Tradwives and the Monetization of Womanhood

The camera pans across a beautiful kitchen, artfully dusted with flour but lacking other signs of life. An elegant woman wearing a full face of makeup and designer gown slowly moves bowls and pots. We are meant to believe that she is cooking. A monotone voice narrates how the woman’s sister-in-law was craving bubblegum so she just “decided to make it for her.” After much rolling, cutting, and flour dusting, the homemade gum is finished. A second glamorous woman enters the video. Both women blow bubbles. This 1:09 minute video has 50.8 million views on TikTok alone.

Nara Smith of the monotonous voice-overs is one of the infamous TikTok Tradwives. Stemming from the term “traditional wife,” these women practice traditional gender roles in their marriages: raising their children, listening to their husbands, and baking lots of bread. Oftentimes they are strongly influenced by Christian or Mormon values and a nostalgic view of mid 20th century America. Key to the idea of the Tradwife is homemaking. The vast majority of content is filmed in kitchens and other spaces around the home, where women engage in cooking, cleaning, and childrearing.

What makes Tradwives controversial isn’t the fact that they are stay-at-home mothers or Christians. It is the way that they monetize womanhood and, knowingly or not, promote unrealistic expectations for women rooted in an alt-right countermovement to fourth wave feminism.

Hannah Neeleman, crowned “Queen of the Tradwives” by a recent Times article, has 10 million followers on Instagram. Widely known by her social media handle Ballerina Farm, this 34-year-old mother of eight studied ballet at the world-renowned Juilliard School. She paid for her degree by competing in scholarship pageants before becoming the first undergraduate at Juilliard “to be expecting in modern history.” After giving up dance to raise her first child with husband Daniel Neeleman, the former ballerina turned to blogging and eventually social media as an outlet for her creative energy.

Ballerina Farm’s content utilizes quite a different aesthetic than Nara Smith. Her content features farmyard animals, sweeping views of northern Utah’s mountain ranges, and images of Neeleman cooking or playing with her family. Oftentimes Neeleman shows herself barefaced, in simple cotton dresses or T-shirts. Her TikToks include the noises of her children in the background, and show the sometimes imperfect process of making food from scratch. Everything appears wholesome, realistic, and natural: A rural life where Neeleman and her husband embrace values from the past to raise a wonderful family.

It’s hard not to want the life Neeleman has. The cozy homestead with its wooden ceilings and green stove affectionately named Agnes. The horde of adorable children that help their mother with cooking and chores around the farm. A multimillion dollar ranch in rural America, where the local community gathers for candlelit weddings. Perhaps the reason why so many women enjoy this content is that we want to be Neeleman — the woman with a brilliant smile and flowing golden hair, who dances in green fields beneath a rose-tinted sunrise to Tangled’s “Kingdom Dance” soundtrack. More than anything else, Ballerina Farm’s content is selling Neeleman herself.

And that’s where the danger lies.

The Tradwife debate has centered itself on Neeleman — if she’s oppressed, if she’s empowered, if the life she leads is aspirational or horrifying. In the midst of this maelstrom of questions, speculations, and opinions is a real woman whose personal life has become politicized.

It is crucial to acknowledge that Tradwives are constructs of social media. These women are not stay at home mothers: They are entrepreneurs who entrance audiences of millions in order to sell an impossibility. They create a dream world online, where women raising a school bus's worth of children somehow maintain the perfect kitchen, the perfect figure, and the perfect attitude. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the feminine fashion or beautiful farm aesthetics that these influencers show in their videos. However, it is dangerous to hold all women to these standards or ignore the negative effects that Tradwife content can have on already stressed and overworked women.

The fact that Neeleman as an individual has become politicized, with millions of people on the internet offering patronizing advice or idolizing her, is unacceptable. Strangers telling women they see online that they are victims oversimplifies the complex reasons why women choose to live a more traditional life. Pressure from one’s community and religious expectations can certainly play a role in women’s decision making, but it is dangerous and antifeminist to assume that all women who post Tradwife content are oppressed.

The internet drama surrounding Neeleman and the Tradwives has illustrated how society needs to support women who embrace traditional roles without expecting perfection from them or making assumptions about their personal lives.

—Staff writer Laura B. Martens can be reached at laura.martens@thecrimson.com.