The problems with the rise of the “tradwife” are dense and many, from their fascist undertones to their regressive gender politics, but the one that is most unnerving, most irritating, and most difficult to articulate, is that they make this life look so bloody delicious.
Tradwives are women who live, online and sometimes in Utah, as idealised homemakers. They cook, clean, raise children, and then perform and document these tasks (tasks more often, of course, taken on by those living in poverty), gaining millions of followers and dollars along the way. Last weekend, the Sunday Times profiled Ballerina Farm, the brand name of Hannah Neeleman who is a Mormon dancer turned beauty pageant winner, homesteader, mother of eight and, with about 18m followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, the undisputed queen of tradwives. She’s famous for baking pies, milking cows straight into her coffee cup and giving birth by candlelight before competing in the “Mrs World” pageant 12 days later.
Though men remain largely absent in the tradwife’s public-facing fantasy, Neeleman’s husband, the heir to an airline fortune, was all-too vocal in this recent interview – “We’re on His [God’s] errand a little bit,” Daniel said. “We’re on His errand a little bit,” she repeats. Neeleman’s life as depicted online, and that of her peers, is mesmerising, in that sinking, near-deathy way (“Come a little closer Eva, towards the light, can you hear the voices calling?”), but the tradwife I find myself watching the most is 22-year-old model, chef and mother Nara Smith. Her videos are nutty. In white couture, she explains that she is going to make, for instance, a grilled cheese sandwich for her toddlers and husband, before she starts to make the cheese from curds. The other day she made a glass of fizzy coke from scratch, in a sequined evening gown. It’s exquisite performance art and I love it, but it also occurred to me while watching her that I wouldn’t be surprised if the videos would, like an aestheticised Havana syndrome, cause brain damage to viewers due to undetectable radio frequencies. Inconclusive.
They are certainly having some impact: tradwives have been debated in every newspaper, magazine and on almost all the websites. Their origins can be traced to America’s religious “alt-right”, itself a reaction to progressive feminism, but even those of us who are pro-choice and pro-vaccines, and pro-women’s financial independence, find ourselves drawn to their videos, their spotless countertops, their muslined butter. This is because they speak to a real problem. It’s not the problem that one might think – that fewer babies are being born or that women have forgotten their rightful place. It’s that women’s domestic lives, today, are largely chaos.
Though it has been unbalanced for many decades, the pandemic threw this chaos into sharp relief. With schools closed and parents working from claustrophobic homes, not to mention loved ones dying, many women found themselves unravelling. Across the world they were collapsing, crying, drinking, unable to perform the roles expected of them, sometimes leaving their marriages. Many recognised that while the seemingly feminist husbands appeared to have been sharing the domestic load, the wives still bore the weight of the home. Of childcare, of cleaning, of cooking, of marriage.
For all the rights they had gained at work, at home their feet remained firmly grounded in the 1950s. So these tradwife fantasies appealed immediately for their simplicity. Partly their simplicity of movement, partly simplicity of thought. Despite the focus on extreme fertility, it’s clear theirs are performances where the mother is also the child, their primary responsibility to bake a loaf of beautiful bread (then post it on TikTok). The image of a woman in rural America who spends an entire morning arranging a posy of wildflowers in a milk bottle, or afternoon brushing their hair in preparation for their husband’s return from work, offers a radical fantasy of a straightforward exchange of care, and a fairytale of security, all ambition, politics, reality and self swept neatly behind the sofa.
I find myself less interested in discussing their anti-feminist agenda and regressive subservience, or the white nationalist politics bubbling alongside their soups, and more aware of why their videos of nostalgic, wholesome comfort appeal to so many today. No doubt they are influencing some men and women in dangerous ways, pushing them away from “traditional medicine”, and from acknowledging the drudgery of child-rearing, and towards violent far-right views. But their hidden influence can be seen quietly awakening unsatisfied working women, feminists who would never dream of reducing their life to the size of a kitchen, but, after watching the tradwives’ performance of domestic labour, put down their phones and see the imbalance reflected in their own apparently liberated lives.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
