Traditional housewives have something to tell us, writes Eva Wiseman.
The problems with the rise of the “traditional wife” are many and numerous, from its fascist undertones to its regressive gender politics, but what is most baffling and difficult to articulate is that it makes this life seem so delicious.
Traditional wives are women who live, online and sometimes in Utah, as idealized housewives. They cook, clean, raise children, and then perform and document these tasks, earning millions of followers and dollars along the way.
Ballerina Farm, the trademark of Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon ballerina turned beauty pageant winner, homeowner and mother of eight, is the undisputed queen of tradwives. She is famous for milking cows directly into her coffee cup and giving birth by candlelight before competing in the Mrs World pageant 12 days later.
Neeleman’s life, as depicted online, and that of her colleagues, is fascinating, in that sunken, almost deathly way (“Come a little closer, Eva, towards the light. Can you hear the voices calling?”), but The Tradwife I watch most is the 22-year-old model, chef and mother Nara Smith. Your videos are insane. Dressed in white couture, she explains that she will make, say, a grilled cheese sandwich for her young children and husband, before setting about making the cheese from curds. It’s exquisite performance art, but it also occurred to me that the videos might, like an aestheticised Havana syndrome, cause brain damage to viewers through undetectable radio frequencies. Inconclusive.
Tradwives have their origins in the American religious “alt-right,” itself a reaction to progressive feminism, but even those of us who are pro-choice, pro-vax, pro-financial-independence for women are drawn to their spotless countertops, their buttery muslin. That’s because they speak to a real problem: that women’s home lives today are largely in chaos.
Although it has been unbalanced for many decades, this chaos has been brought into sharp relief during the pandemic. With schools closed and parents working in claustrophobic households, many women recognized that while their seemingly feminist husbands seemed to share the domestic burden, their wives still carried the weight of it.
For all the rights they had acquired at work, at home their feet remained firmly planted in the 1950s. So these traditional wifely fantasies appealed by their simplicity. The image of a woman in rural America spending an entire morning arranging a bouquet of wildflowers, or an afternoon brushing her hair in preparation for her husband’s return from work, offers a radical fantasy of a direct exchange of care and a story of security. The fairies, all ambition, politics, reality and ego swept neatly behind the sofa.
I find myself less interested in discussing their anti-feminist agenda and regressive submission, or the white nationalist politics that bubble along with their soups, and more aware of why their wholesome comfort videos appeal to so many people. Their hidden influence can be seen quietly awakening dissatisfied working women, feminists who would never dream of shrinking their lives to the size of a kitchen, but, after watching housewives perform domestic labor, see the imbalance reflected in their own lives seemingly released. —The Observer
