In the last several years, "tradwives" — shorthand for traditional wife — have become a lightning rod for feminists on social media. These influencers post about raising children and cooking from scratch, all in a beautiful, perfectly maintained home.
Some of the most popular creators, like Hannah Neelemen of Ballerina Farm in Kamas, Utah, and Nara Smith, are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But tradwives and feminists "actually start from a very similar place," said Caroline Kline, assistant director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California.
Unpaid domestic labor has historically been undervalued, unpaid and underappreciated. It isn't included in Gross Domestic Product calculations in the United States. U.N. Women, a United Nations project focused on gender equality, finds it could account for 40% or more of GDP in some countries if it were included.
Kline said feminists and tradwives "both take women's domestic labor seriously, and they both insist that it matters."
The difference, she said, is in the solutions. Feminists focus on finding ways to share labor between partners, build flexible workplaces and create affordable child care. A lot of tradwife content, however, says women should retreat from the workplace and concentrate on the home.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: You talk about girl boss culture, this feminist ideal that women can do it all, they can have a career, family and home. How do you see the tradwife movement as an alternative to that?
Caroline Kline: Yeah, so girl boss culture really came about in the early 2000s, and it told women that they could have it all if they just hustled hard enough. However, the structures just never changed enough to support that promise. A lot of women ended up exhausted. They were juggling paid work, unpaid care, emotional labor, and they were just doing it with very little structural support.
And tradwife content can feel really appealing in that context, even to women who don't believe in strict gender roles, just because it rejects that constant hustle culture. And it just features this life of slower time, of visible caretaking labor, and it presents this kind of beautiful image of a life that feels more manageable.
CH: …and that values unpaid domestic labor more because this content is really promoting that and glamorizing it.
CK: Yeah, absolutely. I think that can be really refreshing to see women's caretaking labor in the home honored and respected, and promoted as something that's really important in this life.
CH: At the same time, they're monetizing that unpaid labor through their content.
CK: Yeah, that's like a really interesting factor here is that while tradwife content promotes, sometimes explicitly, often not at all explicitly, the idea of women being wives and mothers and being in the home and leaving the breadwinning to their husbands. The almost ironic thing is that the very most popular tradwife influencers are actually bringing in pretty excellent incomes from their influencer work. And so some people have kind of pointed that out that these tradwife influencers are making money by telling other women not to make money.
CH: Why do you think so many of these content creators are Latter-day Saints?
CK: It's true that Mormon women have a history of being kind of out in front in some of these lifestyle online worlds, starting with the mommy bloggers, you know, 20 years or so ago.
But I think that the reason why Mormon women have been successful is because Mormonism produces smart, capable women — women with experience in public speaking, experience with leadership, who also happen to take motherhood and domestic work really, really seriously.
CH: Feminist critics argue that tradwife content reinforces the idea that domestic labor is a woman's realm and models submission to a husband's authority. Is the tradwife movement a form of feminism with those things in mind?
CK: No, I would never call the tradwife movement a form of feminism. And of course, I want to emphasize that tradwife content is on a spectrum. A lot of it is very overt about saying that women's God-given duty is to stay at home and support their husbands. Other tradwife content, like Ballerina Farm, that's not going to be overt at all. She's never going to say anything like that.
But certainly for those tradwife content producers who do hammer down on strict gender roles, it is a real risk. And you know if you frame cooking and caregiving and emotional work as women's moral duty, moral calling, rather than any kind of shared responsibility, it does risk entrenching gender expectations.
Editor's note: Caroline Kline is giving a talk titled "Instagram, Trad Wives, and Evolutions in Mormon Feminism" at the University of Utah's American West Center on Wednesday, Jan. 14, at 3:30 p.m.
Copyright 2026 KUER 90.1