The Cult of Tradwife Influencers

Summary

Podcast Summary: Sounds Like A Cult – The Cult of Tradwife Influencers

Release Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Amanda Montell (with Reese Oliver)
Special Guest: Anne Helen Peterson

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Overview

This episode of Sounds Like A Cult unpacks the phenomenon of "Tradwife Influencers"—women online who are embracing and promoting a traditional, often highly gendered and patriarchal, model of womanhood and family. Amanda Montell, joined by team member Reese Oliver and guest cultural critic Anne Helen Peterson, dissects the tradwife trend, its aesthetics, underlying ideologies, internet subcultures, appeal to young women, connections to Christian fundamentalism and the far right, and how it might fit the show's cult spectrum.

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1. Introduction to Tradwife Influencers

Main question: Is the online tradwife movement a cult, or just a nostalgic lifestyle trend?

• Amanda Montell introduces the topic with humor, promising listeners “a PhD in the cult of tradwives” by episode’s end (03:04).
• Who or what is a tradwife?
  • Definition (06:30–07:00): “Tradwife” is short for “traditional wife,” referring to influencers who combine a specific aesthetic (modesty, baking, sourdough) with an ideology encouraging women to choose submissiveness, homemaking, and patriarchal gender norms over feminist empowerment.
• Amanda’s confusion: Tradwives aren’t always cosplaying. Many genuinely live these ideals, tying them to evangelical Christianity, Mormonism, or conservative movements.

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2. Core Characteristics and Tradwife Typologies

The Aesthetics vs. The Ideology

• Aesthetics:
  • Sourdough baking, flowing peasant dresses, soft domestic vlogs, vanilla-Instagram hues (07:45–08:47).
  • Reese: “The true trademarks are just aesthetically pleasing montages of nice, quiet, soothing domestic labor…usually the thin veil atop a ton of honestly cringeworthy at best and really bigoted abusive rhetoric at worst.” (09:10)
• Pipeline Warning:
  • Amanda: “You come for the calming visuals…pouring milk into one glass container from another…and you stay without realizing you are consuming covertly white nationalist content.” (09:47)

Three Main “Genres” of Tradwives (11:27–16:05)

Based on Anne Helen Peterson’s substack:

1. Evangelical Christians:
   • Centered on biblical submissiveness and motherhood (12:13).
   • Example: Morgan from "Paul and Morgan" YouTube channel—mixes Bible teachings, cishet gender roles, and conspiracy.
2. The “God-loving” Aesthetes:
   • Homesteaders, less politically overt, more into authenticity and natural living (13:50).
   • Example: “Ballerina Farm”—wealthy, Mormon, Oregon Trail cosplay, less open about strict ideology.
3. Stay-at-home Girlfriends:
   • Young, polished, secular-appearing, less explicitly religious—smoothies, skincare, and “clean girl” routines (16:05).
   • Examples: Kendall K, Nara Smith (whose Mormonism is subtle in the content).

Notable Quote:
“A lot of these content creators, especially the ones that are super aesthetic, are actually quietly luring you down the gateway-to-alt-right pipeline.” — Amanda (09:57)

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3. Deeper Dives: Culty Elements and Sociocultural Analysis

The Indoctrination Factor

• “It’s like a frog in a pot of boiling water. Your brain is being steeped in misogynistic, Eurocentric, anti-science ideals.” (18:42)
• Tradwife content is optimized to blend guilt-free #cozycore consumption with soft-pedaled regressive ideology—dangerous because it's so easy to passively scroll and absorb.

The Gen Z Factor

• The movement's spread to Gen Z is significant—aestheticized, “fun” packages obscure historically misogynist ideas.
• “Tradwifery is a complicated movement entangled in a difficult history of patriarchal religiosity, racism, and misogyny…but aspiring Zoomer tradwives are simplifying it…into musical video bites.” — Amanda reading Political Research Associates (19:23)

Defections and Real Consequences

• Some ex-Tradwives, like Anita Templeton, share stories about losing autonomy and fulfillment—making bread at 4 a.m., childrearing as a prison, and isolation (21:57–24:09).
• “Monotony, constant tasks, exhaustion—they distract you from the fact that you’re in a fucking cult.” — Amanda (24:09)

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4. Interview with Anne Helen Peterson (29:03–76:24)

Tradwife Origins and Evolution

• Cultural context:
  • Anne’s background in the intersections of pop culture and Christianity (29:59–36:19).
  • The evangelicalization of Protestant churches in the 90s led to more charismatic, “Rock Church” vibes, which blend into modern tradwife branding.
• Why are tradwives trending now?
  • The pandemic and algorithmic social media accelerated the popularity—“If I lean into [this aesthetic/ideology], I’ll get more views” (38:18).

Tradwives vs. Lifestyle Influencers

• Many genuinely believe in “biblical femininity.” Others are brand opportunists.
• Mormon influencers (like Ballerina Farm) rarely label themselves tradwives—they “show, don’t tell,” aiming to be quietly aspirational rather than overtly evangelical (46:13–47:21).

Notable Quote:
“It allows them to have very strict rules, a very strict understanding of their role in the home, in their marriage, as mothers. It’s very comforting in that way.” — Anne Helen Peterson (31:24)

The Culty Rituals and Practices

• Family Expansion:
  • Having as many children as possible, naming miscarried fetuses, ritualizing pregnancy loss—"almost a fetishization of these lost children" (55:46–57:10).
• Public Grief:
  • “A lot of tradwife bios will say, like, 'seven kids on earth, three kids in heaven'...they name every miscarriage…it's almost a ritual.” (56:30–56:39)

Intersection with Race and Reactionary Politics

• The tradwife phenomenon is almost exclusively white.
• It’s both an individual self-presentation and a symptom of broader anti-feminist, anti-progressive, occasionally white nationalist reactionary politics (68:21–69:47).

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5. The Trad Husband Question (64:26–66:42)

• Most “trad husbands” act like apathetic or passive patriarchs—“learned incompetency in domestic tasks is part of being a trad husband” (64:50).
• Occasionally, husbands appear in content (e.g. “hog fathering” by Ballerina Farm’s husband), but always as silent “heads of household.”

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6. Evaluating the Cultiness

Cult Comparison Game

• Who's cultier:
  • Born-into-it evangelical tradwives or converts? “Those who've elected into it are cultier.” — Amanda (71:04)
  • Cottagecore tradwives or 1950s homemaker tradwives? “Susie Homemaker tradwives…I think that there is a real ideological perversion [there].” — Anne (71:24)
  • Handmaid’s Tale vs. Jonestown comparisons: “Both lose power with overuse,” but Jonestown is “more insidiously cultish.” (73:55–74:10)
  • Tradwives or men? “Men.” — Anne (74:21–74:35)

Final Judgment

Is the Cult of Tradwives a 'live your life,' 'watch your back,' or 'get the fuck out' level cult?

• “Watch your back.” — Anne Helen Peterson (75:36)
• The tradwife movement signals larger cultural reactionism and can reinforce regressive policy, but most listeners aren’t at risk of falling in.

Amanda’s final note:
“We don’t need to throw Ballerina Farm in prison—she’s already in a prison of her own creation.” (76:13)

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7. Memorable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• “There’s a lot of sourdough, but why is it always sourdough?” – Amanda & Reese (07:54)
• “You come for the pretty aprons, stay for the white supremacist content.” – Amanda (09:57)
• “If you’re not a Christian, you can’t be a tradwife.” – Anne Helen Peterson (52:49)
• “Having as many children as possible is part of, like, tradwife belief system…let God take action on your body.” – Anne Helen Peterson (55:46)
• “We are willing to sacrifice apparently a lot of liberties to make the world feel more manageable.” – Amanda (21:57)
• “Part of the reason these women are doing their Instagram accounts is because they are so fucking bored.” – Anne Helen Peterson (67:49)
• “Men are the cultier.” – Anne Helen Peterson (74:21)

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8. Key Timestamps

• What is a Tradwife: 06:30
• Aesthetic vs. ideological breakdown: 07:54–09:10
• Typology of tradwives: 11:27–16:05
• Crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline: 09:10, 18:42
• Gen Z and tradwifery online: 19:23
• Defectors from the lifestyle: 21:57–24:09
• Interview: Anne Helen Peterson: 29:03–76:24
• Cult rituals: miscarriage memorials: 55:46–57:28
• Trad husbands: 64:26–66:42
• Cult meter verdict: 75:36

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9. Tone and Closing Thoughts

• The episode couples incisive critique with playful, sometimes irreverent banter.
• Both hosts and guest recognize their own susceptibility to the pull of these aesthetics—acknowledging the deep social, psychological, and cultural lures at play.
• The final take: Tradwife culture is not a “get the fuck out” cult, but its seductive blend of domestic nostalgia and reactionary politics is worthy of serious wariness—especially for young and impressionable internet users.

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For more on Anne Helen Peterson’s work:

Culture Study on Substack

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“Stay culty—but not too culty!”

Transcript

[Amanda Montell]

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The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Oftentimes I see that like a lot of cults, it happens after a trauma, after someone has had their life fall apart for some reason and they're trying to find a way to make the world legible to them again. And what trad wife life and Christian fundamentalism does it allows them to like have very strict rules, a very strict understanding of their role in the home, in their marriage, as mothers, in society. It's very comforting in that way way. And then there's this like external cult of people who are aspirational trad wifes, right? Or like are taking parts of it. So I think of it as kind of concentric circles.

[Amanda Montell]

This is sounds like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow I'm your host, Amanda Montel,

author of the books Cultish and the Age of Magical Overthinking out now, as

well as the host of the new Magical Overthinkers podcast. Every week on the show you're going

to hear about a different fanatical fringe

group from the cultural zeitgeist from k pop to CrossFit. To try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watch your back or a get the fuck out level Culture. After all the word cult, it's up to interpretation these days.

Today we're going to be talking about

the Cult of Tradwives. And if you've never heard this term before, if you don't know what the motherfuck a tradwife is, don't worry. By the end of this episode you're going to have a damn PhD in the cult of Trad Wives. Thanks to two very special guest voices that we're having on the show today. Stick around because later we're going to be doing an interview with Anne Helen Peterson, who is a cultural critic, an icon, a trad wife connoisseur.

Fortunately, unfortunately.

But before we get into that interview, I'm going to be bringing on a voice that is very important to Sounds like a Cult. That's usually a behind the scenes figure here behind the curtain at Slack and that is our intern, paid intern feel the the term intern can be triggering. Okay, everyone, please welco. Reese Oliver. Hi.

Hello.

Reese is an emotionally and professionally important voice at Sounds like a cult in 2024. If you've enjoyed a meme roundup on our social media on Instagram that sounds like a cult pod, you have Reese to thank. But the reason why I wanted to bring you Rhys on to help me set up this episode was because when we were having like a little editorial meeting, when I mentioned that had a Cult of Tradwives episode in the works, your face lit up like a Christmas tree in a trad wife's Pinterest ready farmhouse home. And I was just thinking how fun would it be to set this up together. So welcome and thank you.

[Reese Oliver]

Well, thank you. I am always happy to be here to info dump on all of my most niche and not so niche interests.

[Amanda Montell]

Reese.

Yeah? Why the glow to your expression when I mentioned Cult of Tradwives?

[Reese Oliver]

I am a huge lover of all things fundy snark related or just general religious criticism. I guess you could say I feel pretty lucky and that I am one of the only little white girls in my hometown that was not raised super duper religious.

[Amanda Montell]

Congrats.

[Reese Oliver]

Right? I'm like, you know, my parents had their ups and downs, but they really did their job there. So no offense, if you're religious or raised religious kids or were raised religious, I think that's all well and good. Unless you're a tribwit, which we'll get into, but just fell down a rabbit hole one day and here I am watching Nara Smith TikToks.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay, here's the thing is that I thought I knew what a tradwife was until I spoke to Anne Helen Peterson for our interview, which you're going to hear about later, and was filmed long before we did this introduction. I thought trad wives were a bit. Oh, yeah. I thought, like, even if you were earnestly participating in the aesthetic or even some of the beliefs, that you were performing for the camera and that at the end of the day, you did not actually live and breathe the tradwife lifestyle. But I've come to understand that this is not the case. So actually, just to back the fuck up, because there are plenty of people who are not in our same algorithm and don't have Ballerina Farm just kneading bread all over their Instagram feeds. For those fortunate enough to be unaware, could you help us define what a tradwife unit is?

[Reese Oliver]

I sure can. Short for traditional wife, according to Political Research Associates, tradwifery is a movement that's part aesthetic and part ideology, encouraging women to embrace supposedly feminine characteristics like chastity and submissiveness and trade feminist empowerment for a patriarchal vision of gender norms. Just what we all need.

[Amanda Montell]

Now that I understand truly what a tradwife is, that the ideology is a necessary part of it. When I see them popping up and I see them saying, like, my makeup routine before my husband wakes up in the morning, so I'm always beautiful, or even a subtler piece of content, like an aesthetic trending song on Instagram, and a woman, like, dancing around in a crinoline petticoat being like, I used to dress in a way that didn't honor my body. And now. And they're like, in a full blown Christy dawn peasant gown, I'm like, I love this for you. And then low key fundamentalist, evangelical and or Mormon rhetoric starts to enter the picture and I'm like, that's scary. So again, to break it down, tradwifes do actually come in many shapes and forms. We will go into these many shapes and forms later. But the core tenets of tradwifery are homemaking, submission to men, upholding your wifely and motherly duties with pride, dressing modestly. Those Christy dawn dresses, I do love them. I am a modesty blogger. Accidentally baking sourdough. There is so much fucking sourdough.

[Reese Oliver]

So much sourdough.

[Amanda Montell]

What is that? It's like, is it easier on the gut?

[Reese Oliver]

My theory is that sourdough famously over Covid blew up. Because it's easy. Everyone can make sourdough.

[Amanda Montell]

Remember sour bro. That's a portmanteau. That's a fucking portmanteau. Sour bro.

[Reese Oliver]

Put that on a T shirt.

[Amanda Montell]

Exactly. Boys who made bread in the panty were sour bros.

[Reese Oliver]

Exactly.

[Amanda Montell]

And it wasn't that deep. They weren't trying to say anything with their sour bro bread making, but trad wives are trying to say something and

[Reese Oliver]

they're saying, look at me. Make this sourdough.

[Amanda Montell]

Look at me. Make the sourdough follow by example. This is where women belong. Making the easiest form of bread. It's like once. Once you hit me with a. With a. Like a raisin swirl.

[Reese Oliver]

Yeah, make me a brioche. And then we'll talk.

[Amanda Montell]

Then we'll fucking talk. A brioche. Listen then. That's traditional. Now, trad wife originally became a term of interest in the early 2000s, in November of 2004, specifically according to Google Trends. But it only really started accruing interest in when January of 2020. Huh. I wonder what national tensions and sense of isolation and mistrust in existing institutions may have triggered this. And TradWife has been consistently increasing in searches ever since.

[Reese Oliver]

In the surge of this Tradwife content, the true trademarks are just aesthetically pleasing montages of nice, quiet, soothing domestic labor. This is usually the thin veil atop a ton of honestly cringeworthy at best and really bigoted abusive rhetoric at worst. The balance of aesthetic and ideology varies among the different varietals of trad wife you'll encounter on your journey down the alt right pipeline. Speaking of which, Catherine Belew of the Cuts Crunchy to alt right Pipeline said that you, you know, you come for the calming visuals of pouring milk into one big glass container into another glass container.

[Amanda Montell]

I do come for that.

[Reese Oliver]

There's always the sourdough, there's always the overnight oats. And you stay without realizing that you are consuming covertly white nationalist content exactly to your point.

[Amanda Montell]

To the cut's point. It is sending you down a rabbit hole in a way that there is the new age. I go To Bali and do yoga in Orange County. Oh, no. Oops, Fell down a rabbit hole. Now I'm an anti vax Q in honor. And the way that there is that pipeline that would never appeal to me because I'm not flexible and my hips don't move. Saying this pipeline would get me. All of a sudden I'm like spewing accidentally alt right rhetoric because I just love paisley. This is for the girlies who grew

[Reese Oliver]

up reading historical fiction. This is like, oh, it feels like I'm just reading a little book, but it's my life and it feels like a dream.

[Amanda Montell]

Oh my God. Do you remember those little diary books? Did we talk about this? It was called, like, dear America or something. It would be like, I'm Abigail and like I'm living through the civil war. You know, the pages with the gold on the tips. Oh, the gilded. Oh, I'm a slot for those Tradwives are coming for us. But I feel like we should walk through some of the key features in the classification and identification of these different tradwife varietals before we get into a teaser of the culti analysis.

[Reese Oliver]

So, yeah, as the title of that cut piece implied, steadily supplying the tradwife ecosystem with fresh meat to indoctrinate more TikTok obsessed preteens is the ever flowing crunchy to alt right pipeline. Yippee. This crunchy to alt right pipeline also functions as a little spectrum. So it's like an axis on the graph of trad wife subsex.

[Amanda Montell]

We do love a three category system here. It sounds like a cult. And so does Anne Helen Peterson, our special guest today. She has a fantastic substack called culture study. And for her newsletter, she wrote a piece titled hashtag tradwife Life as self annihilation. In that piece, she proposes three genres of trad wives. Okay, first is the evangelical Christians living out some understanding of biblical womanhood. Think submissive motherly duties. Picture a great deal of beige. So much beige. And honestly, during times of crisis and existential peril, I do see how that lifestyle or the illusion of that lifestyle could appeal even to progressives. You know what I'm saying? This is what makes tradwives confusing to me.

[Reese Oliver]

There's this one trad wife that I've seen online who used to be like a super alternative, outwardly queer quee reader. And she's like, fully fallen down the treadwise pipeline and is now like again, making the bread, pouring the milk. I think it's truly just like, wow, that, that sounds nice. And then you're racist.

[Amanda Montell]

This is how people join cults like NXIVM and Scientology and Heaven's Gate as well. It's a great deal of work to have to navigate the cognitive dissonance of submitting to a group that promised to save you, then feeling like those promises are not coming to fruition. But also, you've sunk so many costs, time, money, hope into this group. And also you joined it in the first place because something was wrong in your life. So here's the thing. There's this lady named Morgan. If you're on my side of YouTube, you've probably come across her Morgan of Paul and Morgan, the fundamentalist YouTube channel. You might also have seen them in the documentary Shiny Happy People about the Duggars. She's one of the ladies who falls into this category. Her content is very trendy, couple focused, lots of Bible teachings, a healthy dose of conspiracy, lots of cisheteronormativity. It's like, submit to God, submit to your husband, but also be famous on YouTube.

[Reese Oliver]

Paul and Morgan, to me, they're a lot more modern than some of the tradwives we'll get into. They're not necessarily making the bread. These are definitely a starter trad wife for people who might already be there ideologically but aren't quite there aesthetically. They're just making content about like, oh, here's how to be a good God honoring wife. All the ideologies there, they're just not as beige.

[Amanda Montell]

Literally not a single floral printed apron. Which like doesn't make sense because that's the best part. Okay. According to Anne Helen Peterson, Category 2 is God loving mothers. Okay? God loving and scare quotes who are more into the aesthetics and are homesteading. This is me. I'm like an aspiring trad wife who just like, there's like too much to swallow. I can't like fully get the whole entire vibe down my throat. But yeah, these folks are less urban. They usually live on mini homesteads. They're a little crunchier. God is definitely present here, but in a much less outwardly political capacity. So there's a famous juilliard dancer turned JetBlue heiress turned TradWife ballerina farm. You may recognize that name from our momfluencers episode. She definitely falls into this category. She is this like very, very, very, very wealthy woman cosplaying cholera stricken wife on the Oregon trail. There's also a Tumblr scene girl turned Laura Ingalls Wilder wet dream named Kelly Havens who would fit the bill of this category. She made a Vegetable mobile for her kids. That will never not be hilarious. And this is also where a lot of those sort of new age anti vax natural birth trad wives reside too. To me, that aesthetic is a little different. That's more like I gave birth to my triplets in a mango peel in Hawaii. As Anne Helen Peterson puts it, there's also a point where extremism on both ends becomes a bending line that eventually becomes a circle horseshoe theory. So you have your like divine pseudo feminist Bali ladies sort of marching shoulder and shoulder with alt right conspiracy theorists in this category.

[Reese Oliver]

Yeah, you might be different, but at the end of the day, you can both agree that sunscreen will kill you and that's. That's truly what matters.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, sunscreen will kill you. We need to destroy the elites. Okay, now we land at trad wife category number three, which is the stay at home girlfriend. She's the least biblical. She's the youngest. She's this girly. Think smoothies, Pilates, standing desks, unending skincare over consumption. Rhys names some fucking names. Who are these stay at home girlfriends?

[Reese Oliver]

One you might have seen is Kendall K. She's lots of here's my morning routine as a stay at home girlfriend. I make my smoothie bowl and I

[Anne Helen Peterson]

do nothing all day, but I look pretty.

[Reese Oliver]

And then if you have been on Twitter in the past, like three weeks, or at least on my side of Twitter, you've definitely gotten probably hit with way more Nara Smith content than you were wanting to. Nara Smith is like real weird and insidious because all of her videos are basically her being like, my kids were hungry, so I'm making them cereal from scratch. And she's doing it in like a gown, like formal wear. Like, she just makes cooking videos in formal wear. And she has like a little clean girl, sleek French bob, and she doesn't really say much and she's super, like, mysterious. But then people are like doing a little digging and they're like, she's a huge Mormon. So I very back and forth on whether she belongs here or whether she belongs in the category prior to this because she is a mom and she's definitely religious, but her content leans way more polished stay at home girlfriend core, if you will.

[Amanda Montell]

The Mormons are always so good at branding. Like, they pioneered the beauty blogger vibe. They. They pioneered the mommy blogger vibe. Like, they're just so good at making cultishness mainstream. Literally. Shout out to the Mormons.

[Reese Oliver]

Shout out to the Mormons. For all of our cultural influence.

[Amanda Montell]

Now we gotta get into the culty aspects because we're giggling. This is all fun and games, but there is serious bigotry here. So there is this one trad wife named Laurie who goes by the transformed

[Reese Oliver]

wife Lori is so terrifying.

[Amanda Montell]

Tell us about Laurie, for God's sake.

[Reese Oliver]

So if you are familiar with famous fundies and child abusers Michael and Debbie Pearl, who wrote To Train Up a Child, which is like one of the world's most disgusting books, Michael and Debbie Pearl are good friends of Laurie. A lot of her stuff is like way extreme, way bigoted, way gross. And then some of these tradwives in this category are like Nora Smith subtly dipping their toes into the white supremacist eugenicist content. This is definitely Mrs. Midwest if anyone's heard of her out there. Or some of them like girl defined. Just like to write subtle little captions about their Nazi grandparents and then ignore it the rest of the time and just biblical womanhood.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, girl defined. We talked about them in our Purity Rings episode. I was their like number one subscriber, aka paying their bills in like 2017 because I was fudgeing rubbernecking so hard at their content fundy car crash. So as if trad wives even needed a cultish analysis, let's run through some of what makes this the perfect and most nefarious cult of 2024.

[Reese Oliver]

So yeah, as we talked about with the crunchy to alt right pipeline earlier, with the tradwife content you are coming for the cute aprons and the scrub daddy montages and the vacuuming your beige rug like a frog in a pot of boiling water. Your brain is being steeped in misogynistic Eurocentric anti science ideals. Tradwife content is generally just the perfect combination of sensorially pleasing turn off your brain, just doom scroll brain rot side of the Internet and the side that is obsessed with categorizing and living up to the ideals of femininity. It just it takes all of your guilty pleasure social media time and uses it to indoctrinate you. Which is honestly so mean. Like I came here to have a good time. Why am I being converted so mean.

[Amanda Montell]

One thing I want to shout out is how this tradwife content has really come to appeal to Gen Z. This piece by Political Research Associates put it really well in their article why are Gen Z girls Attracted to the Tradwife lifestyle? They said, quote zoomers foray into tradwifery signals a massive change in the movement. Not only is this ideology becoming more mainstream with younger right leaning female audiences, it's becoming integrated into Gen Z Internet culture, taking on timely cultural trends, political views, and concepts of gender. Tradwifery is a complicated movement entangled in a difficult history of patriarchal religiosity, racism, and misogyny. But aspiring zoomer tradwives are actively simplifying it, transforming tradwife ideology into fun musical video bites easily digested by their followers in 30 seconds or less. So much to your point, essentially like that gateway style content gently lulls you into this false sense of security, as cults so often do, and then stabs you in the fucking back with these significantly less pleasant fundamentalist alt right ideologies all behind, you know, like, get ready with me. So we're going to get into our interview with Anne Helen Peterson, our very special guest soon, because once we do that, all of this chaos will start making a little bit more sense. But something very, very cultish that I want to point out for now that Anne Helen wrote in a piece for Elle is that proper tradwifery is not something that you can just dip a toe into. It's not something that you can just like, do for five minutes and then return to your regular life, your regular identity, your regular beliefs. It requires this all in commitment. I'm going to quote her she said tradwife behaviors seem to require a wholesale ideological conviction that a woman's primary goal is to be the helpmate of her spouse. They demand a subsumption of personal will, an unquestioning eagerness to bend to a man's desires, and a belief that those who don't are sinning against God.

[Reese Oliver]

Yes, as political research associates kind of echoes, these extreme movements simplify an increasingly complex world, one that is easy to retreat into through chat rooms and algorithmic recommendations. The nostalgia for a mythic past in which gender norms are dictated by a clear division of labor or the reinforcement of social status becomes appealing. And I definitely agree with that. There's something predictable and soothing that the human brain likes about the binary that gender provides. And what better way to experience that and to let yourself live that than combining it with like, consumerism and TikTok,

[Amanda Montell]

you know, 100%, just across arenas of life. Whether we're talking about gender, social identity, cultish affiliation, we like to put things in boxes because it makes the world feel more organized and manageable and like it makes sense to. And we are willing to sacrifice apparently a lot of liberties in order to make the world feel more manageable. Now, that said, it seems like there are some trad wifes who have defected from the cult who Were like, all in on it and then woke up to the serious damage that this lifestyle can cause. So in an article for Apple News, this one former trad wife named Anita Templeton of Littleton, Colorado, shared that she, quote, embodied the tradwife lifestyle for 10 years. At 4am she would start making bread and begin prep for the day's meals, always from scratch. This mother of four would do all of the household chores while her husband focused solely on bread, winning the other kind of bread. A lot of carbs in this conversation. Templeton, though, has since left this life, and now she spends her time basically educating other trad wives online and encouraging them to do the same. Kind of like the anti MLM movement on social media, YouTube, TikTok podcasts, but for anti trad wives, maybe we'll start to see that become more popular. She says that she felt, quote, as if the daily mental tasks were meant to distract her from her lack of autonomy and independence, which is something that we see in cults all the time. Monotony, constant tasks, exhaustion. They distract you from the fact that you're in a fucking cult. She also said that in the beginnings of her trad life, she hypothesized that the solution to her lack of fulfillment in life would be more kids. Kids, which only further embedded her into this life of financial dependence on her husband, which is something that I've seen in much more insidious religious cults like the Amish and other groups I shan't name because it's too fucking controversial where, like, women are coerced to having as many children as possible, in part so that they can never leave. How could they fucking leave?

[Reese Oliver]

You know, all of your resources are divided amongst your 10 children.

[Amanda Montell]

Exactly. And also, like, you fucking love them. Like, you're not gonna leave your kids. You're gon sacrifice your life for them. Also, I can't help but relate to this idea that having more kids would solve her lack of fulfillment, because I think we as human beings have a bias toward that consumerist solution to a problem. Like, oh my God, something doesn't feel right in my life. I need to add more things. I need to add more kids, more supplements, more clothes. And that's why there are so many consumerist cults in the United States, because there's this fucking capitalistic lie. And I would even like rope having more kids into that. That having more, more, more, more, more will save you. Templeton finally had to get a job after 10 years of not having one, which was extremely difficult. A major exit cost and she had to rely on food stamps from the government to begin her new life as a single mom. So that kind of like sets the stakes of what trad wives are getting into when they join this cult. What do you of tradwifery? Do you think this is going to continue to get worse and worse or do you have hope? Rhys?

[Reese Oliver]

I think as with most Internet cults, it's going to get worse and better at the same time. I would like to give a little shout out to specifically Dave, but also Bethany of Girl Defined. They recently did a collaboration with Paul and Morgan. And all of this is to say it seems like Bethany is moving in a more accepting direction with her content. A more sex positive direction for sure. Which is like pleasant surprise. But then on one hand it feels like those who are the worst might be getting better, but I also feel like there's so many more stay at home girlfriends now and so many more girls my age wanting to like get into that and like being indoctrinated. So it's getting worse and it's getting better.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, the damage is done. Like all of that gateway content is out there and that's just fucking done. Okay, exciting. Well, Rhys, thank you so much for joining me for this intro. So I feel again under caffeinated but glad that you were here to help me explain this ever confusing topic. Stick around for after our little breaky break because Anne Helen Peterson, the fucking granddaddy priest of understanding tradwives is gonna come here. I recorded this interview with Anne Helen like before Reese was even born. So she's not part of it. But I really hope you enjoy.

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Let's get into it. The Cult of Tradwives no one can see that I'm dancing, but I am thrilled to be talking about this with none other than Anne Helen Peterson. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to our listeners?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yeah, I write the newsletter Culture Study, which is a newsletter that's about thinking more about the culture that surrounds us. I do that like it's super broad so that I can really just write about anything that I find interesting. And I have a PhD in media studies and I used to be very much more focused specifically on the history of celebrity and the history of celebrity gossip. But those analytical tools have served me well as I've expanded to look at other phenomenon within our larger pop culture world.

[Amanda Montell]

Yes, and the interpretation of celebrity has become so Loosey goosey as celebrities are now in spaces where maybe 50 years ago we would have never envisioned them to be.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, it's so funny because I think that, that there is always anxiety about celebritization of new parts of media. And like, I spent a lot of time in the gutters of the 1950s pop culture press, like lots of different fan magazines and like there was so much anxiety over television stars. Like, imagine being anxious about television stars and teen idols also, many of whom were either like, oh, like maybe they can sing, but they don't have any other talent, right? So there's just this real like hierarchy of movie stars are the most important and everyone else is somehow like, if you are paying attention to them or if they show up in this magazine. It is an attack on the integrity of the pop culture world. And I think that we see that especially when people are like, oh, how dare we pay attention to influencers, whether they're trad wife influencers or like home decorating influencers.

[Amanda Montell]

Ooh, slick transition. Thank you for that. You're right though. And I do have to check myself too, because I can slip into that like moral panic of like, stay in your lane celebrity, because the worst case scenarios are like the Donald trumps and the Dr. Oz's and the whatnot. But we do need to remember that that type of panic is nothing new at all. But onto the topic at hand, when I say the cult of trad wives, what does that mean to you exactly? The cultish aspect of it?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, I mean, there's the people who are like in the world, right? Like deeply invested in the world. And I think that if you are not super familiar with fundamental Christianity, then this is hard to understand. But like a lot people who espouse this ideology have never known any other way, right. And who understand choosing to live not this way as choosing damnation for themselves and their family. Right. I think that that's hard for a lot of us who understand personal choice as like a cornucopia of like different ways that we can find happiness. Right. When you are within this fundamentalist worldview, it's like, if I try to escape or if I try to leave this, then, then we're all going to hell forever. And so there are those people who've grown up into it or who have been otherwise inculcated, which is a great word because it sounds like cult into that world. Oftentimes I see that like a lot of cults, it happens after a trauma, after someone has had their life fall apart for Some reason. And they're trying to find a way to make the world legible to them again. And what trad wife life and Christian fundamentalism does, it allows them to, like, have very strict rules, a very strict understanding of their role in the home, in their marriage, as mothers, in society. It's very comforting in that way. And then there's this, like, external cult of people who are aspirational. Trad wives. Right. Or, like, are taking parts of it. So I think of it as kind of concentric circles.

[Reese Oliver]

Mm.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Mm.

[Amanda Montell]

I always go back to that fleabag quote when she's going through a rough time and she's in the confessional with the hot priest and her life feels unmanageable, and she just is pleading to him, I want someone to tell me who to vote for, what band to like, who to love, how to love them. And it's no coincidence that she's in, like, a religious space having that crisis, begging this person to tell her what to do. And I love that point of, like, it's exactly what you said. It's just a way to make the world feel more legible and not worrying about the consequences, because the most urgent desire is just like, I need to get grounded in something that feels manageable. I want to back up, though. Could you sort of explain to the listeners how you developed an interest in tradwives and in writing about them to begin with and some of the work that you've done looking into tradwives?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yeah. You know, I think, like, a lot of things about the way that Christianity and evangelical Christianity manifests online. It's one of those things that other people in my universe were like, oh, my God, can you believe this? And I'm like, yes. So I grew up Presbyterian, but. But in the 90s, a lot of churches that were what's called mainline Protestant. So mainline is, like, basically like any of these Protestant religions that you can think of that had churches and suburbs. Right. So, like, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, all those sorts of things. A lot of them took a little bit of a evangelical flare in the

[Amanda Montell]

1990s because the evangelicalisms had their mega churches and their fabulous Christian rock. I mean, a chord progression. The evangelical angels mastered the chord progression is what they did.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Just, like, raising your hand, like, having that. What's known as, like, a charismatic experience in worship of, like, raising your hand and closing your eyes and, like, feeling the spirit wash over you. Like, that is a very evangelical pivot from, like. Presbyterians were known as the frozen chosen. Like, you did not do that sort of movement. And then Suddenly in the 90s, we had like an early service with guitars. Right, right. And it was also, I think, especially prevalent in the way that pastors were speaking to the youth. Like, you had a bunch of evangelical movements happening on a national scale in terms of, like, purity movements and like, trying to make Christianity more prevalent in schools. Right. See you at the pole was one that I. That I remember where you, like, went and prayed at school in the morning. So I grew up around a lot of this stuff. And I understand how, like, where I was positioned. I knew people both in my friend group and then also who I went to church camp with, who had taken it to a further extent. Right. Who are more in the evangelical, non denominational, some of them fundamentalist, don't believe in evolution, that sort of thing, and much more traditional understanding of wives in the home. I also grew up in Idaho around a lot of Mormons, and I was familiar with lots of families whose the way that their family was organized was not dissimilar to a tradwife. It probably wasn't as explicit. Some of the rules that tradwives like, broadcast in terms of, like, you submit to your husband and that sort of thing. But that is very much written into the way that a lot of not progressive Mormons understand, like, the way the family should be. So my interest, like, a lot of the stuff was like, I already know a lot about this. I should, like, think about it more and how it's manifesting now, why it's popular now, that sort of thing.

[Amanda Montell]

Right.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And I think I also saw it popping up a lot in another area of my work, which is. So when we talk about what different parts of Idaho are known for, I'm from north Idaho, which is known for racists and neo Nazis. And now, like, the. The extreme far right. And this has been the case for decades. There was an arid nation compound in north Idaho where, like, if I talk to people who are my parents generation and you say you're from north Idaho, that's what they bring up. And now it's just a lot of, like, people fleeing California because there's too much unrest there.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay. So this is the type of trad wife that I think of as, like, the canonical trad wife is someone who aspired to a more liberated world and the reality did not meet their expectations. And so they were like, you know what? I reject it all. I'm going to Idaho and I'm gonna bake and I'm gonna submit to my husband. Am I mistaken?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And those trad wives are usually, like, really hot. Right. Because the thing is that they've already become incredibly familiar with the vernacular of social media and how they should dress, how to do their hair, all that sort of thing. Whereas the trad wives that I knew had hair down to their butts and braided it and would never, ever show off their shoulders are much more conservative in that capacity. They are not social media ready.

[Amanda Montell]

It's not a Christy dawn dress. The puffy sleeves are so much more honest than that. Okay, but those people would never call themselves a tradwife because trad wife is like a branding exercise. They're just a woman as far as they're concerned.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

No, they would say that they follow the teaching of biblical femininity.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay, so then speaking of why trad wifes are like, in the zeitgeist now and where that term came from, can you, like, set the scene a little bit? Why? I feel like a year and a half ago, did this term tradwife seem to explode all over the Internet?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, I think there was a handful of people doing exactly what you described who wanted to figure out their influencer brand and, like, move to places like Idaho and started hashtag homesteading in the

[Amanda Montell]

pandemic, it feels like.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yeah. And in the pandemic, I think a couple of them had this before. The roots were there, obviously, for online performance of this sort of lifestyle. Like, Mormon mommy blogging was absolutely doing this long before the trad wife was. But I think there's a whole bunch of different Internet niches that people went deep in over the pandemic. Right. And so when something seems to, like, hit the algorithm, this is particularly true on TikTok, right? You're like, oh, well, if I do more of that, if I lean into that, then that will make my account more popular, all that sort of thing. So I think that, like, some people who may have thought of themselves as just like conservative mom became tradwaves in the way that they marketed themselves and the what they emphasized in their content. And then it became somewhat of like a panic point, right? An anxiety point of people saying, why is this happening? This seems so retrograde. Which include, you know, that made it so that more people like you and I were following them so they would make more content. So you have people who are like, oppositionally watching them, and then people who are watching them because they actually see them as aspirational. And I think that that actually a much smaller percentage.

[Amanda Montell]

Well, I can't tell which I am because I don't want to subscribe to like fundamentalist religious patriarchy. But I do sometimes like the aesthetic of it.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, and here's the thing. It's like the aesthetic is very like, what if we lived in Little House on the Prairie, but like, no one got sick and we had electricity.

[Amanda Montell]

I know, it's like, I call it tuberculosis core. Remember during the pandemic when that headline went viral saying that medieval peasants had more time off than the average, like contemporary worker or whatever. And it's like, no one wants to be a medieval peasant. It was objectively like a bad, bad, bad time. But the Middle Ages have a similar kind of romance to them because they've been romanticized in like fairy tales. And I eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I love that kind of nostalgia. What does that say about me? Can you help me understand?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, it says that you're just doing too many jobs like that. And that is the hard. It's like. And I wrote about this in this article that I ended up writing for Elle where my editor was like, you should live as a trad wife. And I was like, do I actually want to like lose money by doing this? Because if I didn't like, do my work for a week, the amount that I would get paid to write the article would not make up for the lack of doing the work. But I think that the appeal is absolutely to women who feel like they're, you know, you're already doing so many jobs, right? And whether or not you have kids, you're doing all of the jobs of the home, whatever that means, in individuals experience. And then doing work for pay in most situations. And like, that's just so exhausting. So the idea to just do the responsibilities of the home, like, who wouldn't want to do one job instead of two or five? And so I think that that's part of the allure, right? And that to me, that is a manifestation of the fact that like so many of of us, our lives have become so incredibly tethered to work. Like, work is the center work. And maybe family, like maybe parenting. Parenting as a verb. And I think that that doesn't leave any space for things that can be really nourishing about work that we do in the home and what are often dismissively called hobbies. I have personally like done a lot of work to get into hobbies in the last couple years. Like, that's my anti burnout strategy is like, yeah, having things that I actually like to do that are not work. Because before I just didn't have that Right. Like, there was just work. And I was like, well, why wouldn't I do more work? Right.

[Amanda Montell]

Totally.

[Reese Oliver]

Well, also.

[Amanda Montell]

Cause I feel like we like to write and that's what's tough is, like, I really like my work, if I may say so. But that doesn't mean I should do it 24 7. I'm still really reckoning with that. So, anyway, hobbies. So do any of your hobbies have

[Anne Helen Peterson]

a whiff of traditional gardening? I think intersects with especially the homesteading component. Especially someone who's kind of in this, like, this larger trad wife universe, like Ballerina Farm, who is an enormously popular Mormon influencer who is married to one of the heirs to the JetBlue fortune and is currently pregnant with her eighth kid and is also the reigning Mrs. America. Not Miss America, Mrs. America. She has a beautiful life. And this homestead area that they have in Utah that's like not that far from Park City. Even though it seems like it's far in the middle of nowhere. You're, like just over the hill from Park City. But part of the reason that it looks so alluring is because they have a lot of money.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, money makes a big difference in branding. As it turns out. As I get older, I become quite

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Okay, speaking of Ballerina Farm, I would love if you could sort of break down the different denominations of trad wife, the different sects and could you name names in addition to Ballerina Farm? Like she is sort of canonical, reigning tradwife, but how would you describe her denomination and then how would you describe others that might diverge a bit?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

She's canonical, but like sneaky canonical because she would never call herself a trad wife. She would never hashtag something, something with trad wife, Never.

[Amanda Montell]

Why not?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

That's just, that's not her brand and it's also not Mormon brand at all. Like I'm not going to speak like universally here, but I think talking to people who are experts in Mormon evangelical style, right? Because it's different than that of Christian non denominational evangelicals. And having seen it a lot and analyzed it a lot, like you show you don't tell. So there is the style that is very much you tell, right? Like there is Mormon missionaries knocking on the door, recruiting people to come to church, church. But there's a lot of just being a very public Mormon person. So that is why something like the blogging or the Instagram accounts and that sort of thing like that is a great way to be an example of what Mormonism looks like. Right. So Ballerina Farm would never say, like, you should consider joining the LDS Church. Would never put that on her Instagram. Would never say, here is why I'm a trad wife and here's why you should be a trad wife. Right. Like, to her, there's nothing that is like, acceptable, exceptional about the way that she is living her life. She is simply living according to her faith.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

So I would put the vast, vast majority of Mormon influencers who have a lot of overlap with what we think of as hashtag TradWife in that bucket.

[Amanda Montell]

Got it.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Then there are people who are really leaning into the tradwife thing. Right? And that's the people that you are talking about who, like, either have converted to evangelical Christianity or who grew up in. In it. And I think that there are extremes in terms of, like, people who are very focused on presentation and like, looking hot. There are people who are much more focused on homeschooling and having, like, that be the real focus of their brand. And then there are people like the transformed wife is. She is an older woman. She's probably in her either late 60s or 70s and came to espouse the teachings of biblical femininity probably within the last 20 years. And, like, has had a blog for a long time. And now because she can't create content of her own life that's in that vein, she instead just, like, does these screenshots of tweets that are like, women waste themselves when they go to school. Like, just really ardent and aggressive understandings of how a woman should embrace passivity in home. So she's like on the, I think, extreme end of this spectrum. And so there are people who are like, arguing about theology a lot more and she's there. And then there are people who are much more into the ascendant aesthetics. Right. And who, like, still have like, Jesus loving mama of six or whatever in their bio. But they're not as. I mean, aggressive is the only word I can, I can think of.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And then there are the watered down types. And some of those are like, on Tik Tok, there's this woman named Esti Williams who sometimes puts some stuff about like, God or like, I don't know, like we go to church or something like that. But I don't actually think she goes to church necessarily. I think it's Christian the way that, like, a lot of Trump voters are Christian in that they say they are Christian but haven't gone to church in probably a year and don't necessarily ascribe to a particular theology, but really understand Christianity as part of their overall identity.

[Amanda Montell]

Sure.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And so esti, I think this is my theory, understood that she was performing really well on TikTok when she dressed like Marilyn Monroe and talked about how she did her hair the way that her husband liked and cooked the way that her husband liked and dressed the way that her husband liked. And so she creates content that a lot of it is like my rules for being a trad wife. Right. So it's very much leaning into it and it's so obvious.

[Amanda Montell]

Right.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Like, to me, it strikes me as different, but I think if you are not a discerning consumer of trad wife content, then it might be a little different.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay. So she's beholden to the algorithm. Essentially, the algorithm told her that this was the brand she should stick to. And now she's sort of like her own cult leader and her own cult follower in that sense. I'm confused by all of the denominations of trad wife because I understand that there's the sort of more explicit missionary style tradwife who's like spreading gospel, trying to get other people to see that this is the right way of living in the way that any missionary religion does. And then there's the branding exercise of it. People who maybe don't even earnestly believe this stuff, but, like, it's just working for their social media platform. But then I want to talk a little bit about the, like, neoliberal tradwife and maybe this is not a trad wife at all. But I definitely followed hella DIY homesteader influencers, not so much on TikTok, but on YouTube very much so during the pandemic because it felt like, like, okay, the apocalypse is here. Here's a way to like, return to a pre slash post apocalyptic style of living. But they don't talk about God or Jesus. I think they are progressive in their politics. But the aesthetic, maybe. Maybe no maybe. I don't know. Now that we're talking about this, I'm not sure.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

No, but I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think that they're progressive in so much as they're like, gay people should get married, we hate racism, and Donald Trump is bad. But they're like, wokeism has maybe gone a little bit too far.

[Amanda Montell]

Sure.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

There are too many trans kids in schools and school choice is important. Right. Like, I should be able to have my kid go where they're like, they probably are in private school.

[Amanda Montell]

Well, and I guess the people that I follow don't have kids yet. So I think they are, like, more apathetic. They're maybe pregnant right now or they'll maybe be pregnant soon. And so, like, I don't really know their point of view yet. And so I give them the benefit of the doubt because. Because I'm projecting what I want to believe onto them.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Did you see any vax content? No, because a lot of those people, not all, some are, like, into natural birth and, like, let's wait and see on Vax, you know, like that style.

[Amanda Montell]

I don't know. I mean, okay, my favorite YouTuber is this, like, fully DIY homesteader. She, like, built her own tiny house wearing a sundress. She's either engaged or married. She knows how to operate a spinning wheel. She made her own wedding dress out of a curtain. She has her own garden. She harvests her own vegetables. She knows how to make every vegan dish under the sun. I bought her a cookbook.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Oh, she's just a hippie.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay. She's not a tradwife at all. But she's living so old school, right?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

She's living old school, but, like, did she have sex with her boyfriend before she got engaged to him? Probably, right?

[Amanda Montell]

Probably. Yeah.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

You can't be a tradwife if you're not a Christian.

[Amanda Montell]

Not at all.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I mean, I think that, like, there can be people who are living trad wife elements who are different religions.

[Amanda Montell]

What if you're, like, evangelical to New Age? Because that's the thing that trips me up.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, this is the whole circle, right? It's like the people who are like, I would have voted for Bernie, but Bernie didn't get elected, so I voted for Trump. There are a lot of people that I have met who are like that. Mostly older people. And it's where the circle goes complete.

[Amanda Montell]

Right.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And how anti vaxxers also meet. It's the far right and the far left completely. Or like, raw milk people or homeschoolers, too, oftentimes on either side.

[Amanda Montell]

So it's like, I think a lot of New age stuff is just, like, evangelicalism with a new aesthetic. But if you've, like, rejected God and Jesus, you can't be a trad wife anymore.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I think you can have tradwife elements, but where this all springs from, at least its current manifestation, is all from biblical femininity.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

It's all from understanding this as, like, the path to salvation. And so I think you get more of it within, like, Mormonism, because it is a part of their understanding of the way. Way to salvation, the way to being a God of your own planet and being eternally pregnant with your husband's children. But I think you can have elements like this woman of the trad wife aesthetic. But I don't think that she at all espouses to, like, the idea that she should be submissive or that she should, like, not leave the home after dark without her husband. Right. Or like, I'm looking at the homepage like, there's all this stuff of her in a bikini and, like, tank tops and all that sort of thing. Like, you're right.

[Amanda Montell]

Well, this is just how clever the traditional waif wave is, because I have now convinced myself that it's not that bad. And this is how you know that it's a cult. Because there are elements that are good and appealing and harmless. So now in my mind, I'm like, none of them really, truly believe this, but you're correcting me in saying, like, no, no, no. Some of them really, really, really do believe it. And I'm being hoodwinked right now.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I just think, like, the part that appeals to you is not letting your husband make every decision in your home. Right. Or letting your partner. You know what I mean? I think it's more like, oh, what if I did cold plunges and yoga in the dawn light and, like, was self sustaining and I didn't have to worry about stuff all the time? Like, that is what is. That's the lifestyle that is depicted here. And that's just like a bucolic ideal. Right. And I think that has had a hold for so long in so many different manifestations. But content, like, this is just the current iteration, and it appeals to people of our age group who want that sort of connection and yearn for that sort of connection.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah. And trad wives are dominating that corner of the Internet. So it's like, if I want to see people doing that, I very well might be getting that from a tradwife.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yes.

[Amanda Montell]

Okay, that makes more sense. Thank you for puzzling through that with me. What would you say are the cultiest beliefs and rituals in the tradwife community that you've observed?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

This is a. This is a sensitive one because having as many children as possible is part of, like, trad wife belief system. Like, biblical femininity is letting God's will take action on your body and making yourself available to your husband whenever he wants you to be available to him. Like, saying no is actually like a big no no within the understanding of biblical femininity. And if your husband cheats it's be your fault because you didn't say no. But as a result of that, there are a lot of pregnancy pregnancies. Right. And there are a lot of miscarriages. And I think there is a real devotion to memorializing those miscarriages in a very prominent way. Right. So a lot of trad wife bios will say, like, seven kids on earth, three kids in heaven.

[Amanda Montell]

Whoa.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And it's not that three children that they gave birth to at full term lived several years and died. It's that they had three miscarriages.

[Amanda Montell]

Holy shit.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

They name every miscarriage oftentimes. And then they often also, like, really celebrate their birthday, like when they lost that child. And so there's just a lot of that. And I think that, like, gosh, miscarriages are so complicated and I think we don't talk about them enough. But also the way that they are, it's almost like a fetishization of these lost children. That's part of the cultishness of it, I think.

[Amanda Montell]

Whoa. And being. Yeah. Being so public about them and sort of like using them as a clout building exercise.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Right. You have a post about it and then like, because you get a lot of commentary on it, it does well. And so that encourages people to do more of them. And like, I think that again, being public about grief, about a miscarriage totally makes sense, but I think this is one of the things that becomes almost ritualized within the community.

[Amanda Montell]

Yes. And I think, like, obviously there's no right and wrong when it comes to how you want to manage your grief. And if you have a social media profile, it's like, do. But I think as onlookers, we are so intuitively discerning. Like, we can tell because our gut tells us when someone is doing it for reasons other than a sincere individual expression of grief.

They.

They make it known that this is a ritual. It sounds like. Can you tell us more about your Elle piece and that tradwife experiment?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

So it actually was like an experiment that never was because. Because my editor at Elle emailed me with this idea. It's like, what if you lived as a trad wife for a week and then wrote about it? Because you're like, very much not a trad wife. I'm not married to my partner. You know, we've been together almost 10 years, but not married. No plans to get married. I don't have kids and I'm not going to have kids. And so it would be like, funny, right? Like, it's stunt journalism. That also would be illuminating. In some way. And I was like, no, this is silly. I'm not gonna do this. And I talked about it with my partner and he, he's like, he's the one who brought up, are you sure you wanna lose money on this assignment? And he's like, if you do it, you just have to, you have to say in the piece that this was not my idea, right, to like make all the food for him. So. Cause I figured out, okay, what are the elements of this checklist that I can do? Like, you know, one of them is you're not supposed to go to the gym by yourself. And I was like, I don't. My gym is my peloton in the basement. So that's okay. You're not supposed to leave the house at, at night by yourself. And I live on an island of 900 people. So like, that's not really a problem either for a week. Right?

[Amanda Montell]

For a non trad wife, you're set up pretty well to be one.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I am. And I was like, okay, I can kind of like play along with some of this stuff. But then my dog died and that actually forced me to take a real step away from work and allowed me to actually write the piece in like a very different way where I was like, oh, you know how I took care of my family? Like, I stopped working for a little bit and focused on my family and on care. But it didn't have to be, be like in submission, right. It could just be out of love.

[Amanda Montell]

Right?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

So that's how that went. But it was fun and I think, you know, that piece did well. But also the piece that I wrote for my newsletter that was kind of like, here's all the things that I couldn't put into a 1200 word piece that did even better. I think so, yeah.

[Amanda Montell]

Can you tell us about the piece for your substack and some of the reactions to it?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

It was one of those pieces where I was like, I'm just gonna barf. Some of the stuff that I didn't have an opportunity to talk about. And I don't know if you've had. Had this experience where like you spend a lot of time researching a piece or a book chapter or something like that, and it has to be refined to become whatever polished thing that it goes into the world. But you have this giant knowledge cloud all around it. And for me, that knowledge cloud was in part like what I had gleaned from having followed these trad wives for nearly four or five months. You know, I asked my followers on instagram which trad wife should I follow? And I followed all of them. And so I just had this content in my feed. And you know how if something's in your feed for five months, Months, like, you see a lot of it, and so a lot of it with those learnings. And like, you know, in the L piece, I very briefly did a little taxonomy of the different types, you know, like what you're. The denominations, as you said. And this I, you know, I kind of dove more into someone, like, the transformed way for, like, there's this one called Growing Good Ends, different ones, the. The more softer side that you see on Instagram a lot. And I thought people were kind of stuck, sick of tread waves. In fact, no, they still want to know a lot more. But I also was surprised. I should never be surprised by this, but there I was surprised by people who are, like, I had no idea that this was a thing.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, well, I mean, I am learning right now. Like, I thought, you know, I've followed a couple of these people because I follow Sarah Peterson, who we interviewed for our episode on the Cult of Mom Fluencers. And I've learned a little bit about trad wives through her work, and of course you yours. But I still find myself mystified by them in the way that I am mystified by cults in general. And this podcast is a result of that brain cloud that you were talking about. The result of, like, what couldn't be in the book and me wanting to talk about it, like, in a more casual way, because who's a cult expert? Like, anyone branding themselves as a cult expert, I am skeptical of, because we are all in cults, right? And, like, I find a new subculture, cult, like, subculture every single week, and I can't be an expert in all of them just because I know a few things about cult language. So I think the way that we never get sick of cult documentaries, they're all the same. The Nexium ones, the Jonestown ones, the Heaven's Gate ones, the freaking Scientology, whatever. It's like we are trying to determine if this thing is a threat to us, and the answer is always yes. Yes. And we can't get enough of that.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yes. And this is the thing is, I think that what makes it concerning for a lot of especially feminist women is that you're like, how is this still pervasive? Like, how is this a message that is getting through? I mean, I think there will always be reactionary politics, right? Like, oh, women are more liberated. So, like, let's take this reactionary step backwards. Yes, but that doesn't mean that it is a salient ideology for the vast majority of women. Right? Like, yet maybe 1 in 10,000 junior high girls right now are like, this is what I want more than anything.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

But others are like, no, I want to go to college. College is good, right? Or like, whatever they want to do after they graduate. Like, I want to have sex before I get married and not feel bad about it. Like, all those sorts of things.

[Amanda Montell]

That's actually a really important counter perspective is that, like, when something's in your feed as much as trad wives were in your feed, it can start to feel like this is representative of the whole world and this is like a major, major problem. But it doesn't seem like trad wives are like a major global threat. They're just a threat to certain people.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, I mean, they're a manifestation of an ideology that I think is pernicious. Like, it's kind of like, oh, there aren't that many white supremacists, but also there are ways in which that gets watered down and manifests in systemic racism and policy and all that sort of thing. And so I think that, like, I'm not concerned about trad wife accounts. I'm concerned against anti abortion and reproductive rights. You know what I mean? Like, that's where I try to concentrate my energy on, like, this is where we need to fight it completely. But they all are part of the same piece.

[Amanda Montell]

You're so right. And yet it's so much more fun and juicy to look at the tradwives and not have to do the unglamorous daily policy work of like, supporting reproductive rights.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Right. So, like, personally, I analyze how trad wives are like this anti feminist backlash. And also I donate to an abortion access fund. Right? Like, that's how I do my work.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, love that, Love that. I want to ask a couple more questions and then play a game. So obviously society and the Internet are really hard on women. And I would love to know, like, what's the deal? Are there trad husbands? Like, should we be redirecting our rage at them instead? Like, who are these people's husbands? Like, do they have an Internet presence? Why aren't we mad at them?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I mean, trad husbands are just like most husbands. I would say that there is a solid percentage of of husbands whose wives maybe understand themselves as feminists who, like, the husband is still pretty much a TR husband, right? Who's like, I'll do some parenting, but like, that's not totally my job or, like, I'm not going to learn how to be competent in it. Like, their learned incompetency when it comes to domestic tasks is part of being a trad husband. So, like, I like to think of it as, like, part of that larger sphere. But I mean, like, what's the version of a trad husband is like, I don't know, like a huberman bro mixed with a Joe Rogan bro. Like, they. It's like the same guy. It's just espousing a sort of, like, powerful masculinity that doesn't necessarily attack it. Like, say, things like, wives submit, but it's implicit. Some of these husbands show up periodically in these women's accounts being, like, strong biblical men, which means, like, providing for the household and providing a good example and being a man of faith in the home and that sort of thing. Thing I think of, like, ballerina wife's husband who has an Instagram account. That's like hog fathering, I think. Is it?

[Amanda Montell]

Oh, Christ. But it.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I think whenever the husbands show up in the accounts, it's always really interesting to me because it's kind of feminizing to show up in your wife's very popular account.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah. You're acknowledging that you love a woman. How dare you?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

No, but, like, also that you are like, a character in your wife's world almost. Does that make sense? Right. Your wife is controlling the narrative in terms of, like, what your home life is like, and you are passive to that understanding. So I think anytime that the husband shows up, it's always a really interesting text.

[Amanda Montell]

Oh, yeah, that's a wrinkle. Right. Because he's the protagonist and she's not even the main character in her own story. This is just a side story.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Right. She's just the narrator.

[Amanda Montell]

Right. Right. So then we go back to the beginning commentary, which is like, the allure of these people for me is to just foam at the moment, mouth watching someone give up all control, because there's some part of me that wants to do that. You know, it's like what we were saying before. It's like we're like these quote unquote empowered feminists, like, working women. But I am so tired.

[Reese Oliver]

Right.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

But it's like you want to go on a drug trip for, like, one day. Right? Like, you don't actually want this to be the rest of your life.

[Amanda Montell]

This is you, like, talking me off the it watching. Two weeks. This will be a shadwife podcast. I will be espousing proverbs no, but I do.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

You know how sometimes you're so tired and you so want to go on vacation and like, you're like, all I want to do is go to a beach and just like, lay there and relax. And like, that works for two days. And then you're like, I'm kind of bored. Right? And that's the thing. Like, you talk to our grandmother's generation or people who had to stay home because, like, they didn't have access to bank accounts, they weren't allowed to drive.

[Amanda Montell]

So fucking boring.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And I think that that's what we have to remember is like, part of the reason these women are doing their Instagram accounts is because they are so fucking bored.

[Amanda Montell]

Bored and trapped. No, this is so true. It's like, I would rather be in temporary pain that I chose than some boring lifestyle that I did not choose. Okay? So I would just love to hear a story of the, like, worst case scenario, because we're trying to evaluate how bad of a cult this really is. So how bad does it get? What's like an extreme example of how far trad wives can go?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Well, I mean, it's become a cliche now to say that, like, we become the Handmaid's Tale, but that, you know, there's a reason why that is a dystopic novel, right? Is that Margaret Atwood perceived the risk of that sort of regression. Right. And the popularity of that novel goes up and down. And I think it's like, like it's popular again now because of that understanding of, like, here's what happens when you seed control in this way. And it's a mix of men and women who make that possible, right? It's never just like, men are like, oh, all women. You must be subjugated. Like, women are the, the handmaidens to that particular project. And I think that, like, there's a reason why the vast majority of these, like, I don't even think I've seen one that's not white, right? That's like a traditional, like a real trad wife that's not white. And so some of it too is like, consolidating your societal power in whatever way you know how, right? So maybe you are disempowered within the home, but you are empowered as a family unit.

[Amanda Montell]

Holy shit. This reminds me so much of the power structure of basically like every notorious cult in history, where there's like a quote unquote charismatic, potentially halfway good looking white man at the top. And then the second tier of power is like a gaggle of white, pretty young women that he's surrounded himself with, who exchange their, like, sexuality and whiteness for like a grain of more power, who are the cultiest trad wives at large right now?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

To me, I think, like, transformed wife is the absolute worst of them. She's like, on Instagram, she's on Twitter. But then I also think that, like, the cultiest oftentimes are ones who don't make their politics as clear. Right. Like, who are much more. More insidious in the way that they, they talk about it. So that I would love to hear, like, from your listeners who they think are like, the person who is, like, most effective at this. I mean, there's an argument to say Ballerina Farm is right, but that I. I don't have the answer yet.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah. I'm gonna toss up a post on the Instagram where we can all caucus and warn each other whisper network style about who the most pernicious tradwives at large were right now are. We're now going to play a little game. It's just a classic. Sounds like a cult game called what's Cultier? I'm going to name two TradWife related scenarios and you're simply going to answer based on your opinions and instincts. Which is cultier? Conservative Christian evangelical tradwives who were born into the lifestyle or reformed sort of city slicker trad wives who've elected to go all Laura Ingalls Wilder on their own volition?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Gosh, I can't tell you. I think that they're just, they're effective in different ways. What do you think?

[Amanda Montell]

Oh, I think those who've elected into it are cultier because there's so much justification of your choices that goes in.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, you're right.

[Amanda Montell]

Round number two, what's cultier? Princessy Snow White 1800s cottage Coratrad wives or 50s leave it to Beaver? Susie Homemaker Tradwives.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Suzy Homemaker tradwifes. Yeah, because I think that there's like, there are positive things to be said about, like, cottagecore, like communing with nature. Like there are, like, parts of it that like, make sense. Whereas I think that there is like a real ideological perversion that's going on with like, I love my microwave, like that sort of thing.

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah. I love just dad and Ed Betty Crocker instant cake mix so much. I don't know. Based on the tchotchkes alone, I'm going cottagecore all day, every day. What's cultier? People sensationally comparing all Trad wifes to the Handmaid's Tale, or people sensationally comparing all cults to Jonestown. Let me kind of justify that question, because, like, whenever a threat to feminist liberation arises in. In the discourse and in politics, I think people are typically quite quick to cry Handmaid's Tale for good reason. But the same shit happens whenever something culty happens with. With Donald Trump or whatever. People are like, it's Jonestown. And I think sometimes that sensationalism can, like, shut down conversations because I can't speak to, like, the Handmaid's Tale trad wife thing as much. But in terms of Jonestown, it's like, I think when people threaten that this is just another Jonestown town, it's like, that was an unprecedented and since unreplicated event. Donald Trump is dumber than Jim Jones and more dangerous. Dumber and more dangerous. More populist, more of a coward. Equally narcissistic. I just think, like, they're different situations that can't be directly compared. Anyway, that's why I formulated that question. Yeah.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

No, no, no. I mean, but you're asking me. These are like. I actually think those two are very similar. Like, I think that the Handmaids take tale analogy loses its power as it's deployed more and more.

[Amanda Montell]

Right.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

And so it's deployed because we don't have language or imagery to express the horror and the fear of, like, this sort of regression. But you become numb to that comparison. I do remember the first time that I saw, like, women in Handmaid's cloaks, right, at some sort of event, like, protesting something, and I was like, that's power.

[Reese Oliver]

Powerful.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

That was the only time, right. Then it became reductive and replicative and, like, it didn't seem to have that power. So, like, what's other language? What's other imagery that we can use to express that, I think is one of the things that the feminist movement and the reproductive rights movement has to. Has to grapple with totally.

[Amanda Montell]

And I understand why people make both comparisons, too, because it's shorthand. But, yeah, I don't know. I. In terms of what's cultier, the Handmaid's Tale comparisons are the Jonestown comparisons. What do you think is more, like,

[Anne Helen Peterson]

insidiously cultish Jonestown, don't you think?

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think so. Last one. What's cultier? Tradwives or men?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Oh, man. What do you think?

[Amanda Montell]

Yeah.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Men. Yes.

[Amanda Montell]

No qualifiers, no explanation, no notes.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

I'm just gonna say that my partner said that he couldn't do something because, like, he had some stuff to do around the house. Like, he was just trying to, like, be on top of some stuff that I. I hadn't even asked him to do. Like, he had to decline an invitation, and someone responded to that and was like, oh, like, Annie's really cracking the whip. Like, Right. Like that idea that, like, you would only do stuff around the house because your partner is, like, disciplining you or something. Right. Like, that, to me, is evidence of the cult of men, and it is all over the place.

[Amanda Montell]

So, so true. Yeah. So now I'm just going to ask you the final question that we ask at the end of every episode of Sounds Like a Cliff Cult, the cult of Tradwives. What do you think? Is it a live your life, a watch your back, or a get the out level cult?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Watch your back.

[Amanda Montell]

Explain.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

Oh, I just think, like, what we were talking about before, I think that it is a flare going up of, like, the. The popularity of regressive and reactionary understandings of the place of women in society and. And how much power women should have in society. We have to be incredibly vigilant about attempts on the part of our legislatures and governments to roll back those protections and those rights. But I'm not scared that, like, my friends are going to go do this

[Amanda Montell]

fair and we don't need to, like, throw Ballerina farm in prison.

[Anne Helen Peterson]

No, no.

[Amanda Montell]

She's already in a prison of her own creation. Oh, my gosh. Wow. This conversation has been a joy for me. If folks want to keep up with you and your work and your cult, where can they find you?

[Anne Helen Peterson]

@annehollandubstack.com that's where culture study is. And, you know, maybe by the time this is out, our culture study podcast will have launched as well, so.

[Amanda Montell]

Hooray. Well, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week, but in the meantime, stay culty. Not too culty. Sounds Like a Cult is hosted and

produced by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Pod Cabin.

Our theme music is by Casey Cole.

This episode was made with production help from Katie Epperson. Our intern is Reese Oliver. Thank you as well to our partner, all things comedy.

And if you like the show, please feel free to check out my books,

Word, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, Cultish the Language of Feminine Fanaticism, and the forthcoming the Age of Magical Notes on Modern Irrationality. If you're a fan of Sounds Like

a Cult, I would really appreciate it

if you'd leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

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