“Everything Is Tradwife” Is The New “Everything Is Racist”

Yet women who share similar experiences on social media are shamed, mocked, and told to stop peddling “tradwife propaganda.” 

Flippant use of the intended insult has produced a phenomenon I call “tradflation.” The tradwife label, once reserved for stay-at-home mothers, is now a pejorative catch-all for women who embrace traditional gender roles to any degree.

Tradflation fulfills the rallying cry of second-wave feminism, “the personal is political,” which politicized motherhood, homemaking, and traditional femininity. Now women are forced to justify decisions that were never rooted in ideology to begin with. 

Look no further than the persistent use of “tradwife” as an insult. Unlike “racist” (a term that has also been broadened to the point of absurdity), “tradwife” doesn’t carry a necessarily negative meaning. But the connotation matters. 

Popular media from the past few decades has tainted the image of the tradwife, reducing her to a figure as autonomous and intelligent as a home pet. The Stepford Wives, a popular thriller satire published in 1972, follows suburban housewives as they're turned from free-thinking women into docile robots. This suburban malaise is repackaged ad nauseam in movie and TV tropes. A new media landscape is threatening this monopolized depiction of home life: influencers are now showing homemaking in a beautiful, desirable light. 

Hannah Neeleman, also known as Ballerina Farm, is perhaps the most famous example. She’s made a name for herself through posting her daily domestic and homesteading tasks—hardly the brand of an ideologue. She often films herself cooking but has never publicly advocated for women to “stay in the kitchen.” In fact, she has publicly rejected the tradwife label.

Yet Neeleman has been made into the poster woman for the tradwife movement. When she released a video announcing her pregnancy with her ninth child, it sparked an uproar. She was even compared to Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid’s Tale, a “gender traitor” who abuses the women trapped as handmaids. 

Wanting to bake, garden, take your husband’s last name, or leave a job for motherhood is now flagged as a “dangerous pipeline” to the tradwife life.

The same formula has been applied to Nara Smith, another so-called “tradwife influencer,” although she too has rejected that label. Yet the fact that she married young, has multiple children, and posts lavish home-cooking videos is enough to mark her as a “tradwife” type.

This maneuver puts women like Neeleman and Smith in a category they never identified with. Frustratingly, when Neeleman and Smith earn money through social media or brand deals, they're accused of hypocrisy for “defying” gender roles they never claimed to uphold. They've been chosen as scapegoats not only because of the lifestyles they live, but because they seem perfectly content within them. The problem isn’t their apparent traditionalism; it’s their apparent happiness. 

The media has attempted to undermine this happiness in two ways: by framing tradwife influencers as either victims or charlatans. 

According to the first interpretation, tradwives suffer from Stockholm syndrome. They think they’re happy, but are truly confined, like prisoners, to their home. The second interpretation more cynically casts tradwife influencers as knowingly selling a false depiction of the serenity of home life. This is the interpretation of tradwife influencers offered in the bestseller Yesteryear. 

This framing undermines the influence of internet celebrities, but at the cost of isolating far more than fringe online communities. In casting such a wide net, tradwife critiques end up politicizing ordinary behavior. Wanting to bake, garden, take your husband’s last name, or leave a job for motherhood is now flagged as a “dangerous pipeline” to the tradwife life. Even posts that emphasize the importance of a woman’s cycle to her health and daily routine are dismissed as harboring ulterior motives. Tradflation has become so absurd that even spreading awareness of female biology is flagged as “trad” propaganda.

A third option is that women like Neeleman, Smith, and those who follow them aren’t victims or ideologues; they’re simply women. They aren’t peddling a nefarious agenda, or any agenda for that matter. Ditto for the women inspired by them. When every choice is political, women can never simply live. 

A return to normalcy is needed. While biology isn’t destiny, it also isn’t nothing. That women generally perform more domestic work, including spending more time caring for children, is an expression of an indisputable fact: men and women are different in significant ways. It is irrational to attest to this fact and act surprised when it's expressed in the way men and women choose to live. 

And live we must. There are those who will scoff at the suggestion that there is such a thing as “natural” femininity; let them scoff. We may simply say such reservation is itself rooted in ideological conditioning—the product of a “system” that has trained them to think a certain way about the world. The same game can be played with virtually any conventional wisdom.

The temptation to reduce everything to the product of political engineering is naïve. It vastly underestimates the complexity of human behavior and the intricacy with which customs and ideas are passed down from generation to generation. Norbert Elias wrote about this in his work, The Civilizing Process, in which he analyzes the emergence of the French State. As he puts it, “the interweaving of countless individual interests and intentions—whether tending in the same direction or in divergent and hostile directions—something comes into being that was planned and intended by none of these individuals, yet has emerged nevertheless from their intentions and actions.” In other words, spontaneous order.

The temptation to reduce everything to the product of political engineering is naïve.

The same holds true for conventional femininity, which is strikingly similar across time and cultures. Ask multiple people from different countries to describe a feminine woman and you'll hear similar answers: soft, gentle, nurturing. Have so many countries throughout history been built by people with a nefarious and coincidentally identical plot? Or is it the case that civil society is the type of thing, as Kenneth Minogue puts it, that “bubbles up from below"?

Femininity, like society, bubbles up from below. It isn’t exclusively defined by biology, but it is informed by it. It's the expression of women living their lives as women. Freeing women up to do that means freeing up the possibility that the feminist script—career first, family later—is transgressed. That is the real problem feminists have with tradwives.