I’ve got this dress. You would recognize it; you’ve seen it everywhere, gracing storefronts and magazines and banner ads. Perhaps you own a version, too. Serenely patterned in the spirit of a picnic, it has soft, floaty fabric; sometimes it’s pin-tucked with bell sleeves, other times fitted with a sweetheart neckline, waist-cinching cotton voile, crochet detailing. You might imagine wearing the dress while trundling through fields of waist-tall wildflowers, homemade biscuits and lovely fruits in a basket slung over your elbow, a Lassie look-alike nipping happily at your heels.
This whole pastoral-bucolic daydream — time travel through attire — has been called many things: cottagecore, sexy milkmaid, vintage maximalism, hygge, nap dressing. The more chaotic our world, the greater the appeal of clothing that yearns toward some rosy, candlelit Arcadian past. But the yearning is only yearning: When I don this milkmaid attire, I am not actually preparing to churn butter or weave blankets. I am merely borrowing iconography that I find charming, costuming myself in a specific visual fantasy, a style, a “vibe.”
There is a woman in Utah who also has this dress, and, in it, has whipped up a frothy moral panic. Her name is Hannah Neeleman, and she posts under the nom de internet Ballerina Farm. Most recently profiled in The Times of London, she is a 34-year-old, beauty-pageant-winning mother of eight, a self-styled Betty Crocker homemaker and a leading archetype of the “traditional wife” or “tradwife”: a contemporary woman who hews to the kind of old-school gender norms you might find in Victorian etiquette books or 1950s propaganda. The word “tradwife” sprouted up on the internet years ago, but it’s in this fraught, post-Dobbs election year that the level of ire directed at this phenomenon has rocketed. So-called tradwives — Neeleman is one of many, though none of her peers have achieved 10 million followers on Instagram — eschew careers, voluntarily devoting themselves to household chores and the needs of family, often deferring decision-making to their husbands. Sometimes all their joyful cooking and cleaning and child-rearing is based in religious faith or far-right zealotry. But tradwives seem to rile people up the most when their ideology appears rooted in nothing but earnest ardor for a hyperdomestic, heteronormatively subservient, anti-girlboss lifestyle.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that if you go online and brag about your life, you will encounter some amount of blowback and derision. But these joyful housewives seem to enthrall and repel us, nauseate and fascinate us, to a lunatic degree. Women like Neeleman and the 22-year-old Nara Smith — who boasts some nine million TikTok followers and now appears in GQ with red stilettos, ringed by halcyon toddlers — present their lives as fairy tales. At the same time, appalled onlookers deride them as thorns in the side of feminist progress: chauvinism incarnate, sexism made glamorous, proselytizers of a harmful fantasy.
Sure: All that may be true. But chiding tradwives for their domestic peacocking also tumbles the rest of us into a trap.
Tyrannized as so many of us are by “vibes,” trained by algorithms to care deeply about how everything looks — if you are immune to this, I envy you — plenty of ordinary women and men already romanticize every aspect of their home lives. We fling our paychecks at pastel cookware and strawberries from farmers’ markets; we devour home-organization TikToks and compulsively curate our coffee tables and interior-design mood boards. We work to make beautiful all the little household tasks that might otherwise be dull or grueling. Is this not precisely how the average internet tradwife spends her time? She signals her identity through the same self-fetishizing rituals, even the same stuff. If the modern individual expresses herself through consumption — “I buy, therefore I am” — then what are we to make of the fact that these tradwives shop the same LoveShackFancy sales we do, cook with the same pretty Caraway pots, live in the kinds of gleaming farmhouses that we ourselves lust over on Airbnb or in Condé Nast Traveler?
The joke is on us. When the tradwife puts on that georgic, pinstriped dress, she is not just admiring the visual cues of a fantastical past. She takes these dreams of storybook bliss literally, tracing them backward in time until she reaches a logical conclusion that satisfies her. And by doing so, she ends up delivering an unhappy reminder of just how much our lives consist of artifice and playacting. Because we have merely cherry-picked pleasing visual references as decorative touches on our modern lives, we are disturbed to see those same aesthetics appear alongside the actual ideologies and social norms that once animated them. A tough-looking guy can stroll down the street in cowboy boots, but we wouldn’t expect him to start a gunfight; a woman who puts girlish bows in her hair isn’t meant to start playing with Barbies and cooing like a child. The downtown kids in their heroin-chic eyeliner aren’t actually supposed to be shooting up.
So here we are, stuck in a proxy war over a gingham apron. The tradwife outrages people because of her deliberately regressive ideals. And yet her behavior is, on some level, indistinguishable from the nontradwife’s. Neeleman’s cooking videos could have come out of any issue of Good Housekeeping. Nara Smith’s pregnancy selfies mimic the model Emily Ratajkowski’s, right down to the impish poses, dim exposures and pretend-droll captions. We find ourselves warring over who, ultimately, gets to “own” the aesthetics of domesticity: the post-feminist working woman with an eye for home décor or the gender-fundamentalist housewife. If I put on the milkmaid dress and post a picture of myself in a barn, it’s easy enough to argue that I am the pretender: I am just briefly LARPing the tradwife’s deeper aspirations, indulging the same fantasy while conveniently discarding the antiquated beliefs beneath it. Things begin to collapse into science fiction; you almost worry that the tradwives might be the real human beings, and we the uncanny-valley robots that sometimes look and behave like them. Ostensibly feminist magazines (W, British Vogue) are now publishing hilariously muddied stories like “I Lived the Tradwife Life for a Week” and “Why I’m Dressing Like a Tradwife This Summer.”
An internet addiction can fool you into thinking that image and meaning are the same thing, but this confusion also has its liberating side: It means that anyone can choose her own substance through style, laying claim to any visual identity at any time. The cleverest of the tradwife influencers understand this kind of aesthetic collapse more than anyone, and they use it to their gain. Despite her public veneer as a full-time homemaker, Neeleman runs a beef, pork and kitchen empire with her husband. Alena Pettitt, an O.G. tradwife who first caught the media’s eye in 2020, sells instructional books. Smith, who is also a model, has leveraged her ambiguous tradwifery — like many tradwife influencers, she coyly avoids that description, instead letting the red-cheeked internet heap it onto her — into glitzy brand deals and photo shoots. Are any of the online tradwives even really tradwives, in the end? Or might they be pretenders just as much as we are?
The tradwife’s trollish genius is to beat us at our own dress-up game. By insisting that the idyllic cottage daydream should be real, right down to the primitive gender roles, she leaves others feeling hollow, cheated. The hullabaloo and headaches she causes may be the price we pay for taking too many things at face value: our just deserts, served Instagram-perfect by a manicured hand on a gorgeous ceramic dish, with fat, mouthwatering maraschino cherries on top.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.