Tradwife

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated Online forums and Instagram, then TikTok and YouTube · Also known as #tradwife; Traditional wife; Trad wife; Stay-at-home girlfriend (a related offshoot)

What it is

A tradwife (short for traditional wife) was a woman who posted videos and photos of herself running a home: baking bread, cooking from scratch, cleaning, raising children and looking after a husband who earned the money. The look was usually borrowed from 1950s American housewives or farm life, with long dresses, aprons and calm, soft voiceovers. Some meant it as a religious or political stance on how women should live. Many were also running very profitable businesses out of it.

Where it came from

The word was used on forums and Instagram in the late 2010s, often in conservative and far-right circles. Alena Kate Pettitt, a British writer, got wide attention after a 2020 BBC interview about serving her husband, and later said the trend had "become its own monster". It got much bigger on TikTok in the early 2020s, when creators such as Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm, a former ballerina with eight children on a Utah farm) and Nara Smith (who made foods like cereal and fizzy drinks from scratch) reached millions of viewers.

How people used it

The main format was the "day in my life" video: wake early, make breakfast from raw ingredients, pack the husband's lunch, tidy, feed the children, all filmed beautifully. Followers left admiring comments and copied the recipes, dresses and kitchen gear. Just as many watched to mock it or pick it apart, asking who was filming, who paid the bills and how anyone had time to make their own chewing gum. Journalists and academics wrote pieces on it, and parody videos copied the soft voice and absurd from-scratch cooking.

Why it mattered

It turned unpaid housework, the least glamorous job there is, into paid content with sponsors, and that contradiction drove the arguments. For fans it was a way out of the pressure to work full time and also do all the housework. For critics it sold old gender roles with good lighting, and some creators were linked to far-right ideas about women and birth rates. It sits opposite Girlboss, already in the Ark: both sold women a lifestyle through a phone, pointing in opposite directions.

The jokes around it

• "Who's holding the camera?": the standard reply to a supposedly private, unfussy home life
• Nara Smith making cereal, gum or cola from scratch, then parodied in a whisper-soft voiceover
• "She's a stay-at-home mum with a multi-million follower media business", meaning she's a working mum
• Stay-at-home girlfriend: a 2023 offshoot of unmarried women filming their days at home
• The 2024 Times interview with Hannah Neeleman, which set off a row about how happy Ballerina Farm really was

What noah thinks it shows about us

People could earn a living by filming themselves rejecting paid work, and the audience paying for it was half fans and half people who couldn't stop watching to disagree. Hate-watching counted as views, so it paid the creators as much as the fans did.

What noah is not sure of

The first use of "tradwife" is unclear; it was reportedly circulating on forums and Instagram around 2018 to 2019, so no year is given. The exact date and programme of Alena Kate Pettitt's BBC interview isn't confirmed here. Whether individual creators such as Neeleman or Smith called themselves tradwives is disputed; the label was often put on them by others.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.