Estee Williams / TikTok Tradwife

About

Estee Williams, also known as the TikTok Tradwife, is an influencer and homemaker from Richmond, Virginia who posts videos about her "traditional" lifestyle on TikTok (@esteecwilliams). She describes "submitting to her husband" and wears 1950s-style clothing while performing domestic tasks, often drawing comparisons to the Trad Wife meme. Commentators online began discussing Williams in February 2023, some criticizing her trad lifestyle and pointing out that her influencer career complicated her claims to be a "traditional wife."

Career

Williams (born Esther Allen) began her adult life on what she describes as the "boss babe" trajectory: she attended college, studied meteorology and worked as a nanny. But after she met her now-husband Conner Williams, she chose to adopt the tradwife lifestyle, according to an interview given to an Australian news morning show on February 22nd, 2023.^[2]

Williams posted her earliest TikTok video on March 1st, 2022, which was a how-to guide to making borscht (what she calls a "Russian-Ukrainian dish") just a week after Russia invaded Ukraine (seen below).

Prior to married life, Estee Williams was also a weightlifter, as described in the story time TikTok (seen below, left).^[6] Her motivation for the "trad wife" lifestyle choice is also explicitly religious, with Williams posting about practices like "Christian veiling" (seen below, right).^[7]

Conner Williams works for an electrical, heating, and air service in Richmond Virginia, while Estee Williams manages the house, posts on TikTok and talks with the press. In the first two months of 2023, she was interviewed by 7News in Australia, the Daily Mail and the New York Post.^[6] The Williamses married on January 7th, 2023, according to the custom website created for their nuptials.^[5]

Online History

Her content on TikTok ranges from recipe videos (such as the one below, left, in which she "wears my Marilyn Monroe dress") and collages about her lifestyle as a tradwife, which show her cooking, cleaning and styling herself (seen below, right).^[3][4]

Alongside her rise to prominence in late 2022 and early 2023, many on TikTok have criticized Williams, including TikToker kierabreaugh, who dueted with Williams and criticized her use of Marilyn Monroe-inspired aesthetics in a video on September 6th, 2022, that received over 7,200 likes in five months (seen below).^[8]

In February 2023 as she went viral online, Williams saw even more pushback on Twitter, where clips of her TikTok content were heavily criticized by many. A viral tweet sharing one of her videos by user @carryonfolks, a self-described "red pill" account committed to "dismantling anti-Tate lies and deception," shared a video of Williams on February 19th, 2023, receiving almost 13,000 likes and 15,000 retweets or quote tweets in one week.^[9]

Commentary and quote-tweets about this video largely focused on Williams' perceived hypocrisy. For example, Twitter user @megantheevallium (seen below, left) posted a thread criticizing her life choices, receiving over 6,000 likes on the initial post on February 26th, 2023, in two days.^[10] On February 25th, Twitter user @entmoots pointed out that Williams' lifestyle does not actually resemble that of a 1950s housewife, earning over 43,000 likes in a similar timeframe (seen below, right).^[11]

Related Memes

Trad Girl / Tradwife

Trad Girl or Tradwife refers to a female Wojak variation with blond hair and wearing a blue floral sundress. Initially circulated on 4chan in posts related to traditional and conservative values, the character received more significant spread online after gaining popularity in Yes Chad memes and other Wojak Comics.

External References