“I don’t want a job, I don’t want to be the breadwinner,” a video from TikTok influencer Jasmine Dinis begins. “I want to be home, I want to be in the kitchen cooking, I want to be cleaning, I want to be cooking, I want to be making brownies, I want to be cooking dinner, making home-cooked meals every night.”
Her words overlay a series of idyllic-seeming video clips of her cradling her children, rolling around with them in verdant countryside and taking freshly-baked bread out of the oven. And thus far, nearly 7 million people have watched it. And Jasmine isn’t alone. Introducing the ‘trad wife’…
What is a trad wife?
The women who create this distinct brand of domestic servitude content are part of a subculture known as “tradwives” (traditional wives), based on advocating for traditional values, and, in particular, a ‘traditional’ view of wives as mothers and homemakers.
Follow the hashtags #housewifelife, #tradwife or #homemaker on Instagram and Tiktok and you’ll see young women with perfectly slicked-back hair donning gingham dresses, baking the family’s morning blueberry muffins from scratch, homeschooling their children, or clipping flowers from a backyard garden to ‘whip up’ a Mayfair floristry-style bouquet for a ‘casual’ lunch with their husband.
Jasmine is relatively small-fry compared to some of the bigger influencers spearheading the trad wife movement. Names like Hannah Neeleman, or Ballerina Farm as she is known on social media (whose content went viral after she was profiled in a controversial piece in The Times, entitled “Meet the queen of the tradwives”), has 7.5 million followers on TikTok, 9.1 million on Instagram, and 1.6 million on YouTube. While Nara Smith (who has 10.8 million followers on TikTok and often receives up to 28 million views on her videos) and the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives pop up regularly both on my social media and in conversation, so simultaneously divisive and enthralling is the tradwife movement.
Unsurprisingly, tradwives have incurred criticism from many women, and men, who claim that their specific brand of rose-tinted home life is damaging to the decades-worth of blood, sweat and tears that have been poured into furthering women’s rights. “You’re an embarrassment to feminism,” a scathing comment on one of Smith’s videos reads.
But not all is as it seems, as upon closer inspection, there’s much more to the traditional bliss and wrinkleless-linen dresses than meets the untrained eye. Because a handful of tradwives, including Neeleman and Smith, have now built large followings online, and as we well know, large followings come with large paychecks. Meaning that they have become, whether intentionally or not, traditional wives and breadwinners simultaneously. A complex oxymoron, to put it mildly.
In March 2024, Smith reportedly made an estimated $200,000 from TikTok alone, not including sponsored posts, according to research from Parade, while Neeleman is estimated to earn around £650,000 a-year from TikTok views, not to mention the income she will receive from driving followers to the produce her and her husband sell from the back-to-basics farm life they document.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
