What is the Jam Girl Summer?
Jam girl summer is all about embracing intentionality. It’s cozy, nostalgic, and just a little flirty. Think: less hustle, more homemade. Less scroll, more strolls. Fewer urgent DMs, more vintage pyrax containing freshly picked berries. It’s about leaning into slow pleasures like canning, reading in a sun-drenched corner, and letting your linens get a little wrinkled in the best way.
What Exactly is Jam Girl Summer?
Jam Girl Summer was inspired in part by Meghan Markle’s recent launch of raspberry jam through her lifestyle brand, but this isn’t just about fruit preserves. It’s about preserving a slower, more meaningful way of living—one spoonful at a time. Jam Girl Summer is less about labels and more about living. It’s a mindset rooted in simplicity, sweetness, and soulfulness. Think homemade items, long mornings, picnics, breezy dresses, thrifted baskets, and embracing rituals that nourish both your body and your creativity. It’s a warm rejection of hustle culture in favor of something slower and more chic in its softness.
This summer, being a Jam Girl means:
• Picking berries at a local farm
• Making your own jam (or at least buying small-batch from a farmer’s market)
• Wearing breezy dresses like linen or cotton sundresses
• Hosting small, meaningful gatherings—complete with floral tablecloths and mismatched teacups
• Savoring the moment, whether it’s your morning toast or a lazy afternoon with a good book
How to Have Your Own Jam Girl Summer
You don’t need to move to a cottage or grow your own berries (unless you want to!). Here are a few easy ways to embody the Jam Girl vibe:
• Make your own jam (I’ve included a simple recipe below)
• Host a weekend brunch with fresh pastries, preserves, and vintage plates
• Create a “slow morning” playlist and build a quiet, intentional start to your day
• Visit a local farmers market and chat with the growers
• Take your journal outside and let yourself daydream
• Do something with your hands—bake, sew, paint, arrange flowers
Jam Girl Summer isn’t about having the ultimate summer body or the most luxurious vacation. It’s about holding the warm, sticky moments of life with two hands and saying: this is enough. This is beautiful.
Emily in Your Phone
Embrace the Vibe With Me: Jam Girl Summer
You Don’t Have to Be a Tradwife to Want a Slow, Beautiful Life
Jun 02, 2025
I’ve been thinking about the aesthetics that come with politics these days. My feed is full of tradwife-pipeline pink pill content. Including one that gets my goat every time: “Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince an entire generation that this (mothering a baby) is oppressive.” (No one did that girlies.)
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I’ve talked a lot about how there is an organized political movement that is bringing tradwives and soft life to our digital doorstep. Women who present traditional homemaking as the ultimate feminine calling, complete with pretty dresses, homemade bread, and total submission to their husbands. What looks like innocent lifestyle content is actually part of an organized political movement designed to make patriarchy look cozy and appealing. Because politics is downstream from culture. The vibes that influence how we act and live.Subscribe
But there’s also a reason women are drawn to slow living right now, there’s a reason they are falling down the rabbit hole of chicken coops and homesteading and home cooked meals. And I get it because I am too!!
It looks so damn pretty and nourishing. And we are tired.
The world is falling apart. The internet is unhinged. The government is keening towards authoritarianism. Childcare costs are draining us. The village feels like a foreign concept. And so many of us, especially women, are reaching for something soft and simple. Something that feels like home.
Prairie-core. Domestic bliss. Big sleeves. Bigger sourdough starters. And beneath it all, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) message: a woman’s place is in the kitchen. But not because she wants to be there, because that’s where God or her husband or some TikTok algorithm put her.
The tradwife aesthetic promises comfort, but it delivers control.
It’s softness as a strategy. It’s anti-feminism with a floral filter. It’s nostalgia for a time when women were property, romanticized by influencers who want brand deals from butter. (jk, everyone wants on that Kerrygold brand trip)
But we don’t have to let them own this.
So let me offer you an alternative. A counterspell. A new archetype, a way for us to take back soft living from the right because we deserve nice things too.
Jam Girl Summer.
Because if I’m being honest, I’m tired. Tired of how every inch of our lives has been turned into something to optimize, monetize or defend. Tired of hustle-as-identity. Tired of the pressure to prove we’re worthy through constant motion.
Somewhere along the way, even rest became a task to perform.
So yeah, I want jam. I want the jars. I want the slow heat of fruit on the stove. I want chipped ceramic dishes and linen aprons and a kitchen that smells like strawberries.
This could be slow living at its finest, because anyone can do it without spending a fortune on an AGA stove.
You wait until the fruit is ready. You sit with it. You let it get messy and sticky and hot. You take what’s in season, and only what’s in season, and you preserve it.
That’s the energy I want for this summer.
Jam Girl is domestic, but not domesticated.
Because here’s what the tradwife aesthetic gets wrong about women wanting soft, slow, nourishing lives: it assumes we want them because we’re tired of having control of our own lives.
The reality is the opposite. We are actually tired of being controlled.
The tradwife says: give up your autonomy and someone else will take care of everything.
Jam Girl says my softness has nothing to do with surrender and everything to do with soothing my soul.
Jam Girl Summer says I don’t need to be palatable to be powerful. I am allowed to take up space, even if that space is quiet. Even if that space is mine alone. Even if that space is sticky with jam.
This isn’t just about jam, obviously. Jam Girl Summer is inherently political because it refuses to let the right monopolize comfort, domesticity, and the dream of a slower life. The tradwife pipeline wants us to believe we can only have soft, nourishing lives if we give up our power. But every time a woman chooses preservation over productivity, autonomy over submission, her own timeline over capitalism’s demands, that’s a push against the systems trying to control her.
And jam, by its nature, is shareable. You give them to neighbors, bring them to potlucks, drop them off when someone’s having a hard time. The tradwife movement sells individual domestic perfection as the answer to collective problems, but Jam Girl Summer knows that real nourishment happens in community. It’s the friend who picks up groceries when you’re sick, the policies that actually support families, the networks of care that catches us when we fall.
Maybe this summer you do make jam. Maybe you go to the farmer’s market, pick up some overripe strawberries, and watch them collapse into sweetness. Maybe you eat it straight from the jar with your fingers.
Or maybe the jam is metaphorical, maybe it’s a nap you take without guilt. A conversation you finally have. A chapter you write, not because you’re on deadline, but because something in you is ready. There is no one way to be a Jam Girl.
But if the culture is telling you to speed up, I hope you’ll slow down. If it’s telling you to produce, I hope you’ll preserve.
Let this be the summer you don’t apologize for being in process.
Let this be the summer you let yourself ripen.