How the Trad Wife Took Over

Summary

Podcast Summary: Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: How the Trad Wife Took Over
Date: October 9, 2025
Hosts: Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz

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Overview

In this episode, The New Yorker’s Critics at Large—Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz—explore the “trad wife” phenomenon: a social media trend featuring women who publicly adopt and glamorize ultra-traditional domestic roles. Through lively debate and sharp critique, the hosts dissect why this movement is resonating now, how it interacts with culture and politics, and what it reveals about contemporary anxieties regarding gender, labor, and authenticity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rise of the Trad Wife Trend

[00:41-03:12]

• The episode uses Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and TikTok’s “MomTalk” scandal as a springboard to explore the trad wife trend.
• The trad wife is described as "a kind of domestic goddess who is packaging a pie of her domestic life to share with you, the viewer," actively embracing and promoting stay-at-home wife and mother roles, often in a highly stylized and idealized manner.

  "She is very feminine in her presentation, well made up, well coiffed, often wearing beautiful clothing, floaty, flowy dresses…here's why I think it's fun and great and let me share it with you." —Alex Schwartz [02:37]

2. The Allure and Contradictions of Tradwife Influencers

[03:12-06:37]

• Profiles like Hannah Nealman ("Ballerina Farm") are examined, whose content merges homemaking, childrearing, and rural aesthetics, amassing millions of followers.
• The world presented is intentionally consumable and picturesque, inviting viewers to buy into the fantasy.

  "They're kissing in a field with a baby. We see cows. The husband is wearing a cowboy hat. She's wearing a long prairie dress…this is a fantasy we can buy into." —Nomi Fry [06:14 - 07:02]

3. Prescriptive Fantasy & Internet Genre

[07:02-09:55]

• The hosts note how tradwife content isn’t merely descriptive but often prescriptive, deploying “ideological terms.” It’s part performance, part lifestyle advice, sometimes veering into reactionary spaces (e.g., anti-vaccine rhetoric, dietary extremism).

  "What's interesting to me about Gwen, Hannah, and others is that they're proposing their lifestyle as a kind of punk. It's like, this is alternative, this is cool." —Vinson Cunningham [10:18]

4. Tradwifery as Performance, Parody, and Drag

[09:55-14:45]

• Alexandra highlights Nara Smith, a Black influencer whose tradwife content is self-aware, stylized, and, at times, comic—likened to “drag.”

  "To me, all tradwifery is drag. It's drag. And what I kind of appreciate about Nara Smith...she really embraces the drag element." —Alex Schwartz [12:20]

• The genre’s performativity is underscored by outlandish domestic displays (e.g., making toothpaste from scratch).

  "When I'm all out of toothpaste, all I do is go to the motherf***ing store and act like a regular person." —Vincent Cunningham [14:16]

5. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: The Paradox

[16:09-19:04]

• The hosts shift to discussing Hulu’s show about Mormon “MomTok” influencers, who, while starting as traditional housewives, have become social media breadwinners and accidental subversives.

  "Any tradwvery of any variety is already a sham because this kind of thing takes so much work. These women are all media entrepreneurs, therefore none of them are trad." —Vincent Cunningham [18:34]

6. Performance vs. Reality and the Trappings of Choice

[19:18-25:32]

• The distinction between real-life traditionalism and performative “trad” is drawn; the former is rooted in religious or cultural expectations, while the latter is a marketable performance. The motif of “choice” and its limitations are debated.

  "Women should have the choice to be homemakers or not without being judged... and women should also be able to use the term tradwife... and not be shunned for wanting to be more traditional." —Esti Williams (tradwife influencer) [24:10]

• The hosts interrogate what freedom and choice mean in an American context lacking universal childcare and social supports. Alexandra points to her observations from Sweden, where mandated parental leave for fathers renders the concept of “trad wife” fundamentally different.

  "Choice is not a pure thing. The set of choices is not a pure thing." —Alex Schwartz [25:32]

7. Political and Economic Backdrop

[30:12-33:19]

• Vinson offers the devil’s-advocate conservative argument: feminism was a “bait and switch” for capital, prompting two-income households and a harder life for all, making the tradwife model seem newly appealing in hard economic times.

  "Are you happier, men or women? Why can't we again have the choice... for there to be one income and then the other parent stays home and tends to the house..." —Vinson Cunningham [30:50]

• The scarcity of social provisions in the US (like parental leave or universal healthcare) heightens the tradwife’s appeal, not necessarily out of desire for patriarchy, but as a response to structural inadequacy.

8. Manufactured Nostalgia and the Comfort of Process

[34:15-39:51]

• The hosts critique the “tradition” evoked by tradwives as a selective, reimagined nostalgia (1950s, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie) that omits hardship, poverty, and the key role of government support.

  "What is traditional about the tradwife? What is the tradition? Because in a lot of ways, it's a totally manufactured pastiche of what a traditional woman's life might have looked like in the past." —Alex Schwartz [34:17]

• Naomi acknowledges the soothing quality of these videos—the clarity of purpose and “consumable bits”—even as they reinforce limiting roles.

  "It presents a world that can be broken down into kind of consumable bits... And there is something very soothing about feeling like you can have a grasp of something with no kind of mess to muck it up." —Nomi Fry [38:07]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “To me, all tradwifery is drag...she really embraces the drag element.” —Alex Schwartz [12:20]
• “Any tradwvery of any variety is already a sham because this kind of thing takes so much work. These women are all media entrepreneurs, therefore none of them are trad.” —Vinson Cunningham [18:34]
• “Choice is not a pure thing. The set of choices is not a pure thing.” —Alex Schwartz [25:32]
• “Are you happier, men or women? Why can't we have again the choice...for there to be one income and then the other parent stays home...?” —Vinson Cunningham [30:50]
• “What is traditional about the tradwife?...In a lot of ways, it’s a totally manufactured pastiche.” —Alex Schwartz [34:17]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Main Theme: [00:41–03:12]
• Tradwife Social Media Personalities (Ballerina Farm, Gwen the Milkmaid): [03:12–09:55]
• Performance, Parody, and Comedy (Nara Smith): [11:48–14:45]
• Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—Paradox of Influence: [16:09–19:04]
• Debate About "Choice" and Societal Structure: [19:18–25:32]
• Political Context and Economic Pressures: [30:12–33:19]
• Nostalgia and Manufactured Tradition: [34:15–39:51]
• Closing Thoughts on Modern Dissatisfaction, Identity: [41:21–42:49]

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Conclusion

The episode offers a nuanced and critical take on the trad wife phenomenon, situating it at the crossroads of performance, nostalgia, and social discontent. The hosts highlight both the seductive aesthetics and the unsettling implications of tradwife content, ultimately arguing that its popularity signals deep cultural anxieties about gender, agency, and the structure of work and family. “How the Trad Wife Took Over” deftly exposes how an online trend reflects—and distorts—our broader search for meaning and security in uncertain times.

Transcript

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[Vincent Cunningham]

Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hi, I'm Alex Schwartz.

[Nomi Fry]

And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, guys.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hello. Okay, so we are here today to share a conversation we had a while back in part about the Hulu show the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. When we first talked about it, the show had just premiered, but clearly it's caught on. Its third season will be coming out in November. So the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is about a group of Mormon MomTalk influencers. I love the Mormon Church, but there are a lot of rules that we have to follow. We were raised to be these housewives for the men serving their every desire.

[Tradwife Influencer (Esti Williams)]

Have kids by the time you're 21, or in my case, at 16.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I'm like this.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Show me what you're working with.

[Nomi Fry]

There was a scandal in 2022 with these bunch of Mormon moms who love sharing their lives on TikTok and doing dances until scandal broke out. And one of them spilled the beans and said that there was a lot of what she called soft swinging going among the group with the husbands and wives. And so, you know, lots of drama. But also, there is a reason beyond the kind of like, fun, dramatic trashiness of this show that I wanted us to talk about the show today. And it's that it lines up really well with a trend that's totally captivated our culture recently, and that is the trad wife. Now, Alex, you have been begging, begging, practically begging to discuss the trend of the trad wife on the show for several months now.

[Alex Schwartz]

I've sent emails, I've sent texts.

[Nomi Fry]

No, she really has. We're finally doing it, and I'm so glad we are, because I think there's really. And what are some of the characteristics, Alex, that kind of define this figure of the tradwife as we come across it online?

[Alex Schwartz]

A tradwife is a wife. She is often a mother. She is very feminine in her presentation, well made up, well coiffed, kempt, often wearing beautiful clothing, floaty, flowy dresses. And she really is a kind of domestic goddess who is packaging a pie of her domestic life to share with you, the viewer. In the service of basically saying, yes, I've decided to embrace the traditional stay at home mom kind of gender role. And here's why. I think it's fun and great and let me share it with you.

[Nomi Fry]

Right? And it's a choice, but it also seems to negate basically every gain of feminism that we've had over the past like half century or so. And the accounts that are pushing forth this idea of trad wifedom are really, really popular. They have a lot, a lot. Millions and millions of followers. So my question is, why is this content trending right now? And why does it feel impossible to look away today on critics at large? The trap of the TradW? I'm curious, I guess when you guys first started hearing the term tradwife, do you have a memory of when these figures really started picking up steam, at least for you?

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a this year thing. For me, it happened in the way that things often happen on social media, where suddenly something has infiltrated, something is put before you and you notice it and then it happens more frequently. And then your friends start saying, have you seen such and such? And you get some DMs with some videos. You know, a friend of mine said, there's this woman who I follow on Instagram and I really can't stop watching her videos. And she posts under the handle Ballerina Farm.

[Nomi Fry]

Ah, yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

So I check out Ballerina Farm. And Ballerina Farm turns out to be a woman named Hannah Nealman. She has, at this point, I think, eight kids. She lives with her husband Daniel on a vast farm in a beautiful place in Utah where they do farm stuff, raise animals, sell products which are all packaged and marketed, and they also sell themselves because Ballerina Farm has. I'm just gonna. Briefly, you know, let's go to the account guys, if I may.

[Nomi Fry]

Let's go to the tape.

[Alex Schwartz]

Let's just go to the tape. Ballerina Farm has 10 million followers.

[Nomi Fry]

Is this on Instagram or TikTok?

[Alex Schwartz]

This is on Instagram. It's a lot of eyeballs on this person. And the reason she's called Ballerina Farm, I just wanna explain briefly, is that she trained. Hannah Nealman trained as a ballerina when she was a young woman in New York City. She herself, she is from a Mormon family in Utah. She went to New York City, started to train as a dancer at Juilliard, met Daniel Neilman, son of the founder of JetBlue, among other airlines. Grew up with quite a bit of money.

[Nomi Fry]

Quite a bit of money. Yes. Like, the dad is a billionaire.

[Alex Schwartz]

Let's just, like, take a look at one of the videos so we can, you know, see what they look like.

[Nomi Fry]

There is one that I watched that I think is really is a little more. It's not a cooking video. This is on TikTok. The caption is. I'm calling it a dairy date. Okay, okay, here, this is the one.

[Ballerina Farm (Hannah Nealman)]

When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch. It makes sense why he soon fell in love with the idea of a family milk cow.

[Nomi Fry]

So they're kissing in a field with a baby. We see cows. The husband is wearing a cowboy hat. She's wearing a long prairie dress.

[Ballerina Farm (Hannah Nealman)]

So for date night tonight, Daniel and I snuck over to the dairy. The temperature was perfect. Little Flora Jo was giggling, and the cows were gorgeous. It's the world we created, and I.

[Alex Schwartz]

Couldn'T love it more.

[Nomi Fry]

This has a lot in it. I just wanna say, right, we have the perfect marriage. They still do date night, right? They're loving, they're kissing. She's happy, the baby is giggling. They're making their own, you know, milk products. And crucially, they're gonna share these products with us. So this is a fantasy we can buy into.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know, I'm interested in the sort of more not only the portrayal, the descriptive aspect of how they live. Right. But the way that they also, I think, in their deepest form, become prescriptive that, like, they are not only living out this. Let's call it a fantasy, but are describing it in ideological terms often. My favorite, I think, is Gwen the milkmaid. Do you guys know Gwen?

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm not familiar with Gwen.

[Nomi Fry]

Tell us about Gwen.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Gwen is, and I think this is.

[Nomi Fry]

Really important, she would call herself Gwen the Milkmaid.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That is her handle on Instagram. And she, like Hannah, like many others, is like, always sort of in the kitchen. Often as she's showing you all the different, either playing with chicks or something like that, but often making things in the kitchen. But crucially, she is. And a lot of these people, just like we mentioned, Hannah, former performer, former dancer, Gwen the milkmaid is a former onlyfans model who then sort of has.

[Nomi Fry]

This, like, vegan, right?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Vegan, ASMR person, whatever, but then bisexual, also onlyfans, and has this sort of, like, conversion experience.

[Alex Schwartz]

You mean a religious conversion?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes, yes. She explicitly terms this in terms of, like, I don't find Christians as weird as I used to. And, like, I'm, like, changing my lifestyle, but Also a conversion, a platform conversion, you know, like moving from one form of Internet performance to another. And it feels to me she is like classically post 2020, which is how I think of all these people, which is like, you know, before I heard of trad Wives, I heard in 2020, like, the. Just like trad Catholic was often talked about a person who cares a lot about the, like Latin mass and cares a lot about, like, forms of religious traditionalism. And then I started, as you mentioned, like last year, ish Hear the tradwife the genre, which is really what it is. It's a sort of video genre.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. It's an entertainment genre.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. But they all have this, like, at least the ones that I've encountered this ideological edge. So like, let's watch this one of Gwen. It's like hard. You'll see the text go by. But I'll narrate some of the text. It's just Gwen. Like, there's music on.

[Nomi Fry]

Wow. The speeded up version of like the I feel like I'm Elton John and the don't go breaking my heart.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Don't go breaking my heart. But over it, it's saying hills that I'm willing to die on. And it says, red meat doesn't cause heart disease. Raw milk is nature's superfood. The sun doesn't cause cancer. Beef fat is the superior skincare. Butter over seed oils. So it's like all of these, like.

[Nomi Fry]

So it's anti vax Jordan and Jordan Peterson, esque.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What it is is really pretty women who are RFK Jr. It's like post. It's post Covid. It's post. Also. The two things that are happening at the same time in 2020, post Covid and post, whatever we call the post. George Floyd, Post Great Awokening. It is a reactionary movement.

[Nomi Fry]

It's a return. It's a reversion.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The same way that 2020 radicalized people toward like social democracy and new forms of communitarianism, maybe push people to the left in the form of like the Bernie movement and other things like that. The other thing it did was push people to the right and be like, here is why the world was wrong. Here is why, you know, various promises of the sort of like post feminist world, you know, made promises that obviously, like, the world is broken. Obviously they were wrong. Here is an alternative. And so it's weird. Like, it's almost. What's interesting to me about Gwen, Hannah and others is that they're proposing their lifestyle as a kind of punk. It's like, this is alternative, this is cool.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's right. It's cutting against the mainstream grain. I mean, I just want to say a couple of things because I have not yet encountered Gwen. Gwen herself is thin, long blonde hair that in a lot of ways is what the traditional trad wife. The trad, trad wife looks like a white woman who has this kind of, you know, very hyper feminine, almost Dalek aspect. There is another trad wife who I'm really fascinated by and I actually have friendly feelings for. Her name is Nara Smith. Okay, so Nara Smith is. I learned this recently from a profile in GQ that our colleague Carrie Batten wrote about Nara Smith and her husband, Lucky Smith. Lucky Blue Smith, lucky bluesmith. She's 22 years old. Okay. I knew she was young. I didn't realize she was that young.

[Vincent Cunningham]

She is.

[Alex Schwartz]

She has three kids. Two of them are toddlers. One is a baby. Nara Smith, like Lucky Bluesmith, her husband is a model. She is extremely beautiful. She is black. Her father is German. Her mother is misotho. And she is performative in a way that of course, all social media people and all trad wives are, but differently so. To me, all tradwifery is drag. It's drag. And what I kind of appreciate about Nara Smith is that she, like Vincent, you were talking about the performative elements she really embraces.

[Nomi Fry]

She leans in.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes. She embraces the drag element. She's wearing extraordinary clothes, many of them.

[Nomi Fry]

Very high, very high fashion.

[Alex Schwartz]

High fashion, Looking absolutely gorgeous, making outlandish things from scratch, such as cereal and the way. And we'll watch a video of hers in a second. But the way that she presents these things is itself comic to me at least, and I think to a lot of her followers. She begins most of her videos with the framing that a certain kind of food was requested by her toddlers. You know, my toddlers requested cereal today, but they want a different kind. So I thought, okay, I'll make two different kinds of cereal. When most people's toddlers request something, all you can think is what is the fastest route. Let me buy this real quick to get this. Not even buy. It's like, oh, do I have it in the cabinet? Whatever I got is what's going in your mouth right now. Because I need to stave off the screaming and the conflict and the chaos that's about to unfold in the made up world of the Nara Smith videos. What she does is calmly set around, set about making dough to roll into tiny little pieces to make cereal with. Let's Watch one of her videos.

[Nara Smith]

We were about to go to bed when I realized that we were all out of toothpaste. So my husband went downstairs to make some. Lucky is very precise in his measurements. So he started out by measuring some bentonite clay. He added that to a bowl with a tablespoon of water.

[Alex Schwartz]

My co hosts are absolutely wrapped watching Nara and Lucky Smith make toothpaste from something called bentonite clay. If you know what that is and you don't have to look it up. I guess, hats off to you.

[Nara Smith]

Two ingredients, which were some stevia and peppermint essential oil. We love our toothpaste. Quite minty. So he added a lot of essential oil before mixing that up one night.

[Nomi Fry]

Okay, this one is actually. This is kind of making me actively angry.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, I would say that this is an angering one, in part because most people, when they don't have toothpaste, and by most people, I mean all people, simply go out to purchase toothpaste.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, this is the one that makes me think it's like, sort of comedy, but it's also like, when I'm all out of toothpaste, all I do is go to the motherfucking store and act like a regular person. And then I come back home with it and use it.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah, like, what the fuck?

[Vincent Cunningham]

What the fuck was that? I think it's comedy. I think that's comedy. It's like, how do I make my life as hard as possible is like.

[Nomi Fry]

Actually the genre while making it seem as simple, as sexy as possible.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Fry]

In a minute, we're gonna be talking about the Secret lives of Mormon Wives, which in some ways is a complete 180 on the TradWife form. Stick around.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm Michael Kollory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[Nomi Fry]

Right.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin.

[Alex Schwartz]

Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.

[Alex Schwartz]

Affecting Washington and how they affect you.

[Katie Drummond]

Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Nomi Fry]

Okay, My friends, the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives just came out on Hulu.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's finally here.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah. The most important show of the past decade has finally arrived on our screens. Okay. Laughter aside, I do think there is something to the show that's worth discussing.

[Alex Schwartz]

Absolutely.

[Nomi Fry]

Especially in the context of what we've been kind of like talking about. So it's an eight part series coming out on Hulu. It's been pretty buzzed about. Can one of you guys say a little bit about what the show is?

[Vincent Cunningham]

It is in many ways about the sort of afterlife, the wreckage of a big scandal.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

There are several women, as described by the title of the show. They happen to be wives and they happen to be Mormon. And they crucially though, are part of a sort of group of, again, social media performers. And they call their sort of genre momtalk. Yes. One of the moms, her name is Taylor and we'll get into her.

[Nomi Fry]

Taylor, Frankie Paul.

[Vincent Cunningham]

She describes herself early on as looking like the cool mom played by Amy Poehler in Mean Girls. She's very much like, hey, fellow kids, kind of energy. And she sort of online, this was a big thing. It was covered by, among other August outlets, the New York Post. She kind of like came out saying that all these group, these women sort of inside their friendship or whatever, their ring of friends was also soft swinging. That was happening. That resulted in what sounds like very mild, awkward key parties, I guess. But this, like, given the milieu that they work in, which is like, a lot of them are devoted members of the Church of Latter Day Saints and sort of have a sexual ethic to which they all, at least outwardly, adher, this counts as a big scandal in their world. But in that way, it's like a sort of meta treatment of not only Tradwives, but any number of these phenomena. Because it's so explicitly about what happens when your real life contravenes the performance that you have put forward. You know, something comes forward that makes your online performance of, as we've mentioned, like a genre seem like a bit of hypocrisy. What it does is show that any tradwvery of any variety is already a sham because this kind of thing takes so much work. These women are all media entrepreneurs, therefore none of them are trad.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I know you don't want to make.

[Alex Schwartz]

A TikTok, but we've got to pay the bills.

[Tyler Foggatt]

I mean, who else is going to pay the bills?

[Alex Schwartz]

Who is currently like the breadwinner at home? I think all of us. Yeah, definitely. For sure. All of us.

[Nomi Fry]

Really? Yeah, we all are.

[Alex Schwartz]

Look at us.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Social media has been like the greatest. I would actually say you know that there is a big difference between the kind of social media performance that the women in the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives put on and the tradwife performance. And to me, the difference is that the wives, the Mormon wives in this reality TV show, started out as real traditional wives. I mean, I was taking some notes when I watched, as a critic does. As a critic does. And, you know, one of the first things that one of the wives says is we were raised to be housewives. And we just. She goes on to say, you know, we kind of found a sort of freedom in putting things online that represented a different side of life. After I had my first child, I had this. Is this my life now? Like, am I just a mom? Which I'm not saying is a bad thing, but I didn't want that to define me. And being invited to Mom Talk and getting together with these other women who had the same goals was refreshing and it was exciting. So when you look at Mom Talk, or when you look at the depictions of mom talk on this TV show, it's not like anything like what we were just describing. It's actually the exact opposite. It is not women in cute dresses, cleaning and, you know, taking care of kids and milking cows. It's the opposite. It's women doing what I also consider at this point to be a somewhat traditional genre, like content house creation. They're wearing tight black exercise clothing. They're doing coordinated dances, as you do on TikTok, and they're sexy. They're very purposely trying to be sexy and trying to show off a different side. It actually reads as a kind of gentle rebellion against the moris that they grew up with, but in a kind of charming way. To me, these women seem like behind the curve. The curve now is like, get out your gingham, ladies. We're going to pack a perfect picnic.

[Nomi Fry]

Interesting.

[Alex Schwartz]

And they're still like, get out your Lululemons. We're gonna do a little hip pop and toss our extensions.

[Nomi Fry]

I do feel, though, I mean, I totally agree with you, Alex, that they are kind of bucking the trend. They are engaging with the trend of the trad wife, of course, because they come from tradition. You know, they're like, 23, and they have three kids already, and they're married, and they were taught to be housewives, and they were taught to be helpmates and so on. And they're kind of like, pushing against that with their, like, hair extensions and so on. But there is something, you know, the kind of claim of like, we're going against patriarchy. You know, it's like we're like, we're not trad wives. We're going against the patriarchy. And they, it seems to me, in a slightly different way than the tradwise, but nonetheless, still completely beholden to the patriarchy.

[Alex Schwartz]

Nomi, I totally agree with you. There are two sides of a patriarchy coin. I mean, the tight athleisure, showing off your midriff, showing off your cleavage, your face looks a bit plastic and sculpted. All of that. To me, it's about a certain kind of male attention. And one question that's been asked of the tradwives themselves, and I actually think this is somewhat complicated, not totally straightforward, is are the tradwife influencers just seeking out a certain kind of male attention? Are the real viewers men who want to live this fantasy of a submissive woman? I think the complicated answer is no, not entirely. That a lot of women are really into this as well.

[Vincent Cunningham]

This is, I think, both kinds of both of these, like whether they're the classic trad wives or the Mormon wives. I think they would both answer that with a strident no. And I think the reason is basically saying I can have both things. I can identify myself as a mom, for instance, but also be interested in these other things. It's a way of saying no to a certain form of patriarchy, but also saying no to a certain hyper modern, let's say, Sheryl Sandberg, Lean in Style career first thing, too. It's like, no, I can have it all. The key ideology there is you people, you hyper modern woman who don't like what we're doing, don't like this. You are just enforcing another mandatory femininity on me. And no, we choose to be like this. And every time you say that, it's just a male thing. Every time you say this is just patriarchy, you are actually contravening my choice.

[Nomi Fry]

There's this video that I would like us to look at and to discussed a little bit by this tradwife influencer named Esti Williams. And she explains in it what it means to her to be a trad wife. And I think it touches on this.

[Tradwife Influencer (Esti Williams)]

Issue of choice, the misconception about the tradwife movement. It's not really a movement. Nobody's pushing it. People are typically just living it and maybe showcasing their lifestyle, like me. And we believe our place, specifically us as individuals, believe our purpose is to be homemakers. It doesn't mean that we are trying to take away what women fought for. No, Tradwife tiktokers are saying every woman's place is in their home. We as individuals are just choosing to be homemakers. That's all. To be a homemaker and to have traditional values does not make us bad people. It's 2022. Women should have the choice to be homemakers or not without being judged. And women should also be able to use the term tradwife, which means traditional wife, and not be shunned for wanting to be more traditional.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, of course, no one is really shunning. I do think, you know, the judging is absolutely happening. It's. Judging is rampant in all aspects of American life. So, you know, this gets to one of my favorite kinds of things, something that we all love, which is, how does culture influence politics? And how does politics influence culture? When you're talking about choice of any kind, particularly these ideas of women's choice, you have to ask what choices are available.

[Nomi Fry]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

In American society, the way choice works is, especially for a wife or a mother, has everything to do with childcare options, financial options, who's making the money? I mean, who takes care of the children? We do not have universal childcare, as we all know all too well. So choice is not a pure thing. The set of choices is not a pure thing. This may seem a bit out of left field, but I do just wanna say something that has occurred to me since watching all these videos and being kind of inundated in this very female world of the tradwife. I was recently on vacation in Stockholm, in Sweden. One thing that is so noticeable on the level of culture in Sweden is how many dads are out with young kids. Because the structure of the society is such that both parents have paid leave, and in fact, it's mandated that the dads have to take their leave. They cannot say, oh, I have the leave. I'm just not gonna take it. Like, they actually have to take the leave. And to an American, that looks totally shocking, indifferent. So what, like a trad wife situation look like? We could ask, in a society in which structurally and politically more gender equality has been created in the first place, it still might be there. But I dare say it would look somewhat different than in. When you talk about the idea of choice, are we just talking about false choices?

[Nomi Fry]

So why are tradwives having such a moment right now? That's right after the break on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Alex Schwartz]

I want a shark that.

[Katie Drummond]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.

[Alex Schwartz]

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.

[Katie Drummond]

Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alex Schwartz]

The end of this month is going to be a very busy time here at Critics at Large hq. First up, we are doing a live show at the New Yorker Festival. Nomi Vincent and I will be in conversation with the one and only Padma Lakshmi on Friday, October 24th at 8:30pm you can go to festival.newyorker.com to get tickets to our show and the rest of this year's incredible New Yorker Festival. We will see you there. But also, we are plotting an episode all about horror movies. So just to lay our cards right on the table, the reason we're doing this is because none of the three of us is particularly into horror. We are all scaredy cats. We watch the screen if we do it all with our fingers over our eyes. But we have decided it's time, it's time to face our fears. It's spooky season. It's October. We're going in. And what we want is to hear from you about why you like horror. If you do, what are your takes on it? What are your questions about it? What draws you to the genre? Can you just help us get our feet wet here? Because, you know, in the blood or whatever it is, we need some assistance. So please send us your voicemails to themailewyorker.com with the subject line critics, tell us all about your life as a horror fan. We can't wait to hear from you. And now back to the show.

[Nomi Fry]

We've been talking about the Tradwife. We've been talking about the secret lives of Mormon wives. Obviously, we're Having a moment with wives and with tradition.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, yes.

[Nomi Fry]

Why now? How did we get here?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. You know, the more sophisticated arguments from a sort of populist, conservative angle might put it like this. The 20th century, the late 20th century feminisms that we all know and understand were really a bait and switch. They said, don't you want to enter the workforce and leave the domestic sphere alone? What this really created was first of all for capital, more workers, more drones that can go into offices and do their bidding. And two, make it mandatory really for there to be a two income household instead of a one income household.

[Nomi Fry]

Right.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know, it really just created a harder life for all of us. And wasn't that bullshit? Are you happier, men or women? Why can't we have again the choice for. Why shouldn't it be possible for there to be one income and then the other parent stays home and tends to the house and yet somehow the other parent tends to be a woman? Doesn't have to be. But this is. But I'm laying out the sort of thing.

[Nomi Fry]

You're playing devil's advocate, of course.

[Vincent Cunningham]

This is what the smartest of them, the most sort of subtle.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Would say it like this. This is why. And this connects to all kinds of policy mechanisms as well. It's like, this is why we should have a child tax credit. This is why the pronatalism movement then becomes part of this. Right. This is why we should make it easier for people to have children, not harder. This is why we should make it easier. If a parent stays home, you should have a tax credit for that. It should be easier for our lives to sort of, if we want, return to this traditional ideal as opposed to the raw deal that was cloaked as a kind of feminism, but was really a way for capital to make our lives harder.

[Nomi Fry]

Right.

[Vincent Cunningham]

But this all depends on a sense that we all have, which is like our political economy sucks and life is indeed not easy for anybody who wants to have a family of any composition. The thing is, yes, it depends on that disappointment.

[Nomi Fry]

It's not completely wrong in the sense that of course, but from the perspective of kind of what Alex was saying about how when she was in Sweden, she saw young fathers kind of trotting around with their babies because they have paternity leave.

[Alex Schwartz]

In fact, I even heard an anecdote about American saying to a Swedish person, it's amazing how many male nannies there are here. It's like, no, it's just a different system.

[Nomi Fry]

And this is something we don't have here. We don't have the universal health care that would allow, you know, I mean, all of the kind of, like, possibilities of social democracy that we don't have here that make work in general and women's work in particular that much harder to. To kind of operate right alongside a family. So that's correct. And yet somehow the kind of result of this reasoning is women should be barefooted pregnant, which is not necessarily the correct takeaway.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Right.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, Vincent, you said something really interesting earlier that I've just been thinking about and trying to. To tease out a little bit in my own mind, which is you said that you think some of this comes from a kind of post 2020radicalization. And in some ways, I think skepticism might be the word that plays in here to why the tradwife phenomenon is happening now, such as a skepticism of, for instance, what's in your food. Well, that's not, you know, just a right wing or even a left wing thing. I think many of us are concerned. You know, we read about. We read about forever chemicals finding their way into our food, into our water.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Microplastics.

[Alex Schwartz]

Microplastics and such. There's a concern about what is actually happening and how can I control my environment and how can I take care of my own health and how can I take care of my family's health? It actually paradoxically reminds me of the hippie moment in the 60s, this sense.

[Nomi Fry]

Of back to the land.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. One thing that's very funny here is one question I have persistently that I want us to think about is what is traditional about the tradwife? What is the tradition? Because in a lot of ways, it's a totally manufactured pastiche of what a traditional woman's life might have looked like in the past. So one answer to that question is the 1950s. A lot of these women we just saw, I think S.D. williams is a key example, are hearkening back in their look to a kind of Mad Men era. I'm the wife who stays at home. My husband. I'm going to set my hair in curlers. I'm going to, you know, make up my face. You know, the character of Betty Draper in Mad Men is a perfect example of this. I take no responsibility for anything that goes on in this house.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I hate the bills, clothes on your back, the damn stables.

[Alex Schwartz]

Don't you dare. I'm here all day alone with them, outnumbered.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What about Carla?

[Katie Drummond]

Doesn't she count?

[Alex Schwartz]

It's not her job to raise our children. I'm here. Then you come home and get to be the hero. You want me to bring home what.

[Nomi Fry]

I got at the office today?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'll put you through that window.

[Alex Schwartz]

But of course, the 1950s was, in a lot of ways, the height of total artificiality in terms of products in the home. Food came out of a packet. The idea was, we're gonna make. The industry is going to make the life of the household easier, better for women. Yeah. And that's where you get this kind of female ennui that we've seen depicted in so much culture. You know, this idea of, well, actually, I don't serve a purpose. I'm really bored here. I have all these nice labor saving devices. I have my iron, I have my vacuum cleaner. What am I left to do with my time? I'm not. There's kind of nothing for me to do. This is where, you know, the triad wives themselves are saying, why are you so worked up? This is my choice. And I think the answer for a lot of people is because we fought so hard to not have that be the default. You are still presenting the default. You're just now presenting it as a choice. I think that is why, you know, we were mentioning it earlier, like Nomi, you said you had a real hate reaction to some of these videos. And I think it's disingenuous for the women in these videos to say, but why? Why do you feel so strongly about it? I think it's because it may seem to run counter to the culture. If the culture is lean in Sheryl Sandberg, but that has never really been the culture.

[Nomi Fry]

Totally. It's a much longer history.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right.

[Nomi Fry]

You know, for me, you know, when I was watching these Tradwife videos and thinking about the phenomenon in general, it really took me back to Little House on the Prairie, the Laura Ingalls Wilder series of books from the early 20th century depicting the 1880s where her family went west and, you know, very famously homesteaded. And I love those books. In a similar way to how I feel when I watch some of these videos right now. Cause they're about process and they're about making. Okay, a lot of them. You know, when I look at Inara Smith TikTok, there is something incredibly soothing about seeing kind of the steps it takes to make, like, a loaf of good bread from scratch. It presents a world that can be broken down into kind of consumable bits. Because the world is really complicated. Things are really complicated. And there is something very soothing about feeling like you can have a grasp of something with no kind of mess to muck it up in A way.

[Alex Schwartz]

Absolutely.

[Nomi Fry]

And I think that's the pleasure of it and of course, the trap of it as well, because where I'm watching it and I'm like, oh, how cozy. How nice. But I'm also like, wait a second. This is like you're choking these women, or these women are choking themselves. And we're watching it happen.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes. And it's important for people to know. And there's a wonderful piece published in the New Yorker magazine in 2009 by Judith Thurman about the writing of the Little House books, which I is so fabulous and I recommend to everyone. Little House is a fantasy. They're the TikTok of their day, if one can say. They're not diaries, they're not contemporaneous accounts. And there also is something fundamental about them, which is that this kind of hard scrabble, do it yourself world, first of all, has a lot of poverty in it. That's not something that we're gonna see on social media. And second of all, and Judith Thurman makes this point in her piece, the expansionism, the do it yourself ism of these pioneers is only possible if the government help. The government is building the railroads, they're financing the schools.

[Nomi Fry]

And in fact, when the railroads stop working because of the long winter, if everybody remembers, that was my favorite actually, installment, they almost die.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right. And there was this.

[Nomi Fry]

Yes, they can't do it themselves.

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly. So I find that really interesting. I mean, the other thing, you know, what a lot of this is making me think of in the present is we're talking about the ways that culture nostalgizes the past. And that's a lot of what's going on in our politics these days. I do think that is a big, big reason why 2024, like last year we talked about the year of the Doll. Guess what? The trad wife is the doll too.

[Nomi Fry]

She's making bread now.

[Alex Schwartz]

She's making bread. Exactly. She really bakes. We're still in the year of the Doll. We're in the world of the doll. Important, I think, to think about. We are in a post Dobbs America where women have less control over their bodies and therefore their lives than ever. And so that is why these choices are not merely personal, they are also political or this kind of framing of these choices. I do think it's worth saying we haven't mentioned yet that there was a big article about Hannah Nealman Ballerina Farm in the Times, the English paper. The Times, not the New York Times, that came out of the summer and Caused an enorm. Firestorm of commentary because the interviewer basically could not get her alone, either alone from her kids or alone from her husband. It was revealed that she, you know, kind of. Her husband basically seems to be controlling her life. And she had to drop out of school. She had to leave her ballerina life. She has given birth without epidural, except for once when her husband was not present at the birth. And she gave birth in a hospital and did use an epidural and kind of confesses, it was great. There was a whole other thing about her wanting to go on vacation and to Greece. Yes, to Greece.

[Nomi Fry]

Gets her an egg apron instead.

[Alex Schwartz]

And her husband giving her an apron instead. So, again, I think that lit everybody up with this sense of whose choice is it anyway?

[Nomi Fry]

I mean, there's these women online. Okay, why do we care right now?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think we care because, as usual with these phenomena, the people that are making the videos are doing it because they think that there are marks out there. Right. They think that there is an audience for this performance. And I.

[Nomi Fry]

To me. And there is.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And of course there is. But to me, the troubling aspect of that for all of us is that to me, it says there are lots of people out there who are dissatisfied with whatever promises our world has made them, and that that dissatisfaction centers crucially around the idea of role and identity. Yeah, Like, I always worry that a lot of our society, whether it's like politics, but also like whatever, academia, corporations, whatever, always articulate freedoms from. It's like, oh, we don't have to do this anymore. From gender roles, from the kitchen, as a space from X from Y. But is so bad. We're always so bad. And this is a creative artistic problem, often a problem of the imagination, but doesn't like, articulate freedoms too. It's like, so, okay, we're not doing that. So where are we going?

[Nomi Fry]

This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby, and Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Conde Nast's head of Global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from Jake Loomis with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] critics. If you're enjoying Critics at Large, go ahead and leave us a review. It really is helpful for the show. See you soon.

[Tyler Foggatt]

Hi, I'm Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast. A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the Political Scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment by having these really deep conversations with writers where we actually get into the weeds of what is going on right now and about the damage that is being done. It's not resistance in the activist sense, but I think it is resistance in the sense that we are resisting the feeling of being overwhelmed by chaos. Join me and my colleagues David Remnick, Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer, and Susan Glaser on the Political Scene podcast from the New Yorker. New episodes drop three times a week week available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nara Smith]

From PRX.