Were Tradwives Always a Myth? (Famous Tradwives Disavow Label)

Simone and Malcolm break down the alleged tradwife exodus and explain why the entire aesthetic was never an authentic return to 1950s life. They trace its roots to progressive cottagecore trends, BDSM roleplay, and online fantasy rather than any genuine historical model. The discussion covers high-profile influencers distancing themselves from the label, the straw-man portrayal in the novel Yesteryear, rising ex-trad wife creators, and how AI-driven unemployment will fuel more homemaking content without reviving any real trad movement.

Show Notes

The Tradwife Fanfiction

I started seeing signs of the shift with the April debut of Yesteryear, which was a huge hit (and even before the book came out, Amazon MGM Studios bought the rights to it; Anne Hathaway will both star in and produce it). When I read it, I mentally referred to it as “Strawman: The Musical.”

It is an utter piece of trash, not just because it gives off the air of written by someone incapable of modeling other people (and this is coming form an AUTISTIC PERSON incapable of picking up fundamental social cues), but because it doesn’t even try to explore what tradwife influencers actually are.

Some notes:

* On the author, Caro Claire Burke

* She does not appear to have children and it really shows

* She makes the main character seem like someone who is secretly living a nightmare the moment she became a mother

* Like, she wanted the baby to die when she became a mother

* And postpartum depression is real, but what she describes seems like something very different

* Yet somehow this character has SIX KIDS and no interest in raising any of them

* People who hate kids don’t have six kids in a post-birth-control environment

* She attended “tradwife” influencer bootcamps for research

* In the book [SPOILER ALERT] Burke essentially imagines

* A horrible, spiteful woman incapable of love

* Marrying a rich trust fund kid

* Who doesn’t want to work and would love to be a stay-at-home dad

* And then has a kid with whom she does not at all connect

* And becomes a successful traswife influencer to force her family into some social ideal she wants but nobody else in the family desire

* And then finds out an employee who had an affair with her husband quits

* Then sexually assaults an assistant with whom her husband has an affair

* And has some sort of psychotic break

* And her family BIZARRELY decides to make their house ACTUALLY like the 1850s to “help” this woman

* And she wakes up one morning forgetting everything that happened between the employee quitting and that day, years into their isolation, eventually escapes the house, and gets interviewed by a girl she knew in high school who she hated

* AND NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS

* But it’s made to seem spooky because Burke has the reader skip from Hannah getting notice of an employee quitting to Hannah waking up in her stupid 1840s life and not recognizing her family but thinking they’re similar.

* The book is obviously based on Ballerina Farm (Hannah and Daniel Neelman)

* Proof:

* long kitchen window

* Overpriced cutting board

* Signature sourdough starter

* Shorts of long elaborate meal prep from scratch

* Treasured family cow

* Husband who enjoys birthing calfs

* But she heavily implies that they create an idolized vision of the past

* When Mormons are EXTRA aware of how the past sucked (they go on treks in which they pull hand carts through the wilderness wearing hand-sewn prairie dresses and regularly get sick and dehydrated, plus simulate death

* And she has them hiring nannies from places like LA when a family would never hire such ideologically mismatched people and not want to pay for them either

* Plus she

The Tradwife Exodus

Around the time the book came out, several anti-tradwife creators were on the rise, including one I watch regularly, Life, take two!, who now has 173K subscribers, up from 60K about a year ago.

Then Nara Smith’s interview on Call Her Daddy on July 29th (literally titled, “Nara Smith: Stop Calling Me a Tradwife”, in which she basically disavowed any association with the tradwife label, pointing out, quite fairly, that she is a working mother and that she and her husband Lucky share domestic responsibilities.

The Commentary

Academic article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03616843261437418

As all this was happening,

July 24: “Help! I Might Be a Tradwife!” a NY Times editorial in which poet JoAnna Novak writes about feeling unexpectedly drawn to aspects of domestic life—cooking, caring for children, making a home—while nevertheless rejecting the political and ideological associations with tradwifery.

* It was so popular it got its own follow-up, Challenging the Tradwife Trend.

By July 31st, even The Daily Wire was on this trend, with Why The Tradwife Movement Lost Its Traction, arguing that:

* Isolation is its central flaw (WHO EVER SAID IT WAS ISOLATED??)

* (they argue tradwifing involves homesteading)

* Its standards become exclusionary

* The aesthetic gets confused with virtue

* The lifestyle is difficult to sustain

Then in September, the NY Times published “Her Brand Was Tradwife. Now She’s Divorced.” about about Bernadine Bluntly (aka Bernadine Barber), a former influencer whose public identity was built around the “tradwife” ideal but ultimately—and very publicly—left her husband, got a restraining order, and divorcing, and switched to being an “ex-tradwife” creator warning other women about the ideology.

Is There Actually a Decline?

* No, and the talk about the decline contributed to a boost.

* That’s because this isn’t about any real decline; it’s because tradwives are based off of a fiction that doesn’t map to reality.

* Evie Magazine argued in April that the tradwife rejection trend now is just a reflection of people getting mad about Martha Stewart creating unreasonable standards in the past.

* In reality, the tradwife genre online is about sharing idealized snapshots of homemaking. NOTHING more.

* It’s unmoored from career, religion, gender norms, marriage values, or anything else.

So Why Are People Mad About It (Simone’s Theory Pre-Taping)

My take is people are mad about it because they realize the inevitability of homemaking making a comeback as more people’s careers become obsolete.

* If things go GREAT, more people will be homemakers.

* If things go HORRIBLE, more people will be homemakers.

And I think people are trying to fight the trend—while also becoming fascinated by it—because it scares them.

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be with you today because we’re gonna talk about the trad life exodus. Th