Tradwives: A dangerous and regressive vision of womanhood

Tradwife: A woman who may choose to trade feminism and equality for traditional gender roles, often as a homemaker. The term is a combination of the words “traditional” and “wife.”

The internet’s favorite tradwife

I can’t remember exactly how and where I was first introduced to the idea of a tradwife. But I do know it was an online criticism of Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, who is probably the most visible instantiation of said concept. 

Neeleman is an easy target for internet outrage. She’s a Juilliard-trained ballerina who claims to have traded in a burgeoning career in New York to be a full-time wife and mother. She has 10 million followers on Instagram who watch Neeleman lead a dreamy, bucolic existence in Utah, where she and her husband own a working farm. 

According to the version of her life presented on Instagram, Neeleman’s days are spent performing endless manual labor while never appearing anything less than blissfully serene. She kneads sourdough, milks cows, collects eggs, all while being surrounded by a flock of children dressed in gingham cottagecore that we can only assume Neeleman made herself. 

If you weren’t watching her on your phone, with the ambient awareness that she’d filmed the content on hers, you might think Neeleman existed in some distant agrarian past. Her pans are cast-iron, her jars are Mason, her milk is raw. Her children are more likely to be seen playing with a hoop and stick than sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen. 

At 34, Neeleman already has 8 children, with plans for more, and looks more radiant and composed during childbirth than I did at my own wedding. I know this because she (of course) posts videos of her impossibly peaceful, beautifully lit, and (obviously) unmedicated home births. 

The real kicker is that in addition to being a former ballerina, Neeleman is a current beauty queen who competed in the Mrs. World pageant just two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child.

Two weeks after delivering my first and only child, I was still crouched in a Sitz bath, weeping and bewildered, feeling more like an old Basset Hound than a human woman. Encasing my wayward postpartum flesh in sequins would’ve seemed about as plausible in that moment as summiting Everest. Yet, there was Neeleman, trim and perfect, flashing a thousand-watt grin while betraying no evidence of having just borne an 8-pound human through 10 centimeters of space. 

Role model vs. business model

So, yeah, there’s a lot of hate out there for Neeleman for the very simple reason that she makes normal women feel like shit. 

Although you could make the argument that as an influencer, Neeleman is simply doing her job. She’s just one star in a galaxy of content creators who present highly manipulated portrayals of their lives in order to monetize our insecurities. Their income exists in direct proportion to their ability to make us feel inadequate. Because the worse we feel in comparison to an influencer, the more likely we are to fork over our money to buy whatever it is they’re selling.

But Neeleman isn’t your average Instagram model, calculating macros while doing squats and language-hacking Mandarin — all in the hopes that we’ll click on her affiliate links. What Neeleman is selling is arguably a dangerous and regressive vision of womanhood.

The most serious criticism of Neeleman centers around the charge that her sunlit, pleasing content is really a Trojan horse concealing a backwards, conservative ideology. She isn’t just arranging wildflowers and baking bread, she’s telegraphing to her millions of followers that a woman’s highest purpose is in the home.

And it’s working. 

Tradwife content has been gaining serious online traction for the past few years and it’s especially popular with Gen Z. Younger women log in by the millions to watch Neeleman and other popular creators like Nara Smith and Estee Williams enact scenes of domestic fantasy. They’ve even invented their own junior version of the tradwife, the #SAHG (stay-at-home-girlfriend), whose role is to support her boyfriend’s needs while engaging in rigorous self-care to keep up her appearance, all without having rights to alimony and shared property when it all goes to shit.

The beauty filter on submission

There have been many think pieces dedicated to why younger women might be drawn to this kind of lifestyle, which, in its truest form, is a strict division of gendered labor that leaves women entirely dependent upon — and subservient to — their male partners. But at the risk of being flippant, I think it’s pretty easy to understand why it would appeal to a generation that’s been raised in the age of social media, watching shadows in Plato’s digital cave. 

Tradwife content presents a version of life that appears perpetually beautiful, wholesome, and pure. I’m willing to bet that for the majority of Gen Z consumers, a tradwife is just another trending aesthetic — like Clean Girl or Stealth Wealth — rather than an actual life goal that will guide their decision-making to any measurable degree.  

But a tiny part of me secretly wonders: Should it? 

Waving the white flag

The question that nobody seems to ask is why tradwife content would appeal to someone like me: A middle-aged woman steeped in the tenets of third-wave feminism who would no sooner submit to my husband’s will nor homeschool my child than jump off the edge of a fucking cliff. 

But you know what I would do if I could? Stay home. 

I would “stay home” in the figurative sense that I would stop trying to be anything other than a person who attends to the responsibilities of having a family. I would be a mother. I would be a wife. I would be me. 

I would wave the white flag and admit that no, actually, women can’t have it all. At least I don’t feel like I can. Because in my now years-long attempt to be a successful professional, a good mother, an engaged partner, and a well-rounded human being whose identity is somehow more than the sum of those parts, I have failed. 

I fail everyday. I am always missing something. A meeting, a field trip, an email, a deadline, girls’ night, soccer practice, date night, a sock. I feel like a vessel that can only contain a finite amount. In trying to hold everything, I end up spilling so much. 

Of course, the irony is, I fantasize about escaping the demands of a capitalist patriarchy by returning to the oppression of patriarchal gender roles. The cognitive dissonance I experience in being both attracted to tradwife content and repelled by it is overwhelming. How is it possible to hold two such contradictory positions at once? 

Fortunately, I’m perimenopausal, meaning I don’t sleep at night. So I’ve had plenty of time to figure this out. And oddly enough, it was an answer given by Neeleman at one of her fancy lady pageants that helped me untangle my feelings. 

Asked to explain when she felt most empowered, Neeleman answered:

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