Is the Tradwife just a kink? Don't underestimate the happy housewife's power

The “traditional-wife” lifestyle has recently become a cultural juggernaut. Born of the reactionary idea that women must stay at home to care for children and the household, it teenaged into an aspirational trend which involved everything the dream Fifties stay-at-home mum did plus a soupçon of farmgirl hardiness (the most viral tradwives are those who run homesteads, muddy, ruddy and graceful). In 2024, she came of age, with Mormon model Nara Smith becoming one of TikTok’s top influencers by baking in exquisite ballgowns, baby perennially on the hip. Hannah Neeleman (or “Ballerina Farm” on Instagram), then broke the internet in July. An article in The Sunday Times profiling this “queen of the tradwives” crystallised the fantasy. It kept X busy for at least two weeks, as commentators argued over whether the newspaper had unfairly implied that Neeleman was oppressed. For part of the fascination these women hold is the conviction that beneath their mild and milky exterior, torment and frustration must surely lurk. As a result, the article focused heavily on Neeleman’s pre-trad career as a ballerina at Juilliard; look what you could have been, the piece seemed to say — and you packed it all in… for this? Feminists have, after all, been trained by Betty Draper, Mrs Robinson and the Stepford wives to spy the Prozac-popping crackpot beneath the painted-on smile; exposing the tradwife’s purgatorial “real life” has become a favourite pastime of internet curtain-twitchers — not out of concern, but prurience.

But speculation that these influencers are trapped by male fantasies is all part of the grift: it is no coincidence that Neeleman wore the infamous milkmaid dress on the cover of Evie last month, with the headline “The New American Dream”. Flirting with the aesthetics of Simone de Beauvoir’s archetypal housewife — a woman condemned to “immanence”, a passive and internal state of drudgery — is a deliberate provocation by influencers like Neeleman: dressing like a milkmaid transfigures the common-or-garden microcelebrity into both a sex symbol and a challenge to modern feminism. This is the secret to their success.

Inevitably, then, pulling off the “homesteader” vibe has become the focus of a multimillion-dollar industry, with blogs and books springing up left, right and centre — well, mostly on the Right. But the guides betray an irony of this trend: the real tradwives aren’t just about frilly dresses — there is a serious and sober set of moral values at the core of trad ideology, one shot through with puritanical and paranoid beliefs about the state, Big Pharma, the food industry and so on interfering with the closed, controlled unit of the family. This, after all, is why Nara Smith spends four hours making her kids cinnamon-toast-crunch cereal from scratch. Being this evangelical takes dedication. So the delusion that young mums can dip into this aesthetic without engaging with the conservatism at its foundations is worth a lot of money.

There’s a reason that the tradwife’s appeal has endured — it has, let’s remember, been a trend for a decade or more. It’s partly because the media adores the whiff of oppression that clings to her, hence the Ballerina Farm hysteria. She is also an ideal foil for feminism — beautiful, natural and meek, she is everything conservative men love, and everything radfems hate: perfectly poised for virality. And that’s because her role as a lifestyle guru means that her actual values — though generally Mormon, conservative and modest — are mysterious and therefore intriguing. Her fans are not looking for direct precepts; being told that abortion is wrong, or that premarital sex makes you worthless, would not be appealing. Instead, they want to cosplay a nebulously traditional woman by baking rye bread in a long dress.

So, fans see what they want to see. But are tradwives really oppressed? Must we save them? I would contend that the ambient conservatism of this movement does not necessarily condemn its adherents to servitude. Women, progressive or otherwise, have long found untold and unexpected influence within conservative movements. In the 19th century, American suffragists like Frances Willard led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a huge organisation which successfully infiltrated the male political sphere (and ultimately met its aim of introducing prohibition). In Britain, the Women’s Institute has always epitomised “soft power”; an organisation ostensibly centred around jam and Jerusalem was, in between knocking out doilies, raising awareness of HIV and AIDS alongside the Terrence Higgins Trust in the mid-Eighties, at a time when Margaret Thatcher opposed such leaflets out of fear they would see children “read and learn of practices they never knew about”. In 2000, the WI prevailed again when it embarrassed Tony Blair with a slow hand-clap at its Triennial General Meeting. On the surface, groups like the WI are anathema to forward-looking feminism — but this snobbery ignores the transformative power of such movements, twee as they might seem.

Take the first-ever meeting of the Smisby Women’s Institute in Derbyshire, in 1935. According to its website, it involved an inspection of “rugs, basketry, embroidery, leatherwork etc” and a “very enjoyable… social half-hour playing the game ‘Do you like your neighbour’”. Quaint — but beneath the surface, an unexpected ferocity. Jane Robinson, in her history of the WI, says it “made friends of strangers, confident speakers of the shy, and skilled craftswomen of haphazard amateurs”. Feminism’s aesthetic distaste for the trappings of domesticity tends to underestimate the value of such groups. The image of the smiling housewife is a superficial fantasy which ignores the practical magic of the much-mocked knitting circle — and besides, this fantasy itself is nothing new. Many such phantasms of cheerful submission have sprung up in response to periods of fraught liberation in the past, as the Fifties housewife hoovered up the trouser-wearing home-front girl of the Forties. These fantasies are a response to the naturally creaky way progress tends to settle; Sian Norris nailed the lure of the kitchen worktop when she wrote that trad lifestyles tell women “they can give up the stresses and strains of progressive, modern society … and instead be worshipped and adored as the sacred womb”. In this fantasy, we can escape the grind of the 9 to 5 and be “applauded, adored, and revered” simply for existing. We cannot blame some women, who perhaps do not like their jobs and feel let down by our bleak modern dating culture, for yearning for simplicity. Even less should we patronise them. To use a trad-approved metaphor, it’ll all come out in the wash.

With Trump back, then, this is truly the tradwife’s time to shine. Having packed out the Supreme Court with traditionalist nominations to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022, courted the anti-abortion Project 2025 and run a successful campaign spotlighting “model American families” (thank you JD Vance), the president-elect has made sure family values are back in fashion. The stage is set, as we enter 2025, for tradwife to become an “empowering” new forum. She could pivot away from pornified wenchery into a positive, collective movement, something the WI has been doing for more than a century. Though we feminists might scoff, there are things — hardiness, self-sufficiency, skill — to be learned from these women. And if we take a look at those much-mocked stay-at-home-mums who are riding the nu-Norman Rockwell wave, many of them are so successful they are out-earning their “provider” husbands.

But the danger for our modern milkmaids is the contempt in which the progressive media holds them — the obsession with their oppression, which risks driving them straight into the clutches of far-Right male fantasists. And for these men, it is a useful shortcut to subjugation. Of this route, Lauren Southern should be a cautionary tale.

We cannot, though, blame men in general for fantasising about big-breasted mummy/maiden figures; it is, after all, a way of managing anxiety about women being in positions of power: let’s remember Tony Soprano dreaming of a tender, linen-clad young mother on a breezy Sicilian afternoon, a counterpoint to his fraught relationship with the high-powered, sexy and unattainable therapist Melfi. Such wank bank material is not, in itself, noxious. The danger is that the courting of objectifying, porn-saturated and misogynistic daydreams risks trapping beleaguered mums in tight dresses and kitchens.

It’s the internet, then, and its tendency to sexualise anything on contact which means that, as with that boobalicious milkmaid dress, trad aesthetics are now at a crossroads between hardy, homespun femininity and the epitome of the sex object. To my fellow feminists, though, I’d propose that there’s nothing wrong with the former; as the new year arrives, the tradwife may, as in the conservative women’s movements that came before her, find herself in a position of great political sway. Let women embroider, for god’s sake, and dote on their hirsute husbands if they want to (in my case, dear old Brick would be getting served not homemade bread but divorce papers) — but the tradwife might well use her mettle, and increasing milky sway, to take a seat at the meticulously laid table in 2025. We should take her seriously. A feminism on the skids is one which clings to snobbery about ribbons and pinafores, and sneers at domesticity. Underestimate this happy housewife at your peril.

---

Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

poppy_sowerby