Internet trends are notoriously fickle and often polarizing, but few in recent memory have been more consistently debated than that of the “tradwife,” which is dominating social media discourse this summer.
The term, a portmanteau for “traditional housewife,” describes a specific corner of the internet where, in broad terms, married women eschew gainful employment and focus instead on their commitment to full-time domestic labour, raising what are often large broods of children and allowing their husbands to make the important decisions, and money, for the family.
It’s a 180-degree shift from the Girl Boss generation that came before them — where women were encouraged to lean into their careers and hustle in the working world — as these so-called trad wives fully commit to a life of traditional gender roles, child-rearing and embracing a way of life that harkens back to both the pioneering and post-WWII spirit of North America.
But many of these women — often clad in old-timey house dresses, hair bows and strings of pearls — are also considered influencers, documenting their labour as wives and mothers in a highly curated home environments and adding a shiny gloss to their daily chores with artfully-styled Instagram reels and TikTok videos.
The origins of the trad wife
While the origins of the term tradwife are unclear, the content itself dates back to around 2018, when women leaning into traditional roles in the family began spotlighting their part-aesthetic, part-ideological lives on social media.
Trad wives, however, were cast into the spotlight in 2020, when the BBC ran a profile on one of the original tradwife influencers, Alena Kate Pettitt, who spoke of “submitting to and spoiling her husband like it’s 1959.”
Estee Williams, one of the biggest names in the tradwife sphere, further defined the term in 2022 as a “woman who prefers to take a traditional or ultra-traditional role in marriage, including beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home.”
Paired with the movement-limiting COVID-19 pandemic, where millions of housebound people worldwide turned to domestic boredom busters like baking bread and growing their own produce, the tradwife lifestyle experienced an explosion in interest and was pushed to the top of many people’s social media algorithms, cementing its place as more than a passing trend and giving it legs as a sustainable and attainable way of life.
The trickiness of ‘tradwife’
While some creators, like Williams, claim the tradwife moniker and proudly share how they adhere to ultra-traditional gender roles, the same can’t be said for all women decorated with the label.
Hannah Neeleman, a former Julliard-trained New York City ballerina who gave up on her dreams of dancing to marry her husband, a fellow Mormon, and run their farm in Utah, went viral late last month after a profile in The Times of London pulled back the curtain and detailed why and how she hung up her pointe shoes to run a ranch, Ballerina Farm, with her husband and raise her eight children.
But despite the internet crowning her the ultimate tradwife influencer (The Times even dubbed her “The Queen of the Trad Wives” for their profile), Neeleman says she doesn’t associate herself with the term.
“We are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman,” Neeleman, who has more than 20 million followers across social media, said of her dynamic with her husband, Daniel.
“We have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before. So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,” she added, “I don’t know if I identify with that.”
The Times piece paints a complex portrait of Neeleman’s life raising her family and running Ballerina Farm. While much of her aspirational social media content shows the 34-year-old making homemade butter from the farm’s cows, whipping up pies from scratch and leaning into gentle parenting methods, she also addresses the paradoxical fact that she is making a lucrative salary from her social media presence.
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Also contradictory is the fact that while life of Ballerina Farm appears simple, serene and without a lot of bells and whistles, Neeleman’s father-in-law is the founder of several airlines, including JetBlue, which certainly gives the family an advantage in terms of financial security.
Other details in the article have rankled those critical of the tradwife phenomenon. The author of the piece, Megan Agnew, wrote that it was very difficult to have a conversation with Neeleman on her own, as her husband hovered around the interview and often interjected to speak over his wife or answer questions.
Others took concern with another line in the piece: “Still, Daniel says, Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
And at one point, the writer asked Neeleman if this was the life she dreamed for herself, with Neeleman admitting that no, it was always her ultimate dream to stay in New York City and continue ballet. She told the Times, “I was a good ballerina. But I knew that when I started to have kids, my life would start to look different.”
Since the piece was published, internet sleuths have been combing through the Ballerina Farm accounts, looking for more cracks in the life that Neeleman has painted as serene and fulfilling.
One now-deleted video, in particular, has ignited a lot of speculation about Neeleman’s true happiness and whether her husband is attuned to her needs and wants – she opens a birthday gift, repeatedly talking about how she hopes it’s tickets to Greece, only to reveal a small apron meant to hold multiple chicken eggs.
The Times article brought so much attention (much of it negative) to Neeleman and Ballerina Farm that she went on the offensive this week, expressing her displeasure with how she was portrayed.
The bigger controversy around tradwifery
Those looking beyond the bucolic and serene content produced in the tradwife space point out what they say is the crux of the issue with the concept of tradwifery: it refers back to a time when women were not considered equal to men and that their sole role was to support their families.
“This perspective is viewed by many as undermining the significant progress women have made toward equality,” Rachel Goldberg, marriage and family therapist, explained to Parents magazine. “Unlike stay-at-home moms, who may choose to stay home for practical reasons, such as child care or they simply enjoy household management, trad wives adhere strictly to traditional gender roles, driven by a distinct belief in their necessity and virtue.”
Stephanie Coontz, the author of six acclaimed books about the history of marriage and families, including her forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and the Challenging Future of Marriage, told The Guardian that while trad wives are likely nostalgic for the past because they are “looking back at a time when it was economically possible for a woman who didn’t want to work out of the home to stay home,” she argues that “none of these people would seriously want to go back to a period when a man had a right to rape his wife.”
Too, in a time when inflation, housing prices and cost of living is putting increased financial burden on families, critics say the tradwife trend glosses over the dangers or complications that can arise when a family is financially dependent on just one person — after all, it’s only a small number of tradwife influencers who have the followers and reach to be able to meaningfully monetize their content.
“None of the trending tradwife videos admit that being a ‘happy’ tradwife depends largely on two things: how much money there is for the household and how good of a person your husband is,” relationship expert Nicole Moore told Parents. “For every seemingly wealthy tradwife on social media who appears to glide effortlessly throughout their child care and housework tasks for the day, there’s countless others who struggle financially, feel crushed under the weight of it all, or are unfortunately dealing with less than ideal husbands and they don’t have the financial means to get away from them.”
“I do think that it’s dangerous to promote beautiful imagery linked to women giving up their agency and autonomy, not only because it is a false narrative about what life as a wife and mother is actually like, but because it idealizes a world where a woman has very little ability to survive on her own,” journalist Jo Piazza, host of the Under the Influence podcast, told PopSugar.
Pettitt, the original tradwife feature by the BBC in 2020, told The New Yorker that monetizing her content has never been her motivation and she considers herself a purist; for her, it was always the desire to share her lifestyle and Christian beliefs that prompted her upload content detailing her ultra-gendered home life with an online audience. However, she said, she’s watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the trad wives space has evolved.
“It’s become an aesthetic, and then it’s become politicized,” she said, of the movement in its new era. “And then it’s become its own monster.”
She told the magazine she feels as though the tradwife phenomenon has changed profoundly in the short time it’s been around. New generations of trad wives, she said, are getting “younger and younger, and more polished than realistic.” Too, she said, it appears it’s become more about notoriety, followers and performing than spotlighting a traditional home life in the digital age.
Media critic Caroline Burke, who has extensively followed and examined the rise of tradwife content on social media, explained in a recent TikTok video that many of these creators grew up in Christian households where they were taught that perfectionism is something to aspire to and that they are now “performing” what their faith has taught them about being the perfect wife and mother.
“The reason why we watch, and the reason (trad wives) do it, has much less to do with values or with making money…it’s about perfection. Perfection is really satisfying to watch and when you’re trained to equate perfection with value, it’s also really satisfying for these women to perform.”