I remember the first time the ‘trad wife’ trend slithered into my Instagram algorithm. Whilst scrolling mindlessly, a video by Nara Smith caught my undying attention. Impeccably manicured, in the daintiest white and blue dress, heavily pregnant; making cheese from scratch.
I’ll admit, I was mesmerised. How could a woman be this…feminine? Flawless? Clearly, I was not alone. This video alone has attracted 7.5 million views, alongside Nara’s 2.6 million Instagram followers.
Nara, as it happens, is two days younger than me at age 22, though lives a starkly different life; she is married with three children under the age of four. Through watching a couple more of her Instagram reels and a speedy internet search, I learnt that her rise to influencer-fame as a ‘trad wife’ came from cooking videos. Her videos include her making meals entirely from scratch at the request of her model-husband and young children.
Despite this moment of awe, one fan’s posted comment shattered my spellbound state, clamouring: ‘YOU CAN’T BE REAL!! You’re like those magical fairies in one of those children books!!’. Oh dear. This is the exact image of women, as domestic goddesses from some 1950s fantasy, which for so long kept us out of courtrooms, offices, and parliaments. And here it is again, back in fashion.
The ‘trad wife’ movement’s origins are associated with Alena Kate Pettitt, a British woman who found the boundless choices of modern womanhood damaging to her self-esteem. Leaving a career which left her ‘shattered emotionally’, the role of housewife allowed her to love her ‘feminine identity’ for the first time, a process she has commercialised through book-writing since 2020.
Reading about Alena’s experience, a singular trepidation sat uncomfortably in my head; are some women, and the men they associate with, still unable to marry the idea of a successful career with a ‘feminine identity’? Since when has this narrative crawled back, that a fulfilled femininity is one at home, with children, waiting for a breadwinner husband to return hungry from work?
Now the ‘trad wife’ movement rears its ugly head, presenting far-right ideology as a pretty little picture. Whilst women like Nara and Alena now probably boast huge commercial success through the movement’s incredible popularity, they profit, as influencers, on instructing other women that their ‘role’ is to serve, whilst their husbands is to earn.
One needs to look no further than @thetradwivesclub Instagram page to find the movement’s allegiance to this anti-feminist rhetoric. Quoting far-right culture warrior Jordan Peterson, one post asserts that ‘The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success’, a narrative searingly reminiscent to that of moralistic opponents to reproductive rights like birth control and abortion. Another advises women to ‘Tell your daughter about femininity. Before the internet tells them about feminism’. Ouch. One must pay the price of choice and personal freedom if they want to be feminine, it seems.
The aesthetics these women dispel in their polished videos, preparing homemade cereals and donuts at the click of their husband’s fingers, seem to have tapped into some collective nostalgia for traditional gender archetypes which a century of pioneering women have kicked back from. However, behind the ‘feminine’ glamour and serenity, is the core belief that a woman exists to feed her breadwinning husband, wash his clothes, raise his children, bound to him in servitude through economic dependence.
Without him, and the children he sires, she is without purpose, without meaning.
Nara told me so much as she crafted her lasagne tutorial. In a sultry, smooth voiceover, she explains: ‘it was a gloomy day outside, so what better way to spend my time than making a comforting meal?’. Yes, what could a woman possibly do with her time, better than making cheese – from scratch?