If Carol Brady were on television today, she would sculpt ceramics, join garden clubs, host parties for her husband and organize parent-teacher association events. Regency-era ladies did needlework. Wealthy Victorian women prayed all day as their special liberated hobby. Daisy in The Great Gatsby professionally drank mint juleps at the Plaza Hotel. In the 1990s, rich women became art collectors patronizing the Young British Artists. Today, of course, it’s popular for leisure-class women to post lavish, bait-worthy social-media content about idealized motherhood.
Chief among the honorable occupations in contemporary society, of course, is the content creator, including the aforementioned category of tradwife. At first in the videos of Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman—two of the genre’s most famous practitioners—all I perceived were the luscious gowns, lobotomized girlish narrations, faked serenity and silly, time-consuming emulation of industrial foods like Oreos. That is, I saw the cartoonishly retrograde gender stuff first.
Any working mother who doesn’t moonlight as Mrs America or a Gucci model knows this is not what the grind of parenting looks like in any real day-to-day sense (I am so tired I’ve developed a tic in my left eye). So it took some time for me to also see the class dynamics hurtling toward submissive, eager-to-impress wifehood.
Who else but the online wives of the elite can opt-in to whip up every element of a grilled mozzarella cheese from scratch?
Hannah Neeleman only looks as though she’s performing humble wifely work. In fact she is showing off her free time, won on account of her husband’s business interests and intergenerational riches. Actively obscured is the infrastructure of capital behind her. Who else but the online wives of the elite can opt-in to whip up every element of a grilled mozzarella cheese from scratch?
We’re in classic Theory of the Leisure Class territory here, Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 bestselling critique of wealth accumulation over social good and the wasteful culture that blossomed in its wake. Melding economics with sociology, Veblen examined the way the era was being defined by the rise of the robber baron—industrialists like Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt who took advantage of the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one to accumulate massive amounts of wealth. The supremacy of the landed class was waning, and the new moneyed class advanced a flagrantly lavish culture that almost seemed to celebrate waste and needless expense.
We now know this epoch by an appellation introduced by novelists: published by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, The Gilded Age: A Story of Today satirizes the cultural changes that pulsed outwards from the new elites as the Industrial Revolution hit the American North. Just prior to that, the US had been entangled in the great moral question of slavery, relative to its national identity: was it to be a free nation or a slave nation? With emancipation, that matter was thought tidily settled and done. Slavery had incentivized the retention of an 18th-century model of agrarian life, limited in market scope. Then, as urbanization accelerated, the wealth started flowing. Enrichment reigned.
When a piece of metal is gilded, it is given a thin but irresistible sheen of gold over its base. In Twain and Warner’s metaphor, the unadorned base metal is America’s true and dirty substance. Stripped of lovely gilding, what remains is a foundation of corruption and inequality, which are among the novel’s post-Civil War themes. It was this unprecedented industrialization, at the heart of the Gilded Age, that would see America on its way to becoming the world’s leading economic power.
Veblen saw these changes as only an outsider could. The sixth of twelve children of dispossessed Norwegian farmers who moved to the Midwest, he had a bilingual childhood, and had grown up under the influence of other ways of doing and thinking, of Northern European agrarian life. As somebody who was estranged from America’s money-based culture until adulthood, he was able to see through the myths that masked the leisure class’s social practices.
Does the tradwife influencer, who probably has more wealth and leisure time than any mother in any other era, enjoy making her own cereal simply because she delights in its satisfying crunch?
Dr. Mary Wrenn of the University of the West of England is an expert on the leisure class. In a great paper this year, she also identified some crucial aspects of the tradwife phenomena: the intense reconstitution of an imagined 1950s past based on nuclear family and the June Cleaver housewife blueprint; the deeply conservative politics and Christianity; the rejection of modernity and second-wave feminism; the classic American myths of the rugged individualist, the pure-hearted homesteader, and the pure whiteness of both family and nation; and, as you can see after watching a few videos, the pathologically positive mindset.
In the 1950s, the pre-feminist decade deliberately evoked by the polka-dotted aesthetics of Nara Smith’s feed, housewives were expected to clean the house from floor to ceiling every day. It’s curious, then, that the wiping, scrubbing, disinfecting, vacuuming—that is, the domestic labor—is never shown in the tradwife’s videos. Such vulgar manual drudgery would, according to Veblen, be “a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community.” Clout is gained by exempting yourself from normal work and performing the making of your own paleo waffles, not by scrubbing the dirty waffle iron afterwards—in other words, from the symbolic labor, not the real labor.
A video of Hannah Neeleman making a casual lunch of roast fish, grilled cheese on homemade sourdough, and pumpkin soup is not providing instruction or advice for other mothers. It’s aspirational, performative, and entertaining rather than useful. The tradwife is working, but she is not performing what Veblen would call productive work—her work is enriching her husband, not society at large. It is not about rigorously tested, practical recipes for making homemade Nutella. Nobody makes Nutella for survival. It’s for show.
A performance, yes, of gender and wifely subservience, but also of class and open time. Likewise, influencing is, for sure, a job, and one which requires some serious skills and a nous for the zeitgeist. It’s also a job which is only possible for the tradwife because of the security provided to her by the leisure class and which broadcasts her place in it.
Even Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, couldn’t have dreamed of the financialization of society and the spectacular wealth we know today.
There were fewer explanations for wealth disparity in Veblen’s time. Who were these coarse new millionaires? Veblen offered a credible history that still resonates: In agricultural societies, clerks, priests, warlords and monarchs controlled the community’s wealth and were honorifically and economically more important than the agricultural worker. With their access to the agricultural surplus, they developed titles, symbols and a culture of etiquette—things that have no economic value but gave them distinction and superiority (and made it easy to exclude the common laborer). The 1900 wedding of Louisa Pierpont Morgan, daughter of financier and industrialist John Pierpont Morgan, to Captain Herbert Satterlee in New York saw unforeseen ostentation and a cascade of gifts of diamonds, oriental rugs and gold tableware. Now, we would call this signaling.
Industrialization, and the transformation to a society based on consumption, made this class system more dynamic. Mass production made a lot of everyday goods low-cost, and it created very particular niche products that only the new leisure class could buy: a new hierarchy of consumer items, with luxury goods at the top. Profiting from new markets of steel, oil, business and finance, these new capitalists had their own desires, divergent from those who had inherited their wealth.
They exhibited their wealth in a novel manner, and their conspicuous leisure took on the forms that were not productive. They engaged in ridiculous, time-intensive sports like riding and polo. Yachting. Mansions. Gourmet foods and liquors. Baby furniture. But even Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, couldn’t have dreamed of the financialization of society and the spectacular wealth we know today, generated through speculation and rampant digital monetization rather than mechanization.
Veblen realized that the value of people, possessions and culture is judged in monetary terms. Caught in a redemptive dream of striking it rich, the working and middle classes emulated whatever they could to keep up their status and self-worth. At the same time, the goods the leisure class used to signal their freedom were perpetually made cheaper on account of mass manufacturing, and so the specifics of conspicuous consumption kept changing to ensure exclusivity, specialness and distance from lower class culture.
At each leap forward in productivity, the leisure class latched onto the next big, deluxe thing that could not be copied by the disgusting masses.
It gives me chills to read Veblen’s idea that the stay-at-home wife herself is a wealthy husband’s form of conspicuous consumerism, because she is his economic trophy. No need for a double income here. The gendering goes further: the conspicuous leisure of this new class was mostly carried out by the industrialists’ wives and children. Charity work. Studying the classics at university for years. Parties that appeared in the society page of the newspaper. Smoking cigars. Big cars. Restlessly fast-passing fashion. Year-long European vacations. Frivolous rites of passage like debutante balls. Displayed in these product forms and rituals wasteful consumption swelled dramatically as a social symbol of affluence and liberation from work.
I know firsthand that having a baby can have a disastrous effect on a woman’s retirement savings, career progression, income and everything else that amounts to the gendered pay gap.
A Marcs handbag. A $352,000 old-timey oven. A hobby farm. In this context, all could qualify as Veblen goods, luxury items for which higher prices bring greater appeal, the better for consumers to advertise their fortunes. The more useless the better such goods demonstrate that the tradwife and her husband can spend without working in the regular labor market. Note that all these novelties depend on the labor of people of lower classes (cleaners, farm-hands). They are obscene because they are impossible for working mothers.
Most offline tradwives are probably not in the leisure class, but it’s an apt category for those viral online figures who define the trend, a clear subset of momfluencers who are either very wealthy in their own right or by association with their husbands. They never speak of structural constraints on child-raising, operating in the very neoliberal model of care in which every family, staffed fulltime by the mother, is responsible for itself. By contrast, our culture loathes poor mothers, and fears their fertility.
There is never any glimpse of an outside community beyond the tradwife’s sacred, sparkling home, just the lie of self-madeness and the pro-natalist fantasy of the family as society’s only communal space, a replacement for things like friends, extended family members, postpartum healthcare, solidarity, asking for help, helping others and knowing your neighbors. Within this claustrophobic, lifestyle-soundtracked mirage, the tradwife is the self-created protagonist of her own tiny scrollable universe, entirely in control of her own story while pretending there’s no such thing as society beyond her household.
Reading more about the leisure class recently, I actually laughed out loud at one of its markers: the accumulation of immaterial goods and symbols like… a medieval family crest? What better example of this than the cursive-typographic Ballerina Farm LLC logo? (Their entire website is fairly symbolic and has been beset with operative glitches; I found its newsletter subscription button to be dysfunctional until very recently.) The leisure class’ exhibition of archaic social skills and hyper-niche branches of learning resonates too: out with the fancy-bred hunting dogs of the old-world aristocrats, in with preindustrial cooking methods and agrarian aesthetics.
She is fertile, she is viral, and she has sparked a thousand think-pieces. Her business value is on the up.
Does the tradwife influencer, who probably has more wealth and leisure time than any mother in any other era, enjoy making her own cereal simply because she delights in its satisfying crunch? Or because she knows other moms cannot and would not labor on such a useless task? Either way, conspicuous leisure is wasted time, and conspicuous consumption marks wasted resources. It’s the lack of productive work, contributing to society, that undergirds all of this.
I write this as a new-ish mother who lives on a chemical-free farm, so I understand the degree to which the vision sold by the tradwife is a lie. I wouldn’t say I’m lucky to live on a farm. I would say I benefit from the structural advantage of a miniature food production system that can subsidize me to be a freelance writer (famously an unstable and silly career choice). Nonetheless, I know firsthand that having a baby can have a disastrous effect on a woman’s retirement savings, career progression, income and everything else that amounts to the gendered pay gap.
Farm life allows me to spot the incongruities in the Ballerina Farm set, which is a bit like The Truman Show but for the countryside. When Neeleman pours chicken stock from a store-bought package, or reveals that her oven is fueled by propane (not wood), I see the blips in what is meant to be a pre-modern fantasy set apart from the industrial food and energy systems. Who’s delivering the groceries and the gas canisters, or can Neeleman dash down to the store in the nearby town of Kamas? In these glitches lies more hidden labor amid the shallowness of the tradwife’s ostensible rejection of modernity. Likewise, Nara Smith’s spotless kitchen, replete with its Smeg appliances manufactured in Italy, also bears the hallmarks of a hyper-globalized supply chain.
Even the notion that tradwives are a throwback to the 1950s is ultimately a deception. In their influencer form, tradwives are an online phenomenon selling an extremely 21st-century vision of the self-branded content creator. The commodification of the motherly self—crafting a digital persona, enacting marketing edicts, staying on-message, negotiating brand partnerships with “clean” make-up companies—is not a 1950s anachronism. The top tradwives are better understood as magnates or magnate-adjacent, with slick mom branding.
“Content creator” is the ultimate stay-at-home role for today’s mom. If you have lots of children, you are going to be very house-bound, particularly if you politically reject the very idea of salaried work for women or you simply don’t have to get a job. The motherly personality has now been transformed into a commercial digital asset, not just for her husband but her followers, via the social-media functions of algorithmic feeds, social metrics and one-click sharing. She is fertile, she is viral, and she has sparked a thousand think-pieces. Her business value is on the up.
The idea that tradwives promote a regression to “tradition” is also ahistorical folly. If we were going to be traditional, we wouldn’t parent in nuclear family units (a very recent historical invention), we would probably breastfeed each others’ babies (check the archaeological and historical record before you say “eww”) and we would share all kinds of practical child-raising duties in the style of the “village” (which many parents speak of wistfully and would seek to avail themselves of). We might live intergenerationally, or with other families. If anything, tradwives show the extent to which ideas of motherhood and tradition have been co-opted by conservatives—and the entire culture has bought it.
I know in writing this that I am destined to be cast in the same grouchy role as Thorstein Veblen. But aestheticizing care work is dishonest and ideologically dangerous. I adore living and working on a farm, but it is categorically anti-glam. This may disgust you, but twenty meters from me, there are two hunted kangaroo legs hanging in the cool room, waiting to be skinned and minced. Soon I will learn how to butcher, and tomorrow I need to pour worm juice on the garlic crop. We have no garbage collection service.
I’m not very entrepreneurial but I’m fairly certain there’s not much opportunity for hyper-feminine sponcon in this; it doesn’t exactly conform to the category of lifestyle content. I suppose that’s why I think the tradwife’s sales pitch is not just false but a pathology arising from wealth accumulation in a patriarchal society. Veblen was right: wealth has a very peculiar warping effect on psychology and culture. What these influencers are really doing is commercializing their motherly selves in a competitive manner which is against any ideal of communal care or cooperation.
Beneath the wholesome gingham and the pointless baking, their true message is this: my babies are richer than yours.
