#tradwives, modern chinese malaise and kitsch
and why I don't love to hate tradwives, or hate to love them.
I’m sure you guys have heard of the term tradwives, usually accompanied in singsong hashtag #tradwives on Instagram or Tiktok. If it this doesn’t normally extend to your corner of the internet, the term was brought to mainstream attention by a New Yorker post recently, which, more than anything, made me think sit up and pay a little attention.
It’s short for “traditional wife”, a lifestyle propagated by a select minority of women on the internet that involves retreating into, or “reclaiming” (as they would prefer to say) traditional wife roles— such as the wife shouldn’t work, the wife should know her place (in the home, in the kitchen). That a woman’s role in a marriage is to be a good housewife, take care of the husband and the children, etc. Aesthetically, many women adopt the look of a 1950s housewife or a pioneer on the prairie sort of look.
Examples of tradwives include Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, Estee Williams (featured in above video), and many more. Hannah Neeleman has eight (during my last count) children, runs a farm, makes sourdough bread and became infamous for participating in a beauty contest seemingly looking flawless less than two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child.
As I’m not best positioned to do so, I won’t go into the troubling political or the religious undertones of the tradwife movement, of which there certainly are; as Sophie Elmhirst points out in this
interview “if you're on some of their social media profiles it really doesn't take long, a couple of clicks, to reach some fairly worrying and more extreme political content”. goes into detail about the religious underpinnings here.But— I would love to take a look at the motivations as to why some people may be attracted to the tradwife ideal, as, even as a working non-white woman, I juust might be able to relate. Ever so slightly.
What goes around comes around
Have you guys heard of the nostalgia pendulum? It’s a phenomenon where we tend to get nostalgic about trends from 20-40 years ago, and whether it be film remakes, music sampling in hip-hop, or fashion trends. I guess it’s partly because we grow up and come of age to create our own movies/music/what have you and we want to talk about the things that influence our childhood.
I’m probably reading into the term too much but because it works I’ll continue. It’s a nostalgia pendulum because it swings in the opposite direction of the media vibes du jour. It is human nature to tire of current trends and rebel against the status quo.
Fashion is a great visual example. We had enough of skinny jeans— hence the appearance of the wide legs pants I see ubiquitously in subways and offices now. We also got tired of flats and heels and brought back the chunky sneaker. And am I grateful that low cut jeans have evolved to high cut.
I’ll bring this one step further and posit that some of us got bored of the 2000-2010s independent career woman trend. Here are some examples of the type of thing I’m talking about—
Hello Sex and the City (the original TV show ran from 1998-2004)
Hello Ne-Yo (2008)
Hello Girlboss (2017), or Boss Babe or you know what I mean
Though we have a long way to go in terms of gender equality in positions of leadership and increased media representation of that is awesome, just from a purely aesthetic point of view, seeing repeated iterations of the Independent Career Woman on their screens may wear some people out. Which leads to…
A pressure cooker of (cinnamon) rolls
So, we’re bored and jaded.
We are also pressurized by society to achieve in a saturated economy of overachievers. The economy is tough. We are smarter, more educated, more cultured and world-savvy than our parents’ generation, yet it is harder to find a good job and go up from there. Because everyone is as good as you, if not better, and trying harder.
The ridiculous standards of careers nowadays came to a head for me when I was perusing job listings the other day and came across this job listing for a librarian—
Candidates should possess a Master of Library Science or an equivalent degree and have at least two years of post-qualification experience.
A master of library science?! Excuse my ignorance, but I didn’t even know such a degree existed. And here I was thinking all it took to be a librarian was to like books and sort them.
In China, where due to population size every problem is scaled x1000000000, there’s a term for this hyper-competitiveness called “内卷” (nei4 juan3) lit. ‘curling inwards’, which refers to excessive competition in which no one benefits and everyone suffers because everyone has to work harder. Stuff like school tuition for tuition’s sake (because everyone else is doing it so you have to too to not lose out), studying in excessive amounts and getting excessive amounts of university degrees— just to stand out from your peers, which is difficult because there are so many of them.
There’s a small vein of Chinese youth, understandably, that just stop “curling”, stop working and studying and just “lie flat” (躺平 tang3 ping2) which involves not striving for any career gains and doing minimal work.
Are there any alternatives to being either lying flat or Top Career Woman in the West? There is a readily acceptable one for women— it is the housewife. Ali Wong said it best.
Hence the attraction to being a tradwife. The tradwife is a way out of being a corporate slave. You are not unemployed. It is a conscious choice; your arguments padded with traditional values as a defence.
I do want to make a point that I am solely analysing the social media phenomenon of tradwives, and not assessing the virtues of a housewife, or a traditional wife, because how can one judge such a personal decision? But that’s what it should be— a personal, agreed choice between husband and wife (seems like it’s time for me to raise that conversation with mine…). But problems arise when tradwives gain a following on social media and sell this ideal to others.
The tradwife ideal and kitsch
“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion”
- Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being
It’s pretty, it’s photogenic and it’s simple. All you have to do is have a clean home, something baking in the oven, smiling children and you will be basking in domestic bliss.
And like the ad above, or like the Instagram post of Hannah Neeleman blissfully kneading sourdough with her children, snot-free and wailing-free, it is not big enough to encompass reality.
It is kitsch. There are many definitions of the term, but for the sake of this essay we will define kitsch as “art, writing, etc. of a… shallow kind, calculated to have popular appeal” (Collins dict.).
The sadness of kitsch (and what differentiates kitsch from good art) is that it falls short of what it’s trying to achieve. It’s something that we can sink into aesthetically but it is not deep enough to live by.
I can’t read Russian, but look at the image above and hear how it says “look how worthy and noble it is, being an honest, hardworking farmer!”
The feeling just doesn’t hold. Can you imagine her continuing to toil in the fields while holding that smile for the rest of the day?
Or this Nestle ad, saying “isn’t it beautiful to be a housewife, to create baked goods to delight your children while your older husband looks on admiringly at the youthful vitality of motherhood?”
We see political kitsch and commercial kitsch all the time— the selling of a political ideal or a product by tying to it a particular lifestyle, or set of values. Social media kitsch is simply an 21st century addition, the selling of a personal brand— the rich-girl kitsch, the Paris girl kitsch, the tradwife kitsch.
The dependent wife lifestyle is a lie as
and Sophie Elmhirst note, as the so-called tradwives are actually making a career out of their Instagram personas. The tradwives also don’t acknowledge that for the wife to not be able to work, their husbands/families need to be well off enough to support them.But then again, tradwives are simply the latest addition to a large infinite-scroll-length amount of people already curating and choreographing their public personas online.
So what riles people up about tradwives more so than other types of hypocritical living on social media? Perhaps its because they claim moral superiority in what they do, leveraging things like religion to their advantage. Or it’s worrying feminists that we are going backwards after all we’ve fought for.
Slow-cooker take
But the thing is, the tradwife social media ideal is tenuous and unsustainable, as housewives or traditional wives would know. Once you plow beyond its facade everything that holds it together— like taking care of 8 kids all by yourself without breaking a sweat, or how the tradwives insist that women should not be making money, despite, um, making money themselves— disintegrates because it doesn’t line up with reality. Ballerina Farm is a full-time business selling its produce and Estee Williams is also hustling it up with appearances on Fox and other media outlets.
What happened to not working? I guess they’ll just have to say something along the lines of “doing anything to support my husband in times of need.” Y’know, so it’s still on brand.
I do understand why some people are drawn to it. I am, too, somewhat seduced by its aesthetic and “lying flat” appeal. There was a time when my Pinterest board was literally ALL Betty Draper from Mad Men (that A-line dress!) But, as even the lifestyles of the tradwives themselves demonstrate, the image of the doting wife confined to the kitchen in that beautiful dress is only beautiful kitsch (strengthened by nostalgia, an aversion to a shitty job market and having the privilege to remain so) and not full enough to encompass the full, lived reality of a housewife.
As an aside, I’m reminded of Eve Peyser in VICE on talking about Sex and the City, about how the show “has always been on the receiving end of backlash because it is about deeply flawed women, and people look for any and all opportunities to criticize women.”
So I suppose it’s time for me to shut up and start making that sourdough bread. 🍞
Bit and Bobs - Articles that I want to get stuck in my head
https://nav.al/rich - After reading
’s post on How To Be Wealthy I found a long explainer by Naval himself breaking down his tweets. I’m over halfway through and I love reading his explanations and feel his cut-through-BS-type-intelligence and experience shine through the page.- writes about Patience for Substack Writers— about how humans can have four types of patience— patient and not assertive (passive), assertive and not patient (the jerk in line), not patient and not assertive (passive-aggressive/stewing) and patient and assertive (calmly moving toward our goals), and it’s the last one we want to accomplish.
Thanks for stopping by and would love to know your thoughts! Drop a comment below to chat 👇🏼
“So, we’re bored and jaded.
We are also pressurized by society to achieve in a saturated economy of overachievers. The economy is tough. We are smarter, more educated, more cultured and world-savvy than our parents’ generation, yet it is harder to find a good job and go up from there. Because everyone is as good as you, if not better, and trying harder.”
This. Lots to chew on.
I enjoyed your weaving of trends and observations related to the sentiments of our generations and our changing economy. Something quite top of mind for me as well. To add, there's a growing movement of anti work as more people feel burned out and chewed up by capitalism. I think another trend is at play - the rebalancing of healthy femine and masculine ways of being in the world. Our world has been trapped in wounded masculine for a long time (hypercompetition, aggression, power over). We thought that the answer was for women to become independent, but many of us just became the wounded masculine ourselves. Ive just begun to embrace my healthy feminine side, which has been repressed since childhood. The creative, connecting, nurturing, chaotic, playful, intuitive, loving side of myself. Having a partner who holds the healthy masculine pole strongly (safety, strength, protection, grounding, focus) allows me to trust and lean even more into my healthy feminine. In this regard, I can understand where tradwives are coming from. I think one big challenge is that the healthy masculine is so hard to find in men nowadays - there are few male mentors and role models out there. So many women are left needing to try holding both poles within themselves.