Tradwifery may be in retreat, but the damage these influences wrought is here to stay

Should forgiveness be extended to de-tradders recusing themselves from aesthetics they served out of commercial self-interest?

The tradwife pivot is on: some female influencers whose family, faith and from-scratch cooking content brought headship-of-a-husband “traditional” households into anti-feminist view are “stepping away” from the label.

As a feminist, my instinctive reaction is … fraught.

Tradwives are a subculture of digital content creators. They’re instantly recognisable for an aesthetic in which a heavily feminised gender role is performed with retro styling, harking to a fantasy past in which women were socially submissive, financially dependent and fastidiously joyful in their execution of unpaid domestic labour.

Among the soft renouncers is Nara Smith, the former teenage model and presumed Mormon convert who has been homemaking for her husband and children everything from bread to sunscreen in a parade of sleek couture since she married and started having kids at 18. Rich and beautiful, she has recently come clean that her 90-second videos take eight hours to make; that, yes, she has domestic help; she is “ambitious” for her career and business interests and – surprise! – has a cookbook to sell.

Smith also clarified, in a recent Guardian interview, that she was “never baptised” in her husband’s conservative Mormon faith. The church’s cultural insistence on strict gender roles and women’s performance of child-bearing, cooking, domestic labour and feminine presentation are widely credited as the inspirational infrastructure of the tradwife aesthetic.

Which is why it’s a surprise to see Smith’s friend and confrere, the still-very-much-Mormon mother-of-nine Hannah Neeleman of “Ballerina Farm” branding also reject the “tradwife” label. Neeleman was the subject of an extraordinary Sunday Times article in which her son-of-a-billionaire husband cheerily announced the wifely duties of his homemade-meal-making, milkmaidfluencer partner left her “so sick with exhaustion … she [couldn’t] get out of bed for a week”.

Yet Hannah Neeleman has been “reintroducing” herself since 2024 – through a series of magazine spreads – as an agrarian entrepreneur “prepared to take feedback” if people consider her content “doing harm to our sex”. Meanwhile, she’s retailing asparagus-shaped candles, farmer-themed electrolyte mix and protein powder “made with bovine colostrum”.

Smith and Neeleman are not islands. So common has the retreat from explicit internet tradwifery become that Massey University academics Veronica Hopner and Sophia Sykes have named it “de-tradding”.

Hopner and Sykes come to various conclusions. One affirms anecdotal evidence that women performing a role of submission and dependence in the home found themselves eviscerated by the unequal power dynamics they’d been proselyting. A model online mother-of-five hid her abusive marriage from the cameras until she discovered the husband denying her money to buy groceries was spending it on sex workers. Others speak of violence. Others of rape. In these scenarios, the action of “de-tradding” is content made by survivors that critiques tradwifery and explains their escape.

My solidarity with these women is not qualified. The conservative, cult-like religious communities from which many of them hail operate as sealed information environments; the 18- or 19-year-old girls married off within them are hardly encouraged to explore other options.

It’s the academics’ other conclusion that roils the morality, and the politics.

The explicit “tradwife” emergence online is frequently dated to around the mid-2010s, when the “alt right” were building internet communities around explicit misogyny. Simultaneously, the Christian nationalist movement recognised an opportunity for norm-breaking radical right politics when Donald Trump fused nostalgia and cultural resentment into electoral viability. Raw-milk-drinking, “natural” tradwives became emblematic of the aspirational woman within this unified worldview, and feminised “pronatalism” received considerable cultural promotion.

Not everyone calling themselves a tradwife is a white supremacist, but everyone who has replicated the instantly recognisable aesthetics of its performance in this moment has helped amplify its symbolic language. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about the American far right’s project to build a “womanosphere” of media products designed to culturally cajole women and girls into tradwife-like social roles as submissive homemakers. “Evie” magazine was such a project: one of Evie’s cover girls was Hannah Neeleman.

With the fracturing of Trump’s popularity in his second term – and with it, the institutional ambitions of his movement – the “propaganda assault” mounted on young women has, perhaps, lost some puff. Hopner and Sykes see de-tradding as resistance to personal brand contamination, which seems relevant. The escapist appeal of a deeply marketable, DIY-sunscreen “soft life” of personal domestic divinity is somewhat impaired by association with the ideological fantasies of creepy old white guys with starring roles in the Epstein files. Especially if one remains ambitious.

It’s not so easy for the rest of us to block the impact of destruction tradwives allowed themselves to represent.