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 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, gaining millions of followers and dollars along the way.
Ballerina Farm, the brand name of Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon dancer-turned-beauty pageant winner, homesteader and mother of eight is the undisputed queen of tradwives. She’s famous for milking cows straight into her coffee cup and giving birth by candlelight before competing in the "Mrs World" pageant 12 days later.
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 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. It’s exquisite performance art, but it also occurred to me that the videos could, like an aestheticised Havana syndrome, cause brain damage to viewers due to undetectable radio frequencies. Inconclusive.
Tradwives’ 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 spotless countertops, their muslined butter. This is because they speak to a real problem — that women’s domestic lives, today, are largely chaos.
Though it has been unbalanced for many decades, this chaos was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic. With schools closed and parents working from claustrophobic homes, many women recognised that while the seemingly feminist husbands appeared to have been sharing the domestic load, the wives still bore the weight of it.
For all the rights they had gained at work, at home their feet remained firmly grounded in the 1950s. So these tradwife fantasies appealed for their simplicity. The image of a woman in rural America who spends an entire morning arranging a posy of wildflowers, 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 fairy tale 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 wholesome comfort appeal to so many. 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, see the imbalance reflected in their own apparently liberated lives. — The Observer
