Inventing Tradwives: The Performance of Right-Wing Femininity in The Digital Age
The term “trad” emerges in the same context as terms like “normie” and “red pill,” thus, this terminology is part of a repertoire of in-group – namely, gen-Z and millennials – vernacular that signals identity under the right-wing umbrella. A tradwife is a woman who believes in ‘traditional’ gender roles and family dynamics. The construction of the identity as TradWife is strongly tied with the concept of invented traditions, right-wing ideologies, gender and racism, and how technology – in this case in the form of social media platforms - plays the role of ‘accelerator.’ To understand the above-mentioned concept of invented traditions in the 21st century, this article will observe two TradWives: Nara Smith and her use of tradition as performance, and Hannah Neeleman and the use of tradition to advance and advocate for “choice feminism.”
The ‘new tradition’ of TradWives is steadily grafted into old traditions. These women borrow from the ‘well-supplied’ warehouses of rituals, symbolism and moral exhortation of the past. Traditions are often seen as culture and turned into aesthetic representations only when they are no longer directly experienced.
Indeed, it is important to remember that the concept of tradition was created – among other reasons - to serve as a legitimizing framework for social hierarchies and power structures. Tradition functions as an 'obstacle' in two ways: first, it represents the material constraints and gender norms that historical feminist movements fought to dismantle, such as women's exclusion from education, property ownership, and political participation. Second, and paradoxically, tradition becomes the obstacle that contemporary anti-feminist movements need in order to justify their existence. The TradWife phenomenon requires the narrative of tradition-under-threat to mobilize support, positioning feminism as the destructive force against an idealized past that, in reality, was built on women's subordination.
This is the case, for example, with the way women in upper-middle-class families in the United States lived during the 1950s, that are now being romanticised by TradWives. Thus, it is because the past is ‘dead’ that it is aesthetically brought back to life. As Hobsbawm states, new traditions are invented more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys social patterns, producing new ones to which old traditions cannot be applicable – because these are not sufficiently adaptable and flexible, nor their institutional carriers are. In the current political landscape, a clear break in the continuity of society happened: feminism is seen as ‘woke,’ Roe V. Wade has been overturned, with the election of Donald J. Trump, together with most European countries having elected governments that lean towards the right wing. Thus, this is when movements for the defense and/or revival of traditions start to appear.
Invented traditions are characterized by the modernity of their social and political functions. This is the case with the TradWives phenomenon, whose dispersion is carried out mainly through TikTok, making Gen Z subconsciously familiar with the right-wing world. Indeed, the latter uses these untraditional mediums to facilitate the reach for traditions to meet changing practical needs. In the TradWives case, invented traditions are used to fulfil purposes that are no longer traditional and are characterized by the modern relationship they entertain with tradition and culture. Indeed, the space of the TradWives is where right-wing men ‘seek to recruit.’ Since the alt-right gained traction, it was forced to grapple with “the woman question,” a phrase used in right-wing nationalist circles to refer to the conflicting need to involve women to make the movement viable while maintaining their subordination to men, TradWives were the perfect answer to the question.
Tradition plays a vital role not only because of the terminology of the “trad” part in TradWives but also because contemporary conceptions of traditional femininity rely on erasing the lived experiences of black women. Indeed, in the trad culture, there’s a strong reliance on an aspirational model of traditional femininity that reanimated historical relationality between gender and race. Thus, avoiding acknowledging this and directly universalizing women’s experiences is a direct pipeline to romanticizing traditional gender roles. Moreover, the invented tradition of TradWives fosters the corporate sense of superiority of elites together with exploiting the use of history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.
Tradwifery itself is inherently sexist, since as such it stands firmly against many feminist struggles. Many of the TradWives wear their anti-feminism as a badge, fighting for what they think as “woke anti-feminine rhetoric,” and they do so supporting a false claim of feminism versus femininity. What TradWives do is repackage – through the lens of invented traditions – domesticity, femininity, and benevolent paternalism through feminist languages of choice, liberation and empowerment. In the same way, what these characters are doing is completely modified out of all recognition. Indeed, someone who capitalises on contemporary social media marketing strategies to co-opt and retrench patriarchy in both traditional and creative new ways is far away from the reasoning adopted by women in the fifties. What is astonishing is how these concepts lack contact with real life because, for women around the world, patriarchal servitude is not a performance but the only option available to them.
Nara Smith (@naraazizasmith)
Nara Smith – born Pellman – is a woman of German and South African descent who married Lucky Smith – an American model – in 2020. Originally, she was a model and lifestyle influencer; however, recently, her content has morphed to mimic those of tradwives. She does this by showcasing recipes that she makes from scratch for her children and husband. Her videos start with a prompt where she states that either “Lucky” or her children are craving something, and she then will spend anything from five to eight hours making whatever they are craving; these recipes range from making Cocoa Puffs cereals to cough drops, to Taki’s crisps.
Image 1: Nara Smith’s most recent video where she’s making panna cotta with raspberry sauce
As Proctor states, the persona created is performative. Ms. Smith is performing gender, motherhood and marriage as a TradWife should. By making these recipes from scrap, she supports the TradWife ideal of nature and simplicity, together with the importance of cooking and making a beautiful home. This creates an expectation on how a person should act/talk/live to be considered as a TradWife, together with establishing herself as part of the community.
The TradWife person promotes white supremacy and misogyny, channeled with performances that establish tradwifery as a legitimate practice and form of identification. Nara Smith explained that as a mixed-race person, she had encountered a surge of racist remarks suggesting she wasn’t white enough to be trad, which is peculiar because Trad culture online tries to showcase gender and the notion of traditional femininity to reproduce whiteness while seeming ‘not racist’, but the core of thought process of these peoples is drenched in racism. Although her content steers away from being ‘political’, many of the comments on her content accuse her of using her platform to promote the TradWife lifestyle. Because her husband is Mormon and was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Therefore, the narration is complicated by the fact that she is a Black woman married to a white member of the Church, from which black people were banned from joining until 1978.
Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm)
Ms. Neeleman was raised in Utah (United States), and she is the eighth of nine children. As a dancer, at the age of 16, she joined the Julliard School – turning down a scholarship to Brigham Young University. During her senior year, she met Mr. Neeleman. In 2012, when she graduated, she was already married and expecting her first child. Ever since 2021, she has been posting videos almost daily as she goes about her work as a cook, bread baker, shepherd, gardener, egg collector and entrepreneur of Ballerina Farm. Her decision to give up her career as a ballet dancer, move away from the city, and establish Ballerina Farm, where she sells everything from meat and sourdough to aprons and flour, can be superficially read as a personal choice. However, it is actually inseparable from the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and represents what can be understood as an entrepreneurial response to its contradictions. As neoliberalism hollows out public welfare systems and intensifies work-life conflicts, the 'return to tradition' becomes repackaged as a solution to problems that capitalism itself created. The Ballerina Farm brand monetizes domesticity and agricultural labor, transforming what would traditionally be unpaid reproductive labor into a profitable enterprise. This represents what Marxist feminists identify as the commodification of care work. Ms. Neeleman doesn't reject capitalism but rather finds a way to make traditional femininity marketable within it. The farm becomes both a site of production and a lifestyle brand, where the aesthetic performance of tradition generates surplus value through social media engagement, product sales, and brand partnerships. This entrepreneurial domesticity obscures the material reality that such 'choices' require substantial capital investment, land ownership, and the security of inherited wealth, resources unavailable to the vast majority of women.
Image 2: Hannah Neeleman making sourdough grilled cheese with beet soup
Objectively, what she is doing is actively inventing tradition. The latter happens when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which old traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they are not applicable. Thus, she’s destroying what is known as intersectional feminism, replacing it with ‘choice feminism’ through the lens of what is known as ‘antifeminism.’ Indeed, she does not openly advocate for antifeminist positions but only advocates for the concept that all choices women make are inherently feminist - because they are made by women. But Ms. Neeleman’s mere ability to make this choice is drenched in classism because for racial, geographical, cultural and other reasons, women are unable to work even if they would choose to, and the other way around.
Ms Neeleman is a clear example of women trying to answer neoliberal feminism’s question of ‘Why can’t women have it all.’ Thus, shifting the responsibility on women to become responsible for answering the question by becoming entrepreneurial subjects that perform capital, enhancing productive labour, while still at the same time retaining the primary responsibility of labour in the house.
From a Marxist feminist perspective, Ms. Neeleman's situation illuminates how capitalism subordinates women's 'choice' between 'working' and 'returning home' to the needs of capital accumulation. As Lin and Wang argue, neoliberalism pushes women into precarious labor arrangements while the withdrawal of welfare state support forces families, particularly women, to absorb care responsibilities that were once partially socialized. The Ballerina Farm enterprise brilliantly resolves this contradiction for the elite: Ms. Neeleman performs intensive domestic and agricultural labor while simultaneously monetizing this performance through social media, creating what appears to be a synthesis of traditional femininity and entrepreneurial success.
However, this 'resolution' depends entirely on class position. The valorization of women's unpaid reproductive labor, i.e., the cooking, childcare, and household management, only becomes economically viable when combined with inherited wealth, brand partnerships, and social media income streams. For working-class women, reproductive labor remains invisible, uncompensated, and undervalued within capitalist structures. The TradWife phenomenon doesn't challenge this exploitation, it simply offers an entrepreneurial pathway available only to women with existing capital access, while simultaneously promoting a model of femininity that depends on other women's continued performance of devalued care work.
When women's decision to embrace "tradition-as-liberation" is contrasted with the state's failure and the breakdown of social order brought about by a risky extension of feminism, it is then registered as salvific. The whole phenomenon of TradWives is deeply gender essentialist, and, as mentioned above, it is achievable only by the elites. Ms. Neeleman’s husband’s father has a net worth of $400 million, while Nara Smith is always cooking with a full face of makeup, wearing Haute-couture clothes, and is never seen cleaning or performing other – less aesthetic - aspects of domesticity.
The class dimension of the whole phenomenon of TradWives is not incidental but central to understanding this ideology. A working-class or middle-class woman cannot be a TradWife in the influencer sense because she lacks the material conditions that make performative domesticity viable: she cannot afford to exit the paid labor force, cannot purchase organic ingredients and artisanal supplies, cannot invest in the filming equipment and aesthetic home environments necessary for content creation, and crucially, cannot risk economic dependency on a male partner without the safety net of family wealth. For the majority of women, being economically dependent on a man is not a lifestyle choice but a vulnerability that can lead to poverty, particularly following divorce or domestic abuse.
This raises a critical contradiction that both TradWife influencers embody: they advocate for women's economic dependency on men and withdrawal from paid employment, while simultaneously building substantial independent income through their social media enterprises. They are, in fact, successful digital entrepreneurs earning significant revenue through brand partnerships, sponsorships, and product sales, while promoting a model of femininity that denies other women the economic autonomy they themselves exercise.
The importance of women's economic independence cannot be overstated from a feminist perspective. Economic dependency creates structural vulnerability to domestic violence, limits women's ability to leave unsatisfactory relationships, restricts their decision-making power within households, and correlates with higher rates of poverty in old age (particularly given women's longer life expectancy).
Notwithstanding how different these two TradWives are, also merely from the backdrop of their TikToks, flashy and elegant on one side, modest on the other, both content creators are millionaires and part of the Mormon church. For a long time, Mormon blogging was, in many ways, a radical act because it ran contrary to religious expectations for Mormon women and also opened a space for a range of feminist discussions. Over time, this has changed, and social media became a vehicle through which the Mormon church became known.
The idealization of the worth of a woman being strictly tied to her proximity to men is deeply rooted in the concept of nuclear family – which is, in turn, connected to colonialism. Indeed, the whole concept was used to control the population, using women’s role as domestic servants in a context where white supremacy is the social norm, leaving black people and others behind in this romanticization. And this is palpable in TikTok trends, where the great majority of the content that goes viral is aimed at and seen to be unattainable by the majority of women as they rely on ultrafeminine, white, heteronormative ideals.
Overall, as Hobsbawm states, it is hard to grasp how far new traditions can use old materials, how far they may need to invent new languages or devices or extend the old symbolic vocabulary beyond its established limits, but with the phenomenon of TradWives, we managed to see how far traditions can be recycled and trigger innovation. The file rouge of everything is understanding how the importance of ‘maintaining tradition’ – although done in peculiar ways, through untraditional channels – is one of the ways in which nationalist rhetoric claims an essentialized and largely a-historical version of culture and how women are – and have been - only used as play checkers, victims of patriarchal servitude, for centuries.
The TradWife phenomenon illustrates how tradition is reshaped in the context of technology, turning it into a performative and exclusionary instrument that sets in patriarchal and racial hierarchies. Future research should explore the global dimensions of the TradWife movement, analysing how non-Western influencers interpret and localise this phenomenon.
In addition to largely illuminating the significance of the TradWife movement as a marker of contemporary right-wing identity, this article also suggests that such ‘digital invented traditions’ may represent a more widespread transition towards performative traditionalism as a form of cultural resistance, even if promoted within the context of consumer culture.
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About the author:
Michela Rossettini is Co-Director of Outreach & Partnerships for Politics4Her's European Hub and a Master's student in International and Development Studies at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, specializing in Gender, Race and Diversity, currently on exchange at the Hertie School. A human rights advocate and researcher passionate about how technology impacts women, she contributes to the European Student Think Tank's Digital Policy Working Group, where she writes on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and formerly served as Youth Representative to the UN Office in Geneva with the Centre for Voters Initiative & Action. Michela holds a Bachelor of Law from the University of Turin, where her dissertation examined cybercrime through a gendered lens, and is dedicated to amplifying young women's voices in political and decision-making spaces.
