“With this movement popping up in the modern day, you’d think these women are time-travelers from the 1950s”
On June 25th, 2021, Hannah Neeleman posted a video to her TikTok account of over nine million followers where she opened a birthday gift from her husband, hopefully expecting tickets to Greece, where she has wanted to go for a while. Her face drops in disappointment when she opens the box to find not tickets to Greece, but an egg apron for working on her farm. He responds with a snarky “You’re welcome”. It’s not like he couldn’t afford the tickets, he is after all the son of David Neeleman, founder of Jetblue, Breeze Airways, and Azul. Hannah uses this apron along with her other whimsical kitchen accessories to glamorize her Utah farm life: doing everything while her husband does nothing. With how he treats her, it should be clear she should leave him, right? Well, that gets complicated.
Hannah is among the thousands of “trad-wives” among the internet, groups of women who make curated content of being housewives, using a religious and misogynistic backbone to support the idea that the woman’s place is in the home, where she cooks, cleans, and takes care of her children while her husband goes out and works. With this movement popping up in the modern day, you’d think these women are time-travelers from the 1950s. Sabrina Simpson describes Trad-Wives in the beginning of her thesis Traditional wives and feminine lives: A mixed methods analysis for understanding the traditional wife (#tradwives) phenomenon and its impact on US American women within a Presidential election year by saying, “Tradwives blame feminism for modern economic difficulties, arguing if feminist had not coerced this battle for equity…, we would be in a far more flourishing economy and society; one that is reminiscent of the prosperity of the 1950s. Tradwives oppose feminist efforts by arguing their combat is not feminine. Should these feminists return to their femininity and place in this world (read: the home), all will be well.” (Simpson, 6). It’s with this description that we can see a glaring problem within the “trad-wife” movement, the rejection of feminism for an idealized masculine version of femininity. It’s complicated to discuss the “trad-wife” ideology without bringing up the politics surrounding gender and capitalism.
To first discuss how this movement came to be, it is a good question as to why women went back into the homes towards the 1950s. Just four decades prior, women were fighting out in the streets tooth and nail for suffrage, so that their future daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters wouldn’t have to go through what they did in their homes and in public, simply because they were independent women. Betty Friedan a well-known writer and activist, discussed this in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Freidan goes on to explain that media advertisements along with the politics of men at the time, slowly lured women back into the household. These women gave up their hopes and dreams, their careers, all because a magazine or a newspaper clipping said that having a husband, babies, and maintaining a home are what a woman should be doing with her life. The male perspective of feminism along with internalized misogyny also plays a key role in the evolution of the “trad-wife”.
A popular stereotype of feminists tends to be that they’re pant-wearing, armpit-hair-having, smelly, ugly, and b*tchy women who hate men with a passion. The view of the “ugly feminist” has changed over time but the idea has been solidified amongst the macho men out there who think it’s gay to wash your a**. Men convinced women through these advertisements that wanting rights and freedom makes you unattractive and that having these traits and ideas should be avoided at all costs. Internalized misogyny takes multiple forms and appears differently on both sides of the spectrum, but within the context of “trad-wives”, these women have been taught to think that asking for rights and not being a “feminine” woman is wrong and makes you undesirable.
Even outside the “trad-wife” movement, internalized misogyny is quite rampant amongst various women across the internet. One popular TikTok by the user “@lilykateshow” features Lily Kate showing off how she “isn’t a feminist”. Kate begins the TikTok by saying “I’m not a feminist, I can see men and don’t immediately feel threatened.”, after that she begins to describe other ways that she isn’t a feminist by describing herself in the opposite spectrum of feminism such as being able to feel pretty in a dress, not getting offended by men opening doors for women, not hating children, being able to cook and not having to contribute to any “fear” about who is a woman and who isn’t. She continues in the captions with “Oh & I let him pay for dinner.” This video sparked a large firestorm on TikTok amongst women with how much she missed the actual definition of feminism. Videos like Kate’s along with Ballerina Farm content continue to perpetuate the man’s “ideal woman”.
Religion also plays a huge part in the “trad-wife” movement. Ballerina Farm, for example, uses ideas from the Mormon religion to justify Hannah’s reasoning for giving up on her dreams of being a ballerina to become a housewife. Religion tends to go hand in hand with controversial ideals such as the “trad-wife”. Many men who identify as conservative use the Bible as a moral backbone for their hatred towards women, identifying that it is God’s word that says women should be in the home and subservient towards their husbands. Even from a non-religious standpoint, it can be clear to see that this kind of thinking is not ok.
To make things clear, I am not trying to bash all women who want to be housewives. A lot of these “trad-wives” on the internet argue that they are inherently feminist because it is their choice to be a housewife (claims one tiktoker). While I believe that this lifestyle can be a personal choice for some, it is not for all. The problem comes when looking at statistics that show that “1 in 4 women will experience physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime” (NISVS, 2) and how this number and rates of violence have increased since the start of the pandemic. Yes, it is important for women to be able to make choices like these for themselves, but it is also important to take into account how much damage this can do to so many people.
While there might not be a quick solution to this problem, I suppose that the only thing we can say to trad-wife influencers like Hannah Neeleman is: Stay Safe.
Work Cited
Black, M.C., Basile, K.C., Breiding, M.J., Smith, S.G., Walters, M.L., Merrick, M.T., Chen, J., & Stevens, M.R. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Simpson, Sabrina. “Traditional Wives and Feminine Lives: A Mixed Methods Analysis for Understanding the Traditional Wife (#tradwives) Phenomenon and Its Impact on US American Women within a Presidential Election Year.” Malmö University Publications, Malmö University, 28 June 2024, https://mau.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1879309&dswid=-7257. Accessed Sept. 2024.