What is a tradwife? Why it's different from being a stay-at-home mom

When I was in seventh grade, I spent nine weeks in a classroom designed to look like a small house. It was my only semester of home economics, and even now it plays in my head like a bad movie. The teacher was statuesque, with hair sprayed into perfect waves and makeup that never smudged. She wore long, modest dresses, an apron tied neatly at her waist, and spoke to us in a calm, almost whispery tone. The lessons felt like they’d been pulled from a mid-century magazine—how to make a bed with hospital corners, the proper way to fold laundry, the best sequence for grocery shopping.

The class was coed, but the subtext was clear. When she looked at the boys, she seemed amused by their fumbling attempts at stitching or cooking. When she addressed the girls, her tone shifted—more serious, more deliberate—as if to say, “You’ll need this one day.” I wondered then if these skills were meant to complement a future career, or if the expectation was that they might replace it entirely. Maybe one day the boys would head off to offices while we stayed behind, armed with sewing kits and recipes.

Three decades later, those memories resurface every time I scroll past another viral video tagged #tradwife. The term—short for “traditional wife”—has exploded on social media, and it’s not just about being a stay-at-home mom. It’s a curated lifestyle steeped in mid-20th-century ideals: a husband who works, a wife who manages the home, and children who appear well-mannered and eternally content. The tradwife aesthetic is part vintage fantasy, part influencer brand, and fully steeped in controversy.

A tradwife embraces domesticity as a primary identity. She’s often shown baking bread from scratch, tending gardens, homeschooling children, and keeping the home spotless—all while dressed in long, flowing dresses or retro-inspired outfits. Parenting expert and home educator Meg Tibayan describes it as a return to “mid-20th-century ideals strongly emphasizing domestic duties and family care,” the kind embodied by June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. For some, it’s a celebration of traditional values, a rejection of the hustle, and a way to find purpose in home life. For others, it’s a troubling step backward, a romanticized version of a time when women’s opportunities were constrained and their labor undervalued.

Online, the tradwife is easy to spot. Instagram and TikTok feeds are filled with soft-filtered shots of spacious kitchens, handcrafted meals, children playing in sunlit gardens, and perfectly ironed linens. Influencers like @esteecwilliams post explainers about the movement, framing it as a conscious choice to “submit to their husbands and serve them.” Others, like @ivyoutwest, argue that the label is new but the lifestyle is ancient—that before “tradwife” there was “stay-at-home mom,” and before that, “just women.”

But there’s a twist in the narrative. While many tradwives claim not to work, their days are often filled with the labor of content creation—filming, editing, and managing an online presence that sometimes generates income. Their supposed rejection of modern work happens on modern devices, in a digital economy that rewards their aesthetic. The lifestyle that’s presented as private, family-focused, and offline is in fact deeply intertwined with social media metrics and monetization.

The current wave of tradwife fascination can be traced, at least in part, to Hannah Neeleman, the face behind @ballerinafarm. A Juilliard-trained ballerina who left her dance career after marriage, Neeleman now lives on a sprawling Utah farm with her husband and their eight children. She bakes, she gardens, she competes in beauty pageants—winning Mrs. America in 2023—and she does it all with a smile. Her life is styled like an old-fashioned ideal: physically beautiful, endlessly patient, far from the grind of corporate work.

For her millions of followers, Neeleman’s posts offer a blend of aspiration and escapism. But cracks appeared when viewers learned her husband is the son of JetBlue’s founder and that the couple’s wealth enabled their idyllic setup. Suddenly, the $30,000 Aga stove and the expansive farmland looked less like the result of thrift and hard work and more like a lifestyle underwritten by privilege. The illusion of accessibility evaporated, replaced by the recognition that this version of domestic bliss is not something most families could replicate without significant financial backing.

In July 2024, a Times profile complicated the image further, portraying Neeleman as possibly unhappy, overburdened by childcare, and perhaps subject to her husband’s control. The tradwife fantasy had been dented, if not shattered, for some followers.

It’s worth noting that while both tradwives and stay-at-home moms focus on home life, they aren’t interchangeable. Many stay-at-home moms make the choice based on childcare needs, the cost of daycare, or a temporary life stage. For tradwives, the arrangement is not just practical but philosophical: a long-term commitment to traditional gender roles as a virtue in itself. Rachel Goldberg, a licensed marriage and family therapist, notes that this perspective can be seen as undermining the progress women have made toward equality. It’s less about circumstances and more about ideology.

That ideological bent is part of why the trend is so polarizing. Tradwife content often presents an idealized bubble where life is free of financial stress and marital conflict, glossing over the risks of economic dependence. As relationship coach Moore points out, being a happy tradwife hinges on two things: the household’s financial resources and the character of the husband. Without both, the lifestyle can become isolating or even dangerous, leaving women without the means to leave a bad situation.

Still, the allure of tradwife content is undeniable. For some viewers, it’s a soothing antidote to modern life—a visual lullaby in a world of noise. For others, it’s a staged performance, no more authentic than a reality show, and just as curated. The videos are often free of the mess and chaos that come with raising children, skipping straight to the golden-hour family picnics and the satisfying clatter of a home-cooked meal being served.

Even within the tradwife community, there are contradictions. On TikTok, creator @jasminedinis2 sells courses on becoming a tradwife—for $5,900. The irony is hard to miss: a movement that supposedly rejects modern hustle is also a marketplace, with its own products, services, and monetized brand identities.

In many ways, the tradwife trend is less about actual domestic life and more about the performance of it. It’s a mash-up of vintage aesthetics, influencer marketing, and selective storytelling. And like my home economics class all those years ago, it prompts questions about what we teach girls—explicitly or implicitly—about their roles, their futures, and the value of their labor.

In that junior high classroom, my final project was to sew a throw pillow using a basic stitch. I struggled with the seams, growing frustrated until I grabbed a stapler and closed it up that way. It was a small act of rebellion, but also a reminder that sometimes we improvise our own solutions rather than follow a script. The tradwife trend, for all its nostalgia, is still a script—one that’s being rewritten in real time on social media. Whether it becomes a lasting cultural movement or fades into the background of the algorithm will depend not just on aesthetics, but on whether its promises hold up under the realities of life outside the frame.