Wife school can’t fix MAGA husbands

How hard is it to enjoy your husband’s company? According to content made for Christian conservative women, the heaviest cross they may bear is learning to feel affection for their spouses — or at least fake it well enough to buy some peace at home. That’s what I learned perusing the growing field of influencers offering would-be tradwives advice on how to make MAGA marriages work. 

“Normalize liking your husband,” reads a T-shirt sold by Savanna Stone, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed marriage expert who has been selling content preaching marital submission with the backing of shady far-right funders. At first blush, that may seem like a trifling concept. But, as Stone makes clear in her video content, her definition of liking or even loving a husband is both laborious and ascetic to an extreme. 

“Submission isn’t earned, it is given through the covenant of marriage,” Stone argued in one video. If a husband makes bad decisions, she said, it’s his wife’s fault because she isn’t submitting enough to give him the “confidence” to “take on the masculine role.” At her speech at the 2026 Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Conference, Stone encouraged women to marry young, as she did at 18. If they don’t, the risk is that they will “build their own life,” which she defined as “the death of marriage” because “two separate lives do not easily merge.”

Stone attracts a lot of attention for her tender age and lavishly produced content. But she’s just one of a burgeoning group of Christian influencers, most of them fairly young, who hold themselves out as experts on marriage. Some dress in fashionable and sexy clothes, like Stone, while others favor prairie-style dresses. Some are podcasters or video hosts; others offer online courses with names like “Wife School” or “Wife Academy.” But the message remains the same: They’re all speaking to the deep disappointment and frustration that many Christian women apparently feel in their husbands. The solution, though, only ever seems to be that wives must suck it up and submit even more to their men. 

Recently, Alex Clark, the host of TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” podcast, married another Christian influencer after what appears to have been a whirlwind engagement of only a few months. (As recently as May, she was lamenting her lack of viable marital prospects.) In the run-up to her nuptials, Clark presented her own “wife school” series that made marriage sound so miserable that a reasonable viewer’s only conclusion was to avoid being a wife altogether. 

Her first guest, Tilly Dillehay, got right down to business by scolding women who are “picky” because they want something from a husband beyond just a man who is “active in his faith” and makes enough money to “support a family.” Dillehay held herself out as an example of a woman who failed; she said she had dated men who were “flippant,” which appears to be her code word for fun. Instead, while she was “not immediately attracted” to her husband and he was not attracted to her, Dillehay married him anyway because he is a “steady man,” “serious” and not prone like she is to “joke around.” 

If that sounds like a formula for a miserable sex life, well, Dillehay didn’t seem to be concerned. “God has commanded you to participate” in sex with your husband, she said. An added incentive is that it’s “a way that you protect each other from infidelity.” 

“Half of the time,” she said, “it’s only in getting started that you even start to be in the mood.” What happens the other half of the time, she didn’t say. 

“Remember that there are a lot of women out there whose husbands are at the bar tonight and they’re not coming home,” Dillehay said. “There are a lot of women whose husbands are not going to work today.” It should be “enough,” she added, to have a husband who works and goes to church. 

Dillehay’s view is especially chilling in light of a recent Netflix documentary “The Death of the Pastor’s Wife,” which chronicled the suicide of Mica Miller, who spent years of trying to please the ever-escalating sexual demands of her minister husband. This expectation doesn’t appear to be the exception. As Dillehay showed in her interview with Clark, the view of sex as a wife’s duty is deeply ingrained in conservative Christian culture.

Stone has drawn attention by saying consent isn’t part of marriage. “Because when you say, ‘I do,’ you are committing to a lifetime of sex,” she explained in an interview earlier this year. “‘You didn’t fold your laundry. I’m not going to have sex with you. You didn’t unload the dishwasher. I’m not going to have sex with you.’” In citing these scenarios, Stone mocked women who withdraw from husbands sexually, calling it “manipulation,” or even a “sin,” to feel this way. 

Feminists might argue it’s hard to get in the mood with someone who doesn’t respect you. That opinion, though, carries no weight in MAGA circles. Still, there’s clearly a lot of resentment among some Christian conservative women about husbands who don’t do chores. Trying to stifle anger over this may be the single most common topic in Christian marital advice content.

In her “wife school” series, Clark interviewed her new sister-in-law, Katie Voetberg, a prairie dress-clad podcast host and mother of six, about how to avoid being a “nagging wife” and a “constant dripping faucet.” Voetberg’s heartwarming advice? Abandon all hope of having a responsible husband. If your husband forgets to pay the electric bill, she said, don’t remind him or hold him accountable. Instead, “light a candle” and hope that he learns from the “embarrassment” of his failure. Presumably, wives in these relationships don’t control the money, or they could pay it themselves. In cases where women do have a little more power, Voetberg recommended simply doing every chore a husband can’t be bothered with.

“He hates going to the dentist” or the doctor, she explained, so “I just put it on my to-do list” to make his appointment. Even when a husband won’t do “the stereotypical husband duties,” like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash, she continued, the wife should handle it and say, “it’s never going to hit [the husband’s] radar.”

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Other influencers agree. Millicent Sedra, a rising Christian-right influencer who serves as pastor at Echo Church in Sydney, Australia, recently preached that wives should “[s]top complaining about having to help your husband when our God-given role is to do exactly that.” Another of her sermons centered on Proverbs 21:9, which reads, “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a nagging wife.” 

Laura Zachary, the creator of “Wife Academy,” which is billed as “a program that allows women to rebuild their marriages from the inside out, explained in a video why all household chores should fall to wives: “Women were created for a man. So a woman without a man to take care of, she becomes very empty, very soulless, very bitter.” But Zachary’s logic is flawed: If scrubbing toilets and washing dishes while their husbands kicked back on the couch was, in fact, women’s natural inclination, then she wouldn’t be able to charge women thousands of dollars for courses that reportedly teach them how to love a life of submission.

Often, these lessons in denial are framed for Christian women as a rebuttal to feminists. As a marketing ploy, that’s smart, but it’s not entirely honest. Feminists aren’t listening to this content, and even if they were to stumble across it, they would simply move on. It is not sparking “debate.” 

The real audience for these messages are Christian women, a fact that is itself telling. That these classes exist in the first place shows that, despite being told it’s their “natural” role, Christian women do not actually enjoy submitting to their husbands. If women were eager to have sex in their conservative Christian marriages, they wouldn’t need to be told it’s their duty to have it, like it or not. Clearly, many Christian women resent domestic inequality, or else they wouldn’t have to be told to suck it up.

Why is there “wife school” but no apparent equivalent “husband school”? Men in this situation are perfectly fine; they are benefitting from a system set up to serve them at a woman’s expense. As long as that’s true, it’s inevitable that women will feel frustrated and resentful. “Wife school” can’t actually make women happier, since it reinforces the very male dominance that is causing their pain. But it sure can make men’s lives easier, if the teachers are successful at getting women to stop complaining and learn instead to serve their husband-masters in silence.