How the Trad Wife Took Over

0:03Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, guys. Hello. Okay, so we are here today to share a conversation we had a while back in part about the Hulu show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. When we first talked about it, the show had just premiered, but clearly it's caught on. Its third season will be coming out in November. So The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is about a group of Mormon hashtag mom talk influencers.

0:40I love the Mormon church. But there are a lot of rules that we have to follow. We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire. Have kids by the time you're 21. Or in my case, at 16. Well, I'm like, f*** this. Show me what you're working with. Show me, show me. There was a scandal in 2022 with these bunch of Mormon moms who love sharing their lives on TikTok and doing dances until scandal broke out. And one of them spilled the beans and said that there was a lot of what she called soft swinging going amongst the group with the husbands and wives. And so, you know, lots of drama, but also there is a reason beyond the kind of like fun, dramatic trashiness of this show that I wanted us to talk about the show today.

1:36And it's that it lines up really well with a trend that's totally captivated our culture recently. And that is the trad wife. Now, Alex, you have been begging, practically begging, to discuss the trend of the trad wife on the show for several months now. I've sent emails. I've sent texts. No, she really has. We're finally doing it. And I'm so glad we are because I think there's really a lot to say. And what are some of the characteristics, Alex, that kind of define this figure of the trad wife as we come across it online? A trad wife is a wife. She is often a mother. She is very feminine in her presentation, well made up, well quaffed, kemped, often wearing beautiful clothing, floaty, flowy dresses.

2:28And she really is a kind of domestic goddess who is packaging a piece of her domestic life to share with you, the viewer, in the service of basically saying, yes, I've decided to embrace the traditional stay-at-home mom kind of gender role. And here's why I think it's fun and great. And let me share it with you. Right. And it's a choice, but it also seems to negate basically every gain of feminism that we've had over the past like half century or so. And the accounts that are pushing forth this idea of trad wifedom are really, really popular. They have a lot, a lot, millions and millions of followers.

3:09So my question is, why is this content trending right now? And why does it feel impossible to look away? Today on Critics at Large, the trap of the trad wife.

3:29I'm curious, I guess, when you guys first started hearing the term trad wife, do you have a memory of when these figures really started picking up steam, at least for you? it's a this year thing for me it happened in the way that things often happen on social media where suddenly something has infiltrated something is put before you and you notice it and then it happens more frequently and then your friends start saying have you seen such and such and you get some dms with some videos you know a friend of mine said there's this woman who i follow on instagram and i really can't stop watching her videos and she posts under the handle Ballerina Farm.

4:13Ah, yes. So I check out Ballerina Farm. And Ballerina Farm turns out to be a woman named Hannah Nealman. She has, at this point, I think eight kids. She lives with her husband, Daniel, on a vast farm in a beautiful place in Utah where they do farm stuff, raise animals, sell products, which are all packaged and marketed. And they also sell themselves because Ballerina Farm has, I'm just going to briefly, you know, So let's go to the account, guys, if I may. Let's go to the tape. Let's just go to the tape. Ballerina Farm has 10 million followers. Is this on Instagram or TikTok? This is on Instagram.

4:53It's a lot of eyeballs on this person. And the reason she's called Ballerina Farm, I just want to explain briefly, is that she trained, Hannah Neelman trained as a ballerina when she was a young woman in New York City. She herself, she is from a Mormon family in Utah. She went to New York City, started to train as a dancer. at Juilliard, met Daniel Nealman, son of the founder of JetBlue, among other airlines, grew up with quite a bit of money. Quite a bit of money, yes. Like the dad is a billionaire. Let's just like take a look at one of the videos so we can, you know, see what they look like.

5:24There is one that I watched that I think is really, is a little more, it's not a cooking video. This is on TikTok. The caption is, I'm calling it a dairy date. Okay. Okay, here. This is the one. When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch. It makes sense why I soon fell in love with the idea of a family milk cow. So they're kissing at a field with a baby. We see cows. The husband is wearing a cowboy hat. She's wearing a long prairie dress. So for date night tonight, Daniel and I snuck over to the dairy. The temperature was perfect. Little Florida Joe was giggling.

6:06And the cows were gorgeous. It's the world we created. and I couldn't love it more. This has a lot in it. I just want to say, right? We have the perfect marriage. They still do date night, right? They're loving, they're kissing. She's happy. The baby is giggling. They're making their own, you know, milk products. And crucially, they're going to share these products with us. So this is a fantasy we can buy into. You know, I'm interested in the sort of more not only the portrayal, the descriptive aspect of how they live. Right. But the way that they also, I think, in their deepest form become prescriptive.

6:51That like they are not only living out this, let's call it a fantasy, but are describing it in ideological terms often. My favorite, I think, is Gwen the Milkmaid. Do you guys know Gwen? I'm not familiar with Gwen. Tell us about Gwen. Gwen is, and I think this is really important. Does she call herself Gwen the Milkmane? That is her handle on Instagram. And she, like Hannah, like many others, is always sort of in the kitchen often as she's showing you all the different, either playing with chicks or something like that, but often making things in the kitchen. But crucially, she is, and a lot of these people, just like we mentioned, Hannah, former performer, former dancer.

7:36Gwen the Milkmaid is a former OnlyFans model who then sort of has this like— Vegan, right? Vegan ASMR person, whatever, but then also OnlyFans and has this sort of like conversion experience. You mean a religious conversion? Yes, yes. She explicitly terms this in terms of like I don't find Christians as weird as I used to and like I'm like changing my lifestyle. But also a conversion, a platform conversion, you know, like moving from one form of Internet performance to another. And it feels to me she is like classically post 2020, which is how I think of all these people, which is like, you know, before I heard of trad wives, I heard in 2020 like that just like trad Catholic was often talked about.

8:24A person who cares a lot about the Latin mass and cares a lot about like forms of religious traditionalism. And then I started, as you mentioned, like last year-ish, hearing about the trad wife, the genre, which is really what it is. Like it's a sort of video genre. Yeah, it's an entertainment genre. Yeah. But they all have this like, at least the ones that I've encountered, this ideological edge. So like let's watch this one of Gwen. It's like hard. You'll see the text go by. But I'll narrate some of the text. It's just Gwen. Like there's music on.

9:02Wow. The speeded up version of like Elton John and the Don't Go Breaking My Heart. Don't Go Breaking My Heart. But over it, it's saying hills that I'm willing to die on. And it says red meat doesn't cause heart disease. Raw milk is nature's superfood. The sun doesn't cause cancer. Beef fat is the superior skincare. Butter over seed oils. So it's like all of these like anti-vax adjacent. Jordan Peterson-esque. What it is is really pretty women who are RFK Jr. It's like post-COVID. It's post - also the two things that are happening at the same time in 2020. Post-COVID and post-whatever we call the post-George Floyd, post-Great Awokening.

9:50It is a reactionary movement. It's a return. It's a reversion. The same way that 2020 radicalized people toward like social democracy and new forms of communitarianism, maybe push people to the left in the form of like the Bernie movement and other things like that. The other thing it did was push people to the right and be like, here is why the world was wrong. Here is why, you know, various promises of the sort of like post-feminist world, you know, made promises that obviously like the world is broken. Obviously they were wrong. Here is an alternative. And so it's weird. Like it's almost what's interesting to me about Gwen, Hannah and others is that they're proposing their lifestyle as a kind of punk.

10:35It's like, yeah, this is alternative. This is cool. That's right. It's cutting against the mainstream grain. I mean, I just want to say a couple of things because I've not yet encountered Gwen. Gwen herself is thin, long blonde hair. That, in a lot of ways, is what the traditional trad wife, the trad trad wife, looks like. A white woman who has this kind of, you know, very hyper feminine, almost doll-like aspect. There is another trad wife who I'm really fascinated by. Please. And I actually have friendly feelings for her. Yeah, her name is Nara Smith. Okay. So Nara Smith is, I learned this recently from a profile in GQ that our colleague Carrie Batten wrote about Nara Smith and her husband, Lucky Smith.

11:19Lucky Blue Smith. Lucky Blue Smith. She's 22 years old. Okay, I knew she was young. I didn't realize she was that young. She is. She has three kids. Two of them are toddlers. One is a baby. Nara Smith, like Lucky Blue Smith, her husband, is a model. She is extremely beautiful. She is black. Her father is German. Her mother is Misotho. And she is performative in a way that, of course, all social media people and all trad wives are, but differently so. To me, all tradwifery is drag. It's drag. And what I kind of appreciate about Nara Smith is that she, like, Vincent, you were talking about the performative elements.

11:54She really embraces. She leans in. Yes, she embraces the drag element. She's wearing extraordinary clothes, many of them designer. Very high fashion. High fashion, looking absolutely gorgeous, making outlandish things from scratch, such as cereal. And the way, and we'll watch a video of hers in a second, but the way that she presents these things is itself comic, to me at least, and I think to a lot of her followers. She begins most of her videos with the framing that a certain kind of food was requested by her toddlers. You know, my toddlers requested cereal today, but they wanted different kinds.

12:29So I thought, OK, I'll make two different kinds of cereal. When most people's toddlers request something, all you can think is what is the fastest route to get this? Not even buy. It's like, oh, do I have it in the cabinet? Whatever I got is what's going in your mouth right now because I need to stave off the screaming and the conflict and the chaos that's about to unfold. in the made-up world of the Nara Smith videos. What she does is calmly set around, set about making dough to roll into tiny little pieces to make cereal with. Let's watch one of her videos. We were about to go to bed when I realized that we were all out of toothpaste.

13:04So my husband went downstairs to make some. Lucky is very precise in his measurements, so he started out by measuring some bentonite clay. He added that to a bowl with a tablespoon of water. My co-hosts are absolutely wrapped. watching Nara and Lucky Smith make toothpaste from something called bentonite clay. If you know what that is and you don't have to look it up, I guess hats off to you. The last two ingredients, which were some stevia and peppermint essential oil. We love our toothpaste quite minty, so he added a lot of essential oil before mixing that up. Okay, this one is actually, this is kind of making me actively angry.

13:44Yes, I would say that this is an angering one. Yeah. In part because most people, and they don't have toothpaste. And by most people, I mean all people simply go out to purchase it. Yeah, this is the one that makes me think it's like sort of comedy. But it's also like, when I'm all out of toothpaste, all I do is go to the motherfucking store and act like a regular person. And then I come back home with it and use it. Yeah, like, what the fuck? What the fuck was that? I think it's comedy. I think that's comedy. It's like, how do I make my life as hard as possible is like actually the genre. While making it seem as simple and easy as possible.

14:26In a minute, we're going to be talking about the secret lives of Mormon wives, which in some ways is a complete 180 on the Tradwife form. Stick around.

14:52I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight... And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.

15:29Okay. My friends, the secret lives of Mormon wives just came out on Hulu. It's finally here.

15:43the most important show of the past decade has finally arrived on our screens okay laughter aside i do think there is something to the show that's worth discussing um absolutely especially in the context of what we've been kind of like uh talking about so it's an eight-part series coming out on Hulu. It's been pretty buzzed about. Can one of you guys say a little bit about what the show is about? It is in many ways about the sort of afterlife, the wreckage of a big scandal. There are several women, as described by the title of the show, they happen to be wives and they happen to be Mormon. And they, crucially though, like are part of a sort of group of, again, social media performers and they call their sort of genre hashtag mom talk.

16:48One of the moms, her name is Taylor, and we'll get into her. Taylor Frankie Paul. She describes herself early on as looking like the cool mom played by Amy Poehler in Mean Girls. Right. She's very much like, hey, fellow kids kind of energy. And she sort of online, this was a big thing, was covered by, among other august outlets, the New York Post. She kind of like came out saying that all these groups, these women, sort of inside their friendship or whatever, their ring of friends was also soft swinging that was happening. That resulted in what sounds like very mild, awkward key parties, I guess.

17:31but this like given the milieu that they work in which is like a lot of them are devoted members of the Church of Latter Day Saints and sort of have a sexual ethic to which they all at least outwardly adhere this counts as a big scandal in their world but in that way it's like a sort of meta-treatment of not only Trad Wives but any number of these phenomena because it's so explicitly about what happens when your real life contravenes the performance that you have put forward You know, something comes forward that makes your online performance of, as we've mentioned, like a genre, seem like a bit of hypocrisy.

18:10What it does is show that any trad wivery of any variety is already a sham because this kind of thing takes so much work. These women are all media entrepreneurs. Therefore, none of them are trad. I know you don't want to make a TikTok, but we've got to pay the bills. I mean, who else is going to pay the bills? Who is currently like the breadwinner at home? I think all of us. Yeah, definitely. For sure. All of us. Really? Yeah. We all are. Look at us. Social media has been like the greatest. I would actually say, you know, that there is a big difference between the kind of social media performance that the women in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives put on and the trad wife performance.

18:55And to me, the difference is that the wives, the Mormon wives in this reality TV show, started out as real traditional wives. I mean, I was taking some notes when I watched the show. As a critic does. As a critic does. And, you know, one of the first things that one of the wives says is we were raised to be housewives. And we just, she goes on to say, you know, we kind of found a sort of freedom in putting things online that represented a different side of life. After I had my first child, I had this, is this my life now? Like, am I just a mom? Which I'm not saying is a bad thing, but I didn't want that to define me.

19:36And being invited to MomTalk and getting together with these other women who had the same goals was refreshing and it was exciting. So when you look at MomTalk or when you look at the depictions of MomTalk on this TV show, it's not like anything like what we were just describing. It's actually the exact opposite. It is not women in cute dresses, cleaning and, you know, taking care of kids and milking cows. It's the opposite. It's women doing what I also consider at this point to be a somewhat traditional genre, like content house creation. They're wearing tight black exercise clothing. They're doing coordinated dances as you do on TikTok.

20:14And they're sexy. They're very purposely trying to be sexy and trying to show off a different side. It actually reads as a kind of gentle rebellion against the mores that they grew up with. But in a kind of charming way to me, these women seem like behind the curve. The curve now is like get out your gingham ladies. We're going to pack a perfect picnic. And they're still like get out your lululemons. We're going to do a little hip hop and toss our extensions. I do feel, though, I mean, I totally agree with you, Alex, that they are kind of bucking the trend. They are engaging with the trend of the trad wife, of course, because they come from tradition.

21:01You know, they're like 23 and they have three kids already and they're married and they were taught to be housewives and they were taught to be helpmates and so on. And they're kind of like pushing against that with their like hair extensions and so on. But there is something, you know, the kind of claim of like we're going against patriarchy. You know, it's like we're like we're not tradwise. We're going against the patriarchy. They, it seems to me, in a slightly different way than the tradwise, but nonetheless still completely beholden to the patriarchy. Nomi, I totally agree with you. It's – there are two sides of a patriarchy coin.

21:41I mean, the tight athleisure, showing off your midriff, showing off your cleavage, you know, your face looks a bit plastic and sculpted, all of that, to me, it's about a certain kind of male attention. And one question that's been asked of the trad wives themselves, and I actually think this is somewhat complicated and not totally straightforward, is are the trad wife influencers just seeking out a certain kind of male attention? Are the real viewers men who want to live this fantasy of a submissive woman? I think the complicated answer is no, not entirely. But a lot of women are really into this as well.

22:15I think both kinds of – both of these, like whether they're the classic trad wives or the Mormon wives, I think they would both answer that with a strident no. And I think the reason is like basically saying I can have both things. I can identify myself as a mom, for instance, but also be interested in these other things. Like it's a way of saying no to a certain form of patriarchy but also saying no to a certain hypermodern, let's say, Sheryl Sandberg, lean-in style, you know, career-first thing too. It's like, no, I can have it all. The key ideology there is you people, you hypermodern women who like don't like what we're doing, don't like this, you are just enforcing another like mandatory femininity on me.

23:03And no, we choose to be like this. And every time you say that it's just a male thing, every time you say this is just patriarchy, you are actually like contravening my choice. There's this video that I would like us to look at and, you know, to discuss a little bit by this trad wife influencer named Estee Williams. And she explains in it what it means to her to be a trad wife. And I think it touches on this issue of choice. The misconception about the Trad Wife movement, it's not really a movement. Nobody's pushing it. People are typically just living it and maybe showcasing their lifestyle like me.

23:41And we believe our place, specifically us as individuals, believe our purpose is to be homemakers. It doesn't mean that we are trying to take away what woman fought for. No Trad Wife TikTokers are saying every woman's place is in their home. We as individuals are just choosing to be homemakers. That's all. To be a homemaker and to have traditional values does not make us bad people. It's 2022. Women should have the choice to be homemakers or not without being judged. And women should also be able to use the term tradwife, which means traditional wife, and not be shunned for wanting to be more traditional.

24:22Well, of course, no one is really shunning. I do think, you know, the judging is absolutely happening. It's judging as rampant in all aspects of American life. So, you know, this gets to one of my favorite kinds of things, something that we all love, which is how does culture influence politics and how does politics influence culture? When you're talking about choice of any kind, particularly these ideas of women's choice, you have to ask what choices are available. Yeah. In American society, the way choice works is especially for a wife or a mother is – has everything to do with, you know, child care options, financial options, who is making the money, who – I mean who takes care of the children?

25:09We do not have universal child care as we all know all too well. Yes. So choice is not a pure thing. The set of choices is not a pure thing. This may seem a bit out of left field, but I do just want to say something that has occurred to me since watching all these videos and being kind of inundated in this very female world of the trad wave. I was recently on vacation in Stockholm in Sweden. One thing that is so noticeable on the level of culture in Sweden is how many dads are out with young kids. because the structure of the society is such that both parents have paid leave. And in fact, it's mandated that the dads have to take their leave.

25:51They cannot say, oh, I have the leave. I'm just not going to take it. Like they actually have to take the leave. And to an American, that looks totally shocking and different. So what would like a trad wife situation look like, we could ask, in a society in which, you know, structurally and politically, more gender equality has been created in the first place? It still might be there, but I dare say it would look somewhat different than in, you know, when you talk about the idea of choice, are we just talking about false choices?

26:25So why are Tradwives having such a moment right now? That's right after the break on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.