I’ve been dipping pruriently into a kerfuffle that kicked off in the ruddy-cheeked and sourdough-scented world of the tradwife lifestyle influencer recently. Its brightest star, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, has just prepared for and then competed in a beauty pageant, two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child.
Even some fans of this corner of social media – where stay-at-home mothers document their lives as helpmeets to strong, outdoorsy gents, exalting labour-intensive domestic chores, child-rearing and churning your own butter – have found this a touch, well, much. At odds with Neeleman’s shots of folksy simplicity; a harmful and unrealistic example for other new mothers, that kind of thing. But most think it’s “so inspiring!”
I’m not following Neeleman herself – her 8.7 million Instagram followers, Mormonism, much-envied green Aga, and the way the “honest toil on the land” shtick appears to be somewhat undermined by her husband’s father owning an airline have been endlessly analysed. But I’m fascinated by tradwife life, why it appeals and what it’s selling.
It’s less the campy, colour-saturated, submissive 50s-housewife cosplay (if you aren’t familiar, check out @esteecwilliams and prepare to hear that “God designed two genders for different purposes”). That feels like fantasy or fetish, designed, I suspect, to appeal mainly to men. (Some of the women who yearn to surrender to a male provider could be, as one astute TikToker put it, “mistaking wanting to be a trad wife with wanting universal basic income.”)
But the other kind – families forging a wholesome, homesteading existence – taps into a longing for things it’s objectively reasonable to long for. It’s stuff I long for: a slower, simpler, more intentional way of life, making do and mending, a hands-on relationship with nature, the seasons and food production. The world is chaos, cruelty and despair, but in a peaceful corner of the internet, a woman in sprigged muslin is meditatively pickling beets in a shaft of sunlight or pouring raw milk into a pitcher. A knock-kneed lamb is warming by the Aga, there are freshly podded peas on the table and there is sourdough cooling.
They make it look so lovely, this 19th-century drudgery. The reality of homesteading is precarious and not pretty: drought, mud, animals getting sick and dying, what one homesteader told me is “the daily game of what the hell is under my nails – shit or blood?” You can know tradwife life is fantasy – a Little House on the Prairie performance piece (after all, social-media content, not cattle, often pays the bills) – and still enjoy it. But the gorgeous aesthetics can also lull you into not noticing, what – apart from sourdough starter kit – it’s selling.
At the extreme margins, that’s white supremacy: a fringe of tradwives enthusiastically repopulating the world with blond babies. Others sit along what’s been called the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline”, where granola-fuelled enthusiasm for organic farming, fermentation or home schooling (none of which – obviously! – is inherently alt-right) elides into anti-vaxxing, decrying contraception and woke liberal modernity.
But even when it’s just a homesteader saying feminism makes them sad or suggesting scrubbing dishes glorifies God, it tends to celebrate a narrow vision of life: white, straight, Christian, cleaving to traditional gender roles and family structures. As a friend said: “I’ll get fascinated by a woman baking bread, then she starts talking about how feminism ruined women’s lives.” Influencers with “faith and family” in their profiles are gonna influence.
A pared-back life on the land doesn’t need to be “trad”. It’s often radical, diverse, engaged and outward-looking and it’s not right the lifestyle gets co-opted by tradwives just because they post the prettiest pictures. So I’ve been investigating alternatives when you desperately want to look at people living quietly purposeful lives connected to nature. There’s @farmlifeiceland, a lesbian sheep-farming couple and their baby daughter; @poppy.okotcha, who beautifully documents her journey growing food ecologically, rooted in her Devon community; I really enjoy @Blackyardchickenz, where Reec Swiney’s Atlanta pandemic hen-keeping experiment became a full-blown smallholding and vocation he shares with local schoolchildren. There are hundreds more and I’ll keep exploring. I’m determined to be soothed by the hope of future change, not the false allure of a reactionary retro fantasy.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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