“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the new Hulu reality show, centers on a clique of influencers in Provo, Utah. In their community, they are steered at young ages into marriages and pregnancies. But on TikTok, they converge into a #MomTok squad, executing coordinated dances in crop tops amid beige McMansions as they rack up followers and brand deals. Now they’ve been upgraded to reality television stars, a cast of frenemies who act out mean-girl scenes and hunt for loopholes in the strict codes of their church.
It’s significant that the show identifies these women first as wives, not as influencers. They are professional content creators and, in some cases, family breadwinners. It is their social media popularity that landed them the show, not their unexceptional husbands. Several cast members are actually divorced.
The “Mormon Wives” join an extended wife universe — see also: Bravo’s chaotic “Real Housewives” and Instagram’s ethereal tradwives — where the term “wife” no longer strictly refers to a woman’s marital status. “Wife” is a brand. In “Mormon Wives,” it suggests a woman whose public identity is defined by her relationship to the home. A woman whose worth is still measured by her proximity to the patriarchy, even as she claims that her profitable TikTok presence challenges it.
These wife-themed shows and tradwife social-media accounts might qualify as simple brain-bleaching distractions, were they not proliferating during this particular presidential election season. The Trump campaign and some of its allies have repeatedly suggested that a woman’s domestic contributions are her highest calling — so much so that they have cast motherhood as a prerequisite for her participation in work outside the home. If a woman hopes to claim a role in public life, she must play the wife and mother everywhere that she goes.
In comments from three years ago that resurfaced recently, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, complained of “childless cat ladies” in business and politics, and railed against the “leaders of the left,” like the American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whom he called “people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children.” (Like Kamala Harris, Weingarten is a stepmother.) In September, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas appeared alongside Donald Trump and suggested that because Harris has not birthed children, she has acquired a character defect unbecoming of a leader: “My kids keep me humble,” Sanders said. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
The public wife is a contradictory identity. For the most successful of tradwife or #MomTok content creators, broadcasting home life becomes a remunerative full-time job. It takes some suspension of disbelief to watch an anti-feminist influencer like Lily Kate take shots at working mothers in the course of her own work, filming and editing videos for Instagram and TikTok. But Kate, like Phyllis Schlafly with a smartphone and chunky highlights, reveals how women have always been permitted to rise in certain conservative circles as long as they operate within the confines of patriarchal power.
Even as some figures on the right argue that a woman must acquire a husband and children before she claims an important job, they appear bent on making motherhood so all-consuming that few can escape its demands. Abortion bans, paired with the demonization of public child care, can keep women housebound and reproducing. Vance has dismissed universal day care as “class war against normal people.” In his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” he romanticized his Mamaw’s sacrifices in raising multiple generations of children, and in a 2020 appearance on Eric Weinstein’s The Portal podcast, he endorsed the host’s assertion that free caregiving is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” He recently recast the line, suggesting that the child-care crisis can be resolved by “Grandma and Grandpa” helping out “a little bit more.”
Even Sanders’ comments pitch motherhood as a kind of cheery punishment. When she calls for women to be humbled by having children, she seems to suggest that motherhood actually knocks them down a peg. The Harris campaign, for its part, seems to have anticipated the critique that she is insufficiently maternal to seek the presidency. It has positioned her as what her husband, Doug Emhoff, called “the center of her family,” emphasizing her roles as big sister, godmother, auntie and “Momala” to Emhoff’s two children and suggesting that her care for her family is indicative of how she’ll care for the nation.
Most American mothers do work outside of the home, even as they bear the brunt of unpaid labor inside of it. The one unspoken exception to that arrangement is wealth. Angela Davis described the housewife as “a symbol of the economic prosperity enjoyed by the emerging middle classes.” Embodying and projecting that symbol is part of her job. The women of the “Real Housewives” are so-called not because they engage in domestic work but because they have relationships with wealthy men.
I have to imagine that behind all the sumptuous tradwife Instagram accounts, the wife-centered reality shows and the careers of some conservative politicians, it is the unseen and unheralded housekeepers and nannies who maintain the mirage of the functional nuclear home. The “Mormon Wives” are rarely filmed cleaning house or caring for their children, but someone must be performing domestic work and child care for them as they focus on building their wife-and-mom brands.
When they aren’t creating content, the “Mormon Wives” spend much of their time being pregnant, arguing about who is closest to God and undergoing beauty treatments. Though the wives are no older than 30, their faces are already frozen in masks of Botox. One throws a party to celebrate her upcoming labiaplasty procedure, and excitedly reveals: “They’re cutting it all off, tightening it back up, getting a mommy makeover.” Their gauntlets of procedures, as painful as they are unnecessary, represent the sacrifice inherent in their particular ideal of the public wife.
It’s a little depressing that the wealthy women of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” have achieved only the narrowest of escape hatches from the kitchen: They broadcast on TikTok from within the home itself. Their frequent appeals to the liberating, even patriarchy-breaking character of what they call #MomTok feels underbaked. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a vague statement in August, chiding “recent productions” for depicting “lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church.” But the husbands of our “Mormon Wives” seem to permit their wives to manifest wealth by endorsing vibrators or discussing their sex lives as long as they dutifully return to their trophy cases by day’s end.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
