As you may have clocked by now, it’s the year of the “tradwife” . Hannah Neeleman’s daily chores on her picturesque Ballerina Farm, where she lives with her husband and eight kids in Utah, are routinely broadcast to 9.6 million followers on TikTok - and she was recently the subject of a viral Times of London story .
Former model Nara Smith, who cooks for her husband and three small kids extremely from scratch (a PB&J starts with baking bread and roasting peanuts) before an audience of more than 9 million, was just profiled in GQ . Estee Williams’s nearly 200,000 TikTok followers watch her get “dolled up” for her husband before he gets home from work; in May, she was a guest on Dr. Phil .
The tradwives’ online lives are a pleasant parade of floaty dresses and appealingly rustic recipes, accompanied by voice-over monologues about home, simplicity, God and, of course, husbands who protect and provide and lead the household by example. Are the tradwives okay? wonder some onlookers, while others consume video after video, wistful for a quiet life of butter-churning. Tia Levings’s new memoir argues that some tradwives - especially those whose lifestyles predate the trendy nickname - are not okay.
A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy chronicles Levings’s early adulthood in (and eventual exodus from) the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, whose adherents value conservative politics and prolific procreation. (Having a large brood of kids is akin to having a “quiver full” of arrows, so their saying goes.) Levings decided to write A Well-Trained Wife in the late 2010s, in response to the politically motivated way extreme Christian views were going mainstream .
When she recognised that the members of her fundamentalist Christian community wanted “to run our country the way they run their homes”, she writes, “I suddenly realised why it mattered so much that I talk about what it’s like in those households. I could tell the public what it’s really like.”.
