Do 'trad wives' hate 'hot girls'?
A deep dive into the Internet's favorite trend
Last year, I wrote a piece about the reclaiming of the word girl. We were at the peak of the “girl dinner” and “girl math” trends. I thought that women were leveraging the word girl just like we leveraged bitch, how gay men leveraged the f-word, and how Black Americans leveraged the n-word. While not a slur, girl used to be used as a way to put women down. Mary Cosby, iconic member of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, once insulted Whitney Rose by calling her a, “little girl.” But after Megan Thee Stallion declared the summer of 2019, “hot girl summer,” the word took on a new meaning.
2023 was the year of the girl. We saw Barbie become the most successful movie at the box office. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé literally fueled economies with their stadium concerts. Everything was pink and ordained with bows. Girls took over. And while 2024 has been a success for the pop girls - see brat summer - we’ve also seen an influx of traditionalist ideals invade our media.
Trad wives began flooding my TikTok feed earlier this year. Nara Smith, the most famous trad wife, shares mechanical and eerily quiet videos of her making things like Capri sun from scratch. Her husband and fellow Mormon, Lucky Blue Jones, is nowhere to be seen while she kneads dough for her homemade Cheez-itz. Young, thin, and beautiful, Smith is a mother of three, a homemaker, and refuses to admit she buys anything from Target for her children. And the Internet loves her.
So, what is a “trad wife”?
Modeled after the famously unhappy wives of the 1950s, trad wives are wives who share content to social media about being homemakers. They are the antithesis of Charli XCX’s “brat girls” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “hot girls.” Where brat girls are messy, unserious, partiers, trad wives are quiet, clean, mothers. Trad wives are often Christian, listen to their husbands and always do what’s best for their children. They stay in the home, often homeschooling their children while making picturesque meals for the entire family.
Who are the other trad wives, besides Ms. Nara Smith?
While Smith is the most famous, garnering social media deals with Goop, Lancome and Marc Jacobs, the Internet is teeming with fellow trad wives. In September, Smith shared a Reel of her family meeting up with Hannah Neelman, aka Ballerina Farm. The video shows Smith and Neelman’s combined eleven children running around the farm, eating crepes, and homemade ice cream while Smith describes what they did throughout the day. To some, the video may be a cute meeting of families. But to me, it’s creepy.
Smith speaks in a hushed tone, mirroring many ASMR creators, while the children run around a farmhouse in Utah. She and Neelman wear long dresses while their husbands opt for jeans and a tank top. They are the opposite of girls. And they look like they are living the idealized life. But it all falls away when you remember what The Times wrote about Neelman’s life just a few months before the video was released.
The piece follows Neelman around her farm as her newborn baby is strapped to her chest, detailing how she gave up her life as a Juilliard trained ballerina to be a mother to eight children and wife to a man who, according to the piece, doesn’t do much around the house. The piece was controversial at the time. The author, Megan Agnew’s voice is loud throughout and her distaste for Neelman’s husband Daniel is very much apparent. She infers that the life they have, the “perfect” life on their Utah farm, was dictated by Daniel’s wants.
Agnew writes, “Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”
Neelman responded to the piece in an Instagram Reel similar to Smith’s. Using a voiceover as she gets ready in her wooden mansion, she said the piece was “an attack on [her] family and [her] marriage.”
To me, a simple user of god’s Internet, this controversy just emboldened trad wives. Smith and her children rushed to Utah to film content upholding their life choices. More people, including me, flocked to Neelman’s accounts to find out who she was. Women across America decidedly think women like Smith and Neelman are inspiring. Smith has a combined 14.5 million followers on Instagram and TikTok, while Neelman has a combined 17 million. For some reason, American women love trad wives.
And, after the 2024 election, I’m not surprised. 53% of white women voted for Trump. That’s one more percentage point than in 2020. In my bubble, where many of my friends live alone, make more money than their boyfriends, and all of whom voted for Harris, the rise in trad wife content is simply an Internet trend. But this shift in what’s popular online is more telling than we gave it credit for. There is a collective yearning for a more traditional life. For women being mothers and in the home, for their husbands making money and on the edge of parental duties.
Women like Smith and Neelman align themselves so closely with the patriarchy, subservient to the ideals their husbands dictate. They raise their children on farms, give up their professional dreams, and hand make all of their food to appear like they are living the dream. But their lives are just that, an appearance, an act. They don’t clue us in on the little fights with their husbands, on the days they were too tired to whip up a homemade meal so they just drove to the grocery store. They don’t remind their followers that they are the ones making money for their families, that the very videos of them living the trad wife life are an antithesis to its own definition.
After the election, my TikTok feed was full of people finding out their favorite influencers voted for Trump. While I don’t follow Nara Smith and correctly guessed her and Lucky’s political ideologies, many fellow TikTokers were shocked. One Instagram user commented on Lucky Blue’s recent post, “Really truly disappointed. I loved Nara. I saw her [as] an amazing empowered woman building an amazing brand. A complete superstar. Now I’m worried for her wellbeing being a woman of color married to you.”
This was not a unique take. User after user blamed Lucky for co-opting his young wife. They would get halfway to the point. Forgetting that the whole concept of a trad wife is to take the lead of your husband. To let him make the decisions for the family, even if that means voting for someone who wants to take your rights away. And Smith is a willing participant in this. She portrays her life as inspirational and doesn’t dispel the downsides of being a trad wife.
As it’s easy to do, I have long fallen into the trap of my algorithm. I only know who Nara Smith and Hannah Neelman are because I’m chronically online, not because they are fed to me. My TikTok and Instagram feeds are full of single girls living in New York, giving each other dating advice and sharing stories about their friendships. It was all too easy for me to look at the trad wife trend as a weird offshoot for lonely mothers, not a trend followed by millions and millions of women, hinting at a type of America they wish to see.
The year of the girl, the year of Barbie and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift was fun and loud and pink. It was motivational and inspiring. But just like how we need to address the male loneliness epidemic, we - white women - need to address the traditional underbelly of our gender. They crave to be near the patriarchy, to serve it dutifully so that we find success. Because whether we want to believe it or not, whether we’re a hot girl or a trad wife, the future depends on us being unified in our independence.
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