Girlboss Tradwives Aren’t Necessarily Hypocrites

We can't seem to figure out what a tradwife (or feminist) really is.

Photo by Marisa Howenstine on Unsplash

One of my first big articles was a deep dive of influencer Ballerina Farm, commonly known as “Queen of the Tradwives” after she was unfavorably covered in The Times by an author who clearly had an ideological, or perhaps even personal, interest in making her look like a hostage chained to a hissy pre-war radiator. The article did display some true and unusual things about her life, some of which weren’t terribly flattering toward her husband, but you could tell that was the goal from before the interview began. After that article was released, the fact that Ballerina Farm wasn’t really trad but was actually the co-founder of a company with her husband, and arguably worked more than your average corporate office mom, was presented as a form of hypocrisy. It doesn’t help that her imagery is often used without her consent by right-wing engagement bait accounts, encouraging women to choose “this” (the “this” being Ballerina Farm’s life) over “spreadsheets.”

The hypocrisy talking point—not just about Ballerina Farm but about tradwives in general—gained favorability around 2024 when the vibes started shifting on women who insisted they were “too hot to work” or people who claimed that women working was some newfangled, left-wing invention (as many of us have said, many times over, women have always worked, but feminism enabled women to have more autonomy and opportunities for working.) As I wrote about a year ago, you don’t want a homestead, you want the Sims.

I’ve now seen this take in various forms from countless people. I don’t think they all got it from me; I was probably not the first one to come up with it anyway. The podcast Boy Problems recently covered the idea that tradwives are just “girlbosses in aprons,” highlighting that many of them are not forthcoming about the fact that they make money while LARPing as traditional. After Charlie Kirk’s memorial, I saw a tweet proclaiming (joyously, from a right wing POV) that his widow Erika Kirk “ended feminism” while many other people on the left called her a hypocrite for being the CEO of two companies, having a Master’s degree, and working on her doctorate.

The same criticism is usually levied at Nara Smith (I also wrote about her) whose elaborate videos of cooking commonly processed foods from scratch while wearing glamorous eveningwear have earned her the title of “tradwife” despite the fact that, like Ballerina Farm, she’s rejected the label. Also like Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith is rich as a result of her own ambitious career, and again, like Ballerina Farm, she’s not hiding that fact. She and her husband are, if anything, coworkers (they are both highly successful models.) Smith expressed surprise that anyone would consider her and her husband “trad” given that he does 50% of the housework and watches their children for weeks while she travels for work—a dynamic most modern working mothers can only dream of. (I will say, Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm have both been inconsistent about whether or not they hire nannies. If anything, that is what would make either of them hypocrites, not having jobs and making money.)

I don’t think these women (or others like them) are necessarily hypocrites. But it’s easy to see how people make this mistake. Part of the problem is that nobody can agree on what makes someone a tradwife or feminist in the first place.