Trad wives are women who embrace traditional gender norms and champion homemaking, childcare, and supporting their husbands. Among those documenting their lifestyle on social media is Hannah Neeleman, 35, a mother-of-eight from Utah.
If you know who Ballerina Farm is, chances are she may have unwittingly filled your social media feeds with ‘trad wife’ content in recent weeks.
Ballerina Farm is the Instagram handle of 34-year-old Hannah Neeleman, a mother-of-eight who lives on a dairy farm in Utah with her husband Daniel, 35.
She is one of an increasing number of women promoting the lifestyle of a ‘traditional wife’ to their followers on TikTok and Instagram.
But after a recent interview with Neeleman, details of her relentless schedule as a homemaker have caused controversy with commenters, many of whom have expressed concern for her welfare and the message being conveyed to other young women.
Neeleman, however, described the article as an “attack on her family” and “portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit… couldn’t be further than the truth”.
What is a trad wife?
Trad wives are women who embrace traditional gender norms and champion homemaking, childcare, and supporting their husbands.
They often take influence from early 20th-century American housewives, are devout Christians, and express politically Conservative views.
With the rise of social media, they have begun documenting their lives through Instagram and TikTok reels, usually in full hair and make-up, and often with a child on their arm as they cook, clean, or offer ‘life hacks’ for “serving” or “submitting” to their husbands.
Estee C Williams, a self-confessed trad wife with more than 100,000 Instagram followers says in one of her videos: “Being a traditional wife is so much more than cooking and cleaning and wearing house dresses, it’s about taking your house and making it a home.”
She adds that “aprons are like our house uniforms… so we can wear our beautiful clothes in our home and still protect them”.
A typical video on Nara Smith’s Instagram feed is captioned: “Here’s everything my husband cooks in a day/what I cook for him”.
Professor Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychologist and associate head of psychology at Edge Hill University, says: “People who have these views have always existed – we’re just more aware of it now.”
In the age of social media, she says people have more “creative” ways of declaring and reaffirming their social identities.
A study by Media Matters America suggested that viewers of trad wife content are more likely to be exposed to online conspiracy theories.
Professor Kaye says online algorithms can link people with “particular types of world views” to others of “particular political persuasions”, sometimes with “toxic” consequences.
But she adds that although those risks exist, human behaviour both on and offline is “hugely complex” and multiple decision-making processes are at play to stop us “mindlessly imitating” what we see online.