The business of tradwives

If you haven’t heard of ‘tradwives’ yet, hop on Instagram or TikTok and be prepared to go down a rabbit hole of clashing ideologies. 
On the surface they are ‘traditional wives’ – women who are happily married, busy pumping out children, cooking family meals from scratch and being happy to take orders from their husbands. 
But the content they produce is highly curated, designed for clicks and has become its own business – and it takes time away from the family to do that successfully. 
Today on The Detail we look at this phenomenon and its place in the culture wars. 
Megan Agnew is a writer for The Times of London who earlier this year spent a day with the so-called Queen of Tradwives, Hannah Neeleman, her husband Daniel and their eight children. Hannah’s social media posts are under the name ‘Ballerina Farm’ – she was training to be a ballerina before she met Daniel. 
She went viral recently for a video of her excitedly opening a birthday present from Daniel, hoping all the while it would be her much-hinted for holiday to Greece … only to find an egg-collecting apron, which she then danced around the kitchen wearing, with supposed joy. 
Hannah says she’s not a tradwife but she fits the description. 
She grew up in a traditional Mormon family in Utah and now uses her account to promote their farm business, which she does while home-schooling her children. 
She also competed in the Mrs World beauty pageant 12 days after giving birth to her eighth child and has nine million followers on Instagram. 
In her posts “everything just feels idyllic and peaceful and perfect”, says Agnew. 
But not everyone swallows her public-facing picture, and she’s faced a lot of criticism online. 
“She was attacked for making motherhood look too easy, for promoting a really traditional lifestyle at home when it came to gender roles.”
What Agnew found on Ballerina Farm was not quite what she expected. 
“She was much softer, and much more passive than I thought she was going to be, particularly within the role of the company. She was the face of it, and really was the brains behind putting it all on Instagram.” 
Her husband is from a super-wealthy family and had dreamt of “this enormous brave existence in the American west”, she says. 
“It’s very old-fashioned and romanticising of the old-fashioned lifestyle.” 
The reaction to her article has been “so polarised it’s extraordinary”, says Agnew. 
It came out amid the current conversation in the US about childless people and whether they have a stake in the country or not; Vice-President Kamala Harris being described as a “childless cat lady” by the Republican VP nominee JD Vance; and heated arguments about reproductive freedoms. 
“That was transplanted onto this,” she says. 
“It’s really personal. It just comes down to choice really – one half saying just because you’ve made this decision to live this life it doesn’t mean it’s a decision of freedom, you’re still oppressed in some way. And the other side saying, ‘No no, I did choose it, and that in itself is a feminist free act.
“It has at times been a vicious debate.”   
The Detail also speaks to Kathryn Jezer-Morton who writes about family life for New York Magazine, and has a PhD in sociology studying ‘momfluencers’.
She says these influencers don’t talk politics – it would be terrible for their brand – but it’s there under the surface all the time. 
“The family planning stuff, the no-abortion stuff, the traditional gender role stuff … these are really important parts of the alt right and in some ways bubbling into the more conservative party system in the United States. 
“Even if it’s not talked about overtly, all of the little markers are legible, and you can’t deny that they’re there.” 
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