After a motorcycle crash in 1966, Bob Dylan canceled the remainder of a tour, and according to legend, went into seclusion for almost seven years. In actuality, that "seclusion" amounted to moving upstate to the small town of Woodstock, New York, not touring, doing very little press (although he did find time to let his home be photographed for a feature in The Saturday Evening Post), and basically just being a work-at-home dad. He also recorded five albums. Career as a famous musician aside, why did anyone think Bob Dylan's quiet, domestic Woodstock years were so remarkable? Because he's Bob Dylan. 

Much like a "recluse," sometimes a "tradwife" is just someone living a very conventional life. It's only eccentric when there's an audience.

For the uninitiated, the term "trad" (short for "traditional") emerged from the alt-right internet culture wars to name and valorize an ostensibly familiar, wholesome nuclear family arrangement that its proponents believe hearkens back to better days—when men went to work and women kept a home and cared for the children. The children are essential here: in the trad imaginary, all wives are also moms, and the ones that aren't are presumed to be "trying." "Tradwife" may have been coined by millennial NEETs, but it's women who actually created the sprawling world.

Most of the big accounts aren't really that politically or socially didactic, and the ones that are seem to message some fairly idiosyncratic ideas, usually in passing. Whether it's "I cured my chronic Lyme with a vegan diet" or "I cured my long Covid with a beef and butter diet," it's usually "I" statements, very little "you should." When they do make a prescription, it's cheeky and meme-ified enough to indicate that they are not sermonizing so much as innocuously participating in the discourse. "Here's your sign to start raising pygmy goats," or "don't start drinking Black Cohosh tea (unless you want balanced hormones and perfect skin)!" The words themselves are beside the point, which is why they tend to favor brief, image-heavy, language-light videos over print, podcasts, or extended Vlogs. Trad just doesn't really lend itself to how-to or long-form.

What's the difference between a homemaker and a tradwife? Homemakers make homes; tradwives make content. Or, to put it another way, yes, a tradwife is a housewife, but she also plays one on TV. Work determines who is a housewife; the Internet decides who's a tradwife. Other than those somewhat flexible guidelines, there's really nothing else tradwives need to have in common to receive the label.

What Would Martha Do?

“As with all my new pets, I gently bit each kitten on the face. This is how I let my animals know that I am now their mother.”
― Martha Stewart

Before the trad wives descended upon us, there was Martha Stewart. 

Martha had her own distinct, trademark WASPy aesthetic, but she was more of a guide than a brand. Wives and mothers read her books and watched her show. She might mention her daughter now and then, but Martha was not a "mommy." Martha was Mother. She was a guru, a coach, a sympathetic and encouraging teacher. She taught her students in a fake kitchen, in a television studio, in front of a live studio audience, in New York City (with a few intimate interstitials of her gardening in her own home thrown in here and there). She partnered with K-Mart on her own line of home goods and renovation supplies because Martha believed that everyone deserves nice things. The legend is that she was asked to leave her Connecticut country club over it: "I was too down market," she said. My mother bought her interior paint and roller/brush set when I was in high school. It was beautiful paint.

While it's true that there was only one goddess, Martha was also a genre, ruling a media landscape once populated by a myriad of women, all passionate about teaching you advanced home economics with the promise that you can do it too. And we did. And we saw that it was good.

Then came the Internet, and with it an explosion of cottage industry "mommy bloggers," who pushed homemaker content away from home economics and towards introspective, confessional reflections on parenting. Then came social media, and the bloggers were supplanted by influencers with boutique aesthetics and accompanying lifestyle content. Gone are the guides, à la Martha Stewart. It’s no longer about being an authority, where you aim for a cookbook deal or speaking fees for parenting seminars. It’s about sponsored posts, brand affiliates, and brand ambassadors. 

Tradwives come in a great variety. There’s the prosperity gospel mom who homeschools from her chateau-inspired McMansion. There’s the one with the lazy eye. There’s the crunchy mom who veils her wild judgments under self-deprecating theater-kid skits. I collect them all, like trading cards. But if you want a good sense of the incoherence of the trad wife landscape, I recommend a diverse tasting menu: the Uberwench, the Hot Chick, and the Troll.

The Uberwench

Gwen the Milkmaid, at a humble 90,000 followers, is a "happy wife and homemaker" who is "homesteading in the suburbs," and using her platform to rail against everything from porn to Big Pharma to sunblock, alongside photos and video of her standing in meadows, sitting in meadows, walking in meadows, dancing in meadows (lot of meadow content), always in the exact same prairie dress, just in a different color. 

She also works in a common milieu of trad content: labor intensive imitations of recognizable comfort food ("when your husband wants fast food, but you don't want him to become a Big Pharma patient"). To her credit, she does give out recipes, and for free. "Just comment ‘RECIPE’ and I’ll send you a link to download my free e-book with recipes for sourdough discard burger buns, hamburger patties, baked french fries, gravy and the BEST strawberry milkshake on planet earth." 

Though not a "big" account by the standards of the tradwife content genre, I include Gwen because she's the ne plus ultra of two tradwife themes. 

First, she is very much the picture of the tradwife boogeyman that so many feminists have denounced as "a gateway to white supremacy." The blonde, Christian, cultural conservative Gwen does give off a very "volkisch" vibe in her pseudo-agrarian milkmaid drag (although I would point out that The National Socialist Party was actually pretty progressive when it comes to women in the workforce).

Second, she is a former OnlyFans girl, ASMR creator, and, she self-described, bisexual, "man-hating feminist." This might seem counterintuitive, but it's a common backstory: everybody loves a penitent blonde, and everyone loves to hate a hustler who rebrands as one. A lot of tradwife content creators have sponsored posts and online stores, but they're usually for stuff like high end baby bath toys and stand mixers. Gwen hawks water filters to protect you from the birth control in the water supply, paleo prenatal vitamins, a doomsday prepper-approved food freeze dryer, beef tallow skincare, and a bevy of other conspiracy theory-oriented, MLM consumer products (not to mention the press-on nails and Gwen the Milkmaid swag). As you might imagine, some are suspicious of her new brand.

I also include Gwen as one, incredibly major exception to the unspoken rule of trad: she is not a mother. But despite the bipartisan skepticism of her genuine commitment to conservative wifehood, many of Gwen's followers don't seem to doubt her, or even mind. Maybe it's because she went viral saying she was done with OnlyFans and couldn't wait to become a grandmother. Maybe it's because she posts a lot of born-again Christian vlogs on YouTube, plus cooking tutorials with titles like "pregnancy bake with me!" And while there is no diegetic sound on the vast majority of the TikTok or Instagram videos of Gwen doing things in meadows, these videos often have inlaid text denouncing not only abortion, but also contraception and promiscuity, again with full transparency about her former career in the horny gig economy. 

Plus, she has "the look," and I don't just mean the Aryan physiognomy or the Laura Ashley florals; Gwen has The Island. The little black dress of tradwife influencers is a massive white marble kitchen island. It’s bland—very AirBnb—which makes it ideal for filming. There may be a point at which realtors begin to add "influencer-friendly kitchen" to their listings, as I suspect the white island (no pun intended) earns women like Gwen some kind of legitimacy. The kitchen island doesn't lie. Gwen is destined for motherhood, they think. We love her because she denounces her old ways, and thus has been purified. This gleaming stone surface in the hearth proves it: she is officially A Good Girl.

I have to assume that some people like her for the same reasons I—and at least a few gay guys—do: she's fun to watch. She's a hustler; not a particularly good one, but she still manages to convince a sizable amount of people that she is either entirely sincere or entirely cynical, as if such a person even exists. And it's all just so tacky: "Give me Alex Jones, but make it Live Laugh Love." A deranged libertarian St. Paulie's girl. She's brilliant. She's an idiot. She's a scream.

When it comes to the uncanny personas manufactured on the internet, there are lies, and then there are lies. Gwen is camp, and I'll pick the drag queen every time.  

Also, she has massive tits. 

The Hot Chick

Nara Smith, a.k.a. "the Hot Young Tradwife Making Everyone on the Internet Mad," has 3.6 million followers. She is black and a model, and she's married to a model. His name is Lucky Blue Smith. They have three children: Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, and Whimsy Lou. Yes, they are Mormon, which her admirers are often resistant to admit, despite the fact that she's said that Book of Mormon study is a part of her morning routine.

Smith is a less, well, traditional tradwife in a lot of ways, with her modeling career and decidedly immodest fashion, but most who follow these things would agree that she counts. There's the Mormonism, obviously, but there's also things like the "day in the life" video of a family shopping spree, where Lucky "insisted that we go to the mall, and get whatever I've been wanting" (spoiler, it's everything), as if he's upping her allowance, as a treat. 

Smith says that she cooks to her family's specifications. It's not "Lucky likes his toasted," it's  “Lucky always needs his toasted, so I did that.” She strives for his scarce approval. “He gave them a 10 out of 10, which is very rare. So I was very pleased with that.” One video starts with "when I asked my toddlers what they wanted for lunch, they both wanted grilled cheese, so that's exactly what I got started on." She then makes a no-knead bread from scratch. She makes the cheese, a sort of paneer. Her kids "love pesto," so she makes that too. And since "you need butter on your grilled cheese," she makes butter from scratch.

Her children are all dead now. They starved to death.

I can forgive a woman in a massively ruffled update of an Old Hollywood evening robe or a black evening dress, lips always slightly parted to make them look poutier, chopping away at her white marble island, when, just then, her white marble husband comes up from behind her, toothpick in mouth, and "spontaneously" embraces her while she silently feigns an unmistakable "oh you!" giggle that belies her dead eyes and even deader voiceover.

But there is one thing I cannot forgive: we all know it takes longer than that to make brioche. So at what point do we acknowledge the existence of time, the finite number of hours in the day?

When you portray intensive domestic labor as, in the words of an admiring writer in Rolling Stone, "not just easy, but impossibly sexy," without even a hint of irony, you're pissing on the women who are just trying to find the time to make an actual fucking grilled cheese sandwich. It's boring, misogynist filmmaking. I understand that, just like the nannies and housekeepers, (and most curiously, the provider trad-husbands), influencers hide the labor that goes into filming and editing, whether they do it themselves or hire a crew and an editor. That's just showbiz. But there's content, and then there's motherhood. 

I can't shake my belief that making Olympic-levels of painstakingly styled trad motherhood look that effortless, while being that glamorous—even while eight months pregnant—with the unmistakable nod to cinéma vérité, is being a traitor to the cause. To put it another way, being a happy homemaker isn't inherently anti-woman, but if you decide to make it look too much like a breeze...

I find Nara's content tedious, braggadocious, and smug. She must have picked up the vacant stare from modeling and the sedated voiceover from ASMR. It's all very "perfume commercial": cooking videos drenched in the supposed glamor of a blank expression and her medically lethargic narration. I know she's not the stunning-yet-sincere Quaalude-Pollyanna-Barbie I see in videos. I know that's just a brand. But she never breaks character. Or rather, there is no character for her to break. There is no levity or determination or delight or ambition to perform or to hide. She is a persona with no personality.

So I guess I lied. There is a second thing I cannot forgive: there is nothing "fun" about Nara or her content. Her brand is bloodlessness. Totally, utterly humorless.

The Troll

When you portray a heavily staged, incredibly curated home, party, garden, meal, etc., a lot of people are gonna find you fucking annoying, especially women, who may feel you're "setting us back," or at least scabbing, by raising the domestic standards to which we're being held. Before she was a beloved meme, Martha Stewart got a lot of hate for this very reason, but in retrospect, she was always pretty clear about the labor involved. 

If you're going to make people mad, it's always more fun to do it on purpose, and to be open and honest about the fact that yes, you are trolling everyone with your Suzy Homemaker act.

Enter Alexia Delarosa, follower count, 596,000. Alexia is funny. Very funny. And on purpose.

She says she milks chickens. Once she used plastic baby hands to stage cooking an elaborate meal. She makes fruit loops and cocoa puffs from scratch. She maintains a bent-over, 1950s Betty Crocker ad posture in all of her videos, often while wearing ostentatious bows and an unmoving smile.

But despite her humor, it’s clear that she has become a kind of self-aware social recluse. In an interview, she mentions that her husband got shot outside of a coffee shop (he lived, but still). Predictably, she homeschools, professing her concern about school shootings (understandable), and because her kid came home from school one day and said something was “stupid.” “We don’t use that word in our house.” She’s definitely retreating from the modern world out of fear, all the while mocking it with her enormous bows.

Underneath all the jokes, she's afraid, just like most trolls.

The Truth of Trad

Beyond the grifts, the sensational pandering and trolling, there is a kind of objective truth to trad.

Americans now work themselves to exhaustion. Wages have stagnated, a single-income family feels like a distant memory, and if you do manage to get a job, you can't count on keeping it. Inflation has exploded for everything from housing to groceries. People are drowning in unprecedented debt (medical, college, and more). The subway is down. The bus is late. The traffic is terrible. Everyone is so tired.

There is a misconception that the Luddites, and the men and women who objected to women entering factory work, all fought against what we now call "progress" entirely out of some deep-seated belief in Patriarchy. The truth is that they knew a job at the mill would just mean a "second shift" for women, and that two incomes would immediately be used as a justification for lower wages (since now, you're both bringing in money!). There is a genuinely social sense of protectionism to the conservatism of trad.

Domestic labor is both essential and potentially imaginative, and yet it is undervalued. Everyone pays lip service to the fact that parenting takes a lot of time and work and resources, but it can be uncomfortable to admit that sometimes, the homemaker/wage earner division of labor can be incredibly convenient, and far easier, on an administrative level, than trying to coordinate a byzantine Chinese Fire Drill chore wheel, just to ensure that everyone does exactly half of everything.

And the world is scary. On paper, we might be safer than we've ever been, but we know more about unprecedented threats than we ever have. We want to save our children from mass shootings, brain-altering screens, pandemics, and vaccines alike.

Trad moms are the acid reflux burp of so many thwarted desires. We envy what they say they have: their financial security, the strong, nurturing, restorative family units, and in particular, a motherhood free from the exploitation of waged labor. It’s not really right wing or left wing; no political orientation has a monopoly on family. 

Keeping a home is what Marxists would call "meaningful work," the kind of work that a bored, alienated woman might dreamily doom scroll through while driving an Uber or working an email job. It doesn't matter how phony or corny or obnoxious we might find these trad mom characters, or how banal or grating we might find their videos. When we watch them, we can imagine having a life where our work is all of those things. We can imagine having a home.

Amber A’Lee Frost is a writer and erstwhile podcaster living in Los Angeles. Her book Dirtbag: Essays is out now.