The rise and rise of tradwives

Also: a potted history of vulnerability and why Leo Woodall is the new Di Caprio

One of the most controversial subcultures in contemporary womanhood right now is the tradwife. Writers such as Sara Petersen, Virginia Sole-Smith, Meg Conley, Kathleen Jezer-Morton and Anne Helen Petersen have documented them extensively. My friend Monica lived like one for a week for Vogue. But when gathered with a group of friends last week, it transpired that most of them still didn’t really understand what a tradwife actually was - and how she became an endlessly replenishing lifestyle meme.

I’m fascinated by all tropes of womanhood performed in the public sphere and so I thought I’d do a primer for anyone yet to learn about these reworked homesteaders. I called up Sophie Elmhirst, a journalist and author who recently published a long-read in The New Yorker about a British tradwife called Alena Kate Pettitt, to quiz her on all things tradwives. Below is a condensed version of our conversation.

Sophie, hi! Let’s start with the basics. What is a tradwife?

She’s a woman who lives a kind of idealised '50s-era life as a homemaker. She stays home, cooks, cleans, raises children and looks after her husband. In quite a lot of instances the trad wife has its root in Christian theology. Their favourite and often-quoted part of the Bible is Proverbs 31 which describes a wife who can weave flax, make linen garments and provide food for her family. It’s this sort of ultra-pure, hard-working image of perfected domesticity.

The most prominent and established tradwives who perform this life on Instagram - like Hannah Neelman aka Ballerina Farm (9m followers) - are mostly North American. Neelman has eight kids, runs a farm with her husband, milks cows and makes endless sourdough. She became the ultimate ambassador of homesteading culture - and a certain look developed for the second wave to follow. Old fashioned dressing and hair styling, and videos of them cooking and cleaning were all vital signifiers. And with the second wave of tradwives, such as Estee Williams, that content would be spliced with opinions about whether women should obey their husbands, or go to college.

Ballerina Farm was my gateway to learning about the phenomenon - as I think she was for many people - last year. I wasn’t even aware until I read your piece, that it was a lifestyle trend in the UK, too.

Ballerina Farm was also my way in. She broke into the mainstream through the sheer scale of her following and the grand scale of her life - the huge farm in Utah, the eight kids, the beauty pageants. Alena Kate Pettitt, who I wrote about for The New Yorker, never had such a large audience, but she was a great find because she was in the process of coming out the other side of the movement.

She'd been quite an early adopter - she first appeared in the British press expressing the importance of staying at home and serving her husband in 2020. But over the years, she gradually became disenchanted by the whole tradwife phenomenon online and how commercial and politicised it was turning. She has now come off Instagram and moved to Australia (although she is still blogging.) 

Alena was also unusual because most tradwife influencers tend to avoid the mainstream media. They keep themselves quite exclusively on social media, where they can control the narrative and how they are presented. Alena knew what she was doing: she had a marketing background and also felt she had a sort of duty to communicate what were deeply held values that she thought weren’t respected in the way they should be. I think she was more naive, however, about the political dimension and resonances of this subculture - she didn’t see and couldn't understand why anyone would make the association between the tradwife lifestyle and conservative or alt-right movements. 

Talk to me about that association. Do you believe, to quote Kathleen Belew in The Atlantic, that tradwife culture is a “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline”?

I don’t believe it’s a direct fast-track to white supremacy. But I do think that tradwife culture plays a significant part in the online culture wars and, certainly in America, contributes to a very divided political picture. The home is a political space and marriage is a political institution, as is the nuclear family, which the tradwife life is built around. A lot of the tradwives share their views on abortion, they homeschool their kids, they're openly anti-vaxx - which can all be a part of this deep suspicion that some of them have of the government, or state intervention of any kind. Home is a sacred space that should be untouched by the government in any way.

So are they a pipeline? Not directly. But Belew makes the point that if you're on some of their social media profiles it really doesn't take long, a couple of clicks, to reach some fairly worrying and more extreme political content. In that sense, they're a link in the chain, for sure.

Pettit dresses like a housewife on the front of those novelty giftcards that so often do the rounds at birthdays and her YouTube videos of knitting and jam-making are archaic, to be sure - but she also makes clear in that GMB video [linked above] that she isn’t suggesting we go back to the '50s politically, or socially, that it’s about picking and choosing which bits of past times work for you. Given that she had under 100,000 followers on Instagram - so she’d be considered a micro-influencer, at best - is it surprising that she was receiving death threats?

I’m don’t really use Instagram - except when writing stories like these - but I think that kind of content is very provoking for a lot of women. Firstly there's that feeling that a lot of social media gives us, which is deficiency or inadequacy. Maybe I should be making jam and staying home with my kids all day... But then there's the other reaction - which is “hang on we’ve worked really hard for this not to be our lives”. It seems to undo decades of feminist effort. And to hear someone articulate that this lifestyle - where you don a pretty apron and get given an allowance from your husband - is a legitimate choice, is massively provocative.

Alena told me that all the hate that she would get would always be from women and that she would get loads of support from men. But the flipside of that, and what sustained her, were all women who got in touch with her saying that they also lived - and loved - this life but had always felt it was something they shouldn’t shout about, as though it were somehow embarrassing. And then there were all the women who said how much they wanted that life, how they aspired to it. She felt she had uncovered a desire that a whole chunk of women were too ashamed to talk about or admit.

Do you think some of this nostalgia comes from looking at fashion trends now - the Y2K revival and the naked dressing trend, which I think terrifies a lot of women over the age of 25. And with how expensive travel is now, I think the idea that the home is ‘enough’ is also quite comforting for people (although that in turn demands that your home is a place you feel safe and comfortable in, also not a given.) 

I think that’s very true. Visually, sartorially, domestically - there’s a real comfort that people find in this content, the homeliness and wholesomeness of it. And when there's such economic insecurity, there's the attraction, too, of being safe, of being looked after. You can sometimes read and hear the yearning and relief of it in the comments - the sense of, “oh maybe I don’t have to be a girlboss / do the hustle”. There’s so much around this whole slow living thing at the moment, not working full-time, not giving yourself entirely to your job, and to an extent it interplays with that.

But then the irony of the tradwife influencer is that while some have made a genuine life choice to stay at home, there are a bunch of imitators who are in it solely for the commercial benefit. They have quite transparently pivoted from one form of influencing to another. It is a strategic career choice and they have simply changed their online identity. The home space also offers easy and cheap sources of content - especially compared to fashion and travel. Making sourdough, putting flowers on the table, hanging clothes on a washing line - these are all simply achieved tropes. In that sense, it can be quite an accessible identity. 

And what about the women who choose to stay at home with their kids - or who cannot afford to go back to work due to the prohibitive cost of childcare - isn’t it a bit unfair on them to call this a regressive choice?  

Yes, that's a totally fair point. For many women, it's a quick and dispiriting calculation to realise that you will be paying more in childcare than you'll be earning - and working starts to feel like a privilege. Or an indulgence that you can't afford. And that's in many ways a systemic and political problem. But if this is all a question of choice, then the luxury of being able to choose to stay at home based on personal values is not one they are able to make - they are being forced to stay at home by economic circumstance, whether they want to or not. It's not a choice at all.  

Alena on the other hand was in the privileged position to make the decision to stay home - her husband earned enough to support them both. So in her mind there's no contradiction with feminism because she is making a choice in the knowledge of all the other choices available to her. And she wasn't trying to make money out of being a tradwife. She really believed in this. I guess it's a question of self-determination: you can’t deny people the desires they have for their lives, but there's the question of whether they are in a societal or financial position to make those desires a reality.

Do you think this is just a tale as old as time, women making other women feel bad just by living their lives? Before it was Hannah, or Alena, it was Susie Homemaker across the road who was always better turned out than you, who was never late, who always made the best homemade cakes for the school bake sale, etc.

I think there are different types of tradwives. Some are engaged in what feels like an almost evangelical mission. They are not only displaying their lives but making a case for them, arguing their moral superiority and convincing others to follow suit. Others like Hannah Neelman, I think, are more interested in simply showing you their world. It's a largely aesthetic contribution.

For a lot of the former - the evangelists - their tone is very instructional. This is how you make the sourdough; this is why it's important to obey your husband. I think it’s hard for people to be impassive in the face of that. Their tone can feel actively judgemental - and their more extreme positions and most provocative posts [on abortion, etc] are often their most popular and successful, because it is always the most extreme content that the platform’s algorithm rewards. 

It’s very often connected with Mormonism and the Quiverfull theology - where the sole ambition is to have lots of kids. I think a lot of the reaction to this is “it’s irresponsible to have this many kids” (which is a whole debate in itself) but there’s also an element of envy, I think, about the whole smile ‘n grind thing of tradwife culture: like, “how do you birth and raise 8 kids? I have 2 and I have gone mad!”

I feel like so much social media thrives on that precise discomfort. The old, extremely tiring and yet pernicious "how does she do that?" feeling. And it's so deceptive, of course. There's so much you don't see - not least the making of the video itself. It is surely hard enough to make pastry from scratch while raising eight kids, without rigging up a camera to film yourself doing it. But yes, the whole multi kids thing is very interesting. What is it communicating? Fertility, abundance, wealth, health - and quite often a sense of the family as a source of power and a brand. There is also the huge narrative strength. I had a conversation with a friend recently and she said she knew of influencers who she thought had had extra kids for their content potential. Pregnancy as plot point!

Lord. (Literally.) I need a moment to digest that.

It is too spurious to ever prove. But still - the idea itself is extraordinary.

A lot of the tension - with Ballerina Farm in particular, whose husband is heir to a $300m fortune - comes from the hidden wealth of this lifestyle. There’s an excellent interview on Culture Study with Meg Conley (who writes about the intersection of women, home, money, and care) where Conley breaks down, at a time when American farms are in crisis, the Neelmans cannot be living off the land. A lot of the ire also seems to centre on the Neelmans having an Aga, named Agnes. That’s an expensive oven, but that’s less than they could spend on a car, or decorating their very bare house - all things which many middle-class content creators would and do. Talk to me about the oven. 

I guess the Aga represents the sense of deception that seems to lie at the heart of all this. It’s the centre of the conflict. As you mention with the JetBlue inheritance, there is this element of fraudulence. Yes you're working yourself to the bone and milking your own cows and living this very pared-down, simple life - but you’re being invisibly (or visibly, in the case of the Aga) supported by a fortune! You seem to be implying you are one thing and you are actually another.

And it speaks to what we were talking about before in terms of privilege and financial position - there are many women, at least in the comments of these accounts, who express a desire to be a tradwife but can't afford to. Most people need two incomes in the household. In a recent blog post, Alena Pettitt talks about a British influencer, Michelle, who lives a quasi-Edwardian life with her eight children, homeschools her youngest kids and is lovingly restoring the old cottage where they live. In her blog, even Alena acknowledges the privilege of that - saying how much she would love a home like Michelle's "if she had millions in the bank".

The thing about tradwife life, is that it’s an expensive choice. It’s a different way of using wealth and displaying wealth - and it appears anti-materialistic - but it’s still going to cost money. Most people have to have two incomes to live that way.

But there are two incomes. This is what’s quite boggling about the whole ‘“I don’t work, I stay home and serve” thing. Most of these women are earning! Hannah does paid partnerships with Fedex, several times a year. She sells merch on BF’s website. I reckon just with those two things, given her gigantic following, she can probably earn $1m p/a.

That's the crux of it. It's back to the Aga point and this sense of deception. This whole tradwife culture runs on the idea that you are living a simple, stay-at-home existence that is entirely in service of your family for whom you have sacrificed your own working life - and yet in the very process of exhibiting this you are creating a personal brand and coining it in.

It’s even in that Proverbs 31 quote. This ideal women makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes. Even in their OG set texts, the tradwives are hustling! Sara Petersen recently discovered that Utah has more MLMs than any other state. So there’s definitely a connection between traditional, Christian living and marketing/ earning.

And of course, there's that sense of the "woman's work" which is very real - I guess you could see the social media hustle version of that work as a natural extension of it, and not at odds with its values. But I don't know; to me it often seems like there’s a lot of externalised effort and marketing savvy going into making it seem like you are living a very innocent, pure, domestic existence.

The “woman’s work” you mention, the traditional “work of the home”, raising kids etc is work. It’s just unpaid. The irony is that social media apps rewards the kind of creative home labour that society does not. Is there any part of you that thinks it’s good to see this work remunerated? 

That's a really interesting way of thinking about it - and certainly that was a huge part of Alena's motivation. To celebrate this choice and this work, to have it recognised in a way she felt it was in the 1950s, but isn't now. But I’m not sure the apps are rewarding the labour itself as much as the most kink or politically provocative versions of it. And for all that this work in its essence should be respected and applauded, the problem is when it comes - in some of this content at least - laced with moral judgement, that sense that this is the right way to have a home and raise your children. And that implication that the other ways are wrong. 

I loved a comment under a piece I recently read about feminine leisure (or the lack thereof) which simply read: “adulthood is an ongoing challenge without a simple hack”. That says it all, I think.

Ha, yes. I think part of the fascination with the tradwives is simply seeing women who have made this very clear statement and choice about how to live and how to have a family. They seem so morally certain about their choices, whereas most of us are muddling through and questioning ourselves all the time on this stuff - should we be working more or less, are we doing the right thing, are we at home enough? Ultimately, we are all just trying to figure out the best way to live.

There’s a book by Phyllis Rose that I tell everyone to read called Parallel Lives - which is a biography of five Victorian marriages, first published in 1983 and  recently re-issued with an introduction by Sheila Heti. There’s a bit in the prologue that I find so insightful where she analyses what makes us want to know and discuss other people's personal lives. She's writing about marriage - but I think it applies equally to the hours you might spend down the rabbit hole of a tradwife Instagram account.

"We tend to talk informally about other people's marriages and to disparage our own talk as gossip. But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding. We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying. If marriage is, as Mill suggested, a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national elections."

Gossip as moral inquiry is fascinating. Will you continue to write about tradwifelife?

No, I think that's probably enough on tradwives for now, fascinating though they are. I always want to write about something completely different than what I’ve just done, so it’s on to the next…

You can check out more of Sophie’s brilliant work at sophieelmhirst.com. (I’m a particular fan of her 2021 long-read for The Guardian on the BBL.) You can also order a copy of her new non-fiction book, Maurice and Maralyn, about a married couple who survived for 118 days on a rubber raft in the Pacific Ocean before being rescued in 1973. It’s on my TBR pile and I’m excited to read it.

Please note there is some housekeeping (pun intended) at the bottom of this letter, about changes to the paid subs offering.

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BITS

I wasn’t sure how black and white would work for the new adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley - it’s the Amalfi fgs! - but it turned out to be the perfect choice to set it apart from the film, a colour-saturated millennial fave starring Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gywneth Paltrow. This new series, starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf and Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, has a totally different mood: Marge is quiet and serious, Dickie is well-meaning and gullible, Ripley is snide and doomy. I felt so tense watching it, I drank most of a bottle of wine on my own. My one criticism would be that it should have been 6 parts, I think, not 8.

Speaking of Andrew Scott this video recc by a reader of Scott and Paul Mescal answering questions about each other is charming. 10/10.

Speaking of thesps at the top of their game, I contributed to this piece on the mega-appeal of Leo Woodall. Yes, I am a very serious journalist. Although nothing - nothing - tbh will come close to the insane cultural imprint of Leonardo Di Caprio in 1997.

“He reminds me of Leonardo DiCaprio with a cheeky chappy edge… Leonardo was the pinnacle: more than mere man, he was a pop-culture moment.

It’s like we’re getting a bit of that, again. All the other up-and-comers in Hollywood – Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, Tom Holland, Timothée Chalamet – feel quite young and green, the preserve of gen Z. But I think Woodall is particularly charming to the millennial woman: there’s this sense of him having been there and done that. Of nothing fazing him.”

I am not going to exhaust myself - or you - by summarising Ann Manov’s takedown of the literary takedown artist Lauren Oyler (who became well-known for her takedown of Jia Tolentino, which famously crashed The LRB’s website) but if you’re looking for the litty-gritty, this piece by Freddie deBoer is very good. However I do want to flag Manov’s potted history of vulnerability, because I found it really interesting!

“In the ’60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his theory of the “vulnerable self,” a “true self” around which people erected the defensive “false self.” In the ’70s, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, which urged “avoidants” to become as comfortable with vulnerability as “secures” and has since metastasized into an unbelievably widespread pop psychology. In the ’80s, transpersonal psychologists like John Wenwood preached that vulnerability was “the essence of human nature and of consciousness” and that “getting in touch with our more basic human tenderness and vulnerability can be a source of real power.” In the ’90s, Carol Gilligan’s “feminist care ethics,” with its embrace of vulnerability and interdependence, came to the fore—certainly influencing [Brene] Brown as she completed her social work PhD… Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Gayatri Spivak have all recently called for what Spivak termed a ‘radical acceptance of vulnerability.’”

About a decade ago, a colleague of mine used to speak reverentially about what he called The Toast Woman. (He pronounced it Toe-ast, like it was an Italian city.) She was successful but wore it lightly; earthy and arty; she lived a life of substance and conviction. I’m not sure I embody her qualities just yet (I hope one day!) but how nice it was to take a turn as a Toast woman, for the day. You can see my curation for their very zen website, here.

I absolutely love The Hathaways, even more now I’ve read this interview with her in Vanity Fair where she talks about how “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online.” Just for being nice! I’m pleased the pop-culture pendulum has swung back in Annie’s favour. (Also has anyone seen The Idea of You, yet?? Is it shit, delicious, or deliciously shit?)

I had no idea about the origins of sweetheart lingerie until I read this moving, well-researched piece by Viv Chen. Her newsletter, The Molehill, is one of my favourite recent finds for smart takes on fashion and style.

When it comes to beauty on a budget, Sali Hughes is your woman. I don’t even think of myself as a ‘beauty person’ (still haven’t figured out if I should be using retinol and/or hyaluronic acid) but her piece at the weekend, 50 beauty bargains, was such a joyous read, full of great-sounding, inexpensive products. I’ve made a list on my phone for when I next need make-up or skincare.

Having interviewed him about his book Empire of Pain last year, I was already a big Patrick Radden Keefe fan. But when I read his extraordinary long-read-turned-investigation for The New Yorker - recommended to me by my friend Otegha - my jaw dropped. In 2019, 19-year-old Londoner Zac Brettler was found dead in The Thames. His parents were convinced he wasn’t suicidal - but the case was never sold, and the coroner delivered an open verdict.

In his piece, Radden Keefe pieces together Brettler’s fraudulent identity as an oligarch’s son, how that lead to his death - and crucially, who might be responsible. Last week, The Sunday Times picked up the investigative baton - uncovering new evidence. The pressure is mounting for The Met to re-open the case. I hope they do - and that this time, it leads to justice for Zac and his family.

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Ending on some housekeeping…

After much thought, based on what seems to be hitting/ keeping my offering unique, I have changed the paid subs offering. I will no longer be writing The List. I love - love!!!! - vintage shopping but there are now so many brilliant resources for shopping and secondhand curation on Substack, that for the time being, I’ve decided to retire this segment. (I recommend The Molehill, Gumshoe, 5 Things You Should Buy, The Cereal Aisle, Shop Rat, Add To Wishlist, Mon Review and Remotely.) If I discover something pressing I need you all to know about, I’ll simply include it in the Bits on the main letter.

Paid subs will now be receiving a monthly mix of:

• Shelf Request, where I answer a reader question with a selection of books. Themes so far have included books to lend your teens, books to learn about London, books to read to little kids and books for navigating grief.

• 1-2 editions p/m of Book Thoughts where I dive into one particular read. This is not!!! formal book criticism. I am a reader, not a critic. Sometimes it might be TV Thoughts, or a round-ups of movies.

• Extra Bits when my cup of cultural recommendations doth overfloweth.

• Book Chat with Bobby, a podcast happening every other month, which we recently migrated exclusively to Books+Bits (you can find last year’s archive on all podcast apps.) The first ep in its new home was on One Day by David Nicholls, the next will be on The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Our one rule? The books have to be more than 2 years old.

The order will be ad hoc in nature, as I like to keep things organic (dreaded word) rather than regimented. There may also be open threads - perhaps a lil AMA from time to time! - depending on my brain that week.

If you have feedback/ queries re: the above, please do reply to this e-mail (or you can ofc leave a Comment! I’ve said it once, I’ll say it thrice, I bloody love the Comments section.)

C ya Friday!