{"id":1004,"date":"2026-09-07T17:38:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T17:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1004"},"modified":"2026-09-07T17:38:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T17:38:21","slug":"theres-nothing-traditional-about-tradwives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1004","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s Nothing Traditional About Tradwives"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<p>A tradwife influencer with millions of followers wakes up in the mid-19th century and has to be a farmwife for real. That\u2019s Caro Claire Burke\u2019s best-selling novel <em>Yesteryear<\/em> in a nutshell. The time travel doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense (no spoilers), but it doesn\u2019t matter\u2014by the time the totally unconvincing switcheroo arrives, you\u2019ll be in too deep to care.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1002\">This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: Wendell Berry\u2019s Humanism and Wisdom for Our Times<\/a><\/p>\n<p>No wonder Anne Hathaway is making it into a movie.<\/p>\n<p>As many have noted, <em>Yesteryear<\/em>\u2019s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, Idaho mother of six, tireless content creator for her millions of fans on social media, and one very sharp businesswoman, bears a resemblance to Hannah Neeleman, slim and beautiful Utah mother of nine and proprietor of Ballerina Farm, from which she portrays a picture-perfect life of adorable blond children, cows, chickens, and homemade bread while selling overpriced kitchen supplies to her approximately 23 million followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Skeptics tear her down for selling raw milk (ceased after health authorities found E. coli in a batch of it) and $259 cutting boards (Walmart sells a virtually identical board for around $17), and of course for kowtowing to her husband, Daniel, despite obviously being the brains of the operation. (In her videos, he has all the alertness of a stunned ox.) While she\u2019s idolized by Christian nationalists as the perfect white obedient super-fertile butter-churning Mormon mom, she only occasionally touches on her religious beliefs and does not mention politics. If you want to keep your numbers in the multimillions, you probably want to keep things a bit vague.<\/p>\n<p>Natalie is Hannah\u2019s id. Warped by fundamentalist Christianity, taught by her mother that a woman\u2019s job is to be sweet and uncomplaining, frightened of venturing beyond her rural background, she drops out of Harvard and marries a young man she barely knows, who has no ambition, the IQ of a rock, and is impotent in bed. In return for producing lots of babies, her rich right-wing father-in-law bankrolls Yesteryear Ranch, which Natalie reverse-renovates to look like a 19th-century farm: The modern conveniences are tucked away behind wood cabinetry; the two nannies and Mexican farm workers are never shown on-screen. Trouble arrives when she hires a savvy young video producer, and that\u2019s all I\u2019m going to tell you.<\/p>\n<p>What is a tradwife, anyway? The linguist Amanda Montell traces the term to the manosphere, in which the ideal woman is a fecund \u201ctraditional\u201d housewife who marries young and submits to her man. But it was when women started to buy in that the concept really took off. Today, the face of tradwifery is a beautiful young mom who wears prairie dresses with full makeup, cooks a lot, and wants to please her husband more than he deserves. Nara Smith, a 24-year-old South African\u2013born biracial fashion model and mother of five married to Lucky Blue Smith, another model, makes industrial food in her kitchen (bubble gum? Seriously?) while speaking in a babyish voice. Gwen the Milkmaid, a former feminist bisexual and OnlyFans performer who found Jesus and says that \u201cmen are better,\u201d makes Cinnamon Toast Crunch from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, there is nothing traditional about tradwives. What\u2019s traditional about constantly filming your personal life and putting it on the Internet for the world to see? Women leading a true traditional life\u2014ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, say\u2014are very private. Online tradwives are doing something else: They are monetizing a fantasy, in which the exhausting labor of housework and childcare is hidden from view and the results are made to seem effortless and relaxing. No slaving over a hot stove, no scrubbing the toilet, no fussy children having meltdowns, no wondering how the heck you ended up like this after graduating with honors. Even childbirth\u2014Neeleman posted clips of her most recent unmedicated home birth\u2014looks easy, practically painless, with no complications. Who do they think they\u2019re kidding? In fact, Neeleman told <em>The Times<\/em> of London that for her sixth birth, her husband was absent and she had an epidural: It was \u201ckinda great.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=999\">An Unabashed Misogynist Is in Charge of Our Country. Now What?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Much has been written about the exhausting, unfulfilling lives of women in the corporate world\u2014told to lean in but overworked, denied the rewards bestowed on their male coworkers, and still doing way more than their share at home. But seriously, how many real-life converts to tradwifery are there? There have always been women whose goal was to marry a breadwinner and stay home with kids, but the statistics show young women forging ahead\u2014getting their degrees, entering the workforce, using birth control, leaving organized religion, moving left. The revolt of women from conservative lifestyles is so pronounced that the Trump administration is doing its best to push them back into the kitchen. Unplanned pregnancy, particularly among teenagers, is just what society needs to get the birth rate up: Ergo, cut funding for sex ed and contraception, ban abortion, mock single women as miserable cat ladies, and get rid of DEI so women remain in the lower ranks of the workplace. Maybe they\u2019ll get frustrated and quit.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a catch, though: To live the tradwife life depicted online, you need to have a lot of money. Neeleman\u2019s father-in-law founded JetBlue. Smith\u2019s net worth is estimated to be $6 million (her husband only has $1 million). These women don\u2019t have to worry about ending up divorced and poor with no marketable skills, chasing their ex-husbands through family court for child support. Like Phyllis Schlafly and other propagandists for stay-home domesticity, they\u2019re not staying home: They\u2019re working.<\/p>\n<p>Has tradwifery peaked? The success of <em>Yesteryear<\/em> suggests it may be passing its sell-by date. After a brief return to posting lingerie and ASMR, Gwen the Milkmaid has wiped all her public videos. And true to form, despite all evidence to the contrary, Smith and Neeleman now deny they were ever tradwives\u2014they are just women choosing their choice. In other words, feminists.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=997\">This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: Eight Decades of Hannah Arendt and Her Critics<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-subject-to-debate"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>There\u2019s Nothing Traditional About Tradwives - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1004\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"There\u2019s Nothing Traditional About Tradwives - 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