Living through the unholy fever dreams of rapacious oligarchs, wannabe patriarchs, and their Christian Nationalist accomplices has been a hard slog so far. And, of course, it’ll get worse if they continue to gain more power over the rest of us.
One manifestation of that growing power, especially in the cultural realm, is the marriage of social media and right-wing, mostly white, tradwife influencers.
Much ink has already been spilled by alarmed feminists and others who are chilled by the thought that the Angel in the House is making a 21st century comeback.
I noted the creepy echoes of the tradwife in my analysis of Senator Katie Britt’s Republican reaction to President Biden’s State of the Union address back in March. Britt gave her whispery speech in her gigantic, beige kitchen, which featured an enormous island and gleaming surfaces. That island was the same sort of space many of the social media tradwives film their viral tutorials on. They instruct their followers on all things retro-wifely: how to make bread, churn butter, dice veggies for a 25-ingredient stew bubbling on the stove, and the importance of serving your husband and kids.
It's easy to be dismissive of the manner in which these women brand themselves and monetize what, after all, is a well-heeled lifestyle choice. In her profile on Alena Kate Pettitt, one of the OG tradwives who has since distanced herself from the moniker and the movement, Sophie Elmhirst notes this about the current queen of the crop:
Hannah Neeleman (who sells multiple products, including subscription meat boxes, sourdough kits, and three bags of farm flour for thirty-nine dollars) now has nearly nine million followers on Instagram and close to seven million on TikTok, and has been described as a new Kardashian.
Kardashian, indeed. If you check out Neeleman’s Instagram account, @ballerinafarms, you’re greeted by the winner of the Mrs. American contest—an impossibly fit, blond, beautiful mother of 8 who is Hannah Neeleman. Never mind that her household is made possible by her rich husband, whose father was a co-founder of JetBlue, she sells herself as just a humble traditional wife, keeping house for her family. What could be so menacing about that?
Answer: a lot.
Most of the tradwife influencers are either covert or overt Christian conservatives (Neeleman, for example, is a conservative Mormon) who peddle their brand of Christianity and, often, white supremacy, as if it’s the answer to all that ails contemporary women. The message is that women have been led astray by feminism and #MeToo, that higher education and careers are not only unsatisfying but go against our essential natures. That if we just went back to some moment in time—the 1950s? the 1850s? the 1750s? 597, when St. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury?—women would be so much happier with “traditional,” subordinate gender roles. Women could just lie back, close their eyes, and let daddy, er, hubby, take the reins, and all they need to do is pump out babies and cook pot roasts.
For most of us schlubs, that’s not possible. Which is the point. Tradwife influencers peddle a kind of porn, cottagecore for the white supremacist crowd, where women who are tired of the grind can retreat to a fantasy past and not have to work so damn hard. Except, of course, if you REALLY live the life of these women, if you REALLY have 8 (or 9 or 10) children and no one to help you with them, if you REALLY cater to every whim of the husband who controls all the purse strings and upon whom you’ve made yourself utterly financially dependent, your life is not particularly romantic, relaxing, or empowering.
When Monica Ainley of Vogue Magazine spent five days as a tradwife, she almost lost her mind and ended up diving into a bottle of wine by day four: “As I sip I think about the incidence of alcoholism in post-war housewives, and tipsily decide I’m not far from comprehending how it all came about.” Or, as Amy McCarthy observed on Eater when she spent two days cooking and cleaning like a tradwife and realized why women had been happy to “no longer [be] expected to do this kind of labor day in and day out”:
This is, of course, something I knew intellectually. I was aware that the feminist revolution, such as it was, was born from women who lived exhausting, unfulfilled lives and wanted something more beyond the home. And it’s not that these tasks can’t be fulfilling — I enjoy baking bread for people, and I’m thrilled when I make a meal that my husband loves — but the sense of obligation that tradwife thinking demands is crushing. It is truly never-ending, thankless, and totally uncompensated work, and there is real harm in glamorizing the idea of it, whether or not that’s what creators like Neeleman and Smith intend.
But the tradwife movement is about more than food, children, and keeping a tidy house. It can also be about “outbreeding” the libs. And creating propaganda to call people into the movement and then spreading it (doubt this statement? Check out the hashtags on these accounts and the suggested TikToks).
As one of my favorite Substack bloggers, Lyz, observes in her analysis of rightwing pronatalist movements in Men Yell at Me:
But whether you call it Quiverfull or being fruitful and multiplying, the idea of having children to colonize a land or take over an ideology is always eugenics.
Eugenics is making an ideological comeback, not that it ever really left us. This month, Elon Musk, who has decided the world needs more of his genes and has thus far fathered 11 children, tweeted that it should be considered a national emergency to have children1. Far-right activist Chaiya Raichik replied that she believed conservatives should “outbreed the left.”
And it isn’t just shitposters talking like this. The ideology is evident in the posts of trad wives — women who, at least in their minds, eschew the trappings of modern womanhood and dedicate their lives to being wives and mothers, and posting about it nonstop on social media. Books and articles encouraging people to just get marriedand have kids and fetishistic profiles of atheist couples who are vowing to breed smart children seem to be everywhere. The religion-free rebrand, dubbed “pronatalism,” is really just eugenics dressed up with hipster glasses.
The hipsters aside, tradwives exist to commodify right-wing ideology, as Sophia Sykes and Dr. Veronica Hopner argue in the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. Their work helpfully analyzes the various kinds of tradwives—religious, conservative, militia, countercultural (the right-wing kind)—and then focuses on how they deploy social media to amplify their messages.
Central to the tradwife identity is social media’s power to broadcast and sell the right-wing and Christian nationalist agenda:
Rooted in a perceived decline of patriarchy and the undermining of the imperative role of women within the family unit, Tradwives used commodification to encourage societal reinvigoration of conservative religious and fundamental heteronormative values of sex and gender. In buying into the Tradwife value system and increasingly taking up these conservative and fundamentalist positions, followers were, directly and indirectly, consuming the restrictive elements of right-wing ideology, including xenophobia, patriarchal social order, anti-globalism, and racial and ethnic supremacy. By leading and promoting the adoption of a lifestyle centred around the home (i.e. home-schooling, home-birthing, homesteading), Tradwives also ingrained a perpetual lack of trust in government and science through rejecting contemporary schooling and healthcare (for example). By extension, the influence of right-wing ideological entrenchment extended far beyond Tradwives and their online community(ies). The intergenerational impact of narrow, limiting, and highly traditional ideologies is a direct implication of the way Tradwives present, engage, and commodify their culture on social media.
As Sykes and Hopner put it, “Tradwives have successfully infiltrated mainstream media with their anti-globalist, anti-modern approach to life.” They also warn, “At its extreme, Tradwife culture commodifies the politics of division and intolerance that inevitably threatens social cohesion.”
In other words, tradwife influencers are doing more than just pushing an image and their products.
So the next time you’re compelled to hate scroll through a tradwife’s Instagram account, remember that you’re helping to spread their message…and line their pockets.