“I don’t want a job, I don’t want to be the breadwinner,” a video from TikTok influencer Jasmine Dinis begins. “I want to be home, I want to be in the kitchen cooking, I want to be cleaning, I want to be cooking, I want to be making brownies, I want to be cooking dinner, making home-cooked meals every night.”
Her words overlay a series of idyllic-seeming video clips of her cradling her children, rolling around with them in verdant countryside and taking freshly-baked bread out of the oven. And thus far, nearly 7 million people have watched it. And Jasmine isn’t alone. Introducing the ‘trad wife’…
What is a trad wife?
The women who create this distinct brand of domestic servitude content are part of a subculture known as “tradwives” (traditional wives), based on advocating for traditional values, and, in particular, a 'traditional' view of wives as mothers and homemakers.
Follow the hashtags #housewifelife, #tradwife or #homemaker on Instagram and Tiktok and you’ll see young women with perfectly slicked-back hair donning gingham dresses, baking the family’s morning blueberry muffins from scratch, homeschooling their children, or clipping flowers from a backyard garden to ‘whip up’ a Mayfair floristry-style bouquet for a ‘casual’ lunch with their husband.
The ‘Queen of Trad Wives’ has defended her husband and their lifestyle.
Jasmine is relatively small-fry compared to some of the bigger influencers spearheading the trad wife movement. Names like Hannah Neeleman, or Ballerina Farm as she is known on social media (whose content went viral after she was profiled in a controversial piece in The Times, entitled “Meet the queen of the tradwives”), has 7.5 million followers on TikTok, 9.1 million on Instagram, and 1.6 million on YouTube. While Nara Smith (who has 10.8 million followers on TikTok and often receives up to 28 million views on her videos) and the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives pop up regularly both on my social media and in conversation, so simultaneously divisive and enthralling is the tradwife movement.
Unsurprisingly, tradwives have incurred criticism from many women, and men, who claim that their specific brand of rose-tinted home life is damaging to the decades-worth of blood, sweat and tears that have been poured into furthering women’s rights. “You’re an embarrassment to feminism,” a scathing comment on one of Smith’s videos reads.
But not all is as it seems, as upon closer inspection, there’s much more to the traditional bliss and wrinkleless-linen dresses than meets the untrained eye. Because a handful of tradwives, including Neeleman and Smith, have now built large followings online, and as we well know, large followings come with large paychecks. Meaning that they have become, whether intentionally or not, traditional wives and breadwinners simultaneously. A complex oxymoron, to put it mildly.
In March 2024, Smith reportedly made an estimated $200,000 from TikTok alone, not including sponsored posts, according to research from Parade, while Neeleman is estimated to earn around £650,000 a-year from TikTok views, not to mention the income she will receive from driving followers to the produce her and her husband sell from the back-to-basics farm life they document.
Instagram content
It’s important to note here that not all tradwives earn a living, and many of those who post snippets of their life online are not doing so with the intention of building a business or even a following, but there are an increasing handful who are. This leaves these influencers in somewhat of a paradox: they’re stay-at-home mothers who are also the breadwinners for their families.
They’re homemakers who are able to pull in hundreds of thousands through product affiliations (“the links in my bio if you want your own Kitchenaid”), views, ads and brand collaborations - Smith has her own line of kitchenware. In short, these women aren’t actually financially submissive at all, they’re raking in more than many of us do working the 9-5’s we fought so hard to be a part of.
I will always champion a woman earning her own money and financial independence, and housework is work, there is no question about it. In fact, if unpaid domestic labour were quantified with a monetary value, UN Women estimated it would constitute between 10% and 39% of the average gross income.
The issue here is not that I begrudge these women cashing in on their online presence, it’s that they do it while glorifying the idea of financial dependence – whether they explicitly reference this or not; it’s the contradiction in what this breed of tradwives are selling vs the reality. The fact that they are the breadwinners in their homes runs in direct opposition to one of the defining traits of a tradwife: being at the financial mercy of her significant other.
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In fact, rather than harping back to a bygone era that many tradwives feel was a simpler, ‘more fulfilling’ time for women, they’re subverting the idea of the traditional housewife by turning their at-home chores into their actual job.
I can’t tell you how often I’d be whipping up a batch of sourdough loaves if I knew I was going to make thousands doing it, and I’d be positively glued to the duster if I could count on it financing my life that month, but add that into a short morning window before having to head off to the tube to a full-time job? That’s a different story. And it’s the story of the masses because many women are still taking on the lion's share of household labour ON TOP of working a full-time job.
Take Smith, for example, whose videos primarily focus on domestic tasks, from cooking (I recently watched her pickle her own onions) and cleaning to gardening and home organisation, all while wearing gorgeous outfits. She infuses her content with a touch of humour, elegance, and a certain aesthetic appeal, captivating her audience with her seemingly effortless performance of traditionally feminine roles, all while wearing high couture (she’s now signed to globally-leading model agency, IMG). In fact, Smith’s brand has been so successful that it’s seen her host cooking shows and launch her own product lines.
Her husband, Lucky, features as her sidekick in various videos and she often refers to her love language being performing acts of service for him. But in this ‘demure’ online empire, he’s a sidekick. Though he’s been centred as a main character by the very definition of a tradwife living in servitude to her husband, it’s clear who the real star is here, and Smith has previously referenced her husband’s support and encouragement.
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Then there’s Neeleman, more widely known as Ballerina Farm, who documents life on a 328-acre farm in Kamas, Utah with her husband Daniel and their eight children. Their back-to-basics lifestyle has captivated millions, as Neeleman shows herself straining homemade yoghurt, making bread from scratch and baking with raw honey, all in a pretty stripped-back wooden kitchen that many of us doing far less cooking might struggle in.
But here again, it feels as though there is an element of cosplaying the tradwife role, as the aesthetic appeal of such a lifestyle becomes blurred when you consider the underlying economic gain here. I believe wholeheartedly that Neeleman is just as married to the stove as she is her husband, and her interview with The Times makes it clear that she has sacrificed a lot (including a promising career as a ballet dancer) to stay at home with the children and keep the house and farm running.
However, Neeleman's ability to earn a substantial income through her social media presence highlights the commodification of domesticity and the potential for financial gain from sharing personal life experiences. Not to mention that her husband is the son of a multi-millionaire entrepreneur who launched commercial airlines like JetBlue and WestJet, among others.
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Then there are the female cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, who, during a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, almost all raised their hands (some somewhat sheepishly) when asked if they were the breadwinners in their family. For women, Mormonism hinges on the idea that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling, yet those in the show (Taylor Frankie Paul and Whitney Leavitt among them, both with millions of followers and tens of millions of views) are not simply living that way in quiet reflection, they’re filming it, they’re consciously creating a brand that glamourises this way of life, and then profiting from it.
“From what we’re told [the Mormon community] is a very traditional community,” the interview says. “The men are the ones that are supposed to bring in the money. How does that effect your relationships?”
“My husband’s all for it,” one remarks, while another adds: “Yeah, my husband’s like, ‘I’ll stay at home.”
And their short responses undermine the entire movement, given that much of the criticism levelled at tradwives is that their content is setting women back and yet here sit a gaggle of women whose husbands’ are happy to give up their careers to stay at home while their wives make the dough (quite literally). Their glorification of the traditional has allowed them to live distinctly untraditional lives, subverting gender norms and throwing the rule book they claim to follow out of the window.
“What would you do if your husband upped and left?” reads a comment on one of Smith’s recent videos. In the case of these social media mogul housewives though, isn’t the real question, what would her husband do? Which encapsulates the paradox floating around on this side of the tradwife movement, because they’re not really living small, quiet, homebound lives, where they are reliant on their husbands at all, they’re running a multi-million pound empire from their kitchen. That sounds pretty untraditional to me.
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