“No one I know wants to waste their one wild and magical life shilling for some billionaire tech jerk,” says Shannon, a character in Yesteryear, the buzzy new novel about a tradwife influencer by Caro Claire Burke. Shannon is a Gen Z woman working as a producer for the protagonist, Natalie, a 32-year-old social media star who seems to share more than a few similarities with real-life influencer Hannah Neeleman. Neeleman gained fame by documenting her life as a wife and mother on her ranch, Ballerina Farm.
“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” Natalie quips back.
“Exactly,” the younger woman replies. “What they want is what you have, Natalie: freedom.”
Burke’s novel argues that what looks like freedom—quitting the 9-to-5, children playing in fields, homemade organic meals—is often an illusion. Natalie’s finances, for instance, are controlled by her husband, and her wealthy in-laws’ support depends on her providing them with a “big American family.”
Yet, it’s undeniable that millions find the world of “tradwife” influencers appealing, or at least fascinating. The two most famous influencers labeled as “tradwives”—neither of whom has embraced the term—are Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith. They have 10.4 million and 4.8 million Instagram followers, and 10.5 million and 12.4 million TikTok followers, respectively. Articles about them have gone viral, countless podcasts have been made, and recently, a cluster of tradwife novels has been written. Yesteryear, which is being adapted into a film starring and produced by Anne Hathaway, joins other titles like The Trad Wife’s Secret by Liane Child, Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer, and Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza, while Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife will be published next month.
Alongside this surge in tradwife content, the values linked to these influencers are becoming more popular among young people. A recent global survey showed that Gen Z males are twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey their husbands.
So, for a month, I took on the challenge of consuming as much tradwife-related content as possible: reading the novels, watching social media posts, and even trying out some of Neeleman and Smith’s recipes. I wanted to understand what makes tradwives and their culture so compelling.
Week One
Before this month of earnest tradwife exploration, my algorithm had already shown me a few of Nara Smith’s videos, so I was familiar with her style. The 24-year-old model tells viewers in a husky near-whisper that her child or husband has been “craving” a specific food, and she proceeds to make it—whether that’s recreating the American ready-meal Hamburger Helper or crafting her own bubblegum. All of this happens in her pristine kitchen while she’s dressed in couture. Everything, down to her children’s names—Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, Whimsy Lou, and Fawnie Golden—is so over-the-top it’s almost campy. If I didn’t know that Smith married the Mormon model Lucky Blue Smith at 18 and had her first child the same year, I might have thought her account was a parody.
But this month, I wanted to go deeper, so I started regularly checking Smith and Neeleman’s accounts. I learned that Neeleman is due to give birth to her ninth child any day, and I watched her float around in earth-toned knits while riding the packed train to work. In one particularly attention-grabbing video, she and her husband address the controversy around Ballerina Farm selling potentially unsafe raw milk.I sign up for Smith’s Instagram broadcast channel “Nara’s Notes” and get a shock when, while at the pub with friends, I get a notification from her and think for a second she has messaged me directly. She hasn’t, of course; it’s an update for me and thousands of others, sending us a picture of the 16 chicks she has just acquired, and asking us what she should name them.
As I watch, I can’t pretend I’m not enjoying myself at all—Smith’s highly stylized cooking tutorials in particular have a way of sucking me in. But, when the Neelemans’ ninth child, a daughter, is born on March 4th, I’m reminded of her comments from a viral 2024 interview with the Times, in which she admitted that she had an “amazing experience” when she was able to have an epidural during the birth of her sixth child, Martha, while her husband was out of the room. The implication appeared to be that her husband might not have approved. It’s a reminder that while it’s easy to get sucked into the rainbows of it all, it’s when you zoom out that you start to think about what it might actually be like to live the way these people do.
Week Two
I don’t have heaps in common with your stereotypical tradwife—I work full-time, I’m married to a woman, and I’m about to enter my 30s without having had a child (unless you count my beloved cat, Dolly). But I do happen to love cooking, which is a large part of what tradwife influencers do, so bread-baking seemed like a must. It is central to the homespun, old-fashioned cottagecore aesthetic that has become popular in recent years, and which is at the heart of all successful tradwife content. Making bread also appealed because I already know the basics. Focaccia is the bread I make most often, and as both Neeleman and Smith’s focaccia recipes are available online, it seemed the obvious place to start.
Neeleman’s recipe, inspired by her recent visit to Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, required a sourdough starter, which I didn’t have. Rather than waiting a week for a starter to develop, I went for Smith’s. Her recipe was more or less the same as the one I usually use (from the Bread Ahead Baking School cookbook, if you’re interested), the main point of difference being the addition of “Nara Smith’s Roasted Garlic Algae Cooking Club Oil”—like most influencers’ content, much of what Smith and Neeleman share online is encouraging you to buy the influencers’ own-branded ingredients. Unsurprisingly, my local Asda didn’t have Smith’s oil, so I subbed in regular olive oil and it worked beautifully.
Stretching and dimpling the dough with my hands, I was reminded how relaxing I find it to make bread, and in some ways I could see myself becoming the kind of person who bakes a weekly loaf. When days are hectic and meals a rushed afterthought, the slower pace of life promised by perfectly edited cooking videos seems appealing. While my dough was proving, I decided to have a go at one of Neeleman’s recipes, this time for raspberry jam. “We are a jam family,” Neeleman says on her Substack, The Goose Gazette. “One round of toast at breakfast can clear out the whole lot.”
Mimicking Neeleman’s stylishly rustic aesthetic as much as possible in my small London flat, I don a pair of dungarees not totally dissimilar to the ones she wears making the jam. Since I don’t have a brood of nine children, I scaled the recipe down substantially—perhaps too much, I realize when I am left with just half a jar. I also used regular granulated sugar rather than “raw organic sugar,” as Asda didn’t have that either. Even so, the small amount I do manage to create is pretty tasty, and the process is relatively easy.
They’re on a hamster wheel of just firefighting everything.While I’ve enjoyed slowing down by making things like jam, cough drops, or even sunscreen, tradwife influencers signal that they have time for activities most people are too busy to even consider. Free time—or at least the illusion of it—is a highly enviable resource. Langan, author of the forthcoming novel Trad Wife, believes many of us long not necessarily for the specifics of this lifestyle, but for the idea of having “the leisure and the economic resources to be able to connect to family, connect to friends, to help people when they need help.” Ultimately, the appeal is simple: “Wouldn’t we all like a day off?” she asks.
“Huge numbers of people feel overworked,” says Professor Heejung Chung, co-author of a 2025 King’s College London study suggesting the appeal of the tradwife phenomenon reflects modern pressures. “They’re on a hamster wheel, constantly firefighting everything—work, parenting, social life. They feel like they never get a rest.”
But can women with four or more children truly have a slower pace of life? Another line from the Times interview comes to mind: “Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
Plus, I remind myself, there’s more to life than good bread. As much as I love baking, I also enjoy seeing friends, going to the cinema, visiting art galleries, swimming, reading, and partying. If that means supermarket loaves win most weeks, I’m broadly fine with that.
Week Three
By now, I’m very familiar with Neeleman’s social media content, and I notice how much of it focuses on the Ballerina Farm store, where her branded products are sold. This highlights one of the paradoxes of the most successful tradwife influencers: they earn a fortune from their social media careers, so they aren’t really traditional housewives at all. As Lizzie, the journalist protagonist of the tradwife thriller Everyone is Lying to You, puts it after meeting a group of influencers at a “momfluencer” conference: “They’re all pushing this arcadian fantasy of homemaking and living off the land, the anti-girlbosses, when they’re all building capitalist empires.”
Most of the content I watch is honestly quite boring—though I remind myself not to feel too superior to those who get sucked in. I’ve been known to devour the objectively boring content of UK-based influencer Molly-Mae Hague. Now that I think about it, the fashion influencer and former Love Island contestant, though not usually called a tradwife, has some overlap: she’s a house-proud young mother who emphasizes family life on social media. In fact, what you might call tradwife-coded content—think the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix show With Love, Meghan or cleaning influencer Mrs Hinch—seems far more common than it was a decade ago, when feminism was in fashion and homemaking was broadly uncool.
That’s not to say cooking and cleaning can’t be positive choices, or that a stay-at-home mother can’t be a feminist. But I do worry about the message being spread. Is all this content inspiring people who lack the wealth or careers of Neeleman and Smith, who don’t have financial independence or an easy way out of their relationships if things turn sour, to become true “traditional wives”? And what about the culture that glorified tradwives in the first place? As Burke wrote in a recent Guardian piece, the term “was originally coined and circulated by men, born out of the dank, murky caves of online ‘incel’ forums, where anonymous…”The usernames reveal a deeply unoriginal fantasy of a wife who would do everything the real women in their lives refused to do: manage the household, bear children, provide sex on demand, and, most importantly, ask for nothing in return.
Week Four
Lucy Knight – and Dolly the cat – settle in with a tradwife novel. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
I’ve been steadily working my way through the five tradwife novels all month, but several long train journeys this week allowed me to really dive in.
All five books contain some kind of mystery. Schaefer’s and Langan’s novels use supernatural elements to reflect the horror of misogyny, while Piazza’s reads as a straightforward, yet very entertaining, thriller. It makes sense for these stories to have secrets at their core—after all, when we see tradwives on social media, aren’t many of us thinking their lives can’t possibly be as perfect as they appear?
Of course, the issues run deeper. Yesteryear explores the links between the manosphere, the political agenda of the conservative right, and the appealing nature of tradwife influencers’ content. Burke points out that Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm account “gained millions of followers the summer Roe v. Wade fell, thanks to a number of conservative influencers amplifying the platform.” She rejects “the idea that ‘women just want this,'” noting that “a lot of this is very well funded.”
As I finish this month immersed in tradwife content, it becomes clear that none of the fantasies sold to women as the key to a better life actually work for most people. That includes being a “girlboss” who expertly balances a high-flying career with avoiding processed foods and maintaining a 15-step skincare routine, just as much as it includes living on a farm with a growing brood of children and chickens.
Yet young people are still turning to the fantasy world of tradwives to see if it offers something better. “Most governments haven’t done enough to address the widespread feeling among young people that they can’t make ends meet with a job, can’t get on the housing ladder, let alone have children,” says Chung.
In this context, she warns, we must be cautious about normalizing “even those innocuous little bits” of the tradwife aesthetic, down to “a dress or whatever.” Because in these symbols of tradwifedom, “we are potentially signaling to each other that we’re returning to very old-fashioned norms, which we know were quite misogynistic in how they treated women. And it’s giving the wrong impression.”
After my journey into tradwifedom, I agree with Shannon: no one I know wants to spend their one wild and precious life shilling for some billionaire tech mogul. But they don’t want to be a shill for a misogynistic husband, either. So, can we have a third option, please? Maybe that could become the next big trend.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs My Month Living as a Traditional Wife
Basics Definition
What does living as a traditional wife mean in this context
It typically refers to temporarily adopting a lifestyle where one partner focuses on domestic duties like cooking cleaning and home management while the other is the primary breadwinner based on a more conventional mid20thcentury model
Is this about being submissive or giving up a career
Not necessarily For many its a personal experiment or a conscious choice about division of labor not a permanent surrender of independence or career The experience is often about exploring the value of homemaking not prescribing a single way to live
Why would someone try this in the modern day
People try it for various reasons curiosity to challenge modern assumptions to reduce stress from a dualincome hustle to deepen their appreciation for domestic work or to intentionally reconnect with slower homecentered rhythms
The Experience Personal Insights
What parts did you find yourself enjoying
Commonly enjoyed aspects include the creative satisfaction of cooking and baking the tangible results of a clean and organized home the reduced decision fatigue from a clearer daily structure and the potential for a deeper less rushed connection with family and home
Were there parts you disliked or struggled with
Many report feeling isolated missing adult interaction and professional fulfillment It can feel monotonous and the lack of financial independence or external validation can be challenging The role can also feel restrictive if it doesnt align with ones full identity
Did this experiment change your relationship
It often sparks important conversations about respect value and labor It can lead to greater appreciation for unpaid domestic work However it can also create tension if both partners arent fully communicative and respectful of the experiments boundaries
Did you feel judged by others
Yes this is a common challenge There can be significant social pressure and criticism from those who view it as a step backward for gender equality Navigating these conversations is often a big part of the experience
Practicalities Logistics
How did you handle finances during this month
This requires a clear plan upfront Common methods include using a shared account for household expenses a set allowance for personal spending or simply the working partner covering all bills as the sole income earner for the month
