matter of months later came Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amuruso's #GIRLBOSS, which also implied that women could have it all! Why stay at home when you could, by force of sheer strength, have the job, the relationship and the family? What was not to love? Then came social media, which whipped the world into a frenzy with the way it made life and all of its facets so joyful, so beautiful. Women suddenly began commoditising their faces, their bodies and their lives. The messaging became that if you could make a life — and a home — beautiful, you would be rewarded, and so came more housewives. Gwyneth Paltrow's first cookbook debuted in 2013, her second in 2016 and her third in 2018, almost punctuating the junctures of the evolution of domestic feminism. Happening in tandem was the subsequent release of more Real Housewives franchises — at the time of writing, there are nine active franchises in the United States and 21 international adaptations. Homemaking, if ever it was cast aside as a mere inconvenience, has exploded.
But why have we moved this way? 'In the context of the world that we're living in at the moment with so much uncertainty and so much overwhelm, and with digital technology, where we feel constantly bombarded by things, it makes sense that people are craving something that feels homely and comforting,' health psychologist, Dr. Sula Windgassen, tells ELLE UK.
When the Real Housewives of Orange County premiered in 2006, George W. Bush was President of the United States, and society was still years away from the explosion of the digital ecosystem. Inspired by Desperate Housewives, which premiered in 2004 and had shone a light on stay-at-home women, the show depicted wealthy women behaving badly in their gilded cages. The financial crash arrived in 2008, and housewife content continued its rapid ascent. Fast forward two decades, and with the tools at their disposal now to glamourise their home lives, housewives have come full-circle.
'It feels like to me that this is more of a swing back to internalised misogyny and the repression of women, and we can make that seem more glamorous now with fancy kitchens and Instagram and aesthetics,' Dr. Windgassen notes. 'We can really glorify that in a way that can make it look different to what it is, so I don't know if it feels much like a reclamation, as it does further repression.'
Dr. Windgassen believes that the renaissance of housewife-focussed content is also a reflection of our decreased appetite for content that requires a great deal of attention. 'We've got shorter attention spans with the increased in use of digital technology; there are many more remakes and so there's less room for, like, original films. And I think part of that speaks to our change in appetite for consuming things that are easier to access rather than high dopamine-driven content,' Dr. Windgassen explains. 'It brings familiarity and soothing and so you know, again, it's going to have a mass appeal.'
Dr. Windgassen herself watched the Real Housewives of Orange County, New York and Beverly Hills until the sixth season of the latter caused her to think again. A key storyline featured the women doubting former cast member Yolanda Hadid's 2012 Lyme disease diagnosis, even mentioning Munchausen syndrome, a mental disorder in which someone falsely believes he or she is physically ill. 'That felt so dark to me,' she explains. 'I stopped watching the Real Housewives because it felt exploitive in the end, I used to feel like it relaxed me as I was watching in the background when I was making dinner. But then after a while, I just realised that it's a lot of people treating each other really badly and it wasn't enjoyable anymore. It felt a tearing down of women, rather than building it up.'
Perhaps it's unsurprising that, in a world that continues to discriminate against us, it seems almost understandable that indulging in content within the home has enjoyed a lofty ascent. We're craving safe spaces, and there's very little that's safer than our homes and families.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
