After spending years building audiences and influencer careers showcasing traditional gender roles, some of the earliest so called “tradwives” are denouncing the category. Some say they never claimed the label for themselves in the first place. While this could be seen as a shift away from conservative influencers, a new wave of teenage tradwives is already waiting to prove that notion wrong.
Tradwife influencers dropping the label
Despite having built much of her more than 12 million followers on TikTok through an “outlandish portrayal of domestic perfection,” model and influencer Nara Smith made waves after she “vehemently disavowed” the tradwife label during a recent interview with the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Jessica Grose said at The New York Times. Viewers of Smith’s content were “stuck in this narrative” about traditional gender roles that she didn’t create on purpose, Smith said on the podcast. They used her as the “poster child for the tradwife movement,” which was “very bizarre.”
She is not the only popular so-called trad wife who has veered clear of the terminology. Earlier this year, Estee Williams, another tradwife influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, announced on TikTok that she would be stepping back from making that kind of content to “focus fully” on her family. In June, Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who is rumored to be the inspiration behind the popular thriller book “Yesteryear,” admitted that she “steers clear of conversations around tradwives,” said Vanity Fair.
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For some, the sudden shift can be tied to tradwives being regarded as MAGA-coded. It is no longer “considered cool” to be “tacitly embracing the Trumpian vision,” Grose said. It is “not cute anymore” to be “spending hours making Skittles from scratch” when so many people “can’t even afford haircuts and toilet paper.” Beyond the “superficial politics” of content like Smith’s, there is evidence that “one-note influencers are having trouble retaining their audience” because what used to “get them brand deals and followers has become stale.”
The next generation is here
The first-gen trad wives’ “renunciation” has had “little impact on their progeny,” who “studied them for years” and “viewed their content as a portrait of a viable future,” said Vanity Fair. Now there is a new cohort of “young — often teenage — married influencers.” They have gone viral in the last few months by “mimicking the content formula perfected by their tradwife forebears.”
The new generation cooks, cleans and “fights disaffected former tradwives” who tell them to “stash emergency money away from their husbands,” said Vanity Fair. These teens, typically between the ages of 17 and 21, “present their life as a balm to generational ennui.” In some ways, they are proof that what felt like an “overhyped, postpandemic symbol of an ascending conservative culture” has become an “enduring content category that nearly guarantees virality,” one now “taken over by ever-younger creators.”
The new wave of “young creators making stay-at-home content” appears more than ready to “accept the homemaker label,” Isabel Bekele said at Dazed. The young women “film themselves performing domestic tasks” and post the same “ragebait-esque provocations” with an attitude that “demonstrates an awareness of how their content might be received.”
The lifestyle choices of “teen tradwives” are “certainly not reflective of the country as a whole,” especially as Gen Z women are still “going to college and entering the workforce at a higher rate than their male counterparts,” said Bekele. Still, the fact that these videos “exist and are gaining traction at all” feels indicative of the “current cultural dissonance in America,” where conversations around “work, gender and labor” have changed in line with “women’s lived realities.”
Nara Smith may not be a tradwife, but that “doesn’t mean that the movement is going anywhere,” said Bekele — whether that’s due to the country’s “shift to the right,” the internet’s “obsession with hate-watching,” the algorithm’s “tendency to reward extreme content” or all of the above. With or without the first-era influencers, “tradwives will continue to exist.” Considering the limited options young women have today, “maybe it isn’t that shocking that this romanticization of the past will still be in our future.”
