There’s a new trend on social media led by women who want to be ‘traditional’ homemakers. What happened when Times fashion editor and mother of two, Harriet Walker, tried it out?
From the front row of a fashion week show, I text my husband who has spent a fortnight solo parenting in my absence: “Spending the next week as a tradwife. I’ll do all the cooking and cleaning.”
He replies after putting our two children to bed: “Lol.”
Homemaker, housewife, stay-at-home mum. In the internet age they are “traditional wives” — a label that comes not without a frisson of culture war, because what doesn’t now? Many in this burgeoning social media tribe — largely American, usually Christian, mostly white and well-off — advocate not just for looking after the kids, the cooking and the home but going full Stepford, catering to their partner’s every need as well.
“A man’s home is his castle so he should be treated like a king,” says one TikToker with more than 600,000 views. “Your No 1 duty [is to] show him how much you truly appreciate him.”
I say thank you to Alex approximately 17 times a day, but perhaps that isn’t what she has in mind.
“Keep up with your beauty,” advises Estee C Williams, a hybrid of Alice in Wonderland with headband and apron and Jessica Rabbit (the rest) whose #tradtok channel has more than one million likes. “You and your husband will benefit.”
I think of myself as more rad than trad: half of a household where the load is equally shared. My husband — or doesband, as I call him — and I split the childcare and the bills and the mortgage. We both know which chores need doing and what is about to go off in the fridge.
I got my first job when I was 14. My mother worked full time; so did hers. It has never crossed my mind not to. But recently I have found myself scrolling through Instagram accounts of laundry rooms, sourdough, vast hauls of fresh eggs, immaculately labelled jars of pulses, quilts and wicker baskets. I have a yearning to wear smock dresses, clogs and aprons. Clearly, something is Amish.
Mormon, actually. Like 9 million other people, I am obsessed with an Instagram account called Ballerina Farm. It is run by 33-year-old former ballet dancer, Latter-day Saint-er and mother of eight Hannah Neeleman, who in January competed for America in the Mrs World beauty pageant three weeks postpartum (including the swimsuit round). She posts from her homestead in rural Utah: baking in white frilly nighties and drinking raw milk from jars, newborn dozing on her chest in a £350 ($735) Artipoppe sling. Neeleman is the most famous of a bucolic new band of influencers changing what “modern” motherhood looks like: the past.
Even Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is jumping on the covered wagon: her new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, has all the hallmarks of aspirational homesteader chic with a luxe dash of Goopiness — this is Montecito after all, not Missouri.
Why am I drawn to them? I love my life in southeast London’s baby belt of craft beer and sourdough pizzas. I can’t drive, barely cook, like my job and don’t want to home-school my children or be reliant on my husband for cash. But I can’t stop watching.
“It feels terrible to say it,” a friend confided recently, “but I just want to be in my house folding things. I was raised to believe I could do anything men can. I just don’t want to any more.”
Work as though you don’t have kids; parent as though you don’t have a job; pay through the nose to balance both and be criticised for that too — what it is about the current settlement that is pushing women back into a role from which they have spent the best part of a century trying to break free?
“I could do anything I wanted,” says Jasmine Darke, whose “traditional womanhood” feed has 148,000 followers. “But I’d much rather bake bread and frolic around the house in pretty dresses all day.”
I decide to spend a week doing just that, to see what all the fuss is about. The only problem is we are in the middle of a kitchen renovation, which means — like the prairie pioneers themselves — I only have a slow cooker, induction hob and air fryer.
Wednesday
An Instagram post from @fromscratchfarmstead (178,000 followers) tells me I will get four meals from boiling one chicken. Nothing says natural-born homemaker like whipping out a measuring tape in Lidl to find a chicken that will fit the Crock-Pot. I put it on low for five hours and feel more wholesome at once.
Next, the laundry — except Alex has done it all. I’d normally leave his clean stuff on our bed, but a tradwife would definitely put it away. There is another pile at the foot of the bed. I usually assume Alex has the capacity to put dirty stuff in the basket less than two feet away, but tradwife mode means deciding for him so I put it all in the wash.
The house is a tip because of the building work, so I hoover up the most recent layer of masonry dust. Alex has done this the last few times while I made noises about there being no point because it will only be dirty again tomorrow. The point, I realise, is that it looks nicer and doesn’t take very long.
School pick-up! I try not to feel guilty that I only do this once a fortnight, because my own parents never did and my daughter, Freda, 6 (though tradwives always give ages in months, so she’s my 80-month-old), doesn’t seem bothered about going to after-school club. Most of her friends do. I take her and a little pal to the park, where I make a homesteader point of not telling them not to get dirty like I usually do. Everybody has more fun as a result.
I’ve been travelling for the best part of two weeks, I reason to myself, when my 40-month-old son, Dougie, calls me by the name of his nursery carer twice in as many minutes after I pick him up. That doesn’t stop me feeling terrible though.
After tea (pasta with cucumber: not from-scratch enough; must do better), I wrangle Dougie by the edge of the world’s most infernally heated pool during his sister’s swimming lesson. It is so hot, the glue of his sticker book melts. You never see Ballerina Farm sweating down the municipal: her brood do cold plunges in the farm’s irrigation ditch. There is a large brown puddle in our garden that might do, just behind the cement mixer.
Our boiler is broken, so I shower both kids at a friend’s house then cycle them home in their pyjamas. If you substitute “shower” for tin bath and “e-bike” for pony and trap, we are in perfect homesteader territory; the text I send Alex asking him to pick up some beers, less so.
After bedtime stories, I plate up the chicken just as he arrives home from the coalface (he is also a journalist). The expression of pure gratitude and — yes — love on his face will be hard to forget once we are back to parity again. After dinner, I wash up and empty the bins, then realise it is also now my job to make a packed lunch for Alex (467 months old) before I can go to bed. Thanks to the four-in-one boiled chicken, a decent salad comes together so quickly I barely have time to feel resentment.
“Those PJs were clean on yesterday,” Alex says sadly when I get upstairs, gesturing at where the pile of clothes used to be. “Also, do you know where all my T-shirts have gone?”
Thursday
Usually it’d be Alex’s turn to get up and do the kids’ breakfast, but now I am a tradwife, it’s always mine. Unlike Nara Smith, the 22-year-old wife of the Mormon model Lucky Blue with 1.7 million Insta followers, I do not hand-make my children cereal before the sun has risen. I put sliced wholemeal in the toaster and peel them a pear each, with yoghurt on the side.
I can see why, particularly in America, a from-scratch mentality has taken hold in some middle-class households: most shop-bought food is full of crap and kids bear the brunt of convenience foods. The tradwife approach is extreme (and often comes with coy suggestions about not vaccinating your children either), but even I have googled “how to make bagels at home” recently. Unfortunately, they require more than an air fryer.
Yes, going for a blow-dry is more Sex and the City than tradwife, but the boiler is still broken and the tradwives online all have great hair. In the Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, about religious cult leader Warren Jeffs, the Mormon sister-wives sported astonishing coifs and, as Dolly Parton says, the higher the hair, the closer to God. I put on the dishwasher and another load of laundry as penance before I go.
Later, I take some towels to tumble-dry sumptuously at the launderette, because no self-respecting tradwife would put her husband through drying himself on something as crispy as ours usually are. I plan to stock up at the fill-your-own shop whose dried goods, little scoops and artisan-peasant appeal I partially blame for having turned me into this would-be Peckham Pollyanna. I’m all psyched up to spend £18 on nuts when I realise I have left all the jars I need at home because I have been practising drinking out of them.
Even though I have consumed more milk than a veal calf today per tradwife code, I am actually quite hungry. I buy a croissant while I wait for the towels, knowing that Ballerina Farm made digestives from scratch in an Aga with a newborn on her front less than a week ago.
My husband is out for drinks, so I do pick-up, teatime and bedtime again — not unusual in my non-trad life either, I might add. What’s new is that I ask him to let me know when he is on his way home so I can put his tea on for him, pack him a lunch in advance of tomorrow, stew some oldish apples for the kids’ breakfast, then sew on a button that came off a coat several months ago.
“Have something of your own to do after a day of catering to others,” Estee C Williams suggests in one of her how-to clips. “Sewing, or painting.”
Mine is finally getting the chance to watch One Day.
Friday
Alex is definitely feeling guilty, because he insists on getting up with the children. After washing with water from the kettle (boiler still dead), I take them to school. It is only at the gate that I realise I have forgotten to pack Freda a snack because Friday isn’t usually my morning. Perhaps it really is better if the same one person does all the childcare all the time. That is a joke.
Then I have to do a very non-trad thing: work. The guilt I have felt at having “spare” time between cooking, childcare, laundry loads and hoovering — and not using it to clean the toilet — dissipates temporarily.
Williams’ advice in a “how to transition from two incomes to one” monologue includes having a side hustle, “like tutoring or being a barista”. The husband at Ballerina Farm (Daniel aka @hogfathering; 456,000 followers) has one too: it is being the son of the billionaire who founded JetBlue, the US version of easyJet.
I am supposed to be going to school-mum drinks tonight, but #tradtok tells me not to go out after dark unless I’m with my husband, so I make my excuses. We haven’t seen much of each other recently, anyway. (Tradtok also clarifies that being a tradwife to anybody abusive or controlling is “a disaster waiting to happen”.)
When I tell Alex I’ve cancelled my plans, he replies immediately to say he will go out instead. Given I am definitely not allowed to be annoyed, I decide to lean into it/finish One Day, and tell him to stay out as long as he likes.
Dinner plans thrown into disarray, I turn to the boiled chicken juice and veges I reserved from the slow cooker on the advice of my sister-wives. I warm it up, blast it in the Nutribullet and have a from-scratch meal of chicken soup while enjoying a pathetic thrill of competency.
Saturday
When the Aga broke at Ballerina Farm, Hannah made grilled peaches with lavender honey on their Big Green Egg barbecue. I aim low with a recipe for air-fryer banana bread instead.
I usually bake only as a twice-yearly flagellating ritual ahead of each child’s birthday to prove I am a good mother. It is, however, the tradwife’s raison d’être: one meme of a woman with her hands in a mixing bowl is captioned: “You married a man who loves to work, so you can stay home and bake all day.”
None of them look as if they eat much of what they bake, I must say. In fact, many tradwives seem to be protein bros in aprons. Mother-of-three Meg, 25, from the Texan rancher account @wilsonfamilyhomestead (suggested to me by the algorithm), posts bowls of lamb mince with avocado, steak with orange segments and fried kidneys, all washed down with — yes — a jar of raw milk. She is also quite vocal about not trusting the Government.
Gender roles are paused for the afternoon when a friend’s husband makes dinner for us. Then — in what is perhaps the most tradwife sentence I’ll ever write — I take the kids home to bed while Alex goes out to see a punk band.
Before I turn in, I boil two families’ worth of eggs and pack a basket of food for a picnic the next day. Knowing there is no lie-in ever again has provided all the motivation I needed to stop drinking for a few days.
Sunday
Mother’s Day is not an occasion we usually observe much on account of it being an opportunity for dads who do nothing for the rest of the year to show appreciation in lavish ways. Do I secretly wish Alex would buy me a designer handbag? Of course. But as a rather clunky tradwife meme has it, “The goal isn’t Gucci bags; it’s acres of land.”
Perhaps this is why we head out, in the rain, to a National Trust property in Kent where we allow our kids to get as muddy as they like without constraining them — this is the Scandi way. The tradwife way is similar but with the added knowledge that you are going to be the one washing it all later.
I like to think not being able to drive makes me less trad, not more, but apparently I am fully aligned in being a “passenger princess”, a phrase that actually makes me want to take a test again (driving, not pregnancy).
Monday
Bringing in our weekly vege box from behind the wheelie bin is as close as I come to harvesting anything but, like the fill-your-own shop, its muddy contents have convinced me I live a life of agrarian plenty. Cycling down the Old Kent Rd to the supermarket does test that, but I don’t even need to measure the chicken this time.
When I get home, the plumber has turned the water off entirely but the flasks I filled earlier like some midwestern doomsday prepper mean my plan to unlock the final stage of tradwife by making my own bread is unaffected. I make the dough (tradwife tip: rub oil on your hands to stop the dough sticking when you knead), leave it to prove in the microwave — turned off — then shove it in the air fryer. It makes the whole house smell like a Hovis advert. Should I continue to do this on days when I work from home?
“It’s very chewy,” is my daughter’s verdict on the result.
I am in contemplative mode as I end my week. Real tradwives clean the loo every day; I have done it once. You never see Ballerina Farm scrubbing the toilet, but perhaps that’s what all the children are for.
Then again, you never really see these women doing the actual work: tantrums, nappies, grubby finger stains on the white linen. Desperately trying to think of things to do when it’s raining. The moments I am closest to tradwife in real life — cooking, helping with homework, playing with my kids, putting them to bed — are the times I least resemble any of them: slightly frazzled, usually wearing jogging bottoms.
I don’t judge stay-at-home mothers — I sometimes feel jealous of those who genuinely chose it rather than those whose salaries simply didn’t cover the childcare bills. But it is telling that the most publicity non-working mums have had for some time has been hijacked by a militantly fairytale cosplay contingent rather than reflecting the slog it really is.
“Things that would upset me but don’t because my man provides for me,” reads a caption on TikTok of a woman putting the wheelie bin out in a strong wind that at first I thought was satire.
I have been doing our bins all week — not that I’m upset, but Alex normally does it. I want to tell this woman about the romance of having a husband who loves you so much he encourages you to live beyond your home and takes the bins out as well.
After putting the kids to bed, when I head down to make dinner yet again, my ever solicitous husband asks if I’m okay.
“Tradwife, innit,” I say.
“I love it!” He claps his hands over his mouth, then looks incredibly guilty. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
Tuesday
Despite the week being over, when Alex wakes up poorly (a state I usually have zero sympathy for because I never am) my inner tradwife takes over. I take him a Lemsip while getting the children ready, then fire up the slow cooker: it’s a boiled chicken sort of day.
Written by: Harriet Walker
© The Times of London